Jeffrey Stout grew up in Trenton, New Jersey, and was involved in the civil rights and anti-war movements in his teens and twenties. While attending college at Brown University, he chaired a student strike, ran the Rhode Island Draft Information Center, and founded Issues, a journal of opinion. Upon graduating from Brown in 1972, he began his doctoral work at Princeton University, where he taught in the department of religion from 1975 until his retirement in 2018. At Princeton, he chaired his department and received awards for teaching and mentoring. He has served as a trustee of Princeton University Press, the Journal of Religious Ethics, and Anthology Film Archives.

Stout is a theorist and historian of democratic culture. His work is concerned with ethics, religious thought, political theory, law, and film. He is the author of The Flight from Authority, Ethics after Babel, Democracy and Tradition, and Blessed Are the Organized: Grassroots Democracy in America. Two of his books have received awards for excellence from the American Academy of Religion. He co-edited the Cambridge University Press Series on Religion and Critical Thought.

Stout served as president of the American Academy of Religion in 2007, and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2008. His 2017 Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh discussed the political implications of ancient, medieval, and modern conceptions of religion.

About the Kellogg Lecture Series

The Kellogg Biennial Lecture in Jurisprudence presents the most distinguished contributors to international jurisprudence, judged through writings, reputation, and broad and continuing influence on contemporary legal scholarship. Previous Kellogg lecturers have been Ronald Dworkin, Joseph Raz, Amartya Sen, Michael Sandel, Jeremy Waldron, and Martha Nussbaum.

The series is endowed through the generosity of Frederic R. and Molly S. Kellogg.