Richard Rorty (1931-2007) was Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature and Philosophy at Stanford University. This talk was recorded April 10, 2006 as the annual Dewey Lecture in Law and Philosophy.

Richard Rorty: "Dewey and Posner on Pragmatism and Moral Progress"

David Currie, Edward H. Levi Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus at the University of Chicago Law School, passed away on October 15, 2007. In honor of his life and work, we present this unique recording of his reading of the United States Constitution. The recording was made on April 26 and May 5, 2006 at the studios of WHPK at the University of Chicago and post-production was done at the Digital Media Lab at the University of Chicago in May of 2006. The studio engineer was Patrick Reisinger and the post-production engineer was Luis-Manuel Garcia.

David Currie Reads the U.S. Constitution

This recording of University of Chicago Professor of Economics Milton Friedman was recorded on October 15, 1978 by James H. Fox, JD '78.

The speech was originally scheduled for the B'nai B'rith Hillel Foundation, but was moved to the University of Chicago Law School Auditorium upon the announcement the week before of his Nobel Prize in Economics .

In the talk, Professor Friedman begins with two seemingly contradictory propositions (namely, "There are few peoples, if any in the world, who owe so great a debt to free enterprise and competitive capitalism as the Jews," and "There are few peoples, if any in the world, who have done so much to undermine the intellectual foundations of capitalism as the Jews.") and then attempts to reconcile them.

Milton Friedman, "Capitalism and the Jews"

Personalized Law

Presented by Omri Ben-Shahar, Professor of Law, the Leo and Eileen Herzel Professor of Law, Kearney Director of the Coase-Sandor Institute for Law and Economics

Omri Ben-Shahar spoke about his recent co-authored book, Personalized Law. The book presents a vision of a brave new world, where each person is bound by their own personally tailored law. “Reasonable person” standards would be replaced by a multitude of personalized commands, each individual with their own “reasonable you” rule. Skilled doctors would be held to higher standards of care, the most vulnerable consumers and employees would receive stronger protections, age restrictions for driving or for the consumption of alcohol would vary according to the recklessness risk that each person poses, and borrowers would be entitled to personalized loan disclosures tailored to their unique needs and delivered in a format fitting their mental capacity. Should we welcome this transformation of the law? Does personalized law harbor a utopic promise, or would it produce alienation, demoralization, and discrimination? The lecture asks how personalized law can be designed to deliver precision and justice and what pitfalls the regime would have to prudently avoid.

This event was recorded on June 8, 2022.

2022 Emeritus Luncheon

This lecture by famed legal scholar Karl Llewellyn, who joined the Chicago law faculty in 1951, was recorded on October 18, 1957, by Peter Clarke, AB '56, JD x'59. Picking up where he left off in his classic Bramble Bush lectures, Prof. Llewellyn provides an introduction to law school and the legal profession in the Class of 1959's first Elements of the Law class.

Karl Llewellyn, "Elements of the Law - Introductory Lecture"

Recorded on February 7, 2014, at the University of Chicago Law School, this session featured author Scott Turow as Plenary Speaker and Law School faculty Alison LaCroix, Judge Diane Wood, and Richard McAdams.

Crime in Law and Literature Conference Plenary Talk and Panel, featuring Scott Turow

Legal discussions of negligence focus on issues of harm, fault, and remedy in the context of failure to exercise reasonable care.  The point of orientation is the negligent event.  In this talk I want to investigate a related moral duty, the duty of due care.  Its orientation is ex ante; it is an imperfect duty that ranges across private and public morality; its content is not restricted to injury and loss.  The wrongful failure of due care need not increase the risk of a negligent event.  An agent acting negligently in the moral sense has failed to take on the full burden of some other duty.  The argument for this view of due care will lend support to three more general theses: about the nature and importance of imperfect duties, about the primacy of non-negligence, and about the rationale for different schemes of remedy on the legal side.

