Transylvania announces lecture series named in honor of U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan, an 1852 graduate of Transylvania’s law department
LEXINGTON, KY.—President R. Owen Williams announced today the creation of the John Marshall Harlan Lecture Series at Transylvania University, made possible by the generosity of McBrayer, McGinnis, Leslie & Kirkland, PLLC. Harlan, an associate justice on the U.S. Supreme Court from 1877-1911, was a Kentucky lawyer and politician and an 1853 graduate of Transylvania’s law department. An early champion of civil rights, he is most notable as the lone dissenter in the Civil Rights Cases (1883) and Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which, respectively, struck down as unconstitutional federal anti-discrimination legislation and upheld Southern segregation statutes. There are intriguing coincidences—one involving Harlan—between Williams’s scholarly interests and the history of Transylvania. His Yale dissertation, “Unequal Justice Under Law: The Supreme Court and the First Civil Rights Movement, 1857-1883,” has Justice Harlan as one of its primary protagonists. “John Marshall Harlan is my hero and the central figure in my dissertation,” Williams said. “So I felt as if there were a spiritual connection between Transylvania and me even before coming here.” Transylvania will launch the series this fall. William Wiecek, legal and constitutional historian and professor of public law and legislation at Syracuse University, will give the inaugural Harlan Lecture on September 26, followed by a spring 2012 lecture presented by Akhil Reed Amar, professor of law and political science at Yale University. “We created this lecture series to bring to campus highly esteemed legal figures of national or international prominence who have