Mathilde Cohen

Mathilde Cohen joined the UConn law faculty in 2012. She is a legal scholar working in the field of legal philosophy, constitutional theory, and comparative law. Her work examines the omnipresence of reason-giving as a recurring theme both in everyday encounters with the law and in academic discourse.

She challenges the case for reason-giving according to which justifying legal decisions invariably represents a desirable progress in the realm of public action. Her methodology combines democratic theory with comparative and qualitative empirical approaches, in which she uses interviews and participant observation to understand how legal reasoning functions in different legal contexts. Professor Cohen was awarded a grant from the French ministry of Justice’ research unit “Droit et Justice” to study the way in which supreme courts in the U.S. and Europe make and justify their decisions. She is the winner of the IVR Young Scholar Prize at the 2009 World Congress of Philosophy of Law for her article “The Rule of Law as the Rule of Reasons.”

Before joining UConn Law, Cohen was an associate-in-law at Columbia Law School and a Research Fellow at the French Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS). She graduated from the École Normale Supérieure and the Sorbonne in Paris with undergraduate and graduate degrees in law and philosophy, before completing her LL.M. and her doctorate as a Fulbright scholar at Columbia University. While at Columbia, she was named a James Kent Scholar and served as the head articles editor for the Columbia Journal of European Law.

Representative Publications

• The Social Epistemology of Public Institutions, in New Waves in Philosophy of Law 185 (Maksymilian del Mar, ed., Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming 2011).
• Reasons for Reasons, in Approaches to Legal Rationality 119 (Logic, Epistemology, and the Unity of Science Springer Series Vol. 20) (Dov M. Gabbay et al, eds., 2010).
• Sincerity and Reason Giving:  When May Legal Decision-Makers Lie? 59 DePaul L. Rev. 1091 (2010).
• The Rule of Law as the Rule of Reasons, 96 Archiv für Rechts- und Sozialphilosophie 1 (2010).  Winner, Young Scholar Prize.  2009 IVR World Congress, Beijing, China.  (trans. Chinese. 22 Peking U. L.J. 354 (2010)).
• Reason Giving in Court Practice:  Decision-Makers at the Crossroads, 14 Colum. J. Eur. L. 257 (2008).

French Legal Publications

• L’épreuve orale. Les magistrats administratifs face aux audiences de reconduite à la frontière [The Oral Trial. French Administrative Judges Faced With Deportation Hearings], 72 Droit et Société 387 (2009).
• L’unité de la justification à l’épreuve de la justification juridique [Justificatory Unification and Legal Justification], in L’Unité des Sciences 91 (Thierry Martin, ed., 2009).
• Du justiciable à l’acteur du droit: la perception de la justice aux États-Unis [From Litigant to Legal Actor: Perceptions of Justice in the United States], 31 Recherche, Droit, et Justice 11 (2008).