Barbara Herman is Griffin Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Law at UCLA. This talk was recorded on February 26, 2014, as the Dewey Lecture in Law and Philosophy.

Barbara Herman, "The Moral Side of Non-Negligence"

The U.S. Constitution is "the supreme Law of the Land." Of course some of its provisions are vague and must be interpreted. But when the Constitution says something clearly, we follow it. Don't we?

Actually things are not that simple. There are several important examples of clear language in the Constitution that we do not follow. (For an example, look at the first word of the First Amendment.) Sometimes, in fact, it would be essentially unthinkable to follow themost obvious meaning of apparently clear language.

These are not just slips of the pen by the Framers of the Constitution.Things are more interesting than that: the Framers made deliberate choices that we do not always accept, even though those choices are reflected in the text. The ways in which we ignore apparently clear language in the Constitution can teach us a lot about how American constitutional law actually works.

This talk was recorded on February 26, 2014, as part of the Chicago's Best Ideas Lecture Series. David Strauss is Gerald Ratner Distinguished Service Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School.

David Strauss, "Does the Constitution Always Mean What It Says?"

Richard A. Posner, Senior Lecturer in Law and a judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, devoted a lunchtime keynote to discussing how judges might receive and view empirical research.

Richard A. Posner is a Senior Lecturer in Law at the University of Chicago Law School. Following his graduation from Harvard Law School, Judge Posner clerked for Justice William J. Brennan, Jr. From 1963 to 1965, he was assistant to Commissioner Philip Elman of the Federal Trade Commission. For the next two years, he was assistant to the solicitor general of the United States. Prior to going to Stanford Law School in 1968 as Associate Professor, Judge Posner served as general counsel of the President's Task Force on Communications Policy. He first came to the University of Chicago Law School in 1969, and was Lee and Brena Freeman Professor of Law prior to his appointment in 1981 as a judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. He was the chief judge of the court from 1993 to 2000.

This talk was recorded on October 23, 2014.

Richard Posner, Empirical Legal Studies Conference keynote

How Should We Interpret our Constitutions? 
A Debate between Professors Baude and Harel

Moderated by Professor McAdams

William Baude is Neubauer Family Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School, where he teaches federal courts and constitutional law. His current research projects include papers on originalism, historical practice in constitutional law, federalism, the Supreme Court, and conflicts of law. His recent publications include "Rethinking the Federal Eminent Domain Power," and "Beyond DOMA: State Choice of Law in Federal Statutes." He also contributes to two legal blogs, the Volokh Conspiracy and SCOTUSBlog.

Alon Harel is Mizock Professor of Law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is the author of Why Law Matters (2014) where he argues that (some) legal institutions and legal procedures are valuable and matter as such, irrespective of their instrumental value. His areas of expertise include legal and political theory, criminal law theory, constitutional law theory, human rights, and law and economics.

Richard H. McAdams is the Bernard D. Meltzer Professor of Law and Aaron Director Research Scholar. He writes on criminal law and procedure, social norms, the expressive function of law, inequality, and law and literature. He is co-editor of the 2013 volume on Fairness in Law and Economics and the author of the forthcoming book, The Expressive Powers of Law. He has served as a member of the National Science Foundation Advisory Panel for Law & Social Sciences, the editorial board of the Annual Review of Law and Social Science, and the Board of Directors of the American Law and Economics Association.

This event was sponsored by the American Constitution Society and the Federalist Society and was recorded on November 25, 2014.

Baude, Harel, & McAdams, "How Should We Interpret our Constitutions?"

Martha Minow, Morgan and Helen Chu Dean and Professor of Law, Harvard Law School
with comments by Martha Nussbaum, Aziz Huq, and Michael Schill

What role if any should forgiveness play in law and legal systems? By forgiveness, I mean: a conscious, deliberate decision to forgo rightful grounds for whoever has committed a wrong or harm. Law may penalize those who apologize and in so doing make forgiveness by the victim less likely. Law may construct adversarial processes that render forgiveness less likely than it would otherwise be. Or law can give people chances to meet together, in spaces where they may apologize and forgive.

