Leading voting rights and elections expert to speak Feb. 20 in Herring Hall

PLST to host a lecture and Q&A with Pamela Karlan, Stanford law professor and Supreme Court advocate

Karlan

HOUSTON – (Feb. 7, 2020) – One of the nation’s most prominent constitutional law experts is scheduled to speak at Rice University in a lecture that’s free and open to the public.

Legal scholar and Supreme Court advocate Pamela Karlan will appear Feb. 20 from 4 to 6 p.m. in an event hosted by Rice’s program in Politics, Law and Social Thought (PLST), a collaboration between the schools of Humanities and Social Sciences.

Professor Pamela Karlan of Stanford Law will speak Feb. 20 in Herring Hall. (Photo by Jason Doiy/ALM)
Professor Pamela Karlan of Stanford Law will speak Feb. 20 in Herring Hall. (Photo by Jason Doiy/ALM)

Karlan is a longtime professor of law at Stanford University and co-director of the school’s Supreme Court Litigation Clinic. She served as deputy assistant attorney general under President Barack Obama and has served as legal counsel for the NAACP. Karlan has also argued before the Supreme Court, most recently in October 2019 when she argued employees should not be fired over sexual orientation.

“Professor Karlan is, simply put, one of the most important commentators and teachers of constitutional law in the United States,” said Carl Caldwell, Rice history professor and PLST program director. “She is, in short, someone who can give us an informed and also practical perspective on the current controversies over voting rights and electoral laws in the United States.”

Karlan’s Feb. 20 lecture, “Election Laws and American Democracy,” will cover issues directly related to the upcoming 2020 elections, including voting rights, redistricting and concerns about fraud. A Q&A session with the audience will follow.

“We are at a difficult moment in the history of American democracy — a moment when all kinds of technical means are being used to shape the outcomes of elections, from census questions designed to lower responses and thereby the apportionment of representatives, to gerrymandering using the most advanced computer technologies, to huge infusions of private funds to shape opinions, to outright attempts to undermine the legitimacy of electoral outcomes themselves,” Caldwell said.

“These are the issues that Professor Karlan will address,” he added. “They affect all of us.”

What: “Election Laws and American Democracy” lecture, presented by Rice’s program in Politics, Law and Social Thought

Who: Stanford law professor Pamela Karlan, one of the nation’s foremost experts on voting rights, electoral laws and U.S. political history

When: Feb. 20, 4-6 p.m.

Where: Herring Hall, Room 100, Rice University, 6100 Main St.

For a Rice University map and parking information, visit parking.rice.edu.

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This news release can be found online at news.rice.edu.

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Located on a 300-acre forested campus in Houston, Rice University is consistently ranked among the nation’s top 20 universities by U.S. News & World Report. Rice has highly respected schools of Architecture, Business, Continuing Studies, Engineering, Humanities, Music, Natural Sciences and Social Sciences and is home to the Baker Institute for Public Policy. With 3,970 undergraduates and 2,934 graduate students, Rice’s undergraduate student-to-faculty ratio is just under 6-to-1. Its residential college system builds close-knit communities and lifelong friendships, just one reason why Rice is ranked No. 1 for quality of life and for lots of race/class interaction and No. 4 for happiest students by the Princeton Review. Rice is also rated as a best value among private universities by Kiplinger’s Personal Finance.

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