CAMDEN — Kimberly Ferzan, a professor of law at the Rutgers School of Law–Camden, has been selected for a Laurance S. Rockefeller Visiting Faculty Fellowship at the University Center for Human Values at Princeton for the 2012-13 academic year.
The highly coveted, prestigious fellowship is awarded to scholars doing work in and around moral, political, and legal philosophy.
“I am incredibly excited about this fellowship,” says Ferzan, who teaches courses and seminars on criminal law and evidence at Rutgers–Camden. “Although I love teaching, it is wonderful to have uninterrupted time to do scholarship.”
Ferzan is the second Rutgers–Camden law faculty member to receive the honorable fellowship. John Oberdiek, professor and director of faculty research at the Rutgers School of Law–Camden, was a Rockefeller Visiting Fellow during 2005-06.
Laurance S. Rockefeller Visiting Faculty Fellows devote an academic year in residence at Princeton University researching topics involving ethics and human values. The fellows participate in lectures and various seminars to share works in progress.
“It’s one of the most prestigious and selective fellowships available to anyone working on ethical, political, or legal questions from a philosophical perspective,” Oberdiek says.
During her time at Princeton, Ferzan will be working on a book about self-defense and preventive detention.
“Part of what my work does is to recast what are currently preparatory crimes, like possession offenses, into a preventive regime, where they properly belong,” Ferzan explains. “Right now, the state tries to accomplish purely preventive goals through the criminal law; my aim is to bring these practices to light and scrutinize their legitimacy as the wholly preventive practices they are.”
Ferzan continues, “I think that a theory of self-defense – which is a form of preventive interference – will help us decide which preventive practices are legitimate.”
Ferzan says she is most looking forward to working with a community of theorists with whom she will be able to discuss her work.
“The fellows are picked as a class so that there are synergies among us,” she says. “The fellowship will sharpen my analytical tools in a way that I can then bring to my teaching and my engagement with my colleagues at Rutgers–Camden.”
Ferzan is a co-founder and co-director of the Rutgers Institute for Law and Philosophy. For the academic year 2011-12, she is a Scholar-in-Residence at New York University School of Law’s Center for the Administration of Criminal Law.
A reviewer for a number of legal journals and publishing companies, Ferzan speaks nationally on issues related to criminal law and evidence. She is the co-author of Crime and Culpability: A Theory of Criminal Law (Cambridge University Press, 2009) and co-editor of Criminal Law Conversations (Oxford University Press, 2009).
Ferzan earned her undergraduate degree from the University of North Carolina and her juris doctor from the University of Pennsylvania Law School.