Speakers
Panel 1: Inclusion Panel
Moderator
Professor William R. Corbett, Louisiana State University Paul M. Hebert Law Center (tentative)
Presenters
Professor Atiba Ellis, Marquette University Law School
Atiba R. Ellis joined the Marquette University Law School faculty in 2018. His research focuses on voting rights law with specific attention to how varying conceptions of the right to vote exclude voters on the margins. He has written about the economic entry barriers posed by voter ID laws, felon disenfranchisement laws, the theoretical effects of the Citizens United Supreme Court decision, the impact of the Supreme Court’s decision in Shelby County v. Holder, and related topics. Professor Ellis’s current research focuses on voting rights theory and how ideology affects the scope of the right to vote. He has also written on critical legal theory and legal history. Professor Ellis is a frequent speaker at academic conferences, university and law school lectures, and community events about voting rights law, how race and gender affect the law of politics, diversity issues, and other matters related to the law of politics. Professor Ellis joined Marquette after teaching for nine years at the West Virginia University College of Law and after serving as the Boden Visiting Professor of Law at Marquette Law School in the fall of 2017.
Professor Raymond Diamond, Louisiana State University Paul M. Hebert Law School
Ray Diamond re-joined the faculty in 2009 and in 2012 he was named Vice Chancellor for Faculty Development and Institutional Advancement. He had taught since 1990 at Tulane University, where he held the John Koerner Professorship in Law, was previously the C.J. Morrow Research Professor of Law, and was an Adjunct Professor of African Diaspora Studies. Before his entry into law teaching at LSU in 1984, Professor Diamond spent three years with the Federal Trade Commission’s Bureau of Competition, where he litigated a landmark price signaling case, worked for a year on Capitol Hill as a legislative assistant to Rep. Bob Livingston in the 95th Congress, and practiced law privately in New Orleans.
Professor Diamond has written widely in the area of constitutional law, race relations, and legal history. His scholarship in the area of the Second Amendment and the right to bear arms twice has been cited in Supreme Court jurisprudence, most recently in McDonald v. City of Chicago (2010) (Justice Thomas concurring), and has been awarded the 2000 Carter-Knight Freedom Fund Award. In connection with the issues he has raised in his Second Amendment scholarship, he was co-counsel on the amicus brief presented by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) to the Supreme Court in District of Columbia v. Heller, decided in 2008. He is the co-author of Brown v. Board of Education: Caste, Culture, and the Constitution, which was awarded the 2003 David J. Langum, Sr., Prize by the Langum Project for Historical Literature. His most recent scholarship is “In the Civic Republic: Crime, the Inner City, and the Democracy of Arms – a Disquisition on the Revival of the Militia at Large,” published in the Connecticut Law Review, and he has begun work on a book under contract to the University Press of Kansas, on the new Second Amendment jurisprudence of the Supreme Court.
Professor Diamond is a former member of the Board of Editors of the Journal of Southern Legal History and of the Board of Directors of the Louisiana Supreme Court Historical Society, and is a former chair of the Section on Legal History of the Association of American Law Schools.
Panel 2: Election Emergencies: Voting in Times of War and Pandemic
Moderator
Professor Scott Sullivan, Louisiana State University Paul M. Hebert Law Center (tentative)
Presenter
Professor Michael Morley, Florida State University College of Law
Professor Morley joined FSU Law in 2018, and teaches and writes in the areas of election law, constitutional law, remedies, and the federal courts. He is best known for his work on election emergencies and post-election litigation, nationwide and other defendant-oriented injunctions, the jurisdiction of the federal courts and their equitable powers more generally. He has testified before congressional committees, made presentations to election officials for the U.S. Election Assistance Commission and participated in bipartisan blue-ribbon groups to develop election reforms. The governor of Florida also appointed Professor Morley to the Criminal Punishment Code Task Force, to propose potential revisions to the legislature.
