Past Dunn Lecturers
2012 Dunn Lecturers
ERWIN CHEMERINSKY, Dean and Distinguished Professor of Law, University of California, Irvine School of Law. Prior to accepting this position, was a professor at Duke University School of Law, the University of Southern California Law School, and DePaul College of Law. Author of seven books, including The Conservative Assault on the Constitution (Simon and Schuster, Sept, 2010) and over 100 law review articles. Chemerinsky frequently argues appellate cases, including in the United States Supreme Court.
DAVID COLE, Professor of Law at Georgetown University Law Center. He teaches constitutional law, national security, and criminal justice. He is also a volunteer attorney for the Center for Constitutional Rights. Professor Cole is the author of six books, his most recent being, The Torture Memos: Rationalizing the Unthinkable (2009). He has litigated several significant constitutional cases in the Supreme Court, including Texas v. Johnson and United States v. Eichman, which extended First Amendment protection to flag burning.
WALTER DELLINGER, Douglas B. Maggs Professor Emeritus of Law at Duke University. He served as a law clerk to Justice Hugo L. Black for the 1968-69 Term of the Supreme Court. After serving as an advisor to the President on constitutional issues, Dellinger was nominated to be Assistant Attorney General and head of the Office of Legal Counsel in 1993. He served as acting Solicitor General for the 1996-97 Term of the Supreme Court, arguing nine cases before the Court, the most by any Solicitor in more than twenty years.
STANLEY FISH, Davidson-Kahn Distinguished University Professor of Humanities and professor of law at Florida International University. A prolific author, Professor Fish has written over 200 scholarly publications and books. His research covers a variety of fields including legal theory, liberalism, and the intersection of the two. One of his latest works is entitled, There Is Nothing He Cannot Ask: Milton, Terrorism and Liberalism (In Press).
HEATHER GERKEN, J. Skelly Wright Professor of Law at Yale Law School. She specializes in election law, constitutional law, and civil procedure. She served as a law clerk for Judge Stephen Reinhardt of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and for Justice David H. Souter of the United States Supreme Court, before entering private practice in Washington, D.C. She is currently working on a book on the trans-substantive concept of “second-order diversity” in American public law.
JOHN C. GREEN, Director, Ray C. Bliss Institute of Applied Politics,
The University of Akron. John C. Green is a Distinguished Professor of Political Science. He is
also a Senior Fellow with the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, and is
best known for his work on religion and politics.
He is co-author of The Bully Pulpit: The Politics of Protestant Clergy; Religion and the Culture Wars: Dispatches From the Front, and The Diminishing Divide: Religion’s Changing Role in American Politics. In addition, he is co-editor of The State of the Parties, now in its 5th edition, Multiparty Politics in America, and Financing the 1996 Election.
Green is the Director of the Ray C. Bliss Institute of Applied Politics, a bipartisan research and teaching institute dedicated to the nuts and bolts of practical politics. Green is widely known as an observer of Ohio and national politics, and he is frequently quoted in the national and state media.
RICK HASEN, Chancellor’s Professor of Law and Political Science at the University of California, Irvine. A nationally renowned expert in election law and campaign finance law, Professor Hasen is the founding co-editor of the publication, Election Law Journal. After earning three graduate degrees from UCLA, he clerked for the Honorable David R. Thompson of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. He later worked as a civil appellate lawyer before entering the field of legal education.
MICHAEL J. KLARMAN, Kirkland & Ellis Professor at Harvard Law
School. Professor Michael J. Klarman is the Kirkland & Ellis Professor at
Harvard Law School, where he joined the faculty in 2008. He received his B.A. and M.A. (political
theory) from the University of Pennsylvania in 1980, his J.D. from Stanford Law
School in 1983, and his D. Phil. in legal history from the University of Oxford
(1988), where he was a Marshall Scholar.
After law school, Professor Klarman clerked for the Honorable Ruth Bader
Ginsburg on the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit
(1983-84). He joined the faculty at the
University of Virginia School of Law in 1987 and served there until 2008 as the
James Monroe Distinguished Professor of Law and Professor of History.
Klarman has also served as the Ralph S. Tyler, Jr., Visiting Professor at Harvard Law School, Distinguished Visiting Lee Professor of Law at the Marshall Wythe School of Law at the College of William & Mary, Visiting Professor at Stanford Law School, and Visiting Professor at Yale Law School.
Klarman has won numerous awards for his teaching and scholarship, which are primarily in the areas of Constitutional Law and Constitutional History. In 2009 he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.
Klarman’s first book, From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court and the Struggle for Racial Equality, was published by Oxford University Press in 2004 and received the 2005 Bancroft Prize in History. He published two books in the summer of 2007, also with Oxford University Press: Brown v. Board of Education and the Civil Rights Movement and Unfinished Business: Racial Equality in American History, which is part of Oxford’s Inalienable Rights series. In 2012, he published From the Closet to the Altar: Courts, Backlash, and the Struggle for Same-Sex Marriage. He is currently working on a revisionist history of the Founding.
