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A Super-Scholar, All Grown Up and Still Theorizing

Above left, Jedediah Purdy, 31, an assistant law professor at Duke, with student Asit Gosar last spring. In his mid-twenties, Purdy was one of Washington's intellectual darlings.
Above left, Jedediah Purdy, 31, an assistant law professor at Duke, with student Asit Gosar last spring. In his mid-twenties, Purdy was one of Washington's intellectual darlings. (By Todd Shoemaker -- Duke University Law School)
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After his stint at the New America Foundation, Purdy decamped for the life legal, clerking for a federal appeals court judge in New York City and spending time on a fellowship at Harvard Law. He joined the Duke law faculty in 2004.

At Duke, he's all lit up about property law. What interests him about the topic, he says, is that it explores "how you deal with the fact that human beings are useful things for one another."

"The property system used to include owning other human beings. It still effectively does" deal with a market in humans, he says, mentioning sex trafficking and "highly exploitive labor relations."

"People are always buying, selling, controlling one another," he said. The question: "What can you do to people? . . . How far can you go in getting other people to do the stuff you want them to do for you?"

He's got a handful of articles forthcoming in prestigious journals, a contract with Yale University Press for a book on property theory and a research fellowship next year at Harvard.

In an e-mail, Duke Law School Dean Katharine Bartlett said Purdy is "wildly popular" as a teacher and added that she's "not aware of anyone who, in his first two years of teaching, has published as much work of such high quality and intellectual maturity as he has."

And lest you count him out of the public intellectual game, note that publisher Knopf has signed him for the third in what's become a trilogy of books on American political culture, which he plans to start working on later this year.

So, does his past as cultural wonder boy ever catch up with him?

"What happens now is my students Google me, as they inevitably do. . . . And they find that piece in McSweeney's." The reference is to a fictional piece in the offbeat literary journal that imagines Purdy hot-tubbing in the back of a Bellagio hotel stretch limo, cruising the Vegas Strip in the company of "Shannon and Marcie, both visions in amazing bikinis" while clutching a waterlogged copy of his book. "And they ask me whether it was true."

A lesser man would be tempted here. "I say no. And then I explain."


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