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The Annual Koford Lecture

Co-sponsored by

the Legal Studies Program

and the Department of Economics

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.

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

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. 

The 2008 Koford Lecture

Lewis A. Kornhauser

Alfred B. Engelberg Professor of Law

New York University School of Law

"Modeling Courts"

3:30 p.m. on April 16, 2008

Purnell 118

We are please to announce that our speaker this year is Lewis A. Kornhauser, Alfred B. Engelberg Professor of Law and the Director of the Institute for Law and Society at New York University School of Law, where he has taught since 1982.  Professor Kornhauser was awarded a B.A. and M.A. (Mathematics) from Brown University (1972), a J.D. from the University of California at Berkeley School of Law (1976), and a Ph.D. (Economics) from the University of California, Berkeley (1980).  He has taught as a visitor at Stanford University, Duke University, and the University of California, Berkeley.  Previously, he was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Stanford, California.

In his research, Dr. Kornhauser has applied microeconomic analysis to a wide range of subjects, including fundamental aspects of jurisprudence that are not typically examined from this perspective. His publications include articles about corporate takeovers, divorce, and methods of assigning monetary values to human lives. In this lecture, Dr. Kornhauser will discuss the various models of adjudication advanced by social scientists. Rational choice models of adjudication have largely imported the sequential choice model developed for the study of Congress to the study of courts.  Kornhauser argues that a more fruitful approach would develop a model that captures the institutional features of courts.  He will focus on three "challenges" to the standard models in judicial politics: (1) the role of litigant, and to a lesser extent, judicial, selection (as opposed to no selection); (2) the use of "case space" rather than "policy space" as the basic domain for the study of courts; and (3) supplementing agency models in which judges have heterogeneous preferences with team models in which judges share an objective function.

To see Dr. Kornhauser's resume, click here
 

The 2007 Koford Lecture

Sam Peltzman

Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago

March 15, 2007 at 4:00 pm in Purnell 115

We are very pleased to announce that our guest speaker for the Third Annual Koford Lecture will be Sam Peltzman, the Ralph and Dorothy Keller Distinguished Service Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago.  Professor Peltzman is interested in the economics of regulation and government activity with concentration in the following areas: banking and capital markets, antitrust, public utilities, transportation, consumer protection, and education; economics of politics; industrial organization.  His many publications include: "Prices Rise Faster than they Fall," Journal of Political Economy, (June 2000); Political Participation and Government Regulation (University of Chicago Press, 1998); "The Political Economy of the Decline of American Public Education: Non-College Bound Students," Journal of Law and Economics (April 1996); "Voters as Fiscal Conservatives," Quarterly Journal of Economics (May 1992); "The Economic Theory of Regulation After a Decade of Deregulation," Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Microeconomics (1989).

Peltzman has previously taught at the University of California, Los Angeles (1964-73), the Institute for Advanced Study, Hebrew University, Jerusalem (1978), and was faculty research fellow, National Bureau of Economic Research (1966).  He was senior staff economist on the President's Council of Economic Advisers (1970-71).

Questions regarding events can be directed to Maryanne Brown-MacKay (Staff Assistant) or Sheldon Pollack (Director).

The 2006 Koford Lecture

Professor Eric Posner

University of Chicago Law School

"Emergencies and Democratic Failure"

Thursday April 6, 2006

Our guest speaker for the second annual "Koford Lecture" will be Prof. Eric Posner of the University of Chicago Law School.  The lecture is named in honor of our long-time friend and former Director of Legal Studies, the late Kenneth J. Koford.  The lecture is co-sponsored by the Department of Economics in the Lerner College of Business & Economics.

Eric Posner is Kirkland and Ellis Professor of Law, University of Chicago.  He is author of (with Jack Goldsmith) The Limits of International Law (Oxford, 2005), and Law and Social Norms (Harvard, 2000); and editor of Chicago Lectures in Law and Economics (Foundation, 2000) and (with Matthew Adler) Cost-Benefit Analysis: Legal, Economic, and Philosophical Perspectives (University of Chicago, 2001).  He is also an editor of the Journal of Legal Studies.  He has published articles on bankruptcy law, contract law, international law, cost-benefit analysis, constitutional law, and administrative law, and has taught courses on international law, foreign relations law, contracts, employment law, bankruptcy law, secured transactions, and game theory and the law.  His current research focuses on international law, including the laws of war, international adjudication, and war crimes trials.  He is a graduate of Yale College and Harvard Law School.

Questions regarding this event can be directed to Maryanne Brown-MacKay (Staff Assistant) or Sheldon Pollack (Director).
 

The 2005 Koford Lecture

Professor Jeffrey Rosen

George Washington University Law School

Our guest speaker for the first annual "Koford Lecture" held on April 15, 2005, was Jeffrey Rosen, Professor of Law at George Washington University Law School.   The lecture is named in honor of our long-time friend and former Director of Legal Studies, the late Kenneth J. Koford.

Professor Rosen is the author of The Unwanted Gaze: The Destruction of Privacy in America (2001), which was called by The New York Times "the definitive text on privacy perils in the digital age." His latest book, The Naked Crowd: Reclaiming Security and Freedom in an Anxious Age (2004) was called by the Harvard Law Review a "thoughtful and engaging read . . . [that] provides much-needed depth to the debate over balancing privacy and security in an age of terrorism." Professor Rosen is a graduate of Harvard College, summa cum laude; Oxford University, where he was a Marshall Scholar; and Yale Law School. His essays and book reviews have appeared in many publications, including The New Republic, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, and The New Yorker, where he has been a staff writer. He is a frequent contributor to National Public Radio and is the legal affairs editor of The New Republic.  Professor Rosen spoke on his latest research, a forthcoming book on democracy and the U.S. Supreme Court.