Thomas Bailey is a moral, legal, and political theorist who researches and teachers at the University of Glasgow as Lecturer in Legal Theory in The School of Law. His research draws on Immanuel Kant’s moral, legal, and political philosophy to reexamine the relationships between morality, law, and politics. He combines historical interpretive with contemporary philosophy to both to sharpen his interpretation of Kant and to bring Kant’s distinct contribution to bear on contemporary debates about the near perennial question of how to judge in the entangled domains of morality, law, and politics.

He has wide research and teaching interests across contemporary moral, legal, and political theory and philosophy, as well as in the history of political thought. He was previously Fellow in Political Theory the Department of Government at the London School of Economics and Political Science where he also completed his PhD in Political Theory in 2023.

He is currently working on a monograph project with the tentative title ‘Kant, Judging Politically: The bounds of law and morality’. This project Kant’s Doctrine of Right (1797) as offering a philosophically distinctive and powerful articulation of the concept of political judgment and derives its implications for core issues in legal and political theory such as for the concept of sovereignty, the possibility of international law, and the respective roles of the people and government in creating and reforming constitutions. He develops a Kantian theory of political judgment distinct from dominant forms of Kantian ideal theory as well as from leading articulations of Kant’s legal and political philosophy, which reduce political judgment to the application of ideal conceptions of justice to non-ideal practical circumstances. Instead, Kant gives us an approach to the relationship of theory and practice that develops the core insight that we must judge in moral, legal, and political worlds that are shared but not harmonious and that require action both with and against others.

• Jurisprudence
• Law, Justice, and Morality