Robin B. Kar Professor Robin B. Kar is a professor of law and philosophy at the University of Illinois College of Law. He is an internationally recognized scholar of contract law, philosophy of law, moral and legal philosophy, and the evolution of legal systems and complex social structure (including modern markets).
Professor Kar’s work has been published in a number of top journals, including the Yale Law Journal (both in print and online), the Georgetown Law Journal, the Texas Law Review, the Oxford Handbook of International Human Rights, Law & Philosophy, and the NOMOS volume on Evolution and Morality. Professor Kar is currently the Director of the Illinois Program on Interdisciplinary and Comparative Jurisprudence, a Project Leader for the Illinois Program on Cultures of Law in Global Contexts, and a Faculty Affiliate of the Illinois Program in Law and Philosophy, the Illinois Program in Law, Behavior and the Social Sciences, the Illinois Network for Neurocultures, the Beckman Institute, and the Institute for Genomic Biology. He is the current President of the Society for the Evolutionary Analysis of Law, one of the co-editors of the Jotwell Section on Jurisprudence, and Editor-in-Chief of the Illinois Law Faculty Blog.
Before entering teaching, Professor Kar earned his bachelors degree magna cum laude from Harvard College. He received his JD from Yale Law School, where he was an editor of the Yale Law Journal and a Thurman Arnold Prize finalist. He received his PhD (in legal, moral and political philosophy and philosophy of the social sciences) from the University of Michigan. During this period, he was a Rackham Merit Scholar, a Rackham Predoctoral Scholar, and a Charlotte Newcombe Fellow—awarded through the Woodrow Wilson Foundation. He has clerked twice in Manhattan, first for the Honorable Justice Sonia Sotomayor, then on the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, and later for the Honorable John G. Koeltl, on the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. He has worked for several major law firms in New York City, including Debevoise & Plimpton, Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, Davis Polk & Wardwell. He also had a prior professional life as a computer programmer, and has written award-winning software. Those experiences generate continuing interests in developments in law and technology.
