Jim Zirin graduated from Princeton University with honors and received his law degree from the University of Michigan Law School where he was an editor of the Michigan Law Review and a member of the Order of the Coif. For three years, he was an Assistant United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York and served in the criminal division under Robert M. Morgenthau. William Baude is Neubauer Family Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School, where he...

With commentary by Professor William Hubbard. Michael W. McConnell is the Richard and Frances Mallery Professor and director of the Constitutional Law Center at Stanford Law School, as well as Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is a leading authority on freedom of speech and religion, the relation of individual rights to government structure, originalism, and various other aspects of constitutional history and constitutional law. He is author of numerous articles and co-author of...

In this First Monday event, Law School faculty discuss their insight and opinions on upcoming United States Supreme Court cases and the issues currently facing the Court. Featuring: Anthony J. Casey, '02, Professor of Law and Mark Claster Mamolen Teaching Scholar Nicholas Stephanopoulos, Assistant Professor of Law David Strauss, the Gerald Ratner Distinguished Service Professor of Law. Moderated by Sarah M. Konsky, Assistant Clinical Professor of Law and Director of the Jenner &...

Professor Tasioulas discusses the notion of the ‘minimum core obligations’ associated with economic, social and cultural human rights, such as the rights to education and health. The idea of minimum core obligations, which is a nascent doctrine in international human rights law, is heavily contested both as to its meaning and utility. John Tasioulas is Visiting Professor of Law and the Charles J. Merriam Scholar at the University of Chicago Law School; Yeoh Professor of Politics, Philosophy,...

Today, as our capacity to prolong life increases, people dispute whether indefinite prolongation could possibly be good. A leading bioethicist, Ezekiel Emanuel (brother of Rahm) has written that we should all want to die at 75! I'll approach this question by drawing on ancient Greek arguments about why immortal life is undesirable -- arguments that I find fatally flawed. I then turn to two more recent philosophers who try to reconcile us to finite and reasonably short mortal lives:...

Michael Kirby, "North Korea and our Dilemma: How to Secure Accountability for Crimes Against Humanity by a Recalcitrant Nuclear State?" Michael Kirby was a Justice of the High Court of Australia (1996-2009), the nation's highest appellate and constitutional Court. In 2013-14 he served as chair of the Commission of Inquiry of the UN Human Rights Council investigating crimes against humanity in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (North Korea). The commission found grave and...

Justin Driver is Harry N. Wyatt Professor of Law and Herbert and Marjorie Fried Research Scholar. His principal research interests include constitutional law, constitutional theory, and the intersection of race with legal institutions. Prior to joining the University of Chicago Law School faculty, Driver was a visiting professor at Harvard, Stanford, and the University of Virginia. He began his career in legal academia at the University of Texas in 2009. This Loop Luncheon was presented on...

Recent efforts by opponents of same-sex marriage and reproductive rights to reorient their agenda around religious freedom have sparked an explosion of scholarship on religious claims for exemption from generally applicable laws. Professor Weinrib will discuss an early antecedent of this strategy: the campaign by the National Civil Liberties Bureau, the organizational precursor of the ACLU, to secure exemptions from military service for conscientious objectors during the First World War. The...

Dhammika Dharmapala is the Julius Kreeger Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School. The 2016 Coase Lecture was presented on February 16, 2016.

Chief Judge Diane Wood presents "Making Your Voice Heard" and speaks on issues related to women's professional development and the difficulties they face. Judge Diane Wood is the Chief Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit and a senior lecturer here at the Law School. She earned her B.A. in 1971 and J.D. in 1975 from the University of Texas at Austin, and went on to clerk for Judge Irving L. Goldberg of the Fifth Circuit and for Justice Harry A. Blackmun of the...

Suppose a court holds in the context of a habeas petition that a constitutional right is not yet “clearly established.” Can we conclude from this that the right does not exist? The answer, of course, is “no”—it would be error to treat this case as having held that there is no such right. Yet in case after case, across multiple areas of law, judges (and their clerks) make precisely these types of “deference mistakes”: they rely on precedent without understanding the standard of review or...

Keynote address for the University of Chicago Law School Legal Forum Symposium 2015: Policing the Police First published in 1985, the University of Chicago Legal Forum is the Law School’s second-oldest journal. The Legal Forum is a student-edited journal that focuses on a single cutting-edge legal issue every year, presenting an authoritative and timely approach to a particular topic. Tracey L. Meares is the Walton Hale Hamilton Professor of Law at Yale Law School Recorded on November 6,...

"Standing Up for Marriage Equality: Insights from the Obergefell Supreme Court Arguments" Doug Hallward-Driemeier leads Ropes & Gray’s Appellate and Supreme Court practice. He has presented more than 60 appellate arguments, including before the U.S. Supreme Court and every federal circuit court of appeals. In the 2014-2015 Supreme Court Term, he argued two cases, including the landmark Obergefell case. Daniel Hemel’s research focuses on taxation, risk regulation, and innovation law. His...

