COSIM SAYID

Cosim Sayid is Visiting Assistant Professor at Washington and Lee University; he works in the Law, Justice, and Society minor. Cosim will teach Interpretation in Law; an advanced version is offered as Law 692 in the Law School while an undergrad seminar in the same subject is going to be given as LJS 291. Cosim will also teach LJS 101: Introduction to Law, Justice, and Society. 

Cosim has been Visiting Fellow at the Rutgers Institute for Law and Philosophy. At Rutgers' Institute for Law and Philosophy, Cosim's researched private law (especially tort law and contracts) and evidence law. Cosim also considered issues in criminal law theory and jurisprudence. 

Whilst Lecturer in Philosophy at Princeton University (2019 - 2024), Cosim was head preceptor for courses in the introductory sequence in philosophy (Logic, Moral Philosophy, Metaphysics and Epistemology). With Michael Smith, he gave an upper-division course in Systematic Ethics. Under Gideon Rosen, he was preceptor in Free Will and Responsibility. 

A major theme of Cosim's work is the thought that analytic philosophical  rigor can sharpen legal discourse and that paying heed to legal practice as a proving ground for theoretical accounts serves to perfect them. 

Cosim's recently completed piece, 'Law, Language, and Aboutness: Diaz v. United States as Case-Study', accepted for publication in the Mississippi Law Journal, is an example of this paradigm in action. 

Cosim is currently working on several projects. For more details on material in the pipeline, see his research page. He's explicating an account of false light that speaks to how uptake of defamatory content is possible through (moving) pictures (as in deepfakes) and the third degree (as with false implicature). Cosim is working on naked statistics in the law and fending off the skeptical line that almost all testimony is a matter of such statistics. And with Yuval Abrams (Michigan State University, Law), a novel defense of the controversial tort law doctrine market-share liability is being mounted. 

In the summer of 2025, Cosim went on tour, first at the Evidence Summer Workshop at Vanderbilt Law School to discuss evidence law and 'Law, Language, and Aboutness: Diaz v. United States as Case-Study'. Cosim presented 'Deepfakes, Epistemic Injustice, False Light, and Free Speech' on how to do good things with the false light tort at the Philosophy and Legal Theory Collaborative Summer Workshop at Chicago-Kent College of Law as well as at Junior Faculty Forum held at the University of Richmond School of Law. 

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Cosim received his PhD from the City University of New York in September 2019. Cosim's doctoral dissertation -- Intention and Interpretation in Law -- was on interpretation and meaning in legal contexts; his committee was composed of Noël Carroll (Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, City University of New York) and Jeremy Waldron (University Professor of Law and Philosophy, New York University); his adviser was Stephen Neale (Kornblith Family Distinguished Professor of Linguistics and Philosophy).

Before coming to philosophy, Cosim worked as a lawyer in New York private practice (mostly handling litigation in real estate as well as securities arbitrations, though he did a variety of pro bono work including, inter alia, helping indigent couples divorce (relatively) amicably. As an undergrad, Cosim did research in biophysical chemistry. 

(Cosim usually doesn't refer to himself in the third-person, but this helps search engine robots.)

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