The University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law is pleased to present its 2010 Symposium on The Judiciary and the Popular Will, which will take place on January 29-30, 2010.
The last 200 years of history have proven that the true power behind both the Constitution and judicial review lies within the American people, who have the means to define, limit, or eliminate entirely, judicial authority. For this reason, ever since the ratification of the Constitution, judicial review and the popular will have interacted to influence the meaning of the Constitution itself. The struggle over the power of judicial review highlights the tension between a democratic government, and the Constitution which carefully limits the power of the government. When, and to what extent, is it appropriate for the American public to exert their power over the Supreme Court? How should the Supreme Court balance the competing interests of upholding and supporting a system of democratic rule with the Constitution’s protections against the excesses of the majority? Who are the major actors in the struggle and how have they shaped the debate? How does the dialogue between the people and the courts play out? Motivated by the publication of Professor Barry Friedman’s book, The Will of the People, How Public Opinion Has Influenced the Supreme Court and Shaped the Meaning of the Constitution, this Symposium hosted by the University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law will engage respected legal scholars, political scientists, historians, and journalists in addressing these these and other provocative questions about the workings of American constitutional democracy.
University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law presents:
The Judiciary and the Popular Will
2010 Symposium Schedule
Friday, January 29
Breakfast and registration
The Levy Conference Center (University of Pennsylvania)
9:00 a.m.
Panel #1: The Will of the People
Panelists: Lee Epstein, Barry Friedman, and Jeff Rosen
Moderator: Lyle Denniston
The National Constitutional Center10:30 a.m. – noon
Meet at the Levy Conference Center by 9:45 a.m.
Lunch
Introductions from the Editor-in-Chief, Symposium Editor, and Dean Mike Fitts
The Levy Conference Center
12:30 – 1:30 p.m.
Panel #2: Positive and Normative Approaches to Constitutional Decisionmaking
Panelists: Michael Dorf, William Forbath, Andrew Samaha, and Barry Weingast
Moderator: Theodore Ruger
The Levy Conference Center
1:30 p.m. – 3:30 p.m.
Break
The Levy Conference Center
3:30 -4:00 p.m.
Panel #3: Comparative Approaches to Judicial Review
Panelists: John Ferejohn, Gretchen Helmke, Vicki Jackson
Moderator: Theodore Ruger
The Levy Conference Center
4:00 – 5:30 p.m.
Keynote Address: Linda Greenhouse
The Levy Conference Center
5:30 – 6:30 p.m.
Saturday, January 30
All Events at the Levy Conference Center (University of Pennsylvania)
Breakfast and registration
9:00-9:30 a.m.
Panel #4: Constitutional Decisions and their Makers
Panelists: Neal Devins, Jamal Greene, Andrew Martin, and Risa Goluboff
Moderator: Serena Mayeri
9:30-11:30 a.m.
Closing Remarks: Barry Friedman
11:30 a.m. – noon
Lunch
Noon – 1:00 p.m.
Keynote Speaker:
Linda Greenhouse
Professor Linda Greenhouse is the Senior Research Scholar in Law, Knight Distinguished Journalist-in-Residence, and Joseph Goldstein Lecturer in Law at the Yale Law School. Prior to joining the Yale Law School faculty, she covered the Supreme Court for The New York Times for thirty years and currently writes a bi-weekly column on law. Apart from writing and teaching, she is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and is a member of the American Law Institute, which awarded her its Henry J. Friendly Medal. She is also a member of the Council of the American Philosophical Society and the Harvard University Board of Overseers.
Panelists:
Barry Friedman
Professor Barry Friedman is the Vice Dean and Jacob D. Fuchsberg Professor of Law at the New York University School of Law. He has taught, written and litigated about the Constitution for 25 years. He is one of the country’s leading scholars on the federal courts and judicial behavior and has published over 50 articles in some of the country’s leading journals. Along with University of Pennsylvania Professor Stephen Burbank, he co-edited Judicial Independence: An Interdisciplinary Approach. He also contributes regularly to the media, in publications such as The New Republic, The New York Times, The American Lawyer, and Forbes.com, among others. The Will of the People is Friedman’s first book.
