Editor’s note: The lecture will now be livestreamed. For access, click here.
U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Samuel Alito will give a talk titled “The Emergency Docket” at 12:30 p.m. Thursday (Sept. 30). The in-person event, sponsored by the Kellogg Institute for International Studies’ Constitutionalism and the Rule of Law (CAROL) Lab, will be in the McCartan Courtroom at the Law School, and overflow rooms with a closed circuit livestream will be available at both the Law School and Hesburgh Center for International Studies.
This is a free but ticketed event and is open to the Notre Dame community and the public. Registration is required. Tickets will be distributed via a lottery system, so registration does not guarantee a ticket.
“We are privileged to be able to welcome Justice Alito back to Notre Dame again, for the first time since his 2017 visit to the Kellogg Institute,” said Paolo Carozza, director of the Kellogg Institute for International Studies and professor of law and concurrent professor of political science. “His engagement with the CAROL Lab in this early stage of its formation provides us with a unique opportunity to learn from his depth of experience, and from his keen sense of the rule of law and his deep sense of judicial responsibility in a constitutional democracy.”
Alito will also meet with CAROL Lab faculty and research assistants. The mission of the CAROL Lab is to exert a tangible influence on the practice of constitutional democracy and the rule of law around the world. By bridging rigorous scholarly inquiry and sound policy, faculty and researchers at the CAROL Lab work tirelessly to promote human flourishing through a variety of public contexts including judicial seminars, advisory briefs and expert consultations on matters of constitutional reform and the rule of law.
Sherif Girgis, associate professor of law, will introduce Alito, for whom he clerked. Girgis is co-author of the book “What Is Marriage? Man and Woman: A Defense” cited by Alito in United States v. Windsor, and is a faculty fellow with the Notre Dame Law School’s Religious Liberty Initiative. Established in 2020, the Religious Liberty Initiative promotes religious freedom for people of all faiths through scholarship, events and the Law School’s Religious Liberty Clinic.
“We at Notre Dame Law School are looking forward to hosting Justice Alito. Our students, faculty and the wider community will benefit from hearing firsthand the ideas and viewpoints of a member of our nation’s highest court,” said G. Marcus Cole, the Joseph A. Matson Dean and Professor of Law at Notre Dame Law School.
In 1990, President George H. W. Bush chose Alito to serve as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit where he served for 16 years. From 1987 to 1990, Alito was the United States attorney for the District of New Jersey. He was deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel from 1985 to 1987, and served as an assistant to the solicitor general in the Justice Department from 1981 to 1985. On Jan. 31, 2006, Alito was sworn in as the 110th Justice of the Supreme Court. A native of New Jersey, Alito is a graduate of Princeton University and earned his juris doctor degree in 1975 from Yale Law School, where he served as an editor for the Yale Law Journal.
Contact: Colleen Sharkey, assistant director of media relations, 574-999-0102, csharke2@nd.edu