Kevin Conway

  • Ambition and Aspiration—and Celebrity

    Read Judge Rosenthal’s 2019 Hallows Lecture at Marquette University Law School Judge Lee Rosenthal has done a masterful job of explaining how we ought to live our lives in the law (and how we ought not to). Her warnings about the consequences of ambition without aspiration—especially for judges—are timely and troubling. While most district court…

  • Doing the Right Thing

    Read Judge Rosenthal’s 2019 Hallows Lecture at Marquette University Law School It is quite daunting to discuss a thoughtful tome written by a respected judge, particularly one as senior and intellectually acute as Judge Lee Rosenthal. It is even more daunting to limit that discussion to approximately 600 words, a shorter amount than is usually…

  • Judicial Aspiration and Situational and Institutional Humility

    Read Judge Rosenthal’s 2019 Hallows Lecture at Marquette University Law School It’s entirely fitting that Judge Lee Rosenthal delivered this thoughtful lecture at Marquette Law School. The idea that lawyers and judges should be aspirational—that they should search for “something more” than “the quotidian facts and problems of specific matters, disputes, or cases”—has a religious…

  • Ambition and Aspiration: Living Greatly in the Law

    Lee H. Rosenthal is chief judge of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas, based in Houston. She is a national figure in the judiciary, having served as chair of the Judicial Conference Committee on Rules of Practice and Procedure, to which Chief Justice John Roberts appointed her, and chair of the…

  • The Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Origins of Birthright Citizenship

    T he debate over who is an American and what rights come along with citizenship is as old as the republic and as recent as today’s newspapers. Rarely, however, does the discussion achieve any kind of historical understanding. Such understanding requires familiarity with the era of Reconstruction that followed the American Civil War, when the United…