Neal Devins
Professor Neal Devins serves as the Goodrich Professor of Law, Professor of Government, and Director of the Institute of Bill of Rights Law at William & Mary. Before he joined the faculty in 1987, he served as an Assistant General Counsel for the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and Project Director for the Vanderbilt Institute of Policy Studies. He is a widely-published author, with articles, essays, and reviews appearing in the Columbia, Stanford, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Yale, Virginia, and California law reviews. He has also written or edited several books and book chapters.
Michael C. Dorf
Professor Michael Dorf is the Robert S. Stevens Professor of Law at Cornell University Law School. Before joining the faculty in 2008, he was the Isidor & Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law at Columbia Law School. Professor Dorf served as law clerk to Justice Anthony M. Kennedy of the Supreme Court of the United States and to Judge Stephen Reinhardt of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. He has written over fifty law review articles and several books on constitutional law and related subjects. In addition, he writes a bi-weekly column for FindLaw’s Writ and posts several times per week on his blog, DorfonLaw. Professor Dorf serves on the editorial boards of Legal Theory and Political Science Quarterly. His next book is The Oxford Introduction to American Law: Constitutional Law (with Trevor Morrison), to be published in the Fall of 2010.
Lee Epstein
Professor Lee Epstein is the Henry Wade Rogers Professor at Northwestern University School of Law and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Political and Social Science. She is the recipient of twelve grants from the National Science Foundation for her work on law and legal institutions and has written over 100 articles and fourteen books. Current projects include a book on agenda setting on the Supreme Court (with Jeff Segal and Harold Spaeth), and another on judicial behavior (with William Landes and Richard Posner). Professor Epstein is a co-editor of the Journal of Law, Economics & Organization, a former chair of the Law and Courts Section of the American Political Science Association, and a past President of the Midwest Political Science Association.
John A. Ferejohn
John Ferejohn is the Charles Seligson Professor of Law at New York University and Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Stanford University. Prior to joining the NYU law faculty, Professor Ferejohn taught courses in American government, political philosophy, and positive political theory at Stanford University and, prior to that, the California Institute of Technology. He has written widely on these topics as well as on issues of public law, having published numerous articles and books, on positive political theory and political institutions and behavior focusing on Congress, law and legislation, and constitutional adjudication in the United States and Europe. He has been elected a member of the American Academy of Science as well as the National Academy of Science.
William E. Forbath
William Forbath holds the Lloyd M. Bentsen Chair in Law and is Associate Dean for Research at the School of Law and Professor of History at UT, Austin. He teaches constitutional law and legal and constitutional history, and is the author of Law and the Shaping of the American Labor Movement and about seventy articles on legal and constitutional history and theory. He has two books in progress: Courting the State: Law and the Making of the Modern American State and Social and Economic Rights in the American Grain. He is on the boards of several scholarly journals and public interest organizations.
Risa Goluboff
Professor Risa Goluboff is Professor of Law, Professor of History, and Caddell & Chapman Research Professor at the University of Virginia. Her scholarship focuses on the history of civil rights, labor, and constitutional law in the twentieth century. Professor Goluboff is a 2009 John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellow in Constitutional Studies. She is using the fellowship to explore the demise of vagrancy law as part of the social transformations of the 1960s. Professor Goluboff’s first book, The Lost Promise of Civil Rights (Harvard University Press, 2007), won the 2010 Order of the Coif Biennial Book Award and the 2008 James Willard Hurst Prize. In addition to authoring numerous law review articles, she is also co-editor of Civil Rights Stories (Foundation Press, 2008). Prior to joining the Virginia faculty, she clerked for Judge Guido Calabresi of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and then for Justice Stephen G. Breyer of the Supreme Court of the United States. She also taught at the University of Cape Town as a Fulbright scholar.
