UB School of Law’s signature lecture series looks at Biden and the Supreme Court

BUFFALO, N.Y. — As the nation enters the era of a new presidential administration, the University at Buffalo School of Law will host a lecture and discussion assessing the prior administration’s relationship with the U.S. Supreme Court from a legal historian’s perspective.

The Spring 2025 James McCormick Mitchell Lecture, part of the law school’s signature lecture series, is titled “Antagonists and Enablers: A First Draft History of Biden and the Supremes.”

When: Friday, March 14, from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m.

Where: The Charles B. Sears Law Library in O’Brian Hall on UB’s North Campus.

Who: Yale Law School professor John Fabian Witt, a widely published legal historian, will address President Joe Biden’s complicated relationship with our country’s highest court.

To register: The event is free and open to the public. Required registration is available at law.buffalo.edu/mitchell.

“We are extremely lucky to have John Fabian Witt for this year's Mitchell Lecture,” says UB Law Professor Matthew Steilen, chair of the law school’s Mitchell Lecture steering committee. “Professor Witt is one of the nation’s leading legal historians, whose contributions span a remarkably wide range of topics, from the laws of war, to epidemic disease and public health, and social reform movements. The story is always an engaging one, full of people solving problems, working together and against one another, and building something new.

“His topic, the Supreme Court under President Biden, is an apt one for the present moment. Professor Witt proposes to show us not only a court and a president politically opposed to one another, but also ‘mutually enabling’ each other, constructing from the materials in our Constitution two very powerful and wide-ranging institutions.”

Witt, who holds an endowed faculty chair at Yale Law School, also teaches history at the university. His books include “American Contagions: Epidemics and the Law from Smallpox to COVID-19” and “Lincoln’s Code: The Laws of War in American History,” which won the Bancroft Prize and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His forthcoming book, “The Radical Fund: How a Band of Visionaries and a Million Dollars Upended America,” is a history of the charitable Garland Fund, which funded progressive social activism in the early 20th century.

The Mitchell Lecture series was endowed in 1950 by a gift from Lavinia A. Mitchell in memory of her husband, James McCormick Mitchell. An 1897 graduate of the Buffalo Law School, Mitchell later served as chairman of the Council of the University of Buffalo, which was then a private university.

Justice Robert H. Jackson delivered the first Mitchell Lecture in 1951, titled “Wartime Security and Liberty Under Law.” The lecture was published that year in the first issue of the Buffalo Law Review. Past speakers have also included Derrick Bell, Paul Freund, Lawrence Friedman, Carol Gilligan, Sheila Jasanoff, Duncan Kennedy, Karl Llewellyn, Stuart Macaulay, Catharine MacKinnon and Richard Posner.