Jeffrey Toobin to Give Maurice Rosenberg Memorial Lecture

 

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Jeffrey Toobin, a legal analyst for CNN Worldwide, acclaimed author and staff writer at The New Yorker, will deliver the eleventh annual Maurice Rosenberg Lecture at Columbia Law School on October 27. Toobin will speak on “The Supreme Court and Election 2008.”

Professor Nathaniel Persily will give the welcome address at the Rosenberg Lecture. Persily is a nationally recognized expert on election law and a frequent practitioner and media commentator in the area. He joined the Columbia Law School faculty in 2007 with a secondary appointment in the Department of Political Science. He also is the founder and director of the Center on Law and Politics at Columbia Law School.

Toobin joined CNN from ABC News, where he provided legal analysis on the nation’s highest-profile cases, such as the O.J. Simpson civil trial and the Kenneth Starr investigation of the Clinton White House. Toobin received a 2000 Emmy Award for his coverage of the Elián González custody controversy.

Toobin has written several best-selling books including A Vast Conspiracy: The Real Story of the Sex Scandal that Nearly Brought Down a President; The Run of His Life: The People v. O.J. Simpson; Too Close to Call: The 36-Day Battle to Decide the 2000 Election; and The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court. Toobin’s articles for The New Yorker have covered such subjects as Attorney General John Ashcroft; Supreme Court Justices Stephen Breyer, Anthony Kennedy and Clarence Thomas; the Florida vote recount; and the trials of Martha Stewart, Timothy McVeigh and O.J. Simpson.

Toobin previously served as an assistant U.S. attorney in Brooklyn and as an associate counsel in the Office of Independent Counsel Lawrence E. Walsh. He earned his bachelor and law degrees from Harvard, where he was an editor of the Harvard Law Review.

 
The Maurice Rosenberg Memorial Lecture Series, established in 1996, honors Columbia Law School alumnus and professor Maurice Rosenberg. A renowned advocate for judicial reforms on the state and federal levels, Rosenberg was a specialist in civil procedure and conflict of laws who co-authored the definitive casebooks on those subjects. Rosenberg served in such official appointments as head of the Advisory Council on Appellate Justice, Special Assistant to the U.S. Attorney General, assistant attorney general in charge of the Office for Improvements in the Administration of Justice (appointed by President Carter), and member of the Federal Advisory Committee on Rules of Civil Procedure (appointed by Chief Justice Warren Burger).

 
Rosenberg received his LL.B. from Columbia in 1947 and served as editor-in-chief of the Columbia Law Review. After clerking for the Hon. Stanley H. Fuld ’26, he practiced law at Cravath, Swaine & Moore and Austrian, Lance & Stewart until 1956 when he joined the Columbia Law School faculty. Rosenberg was appointed the Nash Professor of Law in 1970 and the Harold R. Medina Professor of procedural Jurisprudence in 1973. He retired from the Law School faculty in 1989. In 1995 he received the Medal for Excellence from the Law School.

 
Past Maurice Rosenberg Lecturers are Hon. Jack B. Weinstein ’48, Hon. Rosemary Barkett, Hon. J. Harvie Wilkinson III, Eliot Spitzer, Justice Stephen Breyer, Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., Hon. Judith S. Kaye, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg ’59, Justice Antonin Scalia and Justice Anthony M. Kennedy.