JAMESTOWN, NY, June 27,2016 – The Robert H. Jackson Center, a non-profit dedicated to promoting liberty under law through the examination of the life and work of Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson, and his legacy’s relevance to current events and issues, announced that Yale Law School Professor Tracey Meares will deliver the 12th Annual Lecture on the U.S. Supreme Court. Robert H. Jackson Center Executive Director Susan Moran Murphy made the announcement.
The July 11, 2016 event will begin at 4:00pm in the Hall of Philosophy in the Chautauqua Institution. This event is free and open to the public, but a gate pass must be purchased at the Institution to enter the grounds.
The Robert H. Jackson Supreme Court Lecture is made possible, in part, through the generosity of National Fuel Gas and Arnold and Jill Bellowe.
Ms. Meares is the Walton Hale Hamilton Professor of Law at Yale University. Before arriving at Yale, she was Max Pam Professor of Law and Director of the Center for Studies in Criminal Justice at the University of Chicago Law School. She was, at both The University of Chicago and Yale Law Schools, the first African American woman to be granted tenure. Before going into academia, Professor Meares held positions clerking for the Honorable Harlington Wood, Jr., of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit and as an Honors Program Trial Attorney in the Antitrust Division of the United States Department of Justice. Professor Meares has worked extensively with the federal government, having served on the Committee on Law and Justice, two National Research Council Review Committees, and was named by Attorney General Eric Holder to sit on the Department of Justice’s newly-created Science Advisory Board. In December 2014, President Obama named her as a member of his Task Force on 21st Century Policing.
Professor Meares’s teaching and research interests focus on criminal procedure and criminal law policy, with a particular emphasis on empirical investigation of these subjects. Her writings on such issues as crime prevention and community capacity building are concertedly interdisciplinary and reflect a civil society approach to law enforcement that builds upon the interaction between law, culture, social norms, and social organization. Professor Meares has been engaged in a number of action-oriented research projects on violence reduction through legitimacy-enhancing strategies. Meares has been especially interested as of late in teaching and writing about communities, police legitimacy, and legal policy, and she has lectured on this topic extensively across the country. Together with Tom Tyler, she directs the Justice Collaboratory at Yale Law School, which plays a central role, along with John Jay University and the Center for Policing Equity at UCLA, in a new federal initiative to build trust and confidence in the criminal justice system. She has a B.S. in general engineering from the University of Illinois and a J.D. from the University of Chicago Law School.
The Robert H. Jackson Center is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that envisions a global society where the universal principles of equality, fairness and justice prevail. The Center invites and engages scholars, educators, national officials and international dignitaries to analyze contemporary issues of peace and justice through the relevance of Justice Jackson’s body of work.
