This Run.Vote.Work. program will help answer the question: “how do I go about running for office?” The discussion features Deborah Gonzalez (District Attorney for the Western Judicial Circuit of Georgia), Jaylin McClinton (Former Candidate for the Cook County (Illinois) Board of Commissioners), and Megan Pulsts (Former City Council Member of Pine Lake (Georgia)). ACS President Russ Feingold will deliver opening remarks and Jeanne Hruska, ACS Senior Advisor for Communications and Strategy, with moderate the discussion.

Please join the ACS Pittsburgh Lawyer Chapter for a panel discussion regarding abortion access in Pennsylvania and nationwide following the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. We will be discussing current litigation around abortion laws in various states; the current litigation regarding “the abortion pill,” or mifepristone, and its impact on states like Pennsylvania, where abortion remains legal: and extraterritorial efforts by states to enforce abortion laws in other states and Pennsylvania’s executive order protecting out-of-state patients seeking abortion care in Pennsylvania.

Moderator:

Becca Kendis, Legal Fellow, Case Western Reserve University School of Law

Featuring:

Susan Frietsche, Adjunct Professor of Law and Senior Staff Attorney, Western Pennsylvania office of the Women's Law Project

Sheila Ramgopal, Chief Executive Officer, Allegheny Reproductive Health Center

Sara J. Rose, Deputy Legal Director, ACLU of Pennsylvania

This event has been approved for CLE Credit.

Please join the American Constitution Society, DC Lawyers Chapter in welcoming Prof. Stephen Vladeck to Washington, DC, to discuss his new book: The Shadow Docket: How the Supreme Court Uses Stealth Rulings to Amass Power and Undermine the Republic. 

Stephen Vladeck holds the Charles Alan Wright Chair in Federal Courts at the University of Texas School of Law. His work has been published in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and Slate. He has argued before the Supreme Court and has been CNN’s Supreme Court analyst since 2013. Vladeck lives in Austin, Texas. 

Vladeck will be in conversation with Mark Joseph Stern. Stern is a senior writer covering courts and the law for Slate Magazine. He holds a J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center and is a member of the Maryland Bar. He's also the author of American Justice 2019: The Roberts Court Arrives, published by the University of Pennsylvania press.

The event will take place on May 31, 2023, @ 7:00 p.m. at Politics and Prose, 5015 Connecticut Ave NW, Washington, DC 20008. The event is free with first-come, first-served seating.

You can find more information here.

Join the ACS At-Large, Austin, Chicago, Dallas, DC, Houston, Los Angeles, Madison, Michigan, Milwaukee, New Orleans, New York, San Diego, and Virginia Lawyer Chapters Lawyer Chapters for a discussion on the Blue Slip. The panelists will discuss their personal experience with the blue slip, work on the blue slip (including this recent report on the subject), and educate attendees on the Senate and political elements of the Blue Slip process and the potential for reform. The program will feature:

• Mary Barzee Flores: President Obama nominated Ms. Flores as a federal district judge in the Southern District of Florida in 2015, but her nomination died in the Senate after Senator Marco Rubio refused to return a blue slip. She previously served as a circuit judge in Miami-Dade County, Florida from 2003-2011, an assistant federal public defender in Miami from 1991 to 2003, and a shareholder at Stearns Weaver, a law firm in Miami.

• Jeremy Paris: Jeremy served as chief counsel for nominations and oversight on the Senate Judiciary Committee under former Committee Chairman, Sen. Patrick Leahy. He is a public affairs expert, policy counsel, and principal at the Raben Group. He is also a board member for the ACS NE Ohio Lawyer Chapter.

• Paul Gordon: Paul is senior legislative counsel at People for the American Way and co-author of a study on the blue slip, “One Nation, Two Systems of Justice. Why It’s Times to Reform the Blue Slip Process.”

The U.S. Supreme Court is poised to decide the monumental voting rights case Moore v. Harper. The case concerns a legal doctrine known as the independent state legislature, which asserts that state legislatures have exclusive power--not subject to federal or state courts--to govern all aspects of elections, electors, and voting registration and procedures. The theory is rooted in the Elections and Electors Clauses of the U.S. Constitution. It first appeared in legal arguments during the 2000 Presidential Election, when votes in Florida were in dispute. In the current case, it's about Congressional redistricting following the 2020 Census. 

Join us for a lively discussion about the independent state legislature theory and its discontents, debated by Harvard Law School Professor Nick Stephanopolous and University of California Berkeley Law Professor John Yoo. The conversation moderator will be Reform for Illinois board member David Melton.

This is the third in a series of moderated debates on current, critical, and often, contentious, civic questions sponsored by the American Bar Association's Division for Public Education, the American Constitution Society (Chicago chapter), the Federalist Society (Chicago chapter), and Reform for Illinois.

Programs begin with a question, followed by a parliamentary-style (opening statements, rebuttals) debate in response to the question. Programs conclude with a moderated discussion among debaters and Q&A from the audience.

Register here.

Please join the ACS Washington State Lawyer Chapter as we host Evelyn Atkinson for a virtual discussion about her paper “Telegraph Torts: The Lost Lineage of the Public Service Corporation." In this paper, Atkinson, a Teaching Fellow at the University of Chicago, details the emotional responsibilities held by certain public service corporations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and links this history to the contemporary debate about the modern role of public utilities, particularly as to how those duties might be applied to online platforms like Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. As Atkinson writes, "[a]lthough not completely analogous, the telegraph cases offer the possibility of a complimentary paradigm to our more limited modern-day understanding of the public utility corporation—one that links specific important services to heightened public responsibilities, and understands corporations as moral actors that are embedded in a web of social relations, rather than purely profit-driven market actors."

A copy of the forthcoming article can be found at the link: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4232347