The Center for Law and Philosophy's mission is to provide a basis for high-level scholarly cooperation, first among the extraordinary group of faculty at Columbia University in the overlapping areas of moral philosophy, political theory, and jurisprudence, and second, to provide leadership in this area of overlap for scholars in the New York area and the United States.

The center was established at Columbia Law School in 1997, with funds from the Provost's Strategic Initiative (SI). Since then, the center has organized and sponsored a variety of activities to bring together many of Columbia’s impressive faculty resources in moral, political, and legal philosophy, in public lectures, specialist workshops, regular colloquia, and academic conferences.