November 10, 2004
Speaker Biographies
Jean Bethke Elshtain is the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor of Social and Political Ethics in the Divinity School at the University of Chicago. Her books include Public Man, Private Woman: Women in Social Thought; The Family in Political Thought; Meditations on Modern Political Thought; Women and War; Democracy on Trial (a New York Times Notable Book for 1995); Augustine and the Limits of Politics; Real Politics: At the Center of Everyday Life; New Wine in Old Bottles: Politics and Ethical Discourse; and Who Are We? Critical Reflections, Hopeful Possibilities, for which she received the Theologos Award for Best Academic Book 2000 by the Association of Theological Booksellers. In 2002, she published a book, Jane Addams and the Dream of American Democracy, and an edited volume, The Jane Addams Reader, which won second place for biography in 2002 from Society of Midand Authors. In 2003, she published Just War against Terror: The Burden of American Power in a Violent World, which was named one of the best nonfiction books of 2003 by Publisher’s Weekly. She writes widely for journals of civic opinion and lectures on whether democracy will prove sufficiently robust and resilient to survive. She is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and chair of the Council on Civil Society. She has served on the Board of Trustees of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University and is currently on the Board of Trustees of the National Humanities Center and on the Board of Directors of the National Endowment for Democracy. She has been a Phi Beta Kappa lecturer, is the recipient of nine honorary degrees, and received the 2002 Frank J. Goodnow Award, the American Political Science Association’s highest award for distinguished service to the profession. In 2003, she was the second holder of the Maguire Chair in American History and Ethics at the Library of Congress.
Sanford V. Levinson holds the W. St. John Garwood and W. St. John Garwood Jr. Centennial Chair in Law at the University of Texas, in addition to serving as a professor of government. An internationally eminent scholar of constitutional law, he also teaches and writes about professional responsibility, jurisprudence, and political theory. He is author of Constitutional Faith (Princeton University, 1988); Written in Stone (Duke University, 1998); Processes of Constitutional Decision-making (Aspen, 2000); and Wrestling with Diversity (Duke, 2003) and editor or coeditor of Torture: A Collection (Oxford, 2004); Constitutional Stupidities, Constitutional Tragedies (New York University, 1998); Responding to Imperfection: The Theory and Practice of Constitutional Amendment (Princeton University, 1995); and Interpreting Law and Literature: A Hermeneutic Reader (Northwestern University, 1988). His many articles have appeared in the Yale Law Journal, Constitutional Commentary, Ethics, Philosophy & Public Affairs, and elsewhere, including a recent article, “The Canons of Constitutional Law” (Harvard Law Review, 1998). He has been a visiting professor at Harvard Law School and at the New York University School of Law, and is a member of the American Law Institute.
Kim Scheppele is a professor of law, political science, and sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, after spending twelve years in the Department of Political Science at the University of Michigan. During her time at Michigan, she held the Arthur F. Thurnau Chair as Associate Professor of Political Science. From 1994 to 1998, she resided principally in Budapest, where she spent two years carrying out a research project on the new constitutionalism at the Constitutional Court of Hungary. She is currently working on three books: one on the development of “courtocracy” in the aftermath of state socialism, one on abortion in comparative constitutional law, and one on legal fictions and the interpretation of legal facts. Ms. Scheppele has been an active member of the Law and Society Association since 1980, a founding organizer of the Conference Group on Jurisprudence and Public Law within the American Political Science Association (starting in 1985), and a founding organizer of the Sociology of Law section of the American Sociological Association (where she was section chair from1994–1995). She is the author of Legal Secrets: Equality and Efficiency in the Common Law (University of Chicago, 1990), which received special recognition in the Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship prize competition of the American Sociological Association. She has published many articles on subjects ranging from legal narrative and insider trading to feminist jurisprudence and the rule of law.
John Yoo joined the faculty of the University of California–Berkeley’s School of Law (Boalt Hall) in 1993 and then clerked for Justice Clarence Thomas of the U.S. Supreme Court. He served as general counsel of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee from 1995 to 1996. From 2001 to 2003, he served as a deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel at the U.S. Department of Justice, where he worked on issues involving foreign affairs, national security, and the separation of powers. He has been a visiting professor at the University of Chicago and the Free University of Amsterdam. He has received research fellowships from the University of California–Berkeley and the Olin Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation and is a visiting scholar at AEI. He also has received the Paul M. Bator Award for excellence in legal scholarship and teaching from the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy. He has testified before the judiciary committees of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives and has advised the State of California on constitutional issues. He has published articles about foreign affairs, international law, and constitutional law in a number of the nation’s leading law journals, including the law reviews of Boalt Hall, Chicago, Columbia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Texas. He is the author of War, Peace, and the Constitution (University of Chicago Press, forthcoming 2005).
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