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LEST
Program
Activities 2008-2009
The following is a list of the activities and programs of the
LEST program during the 2008-09 academic year:
The 2009 Koford
Lecture
Philip C. Bobbitt
Columbia Law School
"Terror and Consent"
3:30 p.m. on April 13, 2009
Kirkbride Hall, room 100
This annual lecture is named in honor of our
long-time friend and former Director of Legal Studies, the late
Kenneth J. Koford. The lecture series is co-sponsored by the Legal Studies
Program and the Department of Economics in the Lerner College of Business &
Economics.
We are please to announce that our speaker this
year is
Philip Bobbitt, Herbert Wechsler Professor of Jurisprudence Columbia Law
School. Professor Bobbitt joined Columbia in 2007.
Before coming to Columbia,
Bobbitt was A.W. Walker Centennial Chair in Law at the University of Texas Law
School and remains a Senior
Fellow in the Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law at the
University of Texas. He has taught as a
visitor at Oxford University, Harvard Law School, and Kings College in London.
Bobbitt was awarded an undergraduate degree in Philosophy from Princeton
University (1971), a J.D. from Yale Law School (1975), and a Ph.D. (History)
from Oxford University (1983).
Philip
Bobbitt is a Fellow of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is a Life Member of the American Law
Institute, and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Pacific Council
on International Policy, the International Institute for Strategic Studies and
the Executive Council of the American Society of International Law. He is a
member of the Commission on the Continuity of Government. He served as Law Clerk
to the Hon. Henry J. Friendly (2 Cir.), Associate Counsel to the President, the
Counselor on International Law at the State Department, Legal Counsel to the
Senate Iran-Contra Committee, and Director for Intelligence, Senior Director for
Critical Infrastructure and Senior Director for Strategic Planning at the
National Security Council. He is a former trustee of Princeton University.
Professor Bobbitt has published
seven books: Tragic Choices (with G. Calabresi) (Norton, 1978),
Constitutional Fate (Oxford, 1982), Democracy and Deterrence
(Macmillan, 1987), U.S. Nuclear Strategy (with L. Freedman and G.
Treverton) (St. Martin's, 1989), Constitutional Interpretation
(Blackwell, 1991), The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace and the Course of
History (Knopf, 2002),
and, most recently,
Terror and Consent: The Wars for the Twenty-First Century (Knopf, 2008).
Senator
John McCain has praised
Terror and Consent
as
“the best book I’ve ever read on terrorism,”
and Henry Kissinger called Bobbitt, “perhaps the most important political
philosopher today.” Tony Blair wrote of Terror and Consent, “It may be
written by an academic but it is actually required reading for political
leaders.” Professor Bobbitt will lecture on themes from
Terror and Consent.
David A. Harris
University of Pittsburgh School of Law
"Local
Police Enforcing Immigration Law:
Why the Obvious Answer Might Be Wrong"
Monday,
November 17th
Gore 116
5:00-6:30pm
David A. Harris is Professor
of Law at the University of Pittsburgh. He is the leading national authority on
racial profiling. His 2002 book, Profiles in Injustice: Why Racial Profiling
Cannot Work, and his scholarly articles in the field of traffic stops of
minority motorists and stops and frisks, influenced the national debate on
profiling and related topics. His work led to federal efforts to address the
practice and to legislation and voluntary efforts in over half the states and
hundreds of police departments. Professor Harris has testified three times in
the U.S. Senate and before many state legislative bodies on profiling and
related issues. His 2005 book, Good Cops: The Case for Preventive Policing,
uses case studies from around the country to show that citizens need not trade
liberty for safety; they can be safe from criminals and terrorists without
sacrificing their civil rights if law enforcement uses strategies based on
prevention.
Professor Harris is a
graduate of Northwestern University, a J.D. from Yale Law School, and an LL.M
from Georgetown University Graduate School of Law.
Harris writes and comments
frequently in the media on police practices, racial profiling, and other
criminal justice and national security issues. He has appeared on The Today
Show, Dateline NBC, National Public Radio, and has been interviewed by the New
York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Los Angeles Times, among many
others. In 1996, Professor Harris served as a member of the Civil Liberties
Advisory Board to the White House Commission on Aviation Safety and Security.
Before he began teaching in 1990, Professor Harris was a public defender in the
Washington, D.C. area, a litigator at a law firm in Philadelphia, and law clerk
to Federal Judge Walter K. Stapleton in Wilmington, Delaware.
Co-sponsored by:
UD Legal Studies Program, Department of Sociology and Criminal Justice, Black
American Studies, Department of Political Science and International Relations,
Department of History, and Urban Affairs and Public Policy.
Faculty Forum
Legal Studies Program
faculty research seminar
Kris Weller
Ph.D. Candidate
History of Consciousness Program
University of California Santa Cruz
“Minding Minds: Species, Sanity, and Law”
Wednesday October 15
12:15 to 1:30 p.m.
Alfred Lerner Hall 231
Kris Weller is a Ph.D. candidate in the History of Consciousness Program at the
University of California Santa Cruz. In her talk, she will address the figure
of the human in the American legal tradition. Beginning with an analysis of a
1979 New York high court case that consolidated and dismissed two cases on
appeal — one concerning the neglect of animals in New York City zoos and the
other the neglect of humans recently discharged from New York state mental
hospitals — Weller will examine the interplay between captivity and
categorization. She argues suggest that not only is captivity dehumanizing, but
that the act of capturing is humanizing, such that we protect in law an
unwritten right to capture that inheres in the fully human legal subject. One
consequence of this defining right to capture is the necessity of maintaining a
capturable class, a grouping based on the idea of the animal but which always
has included a variable range of categorized humans as well. She argues that the
maintenance of the socio-legal distinction between humans and other animals
guarantees the failure of human rights campaigns to imagine and articulate, much
less achieve, social equality among humans.
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