Human Dignity has become a central value in political and constitutional thought. Yet its meaning and scope, and its relation to other moral and political values such as autonomy and rights have been elusive. The lecture will explicate the value of Human Dignity through the exploration of three distinct ways in which dignity is violated. Moshe Halbertal is the Gruss Professor of Law at NYU and Professor of Philosophy Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. The 2015 Dewey Lecture was...

It's birth control's fiftieth birthday! Professor Case will be discussing what Griswold—the landmark case that began the process of invalidating legal prohibitions on the use of birth control—looks like in the aftermath of Hobby Lobby and Obergefell. Mary Anne Case is the Arnold I. Shure Professor of Law and convener of the Workshop on Regulating Family, Sex and Gender. Presented by the Law Students for Reproductive Justice and the American Constitution Society on November 11, 2015.

Panelists: - Don Harmon, JD’95, Illinois State Senator - Dan Johnson, JD’00, Progressive Public Affairs - Blake Sercye, JD'11, Associate, Jenner & Block - Nicholas Stephanopoulos, Assistant Professor of Law Hosted by the University of Chicago Law School’s Regional Alumni Committee at Skadden Arps in Chicago. Recorded October 13, 2015.

Lawmakers respond to constituents, seek higher office, have lofty goals, and even learn from their mistakes. But do they actually make the world a better place? In this lecture, the first of this year’s Chicago’s Best Ideas series, Professor Levmore examines some aspects of lawmaking that do not make their way into the law school curriculum. First, lawmakers may be forward-looking, but they have tools that are backward looking, or retroactive, and this combination can help us understand why...

James B. Comey, class of 1985, is the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Recorded on October 23, 2015, at the University of Chicago Law School.

Laura Weinrib, Assistant ​Professor ​of ​Law ​and ​Herbert ​and ​Marjorie ​Fried ​Teaching ​Scholar, is a 2003 graduate of Harvard Law School. She completed her PhD in history at Princeton University in 2011. In 2000, she received an AB in literature and an AM in comparative literature from Harvard University. After law school, Weinrib clerked for Judge Thomas L. Ambro of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. From 2009 to 2010, she was a Samuel I. Golieb Fellow in Legal...

Even for those among us who are not altogether convinced by Isaiah Berlin's famous essay "Two Concepts of Liberty," it has by now become commonplace to adopt a distinction between "negative" and "positive" liberties that largely coincides with the one he offered. In my lecture I defend the thesis that this bifurcation of the concept of freedom is incomplete in a significant respect, because it omits a third type, which I will call "social freedom." I proceed first by illustrating with some...

“Newtonian Law and Economics, Quantum Law and Economics, and the Search for a Theory of Relativity” At this law school, “law and economics” is a mantra. But what is the “economics” in “law and economics”? There is a tendency to see research on cognitive biases and bounded rationality (“behavioral economics”) as challenging or even overturning an approach using models of rational behavior (“neo-classical economics”). With the help of an analogy to physics, I argue that such a view disserves...

After the Hobby Lobby and Citizens United decisions, a robust public debate has emerged over corporate constitutional rights. Prof. Huq discusses ongoing empirical research about how the Hobby Lobby case has influenced public perceptions not just of those rights, but also of the Court itself. Aziz Z. Huq teaches and conducts research in constitutional law, criminal procedure, and federal courts. A 1996 summa cum laude graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, he received...

The notion of reasonable expectations filters in and out of many given areas of law. It is often derided as circular claim in which reasonable expectations are shaped by the law that they are supposed to shape. On the other hand, it is often treated, most notably under the Supreme Court’s now pivotal decision in Penn Central Transportation Co v. City of New York, as the linchpin of modern real property law, and has been used as well in other areas, including financial regulation and the law...

For over twenty-five years, federal courts of appeals have rebelled against every Supreme Court mandate that weakens the federal sentencing Guidelines. That rebellion has intensified since the Court dealt a blow to the Guidelines a decade ago by making them advisory, rather than mandatory. This ruling dramatically limited the courts of appeals’ authority to reverse district court sentences that deviate from the Guidelines. Rather than accepting this limitation on their power, the courts of...

A Kreisman Housing Breakfast Series event co-sponsored by the Energy Policy Institute at Chicago and the Coase-Sandor Institute for Law and Economics Led by University of Chicago environmental lawyer Mark Templeton, an expert panel will discuss the advantages and disadvantages of different public and private approaches for addressing the impacts of climate change on infrastructure and housing. Featuring panelists: - Henry Henderson, Midwest Director, Natural Resource Defense Council -...