The U.S. Supreme Court has cited several of his articles, and he was counsel of record for the successful Petitioner in a landmark campaign finance case. Professor Morley has appeared on C-SPAN, Court TV, Fox News and numerous local news programs, and has been quoted in the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Roll Call, Politico, U.S. News and World Report, and a wide range of other national publications. His work has been published in many of the nation’s top law reviews, including the Georgetown Law Journal, Northwestern University Law Review, Boston University Law Review and Emory Law Journal.
Before joining FSU Law, Professor Morley was a Climenko Fellow and Lecturer in Law at Harvard Law School. Prior to his experience in academia, he served in government as special assistant to the General Counsel of the Army at the Pentagon, as well as a law clerk for Judge Gerald B. Tjoflat of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit. During his tenure with the Army General Counsel’s office, he was awarded the Meritorious Civilian Service Award and the Army Staff Lapel Pin. He also worked as an associate at Williams & Connolly LLP and the Supreme Court & Appellate group of Winston & Strawn, LLP, both in Washington, D.C.
Professor Morley earned his J.D. from Yale Law School in 2003, where he was a senior editor on the Yale Law Journal; served on the moot court board; and received the Thurman Arnold Prize for Best Oralist in the Morris Tyler Moot Court of Appeals.
Commentators
Professor Lisa Manheim, University of Washington School of Law
Professor Lisa Manheim writes in the areas of constitutional law, election law, and presidential powers. Her scholarship has been published in the University of Chicago Law Review, the Iowa Law Review, the Supreme Court Review, and other leading academic journals. These works explore questions of federalism and institutionalism in the context of the judiciary. Professor Manheim’s courses include Constitutional Law, Election Law, Legislation, and Federal Courts. She is a three-time recipient of the Philip A. Trautman Professor of the Year Award given by the student body.
Professor Manheim earned her B.A., summa cum laude, from Yale College and her J.D. from Yale Law School, where she served as Managing Editor of the Yale Law Journal. After graduating from law school, Professor Manheim clerked for Judge Pierre N. Leval of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and Justice Anthony M. Kennedy of the United States Supreme Court. Prior to joining the faculty at the University of Washington, Professor Manheim worked as an associate at Perkins Coie LLP, where she specialized in appellate practice, commercial litigation, and political law.
Professor Derek Muller, Iowa College of Law
Professor Derek Muller joined Iowa Law in the Fall of 2020. He graduated from the University of Notre Dame Law School and worked as a judicial clerk for the Honorable Raymond W. Gruender of the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit in St. Louis, Missouri. He then practiced litigation with Kirkland & Ellis LLP of Chicago, Illinois. Professor Muller has taught at Penn State Law, Notre Dame Law School, and Pepperdine Caruso Law. Professor Muller teaches Election Law, Federal Courts, Civil Procedure, Administrative Law, and Evidence.
Panel 3: Historical Perspectives Panel
Moderator
Professor Raymond Diamond, Louisiana State University Paul M. Hebert Law Center (tentative)
Presenters
Professor Earl Maltz, Rutgers Law School
Professor Maltz is the author of nine books and many articles on constitutional law, statutory interpretation, the role of the courts and legal history. His books include The Coming of the Nixon Court: The 1972 Term of the Supreme Court and the Transformation of Constitutional Law, which was published by the University Press of Kansas in 2016, and Slavery and the Supreme Court, 1825-1861, which was published by the University Press of Kansas in 2009. Professor received his B.A. from Northwestern University, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and his J.D. cum laude from Harvard. He teaches Constitutional Law, Torts, Employment Discrimination, Conflicts of Law, and a seminar on the Supreme Court.
Dr. Laura Edwards, Princeton University
Laura F. Edwards is a legal historian whose research focuses on the nineteenth-century United States. She holds a B.A. in American Culture from Northwestern University and a Ph.D. in History from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She taught at Duke University for twenty years before coming to Princeton. She is the author of four books and has received numerous awards, including the Southern Historical Association’s Charles Sydnor Prize for the best book in southern history, the American Historical Association’s Littleton-Griswold Prize for the best book in American Law and Society, and fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Bar Foundation, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Humanities Center, the Newberry Library, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Smithsonian Institution.