This lecture was presented on January 8, 2015, at the University of Chicago Law School as part of the Brennan Center Jorde Symposium.

Martha Minow, "Forgiveness, Law and Justice"

In a conversation with David A. Strauss, Gerald Ratner Distinguished Service Professor of Law, US Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan reflects on decision-making, persuasion, and hunting with Scalia.

This event took place on February 2, 2015, at the University of Chicago Law School.

A Conversation With Elena Kagan

This panel was moderated by Professor Siegler and included Deputy Dean Ginsburg and Professors Huq, McAdams, and Randolph Stone.

The event took place on February 4, 2015. It was presented by BLSA in partnership with the Law School and cosponsored by ACS, APALSA, Criminal Law Society, Defenders, Human Rights Law Society, LLSA, LSRJ, LWC, PILS, and SALSA.

Panel: "Ferguson and Beyond: Criminal Procedure and Police Killings"

At her confirmation hearing, Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan said that "we are all originalists." Is that true, and what would it mean for it to be true?  In Is Originalism Our Law?, I argue that there is an important sense in which Justice Kagan was right. And if originalism is our law, it provides a new and better explanation for why judges today are bound to follow the decisions of the framers.

William Baude is Neubauer Family Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School, where he teaches federal courts and constitutional law. His current research projects include papers on originalism, historical practice in constitutional law, federalism, the Supreme Court, and conflicts of law. His recent publications include "Rethinking the Federal Eminent Domain Power," and "Beyond DOMA: State Choice of Law in Federal Statutes." He also contributes to two legal blogs, the Volokh Conspiracy and SCOTUSBlog.

This lecture was recorded on February 13, 2015, at the University of Chicago Law School.

William Baude, "Is Originalism Our Law?"

Access Justice laws give people equal opportunity to enjoy primary goods, ensuring that access to these goods is not allocated by markets and is not tilted in favor of wealth and privilege. But Access Justice often fails to meet its egalitarian aspirations, because access and its benefits are deployed disproportionately by elites, yet paid for directly by public budgets and indirectly by weaker groups. In this lecture, Professor Ben-Shahar explains why Access Justice law can unintentionally hurt weak groups in a variety of areas — access to courts, information, insurance, internet, and many more.

Omri Ben-Shahar earned his PhD in Economics and SJD from Harvard in 1995 and his BA and LLB from the Hebrew University in 1990. Before coming to Chicago, he was the Kirkland & Ellis Professor of Law and Economics at the University of Michigan. Prior to that, he taught at Tel-Aviv University, was a member of Israel's Antitrust Court and clerked at the Supreme Court of Israel. He teaches contracts, sales, insurance Law,  consumer law, e-commerce, food and drug law, law and economics, and game theory and the law. He writes in the fields of contract law and consumer protection. He is the co-author of More Than You Wanted to Know: The Failure of Mandated Disclosure (Princeton 2014). Ben-Shahar is the Kearny Director of the Coase-Sandor Institute for Law and Economics, and the Editor of the Journal of Legal Studies. He is also the Co-Reporter with Oren Bar-Gill for the Restatement Third of Consumer Contracts.

This lecture was recorded on March 3, 2015, as part of the Chicago's Best Ideas lecture series.

Omri Ben-Shahar, "The Unintended Effects of Access Justice Laws"

The notion of reasonable expectations filters in and out of many given areas of law.  It is often derided as circular claim in which reasonable expectations are shaped by the law that they are supposed to shape.  On the other hand, it is often treated, most notably under the Supreme Court’s now pivotal decision in Penn Central Transportation Co v. City of New York, as the linchpin of modern real property law, and has been used as well in other areas, including financial regulation and the law of searches and seizures.  Both of these views are incorrect.  Reasonable expectations can never be banned from the law, but they must be domesticated, where their primary role is to facilitate cooperation between people who otherwise are unable to coordinate their social behaviors.

