Mitchell Lecture looks at Biden and the Supreme Court
The conventional wisdom of President Joe Biden and the Court figures them as fierce political adversaries. Yet, for all the adversarial clashes, the usual account of Biden and the Supremes hides a parallel story of mutually enabling institutions.
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.” It will take place Friday, March 14, from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m., in the law school’s Charles B. Sears Law Library, in O’Brian Hall on UB’s North Campus. The event is free and open to the public. Registration is required.
Delivering the lecture will be Yale Law School professor John Fabian Witt, a widely published legal historian, who will address President Joe Biden’s complicated relationship with our country’s highest court.
Friday, March 14, 2025
2 p.m. to 4 p.m.
Lecture followed by a Q&A and a reception. Free and open to the public.
Charles B. Sears Law Library, John Lord O’Brian Hall
University at Buffalo, North Campus [View map]
John Fabian Witt
Legal Historian and Allen H. Duffy Class of 1960 Professor of Law, Yale Law School
“We are extremely lucky to have John Fabian Witt for this year's Mitchell Lecture,” says 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 (Simon & Schuster), 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.