Home Official News Releases Yale Professor to Speak on Constitution Day at Drake

Yale Professor to Speak on Constitution Day at Drake

Jack M. Balkin

CONTACT: Lisa Lacher, (515) 271-3119, lisa.lacher@drake.edu


Jack M. Balkin, the Knight professor of constitutional law and the First Amendment at Yale Law School, will speak at Drake University’s observance of Constitution Day on Thursday, Sept. 21.


His speech, which is free and open to the public, is titled “How the Constitution Changes: Partisan Entrenchment and the National Surveillance State.” The event, sponsored by the Drake University Constitutional Law Center, will start at 4 p.m. in room 213 of Cartwright Hall, 27th Street and Carpenter Avenue. A reception will follow.


Balkin holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from Cambridge University and received his bachelor’s and law degrees from Harvard University. He served as a clerk for Judge Carolyn D. King of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and practiced as an attorney in New York City before entering the legal academy. He has been a member of the law faculties at the University of Texas and the University of Missouri-Kansas City, and a visiting professor at Harvard University, New York University, the Buchman Faculty of Law at Tel Aviv University and the University of London.


He has written widely on legal issues for such publications as The New York Times, Washington Monthly, The New Republic Online and Slate. He also writes political and legal commentary at the Weblog Balkinization (http://balkin.blogspot.com/). Balkin is the founder and director of the Information Society Project at Yale Law School, an interdisciplinary center that studies law and the new information technologies. His books include “Cultural Software: A Theory of Ideology,” “Processes of Constitutional Decisionmaking,” “What Brown v. Board of Education Should Have Said” and “What Roe v. Wade Should Have Said.”


All educational institutions receiving federal funds are required to present educational programming about the U.S. Constitution on or about Sept. 17 of each year under a federal law enacted in 2004. Sept. 17 was selected as Constitution Day because delegates to the Constitutional Convention met for the final time on Sept. 17, 1787, to sign the U.S. Constitution and presented it to the public.


For more information about Drake’s Constitution Day, call 515-271-2988.