Richard A. Epstein is the James Parker Hall Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Law and Senior Lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School. Epstein started his legal career at the University of Southern California, where he taught from 1968 to 1972. He served as Interim Dean of the Law School from February to June 2001. He is also the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of Law at New York University, and the Peter and Kirsten Bedford Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution.

Recorded April 22, 2015, as part of the Chicago’s Best Ideas lecture series.

Richard A. Epstein, “Reasonable and Unreasonable Expectations in Property Law and Beyond”

Even for those among us who are not altogether convinced by Isaiah Berlin's famous essay "Two Concepts of Liberty," it has by now become commonplace to adopt a distinction between "negative" and "positive" liberties that largely coincides with the one he offered. In my lecture I defend the thesis that this bifurcation of the concept of freedom is incomplete in a significant respect, because it omits a third type, which I will call "social freedom." I proceed first by illustrating with some well-known examples how we must understand this third form of freedom, which cannot be performed by one subject alone, but rather requires the cooperation of others. In the second step I want to recall briefly the philosophical tradition in which this idea of "social freedom" has always had a central place. Finally, I delve into the systematic question of whether the suggested model of freedom in fact designates a third concept, which does not conform to the traditional bifurcated understanding.

Axel Honneth is a professor of philosophy at the University of Frankfurt and Columbia University, and the director of the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt.

This talk, the Dewey Lecture in Law and Philosophy, was recorded on November 12, 2014.

Axel Honneth, “Three, Not Two, Concepts of Liberty”

Human Dignity has become a central value in political and constitutional thought. Yet its meaning and scope, and its relation to other moral and political values such as autonomy and rights have been elusive. The lecture will explicate the value of Human Dignity through the exploration of three distinct ways in which dignity is violated.

Moshe Halbertal is the Gruss Professor of Law at NYU and Professor of Philosophy Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel.

The 2015 Dewey Lecture was recorded on November 11 at the University of Chicago Law School.

Moshe Halbertal, "Three Concepts of Human Dignity"

Justin Driver is Harry N. Wyatt Professor of Law and Herbert and Marjorie Fried Research Scholar. His principal research interests include constitutional law, constitutional theory, and the intersection of race with legal institutions. Prior to joining the University of Chicago Law School faculty, Driver was a visiting professor at Harvard, Stanford, and the University of Virginia. He began his career in legal academia at the University of Texas in 2009.

This Loop Luncheon was presented on April 29, 2016, as part of reunion weekend.

Justin Driver, "The Southern Manifesto in Myth and Memory"

Interpreting the language of contracts is the most common and least satisfactory task courts perform in contract disputes. In this Chicago’s Best Ideas lecture Professor Strahilevitz proposes to take much of this task out of the hands of lawyers and judges, entrusting it instead to the public. Strahilevitz’s research (written jointly with Professor Ben-Shahar) develops and tests a novel regime — the “survey interpretation method” — in which interpretation disputes are resolved though large surveys of representative respondents, by choosing the meaning that a majority supports. This method has rich potential to examine variations of contractual language that could have made an intended meaning clearer. A similar survey regime has been applied successfully in trademark and unfair competition law to interpret precontractual messages. To demonstrate the technique, Professor Strahilevitz applies the survey interpretation method to several real cases in which courts struggled to interpret contracts.

Lior Jacob Strahilevitz is Sidley Austin Professor of Law. This Chicago's Best Ideas lecture was presented on January 31, 2018.

