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Participants

  • Philip J. Ayers has taught at Monash University, the University of Adelaide and in America as Visiting Professor at Vassar College and Boston University. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society (London) in 1989 and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 1999. Philip Ayres has published biographies of a number of major Australian civic figures including Chief Justice Sir Owen Dixon, Douglas Mawson and Malcolm Fraser.
  • H.W. Brands is the Dickson Allen Anderson Centennial Professor of History at University of Texas at Austin. He writes on American history and politics, with books including Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Andrew Jackson His Life and Times, The Age of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the New American Dream, The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin, and TR: The Last Romantic.  Traitor to His Class and The First American were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. He lectures frequently on historical and current events, and can be seen and heard on national and international television and radio programs.
  • Philip Girard is Professor of Law, History and Canadian Studies and University Research Professor at Dalhousie University’s Schulich School of Law in Canada. He received a B.A. from Brock University, a LL.B. from McGill University, a LL.M. from the University of California at Berkeley, and a Ph. D. from Dalhousie University. Prior to teaching, he clerked for Mr. Justice W.Z. Estey of the Supreme Court of Canada. He has been a Visiting Professor at Osgoode Hall Law School and at the Indian Law Institute in New Delhi, India. He has also served as Legal Research Counsel to the Law Reform Commission of Nova Scotia and as president of the Canadian Association of Law Teachers. Among his publications is Bora Laskin:  Bringing Law to Life which won the 2006 Chalmers Award, awarded by the Champlain Society to the best book in Ontario history.
  • Morton J. Horwitz is the Charles Warren Professor of American Legal History at Harvard Law School. His book The Transformation of American Law, 1780-1860 won the coveted Bancroft Prize in American History. The Transformation of American Law, 1870-1960: The Crisis of Legal Orthodoxy completes a magisterial intellectual history of American law. By contrast, The Warren Court and the Pursuit of Justice is a short interpretive essay that captures the essence of the Warren Court and its significance to the political and social history of the 1950s and 1960s.
  • Gary Jacobsohn is the Patterson-Banister Professor of Government and H. Malcolm MacDonald Professor in Constitutional & Comparative Law at the University of Texas at Austin. He received his Ph.D. from Cornell University. Before joining UT in 2004, Professor Jacobsohn taught at Williams College where he was, most recently, the Woodrow Wilson Professor of Political Science. His interests and work lie at the intersection of constitutional theory and comparative constitutionalism. He has held fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars, the Fulbright Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. He is a past President of the New England Political Science Association, and has served as co-editor of the Rowman and Littlefield series on Studies in American Constitutionalism.
  • John C. Jeffries, Jr. is the David and Mary Harrison Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Virginia School of Law.  Professor Jeffries joined the Virginia law faculty two years after earning his law degree there in 1973.  He received his B.A. from Yale University.  His primary research and teaching interests are civil rights, federal courts, criminal law, and constitutional law.  Among other publications, he has written a biography of Justice Lewis F. Powell, Jr., for whom he clerked before serving in the U.S. Army as a second lieutenant.   
  • Laura Kalman is a professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara.  Professor Kalman received her Ph.D. from Yale University in 1982.  She attended Pomona College where she majored in history and went on to UCLA Law School.  She is most interested in twentieth-century American history and legal history.  Her publications include Yale Law School and the Sixties: Revolt and Reverberations, The Strange Career of Legal Liberalism, and Abe Fortas: A Biography.  Her current research focuses on the United States from 1974 to 1981.
  • Andrew L. Kaufman is the Charles Stebbins Fairchild Professor of Law and Vice-Dean for Academic Programming at Harvard Law School, where he teaches Constitutional Law, Commercial Law, and the Legal Profession.  He chairs the Committee on Professional Ethics of the Massachusetts Bar Association. His definitive biography of Justice Benjamin Cardozo won the 1999 Scribes Book Award sponsored by the American Society of Writers on Legal Subjects and the Erwin N. Griswold Prize of the Supreme Court Historical Society.
  • Paul Kens is a Professor in the Political Science Department of Texas State University. He received a B.A. in Political Science from Northern Illinois University and A JD from the University of Texas School of Law. While attending UT years later, he also earned a Ph.D. in Government. Dr. Kens began his career at Texas State immediately upon receiving his Ph.D. in 1987. Since then he has taught Junior, Senior and Graduate level courses in Constitutional Law, Law and Public Policy, and Constitutional Theory. Before joining the Political Science faculty, Dr. Kens spent time in the private sector, working as an attorney for the Gulf Coast Legal Foundation and as an Editor for the State Bar of Texas, Continuing Legal Education.
