Professors NeJaime and Driver to Participate in Jorde Symposium

Professors Justin Driver and Douglas NeJaime will serve as commentators at the Jorde Symposium 2024 at Berkeley Law on Nov. 18.

David Strauss, Gerald Ratner Distinguished Service Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School, will deliver the lecture, titled “Polarization, Victimization, and Judicial Review.”

Strauss will explore “how a version of judicial review that has been successful in the past…threatens, today, to become a destructive competition among groups claiming the status of vicitims,” according to an announcement.

In his lecture, Strauss will consider how what once seemed like a stable way of understanding judicial review has encouraged an ever-widening array of interest groups — from religious groups to gun owners to opponents of affirmative action — to claim victim status in the courts. Strauss will explore “how it happened, why it’s bad for democracy, and what can be done about it,” according to the announcement.

Driver is the Robert R. Slaughter Professor of Law at Yale Law School. He teaches and writes in the area of constitutional law and is the author of “The Schoolhouse Gate: Public Education, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for the American Mind.” The book was selected as a Washington Post Notable Book of the Year and an Editors’ Choice of The New York Times Book Review. “The Schoolhouse Gate” also received the Steven S. Goldberg Award for Distinguished Scholarship in Education Law and was a finalist for the American Bar Association’s Silver Gavel Award and Phi Beta Kappa’s Ralph Waldo Emerson Book Award.

NeJaime is Anne Urowsky Professor of Law at Yale Law School, where he teaches in the areas of family law, legal ethics, law and sexuality, and constitutional law. Before joining the Yale faculty in 2017, NeJaime was Professor of Law at UCLA School of Law, where he served as Faculty Director of the Williams Institute, a research institute on sexual orientation and gender identity law and public policy.

The Brennan Center Jorde Symposium, held annually since 1996, sponsors top scholarly discourse and writing on the issues central to the legacy of Justice William J. Brennan Jr.

The annual lecture is co-sponsored by the Brennan Center for Justice in partnership with Berkeley Law.