ALI Council Member; Reporter on Restatement of the Law, Constitutional Torts; and Stanford Law School Professor Pamela S. Karlan will deliver the McCorkle Lecture at the University of Virginia School of Law on Feb. 24.
Karlan argues that the structure of the U.S. Constitution and a series of Supreme Court decisions have undercut governmental accountability, and she will discuss several examples of this underlying theme in a lecture titled “Unaccountable.”
The event will be held in Caplin Pavilion at 4 p.m., with a reception to follow the talk. Parking is available in the Law School’s visitors lot on Nash Drive. Parking passes may be obtained from the Law School’s Admissions Office. Dean Leslie Kendrick ’06 will introduce Karlan.
Karlan is the Kenneth and Harle Montgomery Professor of Public Interest Law and co-director of the Supreme Court Litigation Clinic at Stanford Law School, where she teaches courses on Supreme Court litigation, constitutional law and criminal law.
Karlan has served as a commissioner on the California Fair Political Practices Commission, an assistant counsel and cooperating attorney for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and as a deputy assistant attorney general in the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice. She received the Attorney General’s Award for Exceptional Service, the DOJ’s highest award for employee performance, as part of the team responsible for implementing the Supreme Court’s decision in U.S. v. Windsor.
A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Law Institute, Karlan has co-authored leading casebooks on constitutional law, constitutional litigation and the law of democracy, as well as numerous scholarly articles.
From 1988-1998, Karlan taught civil procedure and law and political participation at UVA as the first Roy L. & Rosamond Woodruff Morgan Research Professor. She won an All-University Outstanding Teaching Award and a State Council of Higher Education in Virginia Outstanding Faculty Award.
Karlan served as a law clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Harry A. Blackmun and Judge Abraham D. Sofaer of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.
The McCorkle Lectureship was established in memory of Claiborne Ross McCorkle 1910, by his widow, Hazel Webb McCorkle, and his son, George M. McCorkle. Past lecturers include Ronald H. Coase, Ronald Dworkin, Annette Gordon-Reed and Cass Sunstein.