  • Pnina LaHav is a Law Alumni Scholar and Professor of Law at Boston University School of Law. She received a LL.B. from Hebrew University of Jerusalem Faculty of Law, a LL.M. and J.S.D. from Yale Law School, and an M.A. in Political Science from Boston University. Professor Lahav has also taught at Hebrew University, Tel Aviv University, the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Herzlia, Oxford University and Université Jean Moulin Lyon 3 in Lyon, France. She has been a fellow at the Rockefeller Foundation, the Stanford Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and the Center for Advanced Studies at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Her publications include Judgment in Jerusalem: Chief Justice Simon Agranat and the Zionist Century, winner of Israel’s Seltner Award (1998) and the Gratz College Centennial Book Award (1998). This title was also offered as a selection by the History Book Club in the United States and was the subject of a symposium at the Tel Aviv University Faculty of Law in 1999.
  • Roger Newman is the author of Hugo Black: A Biography, co-author of Banned Films: Movies, Censors and the First Amendment, editor-in-chief of The Constitution and Its Amendments, and editor of the Yale Biographical Dictionary of American Law. He has taught at New York University and Hofstra Law School, and was a Research Scholar at NYU Law School from 1985 to 2001. He was educated at Hunter College, the University of Virginia, NYU and Cardozo Law School.
  • Jim Newton is editor-at-large of the Los Angeles Times and a Senior Fellow with UCLA's School of Public Affairs. He formerly served as a John Jacobs Fellow at U.C. Berkeley's Institute of Governmental Studies. He is a graduate of Dartmouth College and the recipient of numerous local and national awards in journalism. He was part of the Los Angeles Times' coverage of the Los Angeles riots in 1992 and the earthquake of 1994, both of which were awarded Pulitzer Prizes to the staff.  He is the author of Justice for All: Earl Warren and the Nation He Made, and is at work now on a presidential biography of Dwight Eisenhower.
  • David Oshinsky is the Jack S. Blanton Chair in History and a Distinguished Teaching Professor in the Department of History at the University of Texas at Austin and is a Distinguished Scholar in Residence at New York University.  He received his Ph.D. from Brandeis University.  Professor Oshinsky specializes in 20th Century U.S. political and cultural history.  In 2006, Professor Oshinsky won a Pulitzer Prize for his book, Polio: An American Story.  His other books include the Hardeman Prize-winning A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy, and the Robert Kennedy Prize-winning Worse Than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice, both of which were also New York Times Notable Books.
  • Scot Powe clerked for Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas before joining the Texas faculty in 1971. Professor Powe earned his B.A. at Yale University and his J.D. at the University of Washington – Seattle.  His latest book is The Supreme Court and The American Elite, 1789-2008 (2009). Previously, reflecting a split career as a historian and a First Amendment scholar, especially of the electronic media, his three award-winning books were American Broadcasting and the First Amendment, The Fourth Estate and the Constitution, and The Warren Court and American Politics.  Additionally, he has co-authored Regulating Broadcast Programming and written scores of articles.  Professor Powe was also a principal commentator on the 2007 four-part PBS series "The Supreme Court." He is also a Professor of Government at the University of Texas and has been a visiting professor at Berkeley, Connecticut, and Georgetown.
  • Philippa Strum is a Senior Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C.  She received her B.A. from Brandeis University, a master’s in education from Harvard University, and a Ph.D. from The New School.  Ms. Strum is the former Director of Division Studies at the Woodrow Wilson Center and is the Broeklundian Professor of Political Science Emerita at the City University of New York.  Her expertise is in the areas of American civil liberties and civil rights; United States constitutional law; human rights, women, law and politics; United States government; and United States Arabs and Muslims.  Among her other publications is Louis D. Brandeis: Justice for the People.
  • G. Edward White is the David and Mary Harrison Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Virginia, where he joined the faculty in 1972 following a clerkship with Chief Justice Warren of the Supreme Court of the United States and a year as Visiting Scholar at the American Bar Foundation.  Professor White earned his B.A. at Amherst College, his M.A. and Ph.D. at Yale University, and his J.D. at Harvard Law School.  He has published thirteen books, which have won numerous honors and awards such as final listing for the Pulitzer Prize in history, the Silver Gavel Award from the American Bar Association, the James Willard Hurst Prize from the Law & Society Association, the Littleton-Griswold Prize from the American Historical Association, the Scribes Award, and the Association of American Law Schools' Triennial Coif Award. His forays into judicial biography include The American Judicial Tradition: Profiles of Leading American Judges,  Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.,  Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes: Law and the Inner Self, and Earl Warren: A Public Life.