Courts, Social Change, and Political Backlash

On March 31, 2011, Professor of Law, Michael Klarman of Harvard Law School delivered the Georgetown Law Center’s thirty-first annual Philip A. Hart Lecture: “Courts, Social Change, and Political Backlash.” Included here are the speaker\u27s notes from this lecture. Michael Klarman is the Kirkland & Ellis Professor at Harvard Law School. Formerly, he was the James Monroe Distinguished Professor of Law, Professor of History, and the Elizabeth D. and Richard A. Merrill Research Professor at the University of Virginia School of Law. Klarman specializes in the constitutional history of race. Klarman holds a J.D. from Stanford Law School, a D.Phil. from Oxford University and an M.A. and B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania. He has won numerous awards for his teaching and scholarship, which are primarily in the areas of constitutional law and constitutional history. His book, From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court and the Struggle for Racial Equality (2004), received the Bancroft Prize

Brown at 50

Brown at 50: This essay will appear in the Virginia Law Review's symposium issue commemorating the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education. It canvasses three issues: (1) why was Brown a hard case for the justices?; (2) how were the justices able to overcome their legal doubts about invalidating school segregation to achieve a unanimous decision invalidating that practice?; (3) what were the consequences of Brown? (and, more specifically, how did Brown radicalize political opinion in the South, thus creating a climate ripe for violence, and how did the brutalization of peaceful black protestors by white law enforcement officers, when broadcast on national television, transform national opinion on race, leading directly to the enactment of landmark civil rights legislation?)

Civil Rights and Civil Liberties - United States

Civil Rights and Civil LibertiesUnited States: This 6,000-word essay, to be published in the Oxford Encyclopedia of Legal History, considers several issues concerning civil rights and civil liberties in the United States. First, it notes several problems with defining the topic. Second, it examines the historical conditions under which particular rights have gained popularity. Finally, the essay considers several issues involving the judicial enforcement of rights: the inclination and capacity of courts to defend unpopular rights; the enforceability of court decisions protecting rights; the unpredictable consequences of such rulings; and the characteristics of a right that render courts most likely to protect it.

Towards unsupervised ontology learning from data

Data-driven elicitation of ontologies from structured data is a well-recognized knowledge acquisition bottleneck. The development of efficient techniques for (semi-)automating this task is therefore practically vital - yet, hindered by the lack of robust theoretical foundations. In this paper, we study the problem of learning Description Logic TBoxes from interpretations, which naturally translates to the task of ontology learning from data.In the presented framework, the learner is provided with a set of positive interpretations (i.e., logical models) of the TBox adopted by the teacher. The goal is to correctly identify the TBox given this input. We characterize the key constraints on the models that warrant finite learnability of TBoxes expressed in selected fragments of the Description Logic ε λ and define corresponding learning algorithms.This work was funded in part by the National Research Foundation under Grant no. 85482

Marital Agreements in Contemplation of Divorce

Romantic notions that marriage is forever are beginning to give way to the more realistic assessments that marriages indeed may not last. The pressure has been mounting for ways to provide economic planning to parties in the relatively likely event that their marriages terminate in divorce. The purpose of this article is to focus on one method of obtaining such planning: the marital agreement setting forth the support and property distribution which the parties would follow in the event of divorce. This article will review the law regarding marital agreements in contemplation of divorce as it exists in the United States, and the policy considerations relevant to it. The article will also describe a novel attempt in Michigan to deal with the matter legislatively, and will suggest a further change which would make this a fairer method of settling property interests in the event of a divorce

An Interpretive History of Modern Equal Protection

My enterprise here is to write a limited history of modem equal protection - one that will facilitate understanding of the important conceptual shifts that have occurred over time. By modem I mean the period following the switch-in-time in 1937 that signaled the demise of the Lochner era. By limited I mean an account that falls substantially short of a full-scale history of equal protection, which would, for example, necessarily encompass a good deal of political and social history. My aim here, rather, is to tell a story about the evolution of equal protection as a legal concept; I shall, for lack of a better term, label this enterprise conceptual history