Jamal Greene
Professor Jamal Greene is an Associate Professor of Law at the Columbia Law School. Prior to joining the Columbia Law School faculty, Professor Greene served as an Alexander Fellow at the New York University School of Law. He also served as law clerk to Justice John Paul Stevens of the Supreme Court of the United States and law clerk to Judge Guido Calabresi of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Professor Greene’s work, focusing on originalism and privacy, has appeared in numerous law journals, including the Yale Law Journal, Georgetown Law Journal, and Texas Law Review. Prior to matriculating to law school, Professor Greene was a reporter for Sports Illustrated.
Gretchen Helmke
Professor Gretchen Helmke is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Rochester. Her research focuses on comparative political institutions, democratization, law and courts, and Latin American politics. She has published two books and has had articles appear in American Political Science Review, Journal of Politics, Comparative Politics, Desarollo Económico, Electoral Studies, Perspectives on Politics and Annual Review of Political Science. Before joining the University of Rochester faculty, Professor Helmke was a Harvard Academy Scholar at the Weatherhead Center for International and Area Studies at Harvard University and also was a Visiting Fellow of the Kellogg Institute for International Studies at the University of Notre Dame. She currently serves on the editorial board for the Journal of Politics.
Vicki C. Jackson
Professor Vicki Jackson is a Carmack Waterhouse Professor of Constitutional Law at Georgetown University Law Center. Her work focuses on comparative constitutional law, comparative federalism, and freedom of expression. Professor Jackson has also served as a Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Office of Legal Counsel in the U.S. Department of Justice. She also was a law clerk for Judge Murray Gurfein on the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, Judge Morris Lasker of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, and for Justice Thurgood Marshall of the United States Supreme Court. Her numerous articles have appeared in publications such as Harvard Law Review, Yale Law Journal, Georgetown Law Review and she is coauthor, along with Professor Mark Tushnet, of the casebook Comparative Constitutional Law.
Andrew Martin
Professor Andrew Martin is a Professor of Law and Professor of Political Science at Washington University in St. Louis. His work focuses on political methodology and American political institutions, including the Supreme Court, courts of appeals, and the federal district courts. Professor Martin has been published in numerous journals including the Journal of Legal Studies, Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization, California Law Review, Columbia Law Review, Northwestern Law Review, and Vanderbilt University Law Review. He also currently serves as the founding Director of the Center for Empirical Research in the Law and is a Resident Fellow at the Center in Political Economy.
Jeffrey Rosen
Professor Jeffrey Rosen is a Professor of Law at The George Washington University Law School. His areas of expertise include constitutional law, privacy, and criminal procedure. He has published four books including his most recent work, The Supreme Court: The Personalities and Rivalries that Defined America. He has also written articles that have appeared in publications such as the New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, Georgetown Law Journal, Yale Law Journal, and Michigan Law Review. Prior to joining the faculty of The George Washington University School of Law, he was a staff writer for The New Yorker. Professor Rosen also currently serves as the legal affairs editor of The New Republic.
Adam Samaha
Professor Adam Samaha is a Professor of Law and the Herbert and Marjorie Fried Teaching Scholar at The University of Chicago Law School. His work focuses on constitutional law and theory, freedom of speech and religion, and the federal judiciary. He has had many articles published in a number of journals, including Stanford Law Review, Columbia Law Review, University of Chicago Law Review, and Northwestern Law Review. Prior to joining the faculty of the University of Chicago Law School in 2004, Professor Samaha practiced law at Robins, Kaplan, Miller & Ciresi in Minneapolis, and was a Visiting Associate Professor and Visiting Scholar at the University of Minnesota Law School. He also clerked for Chief Justice Alexander M. Keith of the Minnesota Supreme Court and Justice John Paul Stevens of the United States Supreme Court.
Barry Weingast
Professor Barry Weingast is a Ward C. Krebs Family Professor of Law at Stanford University. He also serves as a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. His research focuses on the political economy and public policy, the political foundation of markets and economic reform, United States politics, and regulation. He has published three books including Preferences and Situations: Points of Contact Between Historical and Rational Choice Institutionalisms with Ira Katznelson and his newest work Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History with Douglass C. North and John Joseph Wallis. He has had papers published in numerous publications including Stanford Law Review, Northwestern University Law Review, and University of Pennsylvania Law Review. He has also previously served as a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1996.