Academics
Academics
About the CenterConstitutional Law Center: local presence, national stature
About the Director
Distinguished Lecture Series
Constitutional Law Symposium
Constitutional Law Resources
Opperman Lecture
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.
Eight U.S. Supreme Court Justices have delivered the Opperman Lecture: 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 for a Chicago law firm. 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, as a Fulbright senior specialist in the former Soviet Republic of Moldova, and as a visiting professor at the University of Nantes, France. In 2003, he served as chair of the Association of American Law Schools Section on Africa. In 2008, he will serve as chair of the Section on Constitutional Law.
Kende has lectured and published extensively on constitutional law and human rights issues both nationally and abroad. His 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 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 4 p.m. in Cartwright Hall room 213.
2006-2007 Lecturers
2007-2008 Lecturers:
Friday, October 5, 2007
Professor Emma Coleman Jordan, Georgetown Law School
Lecture starts at 2:00pm in Cartwright Hall room 213
"Wealth and Inequality: Thinking About Communities and Individualism"
Professor Jordan is best known for establishing the field of economic justice in legal theory, and for her work in financial services and civil rights. Her most recent book is Economic Justice: Race, Gender, Identity and Economics (with Berkeley’s Angela P. Harris),the capstone to a series of articles, chapters, and books she has written on the subject. At Georgetown, she teaches courses in Economic Justice, Commercial Law, Torts, and Financial Services.
Previously, she taught for twelve years at the University of California, Davis. She is a past-president of both the Association of American Law Schools and the Society of American Law Teachers. She was elected to membership in the American Law Institute in 1984. Professor Jordan was a White House Fellow in 1980-81, serving as special assistant to the Attorney General. She was counsel to Professor Anita Hill during the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings. Her recent writings include numerous articles as well as another book, Lynching the Dark Metaphor of American Law (forthcoming). Professor Jordan was the editor-in-chief of the Howard Law Journal.
The lecture will cover, first, the subprime mortgage crisis that is now roiling world markets began with the decision by some lenders to expand the pool of borrowers for home mortgages by relaxing credit standards to extend credit on terms that many understood were unstable. We now have a full blown credit crunch that affects the availability of credit to all borrowers. The first round of these subprime loan decisions were seen as purely local market niches or opportunities to make profit. Some of these early loans were clearly predatory because they sought to tap the home equity accumulated by potential borrowers on fixed incomes. These borrowers, often members of racial minorities and the poor, could not repay variable rate loans when the market adjusted upward the interest rates to which they were pegged. So, what began as profitable niche loans to the poor and economically subordinated borrower have, through the wizardry of Wall Street financial instruments and hedge fund portfolios, become the model for profit making in the general community of borrowers in the U.S. This model for aggressive lending is not regulated because the lender is a hedge fund not a regulated financial institution, like a bank. The subprime loan crisis illustrates how expanding individual choice in an unregulated credit market affects the fabric of the entire economic and social community.
Second, when a lender makes a decision to extend a loan to a borrower who, the lender knows, in all reasonable likelihood will not be able to repay the loan on its terms, should there be a legal rule that provides for the lenders accountability? Some argue that lenders should be allowed to charge whatever the market can bear. A strong counter argument, based in tort theory, argues for accountability to the larger economic and social community for the injury caused to individuals and communities who gain and lose economic hope based on these imprudent loans.
Third, private choices for where we live are unavoidably linked to the quality of the public school that our children are entitled to attend. Is the racial composition of public schools a public good or a private good? The recent Supreme Court decision in the Seattle and Kentucky school cases adopts the view that there is no constitutionally protected interest in the decisions of local school boards that choose to intervene in the pattern of private residential segregation that underlies segregated schools. This third problem raises directly the theme of my talk, community and economic individualism. Why should wealthy parents be permitted to hoard public resources by choosing to buy homes that entitle them to schools that are segregated by race and class, yet funded by all taxpayers in the community? Your answer will depend on your view of the proper balance between individual economic autonomy and larger community values such as public education.
Thursday, November 8, 2007
Professor Samuel Issacharoff, NYU School of Law
Lecture starts at 4:00pm in Cartwright Hall room 213
"Democracy at War"
Professor Issacharoff’s wide-ranging research deals with issues in civil procedure (especially complex litigation and class actions), law and economics, constitutional law, particularly with regard to voting rights and electoral systems, and employment law He is one of the pioneers in the law of the political process, where his Law of Democracy casebook (co-authored with Stanford’s Pam Karlan and NYU’s Rick Pildes) and dozens of articles have helped to create a vibrant new area of constitutional law. He is also a leading figure in the field of procedure. In addition to ongoing involvement in some of the front-burner cases in this area, he now serves as the Reporter for the newly created Project on Aggregate Litigation of the American Law Institute.
Professor Issacharoff is a 1983 graduate of the Yale Law School. After clerking , he spent the early part of his career as a voting rights lawyer. He then began his teaching career at the University of Texas in 1989, where he held the Joseph D. Jamail Centennial Chair in Law. In 1999, he moved to Columbia Law School, where he was the Harold R. Medina Professor of Procedural Jurisprudence. His seventy plus published articles appear in every leading law review, as well as in leading journals in other fields. Professor Issacharoff is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
The lecture will cover the source of authority for presidential power in wartime. Many of the most central constitutional controversies concern the conflict between the president's commander-in-chief powers and the residual role of Congress in declaring and funding wars. Cases concerning conditions of detention in Guantanamo, the president's ability to order overrides of prohibitions on domestic information gathering, the treatment of detained suspected terrorists, and a host of other front-burner issues turn on such matters.
The lecture will begin with a positive account of what the law actually is in this area. The focus will be on the need to curtail executive unilateralism and on the central role of courts in compelling congressional authorization of the executive's national security efforts. The second part of the lecture will provide a normative justification for this legal regime as necessary to engage the historic strengths of democracies at war.
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
Honorable Richard Goldstone, Professor and Distinguished Visitor from the Judiciary, Georgetown University Law Center
Lecture starts at 4:00pm in Cartwright Hall room 213.
“The South African Constitution: The Recognition of Social and Economic Rights”
From July 1994 to October 2003 Richard J. Goldstone was a Justice of the Constitutional Court of South Africa. During the spring semester of 2007 he was the Jeremiah Smith, Jr. Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. From 15 August 1994 to September 1996 he served as the Chief Prosecutor of the United Nations International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. From August 1999 until December 2001, he was the chairperson of the International Independent Inquiry on Kosovo that was established by Swedish Prime Minister Goran Persson.
He is presently the co-chairperson of the Human Rights Institute of the International Bar Association. From 1999 to 2003 he served as a member of the International Group of Advisers of the International Committee of the Red Cross. He was a member of the committee, chaired by Paul A Volcker, appointed by the Secretary-General of the United Nations to investigate allegations regarding the Iraq Oil for Food Program. He is an Honorary Bencher of the Inner Temple, London, an Honorary Fellow of St Johns College, Cambridge, and an Honorary Member of the Association of the Bar of New York. He is the author of For Humanity: Reflections of a War Crimes Investigator, (2001) Yale University Press. C.L.E. for state and federal have been approved for 1 hour credit.
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 2008 Constitutional Law Symposium titled "The Forgotten Constitutional Amendments" will be held on Saturday, April 5, 2008 from 8:30 a.m. – 1:00 p.m. at Drake Law School. Speakers will include: 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 has been 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
