Teng Li’s research focuses on legal and political philosophy. In his dissertation on the legitimacy of the state, Teng develops a conception of legitimacy that centers on a state’s role as the pacifier of its territory, according to which attaining legitimacy for a state is understood as creating the social conditions that renders it unnecessary for any subject to resort to coercion to pursue her goals. His account seeks to address the idealization tendency which liberal accounts are prone to display. Teng received his doctoral training at NYU School of Law. Prior to that he was an LLM student at NYU Law’s legal theory program. He has law degrees from mainland China and from Hong Kong.

Research Interests

• Theories of authority 
• Jurisprudence 
• Right theories 
• Contractarianism 
• Political trust 
• Justice 
• Egalitarianism 
• Theories of administrative law

Current projects at SCRIPTS

At SCRIPTS, Teng proposes to explore the connection between legality and legitimacy, a project that builds on the account of legitimacy which he explicated in his doctorate. Specifically, he will engage with the literature about thin and thick conceptions of legality and aim at developing an intermediate account that neither reduces the normative implication of legality to the mere function of facilitating expectations nor appeals necessarily to democratic pedigree for its explanation. The hypothesis he tries to substantiate with normative arguments is that social control in certain legal form is more than just a desideratum of governance, but a requisite for the legitimation of political power. Separately, Teng will also work on a paper about the monism and dualism debate in the justification of state coercion, which he intends to publish in a peer review journal.

Journal Article

Li, Teng 2019: Service Authority as Reason for Action. Peking University Law Review 20(1): 89-110. [Original article is in Chinese].