EVENTS

Date:	Thursday, June 11, 2009
Time:	2:00 PM -- 4:00 PM
Location:	Wohlstetter Conference Center, Twelfth Floor, AEI

Michael A. Carvin is a partner at Jones Day law firm in Washington, D.C. Mr. Carvin specializes in constitutional, appellate, civil rights, and civil litigation against the federal government and has argued numerous cases in the Supreme Court, including the decisions limiting the Justice Department’s ability to create “majority-minority” districts and upholding Proposition 209’s ban on racial preferences in California. He has also represented state governments, financial institutions, and telecommunications and energy companies. Prior to joining Jones Day, Mr. Carvin served at the Justice Department as special assistant to the attorney general and deputy assistant attorney general in the Civil Rights Division, as well as deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel.

Henry Olsen is vice president and director of the National Research Initiative (NRI) at AEI. He disseminates and publicizes the Institute’s work to the academic community; works with AEI’s visiting, adjunct, and NRI research fellows; commissions and supervises NRI projects; and oversees the production of NRI publications. Mr. Olsen previously served as vice president for programs at the Manhattan Institute and as a judicial clerk to the chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, Danny J. Boggs.

Richard H. Pildes is the Sudler Family Professor of Constitutional Law at the New York University School of Law. He is one of the nation’s leading scholars of public law and a specialist in legal issues affecting democracy. In the area of democracy, Mr. Pildes, along with the coauthors of his acclaimed casebook, The Law of Democracy: Legal Structure of the Political Process (now in its third edition), has helped to create a revolutionary field of study in the law schools. Mr. Pildes is widely considered one of the nation’s leading scholars on the Voting Rights Act. He is coeditor of The Future of the Voting Rights Act (Russell Sage Foundation, 2006) and has written dozens of articles on the act. His scholarship is regularly cited by the Supreme Court in cases involving the Voting Rights Act. He has written for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, The New Republic, The American Prospect, and similar journals. Apart from his academic work, Mr. Pildes has also served as counsel to a group of former chairmen of the Securities and Exchange Commission in litigation challenging the constitutionality of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, as counsel in election litigation to the Puerto Rico Electoral Commission, as counsel to the government of Puerto Rico, as a federal court-appointed independent expert on voting rights litigation, and as counsel in successful Supreme Court litigation that challenged the way the U.S. Tax Court operated.

Abigail Thernstrom is an adjunct scholar at AEI, vice-chair of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, and a member of the board of advisers of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission. She was a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute in New York from 1993 to 2009 and a member of the Massachusetts state Board of Education for more than a decade. In 2007, Ms. Thernstrom was awarded a Bradley Prize for Outstanding Intellectual Achievement. Her previous study of the Voting Rights Act, Whose Votes Count? Affirmative Action and Minority Voting Rights (Harvard University Press, 1987) won four awards, including the American Bar Association’s Certificate of Merit; the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for the best book on race and ethnicity; and best policy book from the Policy Studies Organization, a division of the American Political Science Association. Ms. Thernstrom is also coauthor (with her husband, Stephan Thernstrom) of No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning (Simon & Schuster, 2003), which won the Fordham Foundation’s prize for distinguished scholarship, and America in Black and White: One Nation, Indivisible (Simon & Schuster, 1997), named by the New York Times as one of the notable books of the year. Her frequent media appearances have included Fox News Sunday, Good Morning America, and This Week with George Stephanopoulos. Her writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, The Economist, and the Times Literary Supplement (London).

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