Lior Jacob Strahilevitz, “Interpreting Contracts via Surveys and Experiments”

A central question in law and economics is how people will behave in the presence of legal rules. An essential part of that inquiry is what makes people happy or unhappy – what increases or decreases their “subjective well-being.” There is ample evidence that individuals make decisions based in part on what they believe will improve their well-being. In order to understand how legal rules will influence behavior, it is thus vital to understand how those rules will affect happiness. More generally, viewing law through a hedonic lens can help legal policymakers determine whether (or not) a given law or policy will be beneficial for the individuals affected by it.

Jonathan S. Masur is John P. Wilson Professor of Law, David and Celia Hilliard Research Scholar, and Director of the Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz Program in Behavioral Law, Finance and Economics. The 2018 Coase Lecture in Law and Economics was presented on February 6, 2018.

Jonathan S. Masur, "The Behavioral Law & Economics of Happiness"

Does legal education matter? In this lecture, Professor Todd Henderson presents some data on this question, using the behavior of corporate executives as an instrument. Looking at the 10% of large, public company CEOs who are lawyers, the talk tries to determine whether CEOs trained as lawyers act differently than CEOs trained in other ways. Do lawyer CEO firms get sued more or less or the same as other firms? Do they manage litigation differently? And, if they do, what is the impact on the bottom line? There is a burgeoning literature on how personal characteristics, from physical traits to birth order to education, impact CEO decision making. The lecture discusses this literature as well, and situates legal education in it.

This Loop Luncheon talk was presented on May 4, 2018.

Download the slides (PDF): https://www.law.uchicago.edu/files/2018-05/loop_luncheon_2018_slides.pdf

M. Todd Henderson, "Lawyer CEOs"

Supreme Court decisions affecting the constitutional rights of students in the nation's public schools have consistently generated bitter controversy. From racial segregation to unauthorized immigration, from antiwar protests to compulsory flag salutes, from economic inequality to teacher-led prayer: these are among the defining cultural issues that the Court has addressed in elementary and secondary schools. Drawing from his provocative new book, The Schoolhouse Gate, Justin Driver discusses the historic legal battles waged over education that continue to threaten our basic constitutional order.

This talk was recorded on October 4, 2018, as part of the Law School's annual First Monday lecture series.

Justin Driver, "The Future of the Supreme Court: The Constitution of Public Schools"

One of the University of Chicago Law School’s best known ideas or outputs over the last fifty years is that the common law (made by judges and often passed down and adapted over many years) is efficient. It was an idea advanced by Richard Posner, with respect to tort law, in his time as a professor here, but it is also reflected in his and other judicial opinions which students across the country meet in almost every non-constitutional course. What does this idea really mean, and is it plausible or even correct? If yes, why did the common law decline in influence? Statutes and regulations have far more impact on our present-day lives than does the common law. Judges are now known and evaluated for their constitutional decisions rather than for what they do in contracts and torts and other areas that are often described as common-law subjects. Could the common law solve our current concerns about climate change and autonomous vehicles?

Saul Levmore is the William B. Graham Distinguished Service Professor of Law.

This Chicago's Best Ideas lecture was presented on October 15, 2018.

Saul Levmore, "If the Common Law was Efficient, Why Did It Decline?"

This keynote for the 2018 Legal Forum Symposium was recorded on November 2, 2018.

Valerie B. Jarrett is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Law School and former senior advisor to President Barack Obama. Emily Buss is the Mark and Barbara Fried Professor of Law at the Law School.

Law in the Era of #MeToo: A Conversation with Valerie Jarrett

On the first Monday in October, the Supreme Court session opens. Each fall, the University of Chicago Law School invites faculty members to offer insight into some of the issues the Court will hear in the upcoming year. This year we heard from William Baude, Professor of Law and Aaron Director Research Scholar, and Anthony J. Casey, Professor of Law.

Recorded on October 15, 2019, at The Standard Club in Chicago.

