|
CENTERS > ILR >
The Constitutional Law and History Program was inaugurated with the delivery of the ILR Lecture in Constitutional Law. The first lecture, "School Vouchers: Federal Constitutional Issues after the Cleveland Case," was given by Professor Jesse H. Choper on September 18, 2002. Currently in the planning stages are several programs – historical, comparative, and doctrine-oriented – in the U.S. and comparative constitutional law fields.
ILR Director Gives Plenary Speech to 2007 9th Circuit Judicial Conference
Harry N. Scheiber, Director of the Institute for Legal Research and the Riesenfeld Professor of Law and History at Boalt Hall, was a plenary-session speaker on July 19 at the 2007 Ninth Circuit Judicial Conference, which brought together in Honolulu the bench and bar from federal courts throughout the western United States.
Professor Scheiber's address opened the conference session on the courts in wartime, where he discussed the federal judiciary and the impact of martial law in Hawaii during World War II, an often-forgotten episode in the nation's constitutional history. In co-authorship with Jane L. Scheiber, who is Assistant Dean in the College of Chemistry at UC Berkeley, he is completing a book, "Bayonets In Paradise," a full history of the military courts, federal appellate litigation, and the Army's impact on life in Hawaii during the war years.
Hawaii Governor Linda Lingle welcomed the attendees at the opening session, and the closing segment featured Associate Justice John Paul Stevens of the U.S. Supreme Court. Some 800 judges, judiciary employees, government officials, and private attorneys attended the conference, whose theme was "Collision Course: When Liberty and Order Clash."
Lecture on "The Rule of Law in the Age of Terrorism – An Audit"
David Neal, SC
Visiting Scholar, Institute for Legal Research
Tuesday, January 30, 2007, 12:30 pm
Seminar Room, 2240 Piedmont Avenue
In August 2006, the new U.S. ambassador to Australia, Robert D. McCallum – former third-ranking official at the U.S. Justice Department from July 2003 – conducted a media round table to introduce himself to the Canberra press gallery. He was questioned vigorously about whether the detention and proposed trial of Australian citizen, David Hicks, at Guantanamo Bay conformed to the rule of law. The Ambassador replied that, “The record of the United States and the respecting of the rule of law is better than any country in the world, and we are extraordinarily proud of it and should be, so there is no basis, no basis whatsoever in my mind to assert that there is a disregard.”
The title of Philippe Sands’ new book, Lawless World: America and the Making and Breaking of Global Rules from FDR’s Atlantic Charter to George Bush’s Illegal War, gives the clue that not everyone shares the Ambassador’s assessment of the recent record. Sands is highly critical of the “legal black hole” of Guantanamo.
How do such diametrically opposed views both so confidently invoke the rule of law? Are they both talking about the same thing? Has the phrase become so indeterminate as to be virtually meaningless? Has it always been meaningless?
The highly-charged post-September 11 atmosphere has had many consequences. One of them is the level of commitment in the Western democracies to important political values. One of them is the rule of law. It is time for an audit of both the content of the rule of law concept and its salience for the countries which make up the coalition of the willing.
Copies of Mr. Neal’s paper are available in the Center’s library or at http://www.law.berkeley.edu/centers/csls/baglunch/
This lecture is co-sponsored by the Institute for Legal Research and the Center for the Study of Law and Society.
Lecture on "The King and the Dean: Melvin Belli, Roscoe Pound, and the Common Law Nation"
Professor John Fabian Witt
Columbia University
Thursday, November 9, 2006, 12:30 pm
2240 Piedmont Avenue
John Fabian Witt is a Professor of Law and History at Columbia University. His research and teaching interests focus on the history of American law and on the law of torts. His book, The Accidental Republic: Crippled Workingmen, Destitute Widows, and the Remaking of American Law (Harvard University Press, 2004) received the Thomas J. Wilson Prize from Harvard Press, the Willard Hurst Prize from the Law & Society Association, and the Cromwell Prize from the American Society for Legal History.
His next book, Patriots and Cosmopolitans: Hidden Histories of American Law, to be published by Harvard Press in January 2007, explores law and American nationalism at key moments in legal history since the Founding.
This lecture is co-sponsored by the Institute for Legal Research and the Center for the Study of Law and Society.