ROB MCDOWELL, Commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). First appointed to a seat on the FCC by President George W. Bush, he was unanimously confirmed by the Senate in 2006. McDowell became the first Republican to appointed to an independent agency by President Barack Obama when he was reappointed to the Commission in 2009. During his time at the FCC, Commissioner McDowell has worked to help consumers in the communications marketplace enjoy the benefits of more choices, lower prices and useful innovations through increased competition.
PETER SCHUCK, Simeon E. Baldwin Professor Emeritus of Law and Professor (Adjunct) of Law at Yale Law School. He has previously served as Deputy Dean. Prior to joining Yale in 1979, Professor Schuck was Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of Planning and Evaluation in the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. Professor Schuck has testified before Congress or governmental agencies over 28 times. While a significant portion of his career has been dedicated to tort law and other widely ranging interests, he has written extensively about the Government’s limited powers under the Constitution.
2011 Dunn Lecturers
Clyde Wilcox, Jan 19 3:30 - 5:00
Clyde Wilcox is a leading scholar on the subject of religious liberty and author of over thirty books. Mr. Wilcox has also served on the American Political Science Association's Task Force on Religion and Politics and worked as a consultant and expert witness for the Justice Department. Mr. Wilcox is a professor in the Government Department at Georgetown University.
Steve Teles, Feb 2 3:30 - 5:00
Mr. Teles is an associate professor at Johns Hopkins University and the author of The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement: The Battle for Control of the Law. He also serves as a Schwarz Fellow at the New America Foundation, where his work explores the relationship between politics and policymaking.
Marci Hamilton, Feb 16 3:30-5:00
Marci Hamilton has served as constitutional and federal law counsel in many important clergy sex abuse and religious land use cases in state and federal courts. She is frequently asked to advise Congress and state legislatures on the constitutionality of pending legislation and to consult in cases involving important constitutional issues. She was lead counsel for the City of Boerne, Texas, in Boerne v. Flores, 521 U.S. 507 (1997), in the Supreme Court's seminal federalism and church/state case holding the Religious Freedom Restoration Act unconstitutional. Ms. Hamilton is the Paul R. Verkuil Chair in Public Law at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. Before joining the faculty at Cardozo, Ms. Hamilton clerked for former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor.
Chai Feldblum, March 1 3:30-5:00
Chai R. Feldblum currently serves as Commissioner of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, on leave from a professorship at Georgetown. A former law clerk for First Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Frank M. Coffin, and Supreme Court Justice Harry A. Blackmun, Professor Feldblum has been a leading advocate and scholar in the areas of disability rights, health and welfare rights, lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights, and workplace issues. She played a leading role in the drafting and negotiating of both the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 and the ADA Amendments Act of 2008. She also helped draft and negotiate the Employment Nondiscrimination Act and various medical privacy bills and regulations. Professor Feldblum is the author of numerous articles and book chapters on sexuality, morality and the law, disability law, and legislative lawyering. Ms. Feldblum worked as Legislative Counsel for the ACLU. Ms. Feldblum also served as director of the Campaign for Military Service, an organization which works to repeal laws that prohibit gays from serving in the military.
Douglas Laycock, March 22 4:00 – 5:30
Douglas Laycock testifies frequently before Congress on the subject of religious liberty and has argued many cases in the courts, including appearances as counsel at the U.S. Supreme Court in three First Amendment cases. He has co-edited a collection of essays, Same-Sex Marriage and Religious Liberty, and he recently published Religious Liberty, Volume I: Overviews and History, the first of a four-volume collection of his many writings on religious liberty. He is vice president of the American Law Institute, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the 2009 winner of the National First Freedom Award from the Council on America's First Freedom. Mr. Laycock is the Robert E. Scott Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Virginia School of Law.
Ira (Chip) Lupu, April 19 3:30 - 5:00
Professor Lupu is a nationally recognized scholar in constitutional law on the subject of the religion clauses of the First Amendment. Along with his colleague Robert Tuttle, he is co-director of the Project on Law and Religious Institutions. Before joining the faculty at GW Law, Mr. Lupu worked for Hill & Barlow, one of Boston's most elite law firms.
Robert Tuttle, April 19 3:30 - 5:00
Robert Tuttle serves as legal counsel to the Washington DC Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, and as a board member of Lutheran Services in America.He is the author or co-author of numerous articles and reports in the fields of legal ethics and church-state law. Mr. Tuttle is a professor at George Washington Law School and Co-Director of the Project on Law and Religious Institutions. Mr. Tuttle has received a masters from the Lutheran School of Theology in Chicago and a doctorate in religious ethics from the University of Virginia.
Richard Garnett (not yet scheduled)
Mr. Garnett is the founding director of Notre Dame Law School’s Program in Church, State, and Society, an interdisciplinary project that focuses on the role of religious institutions, communities, and authorities in the social order. Mr. Garnett clerked for former Chief Justice Rehnquist during the Court’s 1996 term and also for the late Chief Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, Richard S. Arnold. Mr. Garnett is an associate dean and a professor of law at Notre Dame Law School. Before joining the faculty at Notre Dame, Mr. Garnett worked for the Washington D.C. firm of Miller, Cassidy, Larroca & Lewin, where he specialized in religious liberty and criminal defense.