U.S. DEMOCRACY

MICHAEL KLARMAN

Harvard Law School Professor 

Professor Michael J. Klarman is the Charles Warren Professor of Legal History at Harvard Law School, where he joined the faculty in 2008. He received his B.A. and M.A. (political theory) from the University of Pennsylvania in 1980, his J.D. from Stanford Law School in 1983, and his D. Phil. in legal history from the University of Oxford (1988), where he was a Marshall Scholar. After law school, Professor Klarman clerked for the Honorable Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit (1983–84). He joined the faculty at the University of Virginia School of Law in 1987 and served there until 2008 as the James Monroe Distinguished Professor of Law and Professor of History. 

Klarman has also served as the Ralph S. Tyler, Jr., Visiting Professor at Harvard Law School, Distinguished Visiting Lee Professor of Law at the Marshall Wythe School of Law at the College of William & Mary, Visiting Professor at Stanford Law School, and Visiting Professor at Yale Law School. 

Klarman has won numerous awards for his teaching and scholarship, which are primarily in the areas of Constitutional Law and Constitutional History. In 2009 he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

Klarman’s first book, From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court and the Struggle for Racial Equality, was published by Oxford University Press in 2004 and received the 2005 Bancroft Prize in History. He published two books in the summer of 2007, also with Oxford University Press: Brown v. Board of Education and the Civil Rights Movement and Unfinished Business: Racial Equality in American History, the latter of which is part of Oxford’s Inalienable Rights series. In 2012, he published From the Closet to the Altar: Courts, Backlash, and the Struggle for Same-Sex Marriage. In 2016, Professor Klarman published The Framers’ Coup: The Making of the United States Constitution, which was a finalist for the George Washington Book Prize. In 2020, he authored the Foreword to the Harvard Law Review’s annual Supreme Court issue, entitled “The Degradation of American Democracy—and the Court.” Professor Klarman is currently writing a book on Race and Sports in American History

PEGGY JAMES -MODERATOR
Dean Emeritus of the College of Social Sciences and Professional Studies

Dr. Peggy James, Dean Emeritus of the College of Social Sciences and Professional Studies, has focused her work on active citizenship, engagement, and voting for over 30 years at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside.  She has a Master of Arts degree focused in Political Science and Government from Marquette University and a PhD in Political Science from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

In an effort to increase nonpartisan democratic engagement, student voter registration, election education, and turnout at the polls Peggy created and led the Election Experience Program for the past three presidential elections.  This program led to UW-Parkside receiving the Platinum Campus Award in 2018 50% or more students voting in the midterm elections and the Bronze Campus Award in 2020 for student voting rate in a presidential election between 50 – 59% from All in Democracy.  Her most recent work, while serving as the Director of the Center for Research in Innovation and Smart Cities, focuses on citizen participation in smart city environments, including survey research in Racine and Kenosha to investigate citizen readiness for technology enabled participation, sponsored by the Tommy G. Thompson Center on Public Leadership.  Following her white paper on  “Challenges and Opportunities of Smart Cities and Smart Factories: Foxconn investment in Southeastern Wisconsin.”, she has been actively publishing in innovation and smart cities; the most recent article “ Civic Technology: A Chutes and Ladders Analysis of Transformative Potential”  can be found in the Journal of Smart Cities and Society.