Gerhard Casper To Deliver Inaugural Kronman-Postol Lecture December 7

GERHARD CASPER'S LECTURE IS AVAILABLE HERE AS A PDF.

On Thursday, December 7, 2006, at 4:30 p.m., Gerhard Casper ‘62 LLM will deliver the inaugural Kronman-Postol Lecture in Room 127 of the Law School.  Casper is President Emeritus of Stanford University and the Peter and Helen Bing Professor in Undergraduate Education at Stanford, Professor of Law and Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford. The event honors the inauguration of a new lecture endowed by Sidney S. Postol, A.B. 1939, in honor of Anthony T. Kronman, dean of the Yale Law School from 1994 to 2004, and Sterling Professor of Law. The title of Casper’s lecture will be “Caesarism in Democratic Politics: Reflections on Max Weber.” 
 
“The concept of ‘caesarism’ was of considerable importance to Max Weber and, in reading Weber, one cannot help but be struck by the relevance, to our own historical situation,” says Casper. “His arguments about what, nowadays, we would call ‘governance’ are anything but theoretical as we encounter caesarist tendencies in contemporary politics.”

Casper served as President of Stanford University from 1992 to 2000. Prior to that, he was a longtime faculty member at the University of Chicago, where he served as the provost of the university, the dean of the law school, and a professor of law. He began his career as a professor of political science at the University of California at Berkeley.

Casper holds a law degree from the universities of Freiburg and Hamburg, a Master of Laws degree from Yale Law School and a doctorate from the University of Freiburg. 

Casper has written and taught primarily in the fields of constitutional law, constitutional history, comparative law, and jurisprudence.  From 1977 to 1991, he was an editor of The Supreme Court Review. His books include a monograph on legal realism (Berlin 1967), an empirical study of the Supreme Court’s workload (Chicago, 1976, with Richard A. Posner), as well as Separating Power (Cambridge, MA 1997) concerning the separation of powers practices at the end of the 18th century in the United States. He wrote Cares of the University (Stanford, CA, 1997) about the Stanford presidency. 
 
Casper has been elected to membership in the American Law Institute (1977), the International Academy of Comparative Law, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1980), the Orden Pour le mérite für Wissenschaften und Künste (Order Pour le mérite for the Sciences and Arts) (1993), and the American Philosophical Society (1996).
 
Presently, he serves as a successor trustee of Yale University and is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Central European University in Budapest, the Board of Trustees of the American Academy in Berlin and the Council of the American Law Institute.  He holds an honorary degree from Yale University.