Academics
Academics
Constitutional Law Center
About the CenterConstitutional Law Center: local presence, national stature
About the Director
Distinguished Lecture Series
Constitutional Law Symposium
Constitutional Law Resources
The Drake Constitutional Law Center is one of only four constitutional law programs established by the U.S. Congress and funded by the federal government. The Center's mission is to foster study of the U.S. Constitution, its roots, its formation, its principles and development.
An integral part of the Center's activities is the Dwight D. Opperman Lecture series, an annual event of national importance in constitutional law. Mr. Opperman, former chairman of the West Publishing Company and a Drake Law School alumnus, endowed the lecture series in 1988 to bring the country's top jurists and legal scholars to Drake.
Ten U.S. Supreme Court Justices have delivered the Opperman Lecture: Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., Justice Stephen G. Breyer, Justice Clarence Thomas, Justice Antonin Scalia, Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, Justice Lewis F. Powell and Justice Harry A. Blackmun.
Drake law students have special access to the constitutional law scholars, judges and political leaders who come to Drake to participate in the Center's activities. In addition to lectures, many distinguished guests also hold symposiums, informal gatherings and small group discussions limited to law students and faculty.
In 1999, 2002 and 2006, for example, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas taught special week-long classes for Drake students. In the 2003-2004 academic year, week long classes were taught by Prof. Akhil Amar (Yale), Prof. Mari Matsuda (Georgetown), Prof. Suzanna Sherry (Vanderbilt), and Judge Alex Kozinski (9th Cir.). Distinguished scholars who have participated in symposiums at Drake include Judge Michael McConnell (10th Circuit), Prof. Erwin Chemerinsky (USC), Prof. Michael Gerhardt (William & Mary), Prof. Nadine Strossen (NY Law School & President, ACLU) and Prof. Gerald Torres (Texas).
To learn more about The History of the Supreme Court, click here.
For more information, call the Center at 515-271-2988.
About the Director
Mark Kende is the James Madison Chair Professor of Constitutional Law and Director of the Drake Constitutional Law Center. Kende earned his B.A. cum laude with honors in Philosophy from Yale University, and his J.D. from the University of Chicago Law School where he was a member of the Law Review. Prior to entering academia, he clerked for a federal judge and litigated employment, civil rights and constitutional cases at a Chicago law firm where he worked with Senator Barack Obama. He has co-taught constitutional law classes with two current U.S. Supreme Court Justices.Kende previously taught at Notre Dame Law School, the University of Montana School of Law and the University of Tennessee Law School. He was Teacher of the Year at Montana in 2002-2003. He has served as a Senior Fulbright Scholar and Visiting Professor of Law at the University of Stellenbosch in South Africa, a Fulbright Senior Specialist in the former Soviet Republic of Moldova, and as a Visiting Professor at the University of Nantes, France. He has lectured or published scholarship in Canada, China, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (as a rule of law consultant), France (at the University of Paris I - Sorbonne), Germany, Spain, South Africa, the United Kingdom (at Oxford University), and throughout the United States. In 2003, he served as chair of the Association of American Law Schools Section on Africa. In 2008, he served as chair of the Section on Constitutional Law. He also co-directs a Law & Society Research Network on Africa.
Kende’s writings have appeared in publications such as Constitutional Commentary, the South African Law Journal, the Hastings Law Journal, and the Notre Dame Law Journal. He is also the co-author of a casebook, Theater Law, and was one of the authors of Courting the Yankees, Legal Essays on the Bronx Bombers. Professor Kende's recent book, Constitutional Rights in Two Worlds, South Africa and the United States is set for publication by Cambridge University Press in Feb. 2009.
Professor Kende's full CV Faculty Profile
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Distinguished Lecture Series
The Constitutional Law Center invites the nation's leading constitutional scholars to Drake Law School to engage students and faculty in discussions about current issues. Speakers deliver a formal lecture, teach a class, and meet with students informally. The lectures will be held at 3 p.m. in Cartwright Hall room 213.
Past Lecturers
2009-2010 Lecturers:
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
Adam Liptak, Esq, U.S. Supreme Court Correspondent, The New York Times
"The Roberts Court in the Obama Era: A Reporter’s Reflections."
3 pm, Room 213, Drake Law School Cartwright Hall
This event is held in honor of National Constitution Day.
Adam Liptak was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in explanatory reporting in 2009 for a series of articles examining ways in which the American legal system differs from those of other developed nations. As The New York Times national legal correspondent from 2002 to 2008, Liptak covered the Supreme Court nominations of John G. Roberts Jr. and Samuel A. Alito Jr, the investigation into the disclosure of the identity of Valerie Plame, an undercover CIA Operative, judicial ethics, and various aspects of the criminal justice system, notably the death penalty.
