Nick Smith is currently a philosophy professor at the University of New Hampshire. He graduated from Vassar College in 1994, earned a law degree from State University of New York, Buffalo in 1997, and went on to complete a PhD in philosophy from Vanderbilt University, Tennessee in 2002. He made a living as an attorney before coming to the University of New Hampshire, working as a litigator for a major corporate law firm based in Manhattan. He also held positions as a judicial clerk for the Honorable R. L. Nygaard of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, in-house counsel for a New England medical technology corporation, a clerk for a New York State Department of Human Rights judge, and an intern at two public defenders' offices. He specialises in the philosophy of law, politics, and society, particularly as considered through contemporary continental philosophy. He also writes on and teaches aesthetics. He is currently working on the sequel to The Categorical Apology. This next book, also with Cambridge University Press, applies his framework for the various kinds of meanings conveyed by apologies to examples in criminal and civil law. His writings have appeared in journals such as Continental Philosophy Review, Social Theory and Practice, The Journal of Social Philosophy, Culture, Theory and Critique, The Rutgers Law Journal, and The Buffalo Law Review.

Part I. The Meanings of Apologies: 1. The meanings of apologies; 2. Elements of the categorical apology; 3. Apologies and gender; 4. Apologies in diverse religious and cultural traditions; 5. Unusual cases; 6. The relationship between apologies and forgiveness; 7. Varieties of apologies; Part II: 8. The collective categorical apology; 9. The problem of consensus; 10. Issues specific to collective apologies; 11. Varieties of collective apologies.