The Robert H. Jackson Center Lecture on the Supreme Court of the United States has been a staple of Chautauqua Insitution’s summer season for two decades, welcoming legal luminaries to the grounds in partnership with the Robert H. Jackson Center in Jamestown.
Every summer the Jackson Lecture features a leading expert discussing the Supreme Court, the Justices, signal decisions, and related legal developments — always coming shortly after the Court’s most recent session has concluded, with the Justices’ decisions still in headlines across the nation.
This summer, constitutional law scholar Kate Shaw will be delivering the 20th Jackson Lecture at 3:30 p.m. today in the Hall of Philosophy, drawing on her work covering executive power, the law of democracy, the Supreme Court, and reproductive rights and justice.
Shaw is Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School, and her academic writing and popular writing have both been published broadly, from the Harvard Law Review and the Columbia Law Review, to The Washington Post, Slate and The Atlantic.
In a July 11 New York Times Roundtable Opinion piece with law professors Will Baude and Stephen Vladeck, Shaw cut right to the chase: Trump v. United States.
“I didn’t expect Trump to win this case, and I definitely didn’t expect the court to issue such a sweeping opinion, broadly insulating ex-presidents from criminal liability and fundamentally reshaping the relationship of the presidency to the law,” Shaw wrote to open the forum.
Shaw was referencing the July 1 decision — 6-3, along party lines — that Donald Trump’s presidential immunity protects him from criminal prosecution. It was the first time a case concerning criminal prosecution for alleged official acts of a president came before the Supreme Court. Leading the Times’ roundtable, Shaw wrote that she was struck by how “the majority opinion suggests that the president’s relationship with the Justice Department is essentially sacrosanct.”
Early in Shaw’s career, she served as an associate counsel in the Obama White House Counsel’s Office and as a law clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens and the Honorable Richard Posner of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit.
“When I was in the Obama White House Counsel’s Office, we worked hard to maintain a degree of separation between the White House and Justice Department — something administrations of both parties have long done,” she wrote.
Before joining the Penn faculty in January 2024, she spent over a decade on the faculty of the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, where she co-directed the Floersheimer Center for Constitutional Democracy.