Lecture on "The Almighty and the Dollar:
Catholics, Protestants, and School Funding At Mid-Century"
Professor Sarah Gordon
University of Pennsylvania
Thursday, April 6, 2006, 4:30 pm
JSP Seminar Room, 2240 Piedmont Avenue
Sarah Gordon is a widely recognized scholar on the historical role of religion in American political life and the separation of church and state. Professor Gordon researches and teaches extensively in the history of American constitutional history, religion, westward expansion, and property. She has been giving talks around the country on her book, The Mormon Question: Polygamy and Constitutional Conflict in Nineteenth-Century America (2002), which won the Mormon History Association's Best Book Award in 2003 and the Utah Historical Association Best Book Award in 2003.
She is the recipient of numerous prizes and fellowships and recently was a Fellow at the Center for Law & Public Affairs at Princeton University. Professor Gordon also served as Associate Dean for Academic Affairs in the Law School from 2000-2002, and is on the advisory board of the National Constitution Center, the Library Company of Philadelphia, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, and Vassar College.
Professor Gordon holds a joint appointment in the Law School and the History Department at the University of Pennsylvania. She directs the Penn Legal History Consortium and founded the University of Pennsylvania joint history and law J.D./Ph.D. program.
2004-2005 ILR Lecture in Constitutional Law
"Separation of Church and State: Facts and Fictions of American History"
Professor John Witte, Jr.
Emory University
Monday, February 7, 2005, 4:15 pm
Goldberg Room, Boalt Hall
Professor Witte is the Jonas Robitscher Professor of Law and Ethics, Director of the Law and Religion Program, and Director of the Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Religion at Emory University. A specialist in legal history, family law, and religious liberty, he has published numerous books and articles, including Religious Human Rights in Global Perspective, 2 volumes (1996); From Sacrament to Contract: Marriage, Religion, and Law in the Western Tradition (1997); Proselytism and Orthodoxy in Russia (1999); Religion and the American Constitutional Experiment (2000); and Law and Protestantism: The Legal Teachings of the Lutheran Reformation (2002).
Lecture on "Inside the 9-ll Commission: The Bush White House, Executive Privilege,and Separation of Powers"
Daniel Marcus
National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States ("9-11 Commission")
Wednesday, November 10, 2004, 2:00 pm
105 Boalt Hall
Daniel Marcus is currently the General Counsel to the "9-11 Commission." For many years, Mr. Marcus was a partner in the Washington law firm of Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering, serving on the firm's Management Committee from 1995 to 1998. During the Jimmy Carter administration, Mr. Marcus was Deputy General Counsel of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, and General Counsel of the Department of Agriculture. He returned to government service in 1998 as Senior Counsel in the White House Counsel's office. From 1999 to 2001 he held several senior positions at the Department of Justice, including Associate Attorney General. In 2003 he was a Visiting Professor at Georgetown University Law Center. Mr. Marcus is a graduate of Brandeis University and Yale Law School, and was a law clerk for Judge Harold Leventhal of the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit.
Conference on "Earl Warren and the Warren Court: A Fifty-Year Retrospect"
February 27-28, 2004, 9:00 am-5:00 pm
140 Boalt Hall
This conference commemorated the constitutional legacy of U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren and the Warren Court. This is the fiftieth-year anniversary of the Warren Court's initial term. The conference featured a set of lectures by leading constitutional lawyers, legal historians, and political scientists. Several of the lectures dealt with the impact of the Warren Court on legal development in Europe, Asia, and the Americas; others treated the Court's legacy in U.S. law in major areas such as criminal justice, freedom of speech, equal protection and desegregation.
The conference was sponsored and organized by the ILR, and co-sponsored by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the following UC Berkeley departments: Boalt Hall School of Law; Center for the Study of Law and Society; Institute of Governmental Studies; Jefferson Lectures Committee; and the Robbins Collection, Boalt Hall School of Law.
Publication plans for the conference proceedings are still pending. Please check this website for updated information.
For a copy of the conference program, click here. For photos from the conference, click here.
The conference dinner featured speeches by UC Berkeley Chancellor Emeritus Robert M. Berdahl and four former Warren Court clerks: Professor Jesse H. Choper, UC Berkeley; Chancellor Emeritus Ira Michael Heyman, UC Berkeley; Professor Scott Bice, University of Southern California; and Hon. James R. Browning, U.S. Court of Appeals, 9th Circuit. To read Chancellor Berdahl's talk, click here. To read Judge Browning's remarks, click here.
Selected Publications
"Individual Rights and Liberties under the U.S. Constitution: The Case Law of the U.S. Supreme Court," by Ioannis G. Dimitrakopoulos, Brill Academic Publishers (2007)
"Taking Liberties," by Harry N. Scheiber and Jane L. Scheiber, Legal Affairs, May/June 2003.
|
