Join the Marquette University Law School for its 2023 Hallows Lecture on Tuesday, March 7, from 4:30 p.m. to 5:30 p.m. in Ray and Kay Eckstein Hall’s Lubar Center.
The lecture will feature Hon. Gerard E. Lynch, who serves on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and was previously a judge of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York and the Paul J. Kellner Professor of Law at Columbia University.
RSVP online by Monday, Feb. 27.
Lynch will present “In Praise of Complexity and Contradiction in American Law.” Ronald Dworkin maintained that the ideal judge should decide cases by finding the resolution best fitting with the overall structure of the law. Lynch is not on board.
His critique is not that this is an impractical assignment—a task at which even Dworkin’s “Hercules” of a judge would fail. Rather, it is a categorically impossible assignment: There is no such structure, as American law is inherently the product of multiple forces interacting through widely diverse decision-makers, who themselves are the products of different eras, regions and philosophies.
This annual lecture remembers E. Harold Hallows, a Milwaukee lawyer and a faculty member at Marquette Law School from 1930 to 1958 and a justice of the Wisconsin Supreme Court from 1958 to 1974. He served as chief justice the last six years of his tenure.
A public reception will follow at 5:30 p.m.
