COSIM SAYID

Cosim Sayid is Visiting Fellow at the Rutgers Institute for Law and Philosophy. 

Cosim will become Visiting Assistant Professor at Washington and Lee University this summer; he'll work in the Law, Justice, and Society Program.

Cosim's work at Rutgers' Institute for Law and Philosophy has been in private law and in evidence law. Cosim is also working on issues in criminal law theory and jurisprudence. 

A major theme of Cosim's work is the thought that analytic 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', forthcoming 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 statistics. And with Yuval Abrams (Michigan State University, Law), a novel defense of market-share liability is being mounted. 

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Cosim was Lecturer in Philosophy at Princeton University from 2019 to 2024; he 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. 

Prior to that at York College of the City University of New York, Cosim gave instruction in Cultural Diversity, Philosophy, and Political Science. York is a Thurgood Marshall College Fund member-school, where Cosim was also Quantitative Reasoning Fellow in the Department of Math and Computer Science, teaching and tutoring in math. Cosim also was an instructor in the Rutgers-Merck Summer Bioethics Institute at Rutgers-Newark (directed by Jeff Buechner) for college-bound urban youth in northern New Jersey.

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 and securities arbitrations, though he did a variety of pro bono work including 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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