[1][2][3] Waldron attended Southland Boys' High School, and then went on to study at the University of Otago, New Zealand, where he graduated with a B.A.

at Lincoln College, Oxford, under legal philosopher Ronald Dworkin and political theorist Alan Ryan; Waldron graduated in 1986.

At New York University, he teaches Rule of Law, Jurisprudence, seminars on Property and Human Dignity and regularly hosts the Colloquium on Legal, Social and Political Philosophy, founded by Ronald Dworkin and Thomas Nagel in 1987 and convened by Liam Murphy, Samuel Scheffler, and Waldron.

[8] Waldron has also criticised analytic legal philosophy for its failure to engage with the questions addressed by political theory.

[9] Sandrine Baume has identified Jeremy Waldron and Bruce Ackerman as leading critics of the "compatibility of judicial review with the very principles of democracy".

[12] In contrast to Waldron and Ackerman, Dworkin was a long-time advocate of a moral reading of the United States Constitution, whose lines of support he sees as strongly associated with enhanced versions of judicial review in the federal government.

Waldron states his examples of such judges as including Sandra Day O'Connor, Ruth Ginsburg, and Felix Frankfurter.