Tracking The Tressolini
Jeffrey Rosen will deliver the annual Tresolini Lecture in Packard Auditorium on March 31, 2009.
Rosen is a professor of law at The George Washington University and legal affairs editor at The New Republic. His lecture entitled “Obama’s Constitution: The Future of the Supreme Court,” will explore the most contentious realms of Constitutional law and how they may be affected by Obama’s prospective Supreme Court appointments.
Brian Pinaire, assistant professor of political science and organizer of the annual Tresolini Lecture, predicts that the President will make at least one new appointment to the Supreme Court in his first term. Given the Court’s tenuous 5-4 breakdown on a number of key issues, any appointments made will be crucial.
Pinaire brushed aside suggestions that this year’s lecture was somehow being scaled down, even when past speakers have lectured in Zoellner Arts Center’s grand Baker Hall and included names like Antonin Scalia, Janet Reno, and Jesse Jackson Jr.
A committee of Lehigh’s “most trusted” professors is responsible for Rosen’s selection. Pinaire said the committee considers about ten speakers and tries to anticipate a topic that will be most compelling in the Spring.
Although Rosen is a prominent figure in academia, Pinaire stressed that the lecture will be intended for general consumption, as Rosen is “particularly skilled at taking a scholarly topic and putting it into terms that the community will understand.” Rosen will take questions from the audience after speaking.
A single speaker addressing law and politics may incite what little partisan rancor the Lehigh community is capable of mustering. For those on the right who see Rosen as an agent of the left due to his editorial post at The New Republic, Pinaire notes that “people on the left would argue The New Republic is in fact annoyingly centrist.”
The Tresolini Lecture, of course, is not intended to be a vehicle to promote an ideological agenda. ”I have absolutely not asked him to take an ideological stance and would be disappointed if he did,” said Pinaire “but of course, I don’t think there’s such thing as complete objectivity, because everyone has different ways of viewing the world and communicating their knowledge to the audience.”
Rosen promises to offer a unique perspective on Obama’s constitutional philosophy. Last year, in a New York Times op-ed, he saw the prospect of our first civil-libertarian president in Obama’s candidacy. Conservative libertarians may scoff at that suggestion, but Rosen notes how then-Senator Obama was active in forging a coalition of civil-libertarian liberals and libertarian conservatives to oppose the most controversial elements of the USA PATRIOT Act.
In another article entitled “Supreme Court Inc,” published in The New York Times Magazine, Rosen argues that the Roberts Court, in the absence of an “economic populist,” has overcome its divisiveness on so many cultural issues to hand down decisions that are reliably pro-business. These business decisions affect billions of dollars in economic activity, but are unlikely to be altered by any Obama appointments.
In terms of Obama’s prospective appointees to the Court, Pinaire said that Rosen will not speculate about specific nominees. Rosen’s blogging on The New Republic has indicated that one of Obama’s model justices is Earl Warren, and he may be more of a judicial conservative than commentators have acknowledged. For instance, his campaign season condemnation of the SCOTUS decision banning the execution of child rapists was couched in the rhetoric of states’ rights.
Rosen’s 2007 publication, The Supreme Court, showcases his unique approach to legal and political analysis. He defines the history of the Court in terms of its individual personalities and internal rivalries. The campaign season always raises questions about the future of the Supreme Court, which explains why Rosen was not alone in profiling the Court in 2007. Jeffrey Toobin, a staff writer for The New Yorker, penned The Nine, a conceptually identical account that made the Times’ list of the top 10 books of that year.
In a scheduling oddity that should have Lehigh’s political junkies in a state of jubilation, Jeffrey Toobin will give a talk on campus just six days prior to the Tresolini Lecture. “In many ways they work together,” said Pinaire. “I hope to have the same audience at both lectures, because they are two unique perspectives for people to learn from.”