Liptak’s column on the Supreme Court and legal affairs, “Sidebar”, appears every other Tuesday in The New York Times. His work has also appeared in The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone and several law reviews. A graduate of Yale College and Yale Law School, Liptak practiced law at a large New York City law firm and in the legal department of The New York Times Company before joining the paper’s news staff in 2002. He has taught media law at the Columbia University School of Journalism and at Yale Law School, where he is a visiting lecturer.
Thursday, October 8, 2009
Professor Taunya Lovell Banks, University of Maryland School of Law
“Thurgood Marshall on the Bench: ‘Race Man’ and ‘Pragmatic Feminist’” 3 pm, Room 213, Drake Law School Cartwright Hall
Taunya Lovell Banks teaches Constitutional Law, Asian Americans and the Law, Law in Popular Culture (film and literature), Economic Justice, and Torts. Her research interests span a wide range of socio-legal topics that often explore the interplay of race, gender, class and, increasingly, popular culture in the creation and application of law and social policy. Banks is a contributing co-editor of Screening Justice – The Cinema of Law: Films of Law, Order and Social Justice. Recent publications include critiques of socio-economic rights in the United States and South Africa, film narratives about the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, and the United States Supreme Court’s continued failure to protect black majorities and pluralities in southern states. Her articles have appeared in numerous law journals including The Harvard Civil Rights - Civil Liberties Law Review, UCLA Law Review, New York University Review of Law & Social Change and Michigan Law Review.
Professor Banks served on the Executive Committee of the Association of American Law Schools; the Board of Trustees of the Law School Admissions Council (two terms) and the Curriculum Committee of the American Bar Association’s Section on Legal Education and Admission to the Bar. She also served on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Legal Education and the advisory committee of the Law & Society Review. Prior to entering legal education in 1976, Professor Banks worked as a civil rights lawyer in Mississippi, litigating voting rights and housing discrimination cases. She also litigated some of the earliest sexual harassment cases as a senior trial attorney for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
Thursday, March 25, 2010
Professor Michael C. Dorf, Cornell Law School
“Same-Sex Marriage, Labels, and Social Meaning”
3 pm, Room 213, Drake Law School Cartwright Hall
Mike Dorf’s recent works include “How the Written Constitution Crowds Out the Extraconstitutional Rule of Recognition,” in Matthew D. Adler & Kenneth Einer Himma, eds., The Rule of Recognition and the U.S. Constitution (2009); “Dynamic Incorporation of Foreign Law,” 157 U. Penn. L. Rev. 103 (2008); and “Fallback Law,” 107 Colum. L. Rev. 303 (2007). With Laurence H. Tribe, Professor Dorf is the co‑author of On Reading the Constitution (1991). He is also the author of No Litmus Test: Law Versus Politics in the Twenty-First Century (2006), the editor of Constitutional Law Stories (1st ed. 2004; 2d ed 2009), and the co-author, with Trevor Morrison, of Constitutional Law: An Overview (forthcoming from Oxford U. Press). Professor Dorf’s bi‑weekly legal affairs column appears on the website Writ.FindLaw.com and he blogs at dorfonlaw.org. A graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School, he was a law clerk for Judge Stephen Reinhardt of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and Justice Anthony M. Kennedy of the Supreme Court of the United States. Before joining the Cornell faculty, Professor Dorf taught at Rutgers-Camden Law School for three years and at Columbia Law School for 13 years.
Special Events
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
Professor Thomas C. Berg, University of St. Thomas School of Law
Professor Nan D. Hunter, Georgetown University Law Center
DEBATE
“Religious Liberty Exemptions and Iowa's Same-Sex Marriage Decision”
3 pm, Room 213, Drake Law School Cartwright Hall 
Thomas C. Berg is St. Ives Professor of Law and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at the University of St. Thomas School of Law, Minneapolis, where he teaches and writes on constitutional law, intellectual property, religious liberty, and law and religion. He is the author of four texts, The Free Exercise Clause (Prometheus Books 2007); Religious Organizations in the U.S. (with James Serritella et al. 2006); The State and Religion in a Nutshell (West Group 2d ed. 2004); and the casebook Religion and the Constitution (with Michael McConnell and John Garvey, Aspen Publishers 2d ed. 2006), which won the 2004 Alpha Sigma Nu Prize for best book in professional studies from the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities. He also received the 2006 John Courtney Murray Award from the DePaul University College of Law. He has also written nearly 30 law review articles and numerous other pieces in journals of religion and/or public policy.
