David Kenny
@dkennytcd.bsky.social
Professor in Law and Fellow at Trinity College Dublin, teaching constitutional law, law & lit, & why law is basically nonsense. he/him
Paperback is here and, to judge by its cover, it’s great! It can be yours for €37.50 including shipping if you want 2026 to be your year of law and literature!
December 30, 2025 at 12:51 PM
Paperback is here and, to judge by its cover, it’s great! It can be yours for €37.50 including shipping if you want 2026 to be your year of law and literature!
Just in time for the Christmas, you can preorder the paperback copy of my book! It won’t arrive until after Christmas, which I know will disappoint many, but a printout of a preorder is often an even better stocking filler than a book. 20% off with code below!
www.routledge.com/Pragmatism-L...
www.routledge.com/Pragmatism-L...
December 5, 2025 at 10:15 AM
Just in time for the Christmas, you can preorder the paperback copy of my book! It won’t arrive until after Christmas, which I know will disappoint many, but a printout of a preorder is often an even better stocking filler than a book. 20% off with code below!
www.routledge.com/Pragmatism-L...
www.routledge.com/Pragmatism-L...
Wonderful, sunny Trinity Monday celebrating our newest Fellow Andrea Milligan FTCD and some of our terrific new scholars.
April 28, 2025 at 11:33 AM
Wonderful, sunny Trinity Monday celebrating our newest Fellow Andrea Milligan FTCD and some of our terrific new scholars.
Last day at school for a while! (One photo is from last year but hopefully no one minds)
December 20, 2024 at 5:34 PM
Last day at school for a while! (One photo is from last year but hopefully no one minds)
Excited to talk with @mrkocnnll.bsky.social about his work later today at @tlrhub.bsky.social. There is no real reason that I am doing this—rather than someone more qualified—other than I really enjoy conversation with Mark, so I asked if I could. Come along and enjoy conversation with him too!
December 5, 2024 at 8:48 AM
Excited to talk with @mrkocnnll.bsky.social about his work later today at @tlrhub.bsky.social. There is no real reason that I am doing this—rather than someone more qualified—other than I really enjoy conversation with Mark, so I asked if I could. Come along and enjoy conversation with him too!
Full house for our undergraduate Law graduation. Neville Cox, Registrar and Professor of Law & Morality, begins with a really lovely address explaining the significance of commencement before we move on to award degrees to some extraordinary students. Proud of every one of them!
November 21, 2024 at 10:31 AM
Full house for our undergraduate Law graduation. Neville Cox, Registrar and Professor of Law & Morality, begins with a really lovely address explaining the significance of commencement before we move on to award degrees to some extraordinary students. Proud of every one of them!
I’ve been thinking a lot about Richard Rorty’s 1998 prediction about the rise of an American strongman. The return of “jocular contempt for women” is particularly striking given the appalling outpouring on Twitter since Wednesday.
![A short extract from Richard Rorty’s Achieving our Country about why Americans might turn to a strongman:
M]embers of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers—themselves desperately afraid of being downsized—are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else.
At that point, something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for—someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots.
One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past forty years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion… All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:h5pdgaafb2z3d4n2f4qgh34c/bafkreieihuw2pzxgrxs5frjzrqe74srnbqfa3hvwaew63czww2vns2by6y@jpeg)
November 8, 2024 at 1:35 PM
I’ve been thinking a lot about Richard Rorty’s 1998 prediction about the rise of an American strongman. The return of “jocular contempt for women” is particularly striking given the appalling outpouring on Twitter since Wednesday.
Need to remember to post here more, so: my book—Pragmatism, Law, and Literature—is now out! 20% off the (ludicrous) hardcover price&more affordable ebook with this code, with a more affordable paperback to follow! See if your university library might get a copy!
www.routledge.com/Pragmatism-L...
www.routledge.com/Pragmatism-L...
August 8, 2024 at 9:08 AM
Need to remember to post here more, so: my book—Pragmatism, Law, and Literature—is now out! 20% off the (ludicrous) hardcover price&more affordable ebook with this code, with a more affordable paperback to follow! See if your university library might get a copy!
www.routledge.com/Pragmatism-L...
www.routledge.com/Pragmatism-L...
Just finished a draft of a short article for a symposium about James Boyd White, one of the founders of contemporary law and literature, discussing how his work helps remind us that law is a deeply human enterprise, and we need to engage with it in a deeply humanistic manner.
October 2, 2023 at 3:09 PM
Just finished a draft of a short article for a symposium about James Boyd White, one of the founders of contemporary law and literature, discussing how his work helps remind us that law is a deeply human enterprise, and we need to engage with it in a deeply humanistic manner.
Okay, the Spotify algorithm has hit home with this suggestion.
September 26, 2023 at 1:53 PM
Okay, the Spotify algorithm has hit home with this suggestion.