William Baude and Anthony J. Casey, "Supreme Court Preview 2019: Highlights and Perspectives"

One of Chicago’s Best Ideas was the Coase Theorem, which reminds us daily that people can bargain around law or even before legal intervention is sought. But do we have too much law and too little bargaining around it? The number of cases and judges has grown dramatically over time and many problems are outsourced to the legal system, rather than being handled person-to-person. In this talk, I will consider conventional explanations for the astonishing growth of the legal system, and then suggest that it is not entirely good news. We have become addicted to law, and like most addictions, this one is difficult to undo and likely to grow.

Saul Levmore is William B. Graham Distinguished Service Professor of Law. This Chicago's Best Ideas talk was presented on November 5, 2019.

Saul Levmore, "Addictive Law"

"Chief Justice John Roberts: Defining the Supreme Court as its Leader and at the Center"

Joan Biskupic is a full-time CNN legal analyst and author of a 2019 biography of Chief Justice John Roberts. Before joining CNN in 2017, Biskupic was an editor-in-charge for Legal Affairs at Reuters and, previously, the Supreme Court correspondent for the Washington Post and for USA Today.

This Ulysses and Marguerite Schwartz Memorial Lecture was presented on November 19, 2019.

Joan Biskupic, "Chief Justice John Roberts: Defining the Supreme Court..."

The 1951 Refugee Convention and its 1967 Protocol are among the most important human rights documents of the post-WW II period. Yet the universalization of the refugee status after the 1967 Protocol has given rise to a series of discrepancies between the letter of the Convention and the purposes it is being asked to serve. In particular, the five-protected categories specified by the Convention have come under criticism. There are also tensions between the Eurocentric discourse and jurisprudence of refugee protection and the fact that the largest numbers of the world’s refugees are housed in Third World Countries.

With globalization of the refugee condition, new trends have also emerged: States seek to create measures of “non-entrée”—no access—to their territories by various modes of outsourcing monitoring and enforcement. These range from the installation of refugee processing centers in bordering countries and along the Mediterranean seacoast in particular, to the signing of special bilateral agreements to prevent refugees from accessing the states’ territory (as between the US and Mexico) and  to the more radical measure of simply “excising” territory, that is, declaring it outside the bounds of the jurisdiction of that state. These trends, along with criminalization of the refugee status, have undermined the universal human promise of the “right to have rights” (Hannah Arendt).

In conclusion I ask why cruelty is spreading in liberal democracies and discuss three normative responses to the current predicament: liberal nationalist, liberal internationalist and cosmopolitan interdependence. I suggest a fourth alternative which synthesizes elements of each.

Seyla Benhabib is the Eugene Meyer Professor of Political Science and Professor of Philosophy at Yale University. This Dewey Lecture in Law and Philosophy was presented on January 15, 2020.

Seyla Benhabib, "The End of the 1951 Refugee Convention?"

"The Trust Revolution: How the Digitization of Trust Will Revolutionize Business & Government"

In this CBI, Professor Henderson will examine how Internet platforms--eBay, Uber, AirBnB--relate to the Code of Hammurabi, Medieval guilds, the New York Stock Exchange, and corporate brands. All of these institutions, along with religions and governments and families, are in large part about providing trust to enable human cooperation. By undertaking a genealogy of trust, we can illuminate modern debates about the role and scope of government in regulating the daily lives of citizens.

M. Todd Henderson is the Michael J. Marks Professor of Law. This Chicago's Best Ideas talk was presented on January 27, 2020.

M. Todd Henderson, "The Trust Revolution: How the Digitization of Trust Will Revolutionize..."

This Chicago's Best Ideas talk was presented on February 10, 2020.

Anup Malani and David A. Weisbach, "Addressing Income Inequality"

On the first Monday in October, the Supreme Court session opens. Each fall, the University of Chicago Law School invites faculty members to offer insight into some of the issues the Court will hear in the upcoming year.

This event was recorded on September 15, 2020, and features Aziz Huq, Frank and Bernice J. Greenberg Professor of Law, and Jennifer Nou, Professor of Law.

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