Professor Berg has also written nearly 30 briefs on behalf of parties or amici curiae in the U.S. Supreme Court and other courts in cases involving religious liberty and other constitutional issues. He is or has been a member of advisory committees for the National Council of Churches, the Pew Forum's Roundtable on Religion and Social Welfare Policy, the Christian Legal Society's Center for Law and Religious Freedom, the DePaul Center for Church/State Studies, and Democrats for Life of Minnesota. He has been a visiting professor at the universities of Aix-en-Provence, France, and Siena, Italy. Before beginning his teaching career, he practiced law at Mayer, Brown & Platt in Chicago and served as law clerk to the Hon. Alvin B. Rubin of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. He has degrees from the University of Chicago, in both law and religious studies; from Oxford University, in philosophy and politics (as a Rhodes Scholar); and from Northwestern University, in journalism. He is married to Maureen Kane Berg, and they have two sons, ages 14 and 11. 
Nan D. Hunter is Professor of Law at Georgetown University Law Center and Legal Scholarship Director at the Williams Institute for Sexual Orientation Law and Policy at UCLA Law School. She was the founding Director of the ACLU LGBT Rights and AIDS Projects, and served from 1993 to 1996 as Deputy General Counsel at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. She is co-author of the casebook, Sexuality, Gender and the Law, now in its third edition. Her articles have appeared in the Michigan Law Review, the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review, the Georgetown Law Journal, the Minnesota Law Review, the Virginia Law Review, and the NYU Law Review, among others. Professor Hunter was awarded the first NLGLA Dan Bradley award. In her spare time, she blogs at hunter of justice.
Constitutional Law Symposium
A prominent array of constitutional scholars, civil libertarians, policy analysts, lawyers, and judges gather annually at the Center for a symposium on a timely constitutional issue. The proceedings are published in the Drake Law Review.
The 2009 Constitutional Law Symposium titled "Global Perspectives on Religion, the State, and Constitutionalism" will be held on Saturday, April 4, 2009 from 8:30 a.m. – 1:00 p.m. at Drake Law School. Speakers include Professors Abdullah An'Nain from Emory Law, Rick Garnett from Notre Dame Law, Frank Ravitch from Michigan State Law, Laura Jenkins from the University of Cincinnati, Tom Farr from the Georgetown School of Foreign Science, and Jeremy Gunn, Director of the ACLU Religion and Law Project in D.C. Three hours of Iowa and four hours of federal CLE credit has been approved for this event.
The 2008 Constitutional Law Symposium titled "The Forgotten Constitutional Amendments" was held on Saturday, April 5, 2008 from 8:30 a.m. – 1:00 p.m. at Drake Law School. Speakers included: Randy Barnett (Carmack Waterhouse Professor of Legal Theory, Georgetown Law School), Daniel Farber (Sho Sato Professor of Law, University of California, Berkeley), Kurt Lash (Professor of Law and W. Joseph Ford Fellow, Loyola Law School Los Angeles), Michael Kent Curtis (Judge Donald L. Smith Professor in Constitutional and Public Law, Wake Forest Law School), Rebecca Zietlow (Charles W. Fornoff Professor of Law and Public Values, University of Toledo Law School), David Bogen (Professor Law Emeritus, University of Maryland Law School). C.L.E. credit was approved.
The 2007 Constitutional Law Symposium was titled “The ‘Undemocratic’ American Constitution.” It was held on April 7, 2007 from 9:00 a.m. – 1:00 p.m. at Drake Law School. Speakers included Sanford V. Levinson (W. St. John Garwood and W. St. John Garwood, Jr. Centennial Chair in Law and Professor of Government, The University of Texas School of Law), Heather Gerken (Professor of Law, Yale Law School), Neal Devins (Goodrich Professor of Law, Professor of Government, and Director of the Institute of Bill of Rights Law, William and Mary School of Law), Donald Horowitz, the James B. Duke Professor of Law and Political Science at Duke Law School, and Saikrishna B. Prakash (Herzog Research Professor of Law, University of San Diego Law School). C.L.E. credit has been applied for.
The Drake Constitutional Law Center's Annual Symposium for 2005-2006 was titled "The Role of Courts in Social Change" It was held on April 8, 2006 at the law school. Speakers included Mark Tushnet (Carmack Waterhouse Professor of Constitutional Law, Georgetown University Law Center), Jane Schacter (Edwin A. Heafey Jr. Visiting Professor of Law at Stanford Law School), John Eastman (Professor of Law, Chapman University School of Law and Director of the Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence at the Claremont Institute), Gerald Torres (Bryant Smith Chair in Law at the University of Texas Law School), Gerald Rosenberg ( Associate Professor of Political Science and Lecturer in Law at the University of Chicago).
The 2005 symposium focused on the War on Terror and its impact concerning issues of constitutionality. The 2003 symposium analyzed U.S. Supreme Court cases challenging affirmative action in admissions at both the undergraduate and law school levels. The 2002 symposium examined the nominating and confirming process of Supreme Court justices. The 2001 symposium explored the interface between the Constitution and the Internet. In recent years, Drake has been honored to host distinguished panelists such as Akhil Amar, Stephen Carter, Erwin Chemerinsky, Lawrence Lessig and Nadine Strossen.
Summer Institute in Constitutional Law
