Media Advisory: 'Threats to American Democracy' – A Conversation with a Harvard Law Scholar and a Pulitzer Prize-Winning New York Times Reporter

Oct. 26, 2020

Media Advisory: 'Threats to American Democracy' – A Conversation with a Harvard Law Scholar and a Pulitzer Prize-Winning New York Times Reporter

What: The University of Arizona James E. Rogers College of Law will present a webinar on threats to American democracy, featuring experts from Harvard Law School and The New York Times.
When: Wednesday, Oct. 28, noon – 1 p.m.
Where: The webinar will be presented via Zoom. Registration is required.

TUCSON, Ariz. – A Harvard Law School professor and a former Supreme Court reporter for The New York Times will discuss threats to American democracy and how to protect it in a free webinar on Wednesday.

The webinar, presented by the James E. Rogers College of Law, will feature Michael Klarman, the Kirkland & Ellis Professor at Harvard Law School, and Linda Greenhouse, who covered the Supreme Court for The New York Times for 30 years. The two will discuss a range of socio-political developments that threaten U.S. democracy, the role of the United States Supreme Court in these developments and how to better protect democracy from these perils.

David Marcus, a professor of law at the University of California at Los Angeles, will moderate the discussion.

Klarman is a scholar of constitutional law and constitutional history. After law school, he clerked for the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg when she was a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. He is the author of "From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court and the Struggle for Racial Equality," "Brown v. Board of Education and the Civil Rights Movement," "Unfinished Business: Racial Equality in American History," and "From the Closet to the Altar: Courts, Backlash, and the Struggle for Same-Sex Marriage."

Greenhouse is a senior research scholar at Yale Law School and covered the Supreme Court for The New York Times from 1978 to 2008. She won the Pulitzer Prize, journalism's highest honor, in 1998 for beat reporting for "her consistently illuminating coverage" of the court. She also is a 2004 recipient of the Goldsmith Career Award for Excellence in Journalism from Harvard University's Kennedy School. Her books include "Before Roe v. Wade: Voices That Shaped the Abortion Debate Before the Supreme Court's Ruling," written with Reva B. Siegel; "The U.S. Supreme Court: A Very Short Introduction;" and "Just a Journalist: Reflections on the Press, Life, and the Spaces Between."

The event is sponsored by the James E. Rogers College of Law's student chapter of the American Constitution Society and the college's faculty enrichment committee. Co-sponsors include the Arizona Lawyer Chapter of the ACS and fellow student ACS chapters from across the country.

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Media contact:
Alejandra Cardenas Cuestas
James E. Rogers College of Law
Office: 520-626-6341 | Cell: 520-440-0618
acardena@email.arizona.edu

The University of Arizona, a land-grant university with two independently accredited medical schools, is one of the nation's top 40 public universities, according to U.S. News & World Report. Established in 1885, the university is widely recognized as a student-centric university and has been designated as a Hispanic Serving Institution by the U.S. Department of Education. The university ranked in the top 20 in 2018 in research expenditures among all public universities, according to the National Science Foundation, and is a leading Research 1 institution with $687 million in annual research expenditures. The university advances the frontiers of interdisciplinary scholarship and entrepreneurial partnerships as a member of the Association of American Universities, the 65 leading public and private research universities in the U.S. It benefits the state with an estimated economic impact of $4.1 billion annually. For the latest on the University of Arizona response to the novel coronavirus, visit the university's COVID-19 webpage.