Current Project
Prof. Edwards is working on a new book project, Only the Clothes on Her Back: Textiles, Law, and Commerce in the Nineteenth-Century United States, which tells the history of law and commerce in this period of the United States by foregrounding textiles, the legal principles associated with them, and the people who used them. The legalities associated with textiles existed not in statutes or treatises, but in social and cultural practices, commonly known then, but now long forgotten. Those principles and practices had incredible legal power at the time and made textiles—which included clothing, cloth, bedding, and accessories, such as shoes and hats—a unique form of property that people without rights, even enslaved people, could own and exchange. Reconstructing the colorful dynamics that turned the stuff of daily life into law, the book reframes our understanding of the new republic’s economy and legal system in the process.
Panel 4: Voting Rights Act Panel
Moderator
Professor Melissa Lonegrass, Louisiana State University Paul M. Hebert Law Center (tentative)
Presenters
Professor Paul Finkelman, President of Gratz University
Paul Finkelman received his B.A. in American Studies from Syracuse University in 1971 and his Ph.D. in history from the University of Chicago in 1976. He was later a Fellow in Law and Humanities at Harvard Law School. He has held a number of endowed chairs as a tenured professor or as a visitor, including the Ariel F. Sallows Chair in Human Rights Law at the University of Saskatchewan, the John Hope Franklin Chair in American Legal History at Duke Law School, and the President William McKinley Distinguished Professor at Albany Law School. In 2017 he held the Fulbright Chair in Human Rights and Social Justice at the University of Ottawa School of Law, in Ottawa, Canada and was also the John E. Murray Visiting Professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law. He is the author of more than 200 scholarly articles and the author or editor of more than fifty books. His most recent book, Supreme Injustice: Slavery in the Nation’s Highest Court, was published by Harvard University Press in 2018.
He has published in a wide variety of areas including American Jewish history, American legal history, constitutional law, and legal issues surrounding baseball. His work has been cited in five decisions by the United States Supreme Court. Most recently Justice Ginzburg quoted him in her unanimous decision in Tims v. Indiana. He has been quoted in numerous other courts, and in many appellate briefs. He has lectured on slavery, human trafficking, and human rights issue at the United Nations, throughout the United States, and in more than a dozen other countries, including China, Germany, Israel, and Japan. In 2014, he was ranked as the fifth most cited legal historian in American legal scholarship in Brian Leiter’s “Top Ten Law Faculty Scholarly Impact, 2009-2013.” He was an expert witness in the famous Alabama Ten Commandments Monument Case (Glassroth v. Moore) and in the law suit over the ownership of Barry Bonds’ 73rd home run ball (Popov v. Hayashi).
Professor Travis Crum, Washington University in St. Louis School of Law
Travis Crum is an Associate Professor of Law at Washington University in St. Louis. Professor Crum’s scholarship explores the relationship between voting rights, race, and federalism. His current projects examine the Fifteenth Amendment as an independent constitutional provision and the role of racially polarized voting in redistricting.
Professor Crum’s work on the Voting Rights Act’s bail-in provision was described by the Wall Street Journal as the “blueprint” for the “Obama administration’s new legal strategy to preserve decades of minority-voting rights” in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s decision in Shelby County v. Holder striking down the VRA’s coverage formula. His work has also been discussed in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and MSNBC. He is a frequent contributor to the Election Law Blog and Take Care. Professor Crum’s proposal for an effects-test bail-in provision was incorporated in the Voting Rights Advancement Act of 2019, which passed the U.S. House of Representatives.
Professor Crum served as a law clerk to Justice Anthony Kennedy and Justice (Ret.) John Paul Stevens on the U.S. Supreme Court, Judge David Tatel on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit, and Judge Myron Thompson on the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Alabama. While in practice, he was a Bristow Fellow in the Office of the Solicitor General of the United States and an associate at Mayer Brown LLP. Immediately prior to joining the faculty, he was a Bigelow Fellow at the University of Chicago Law School. Professor Crum received his JD from Yale Law School, his master’s degree from the London School of Economics, and his undergraduate degree from Johns Hopkins University. He was a first-generation college student.
