Faculty of Law, University of Toronto
Constitutional Roundtable
presents
Michael J. Klarman
Harvard Law School
Backlash: The Occasionally Perverse Consequences of
U.S. Supreme Court Decisions
12:30 – 2:00 p.m.
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
Solarium (room FA2) – Falconer Hall - 84 Queen’s Park
In the short term, Brown v. Board of Education (1954) retarded racial progress in the South and radicalized southern racial politics, advancing the careers of extreme segregationists such as Bull Connor and George Wallace. Miranda v. Arizona (1966), in the face of rapidly rising crime rates, facilitated Richard Nixon’s victory in the 1968 presidential election on a law-and-order platform. Furman v. Georgia (1972), by threatening to extinguish the death penalty, produced a dramatic resurgence in support for capital punishment, as thirty-five states enacted new death penalty legislation within the next four years. Roe v. Wade (1973) generated a politically potent right-to-life movement that has significantly influenced national politics ever since. Goodridge v. Department of Public Health (2003) resulted in more than twenty states enacting constitutional bans on same-sex marriage, cost a couple of Democratic senators their seats in 2004, and possibly enabled George Bush to win Ohio’s electoral votes, without which he would not have won a second term. I am writing a book that seeks to explain this phenomenon of backlash—prominent Court rulings that, at least in the short term, seem to retard the causes they purport to benefit.
Professor Michael J. Klarman is the Kirkland & Ellis Professor at Harvard Law School, where he joined the faculty in 2008. He received his B.A. and M.A. from the University of Pennsylvania, his J.D. from Stanford Law School, and his D. Phil. from the University of Oxford, where he was a Marshall Scholar. After law school, Professor Klarman clerked for the Honorable Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the United States Court of Appeals on the District of Columbia Circuit. He joined the faculty at the University of Virginia School of Law in 1987 and served there until 2008 as the James Monroe Distinguished Professor of Law and Professor of History. Klarman has won numerous awards for his teaching and scholarship, which are primarily in the areas of Constitutional Law and Constitutional History. Klarman has also served as the Ralph S. Tyler, Jr., Visiting Professor at Harvard Law School, Distinguished Visiting Lee Professor of Law at the Marshall Wythe School of Law at the College of William & Mary, Visiting Professor at Stanford Law School, and Visiting Professor at Yale Law School. His first book, From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court and the Struggle for Racial Equality, was published by Oxford University Press in 2004 and received the 2005 Bancroft Prize in History. He published two books in the summer of 2007, also with Oxford University Press: Brown v. Board of Education and the Civil Rights Movement and Unfinished Business: Racial Equality in American History, which is part of Oxford’s Inalienable Rights series.
A light lunch will be served.
For more workshop information, please contact Professor Lorraine Weinrib at l.weinrib@utoronto.ca or Nadia Gulezko at n.gulezko@utoronto.ca
