Our speaker Michael J. Klarman is an American legal historian and scholar of constitutional law. Currently, 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 Oxford (Magdalen) 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.

Professor 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 will speak on "The Degradation of American Democracy—and the Supreme Court" which was the title of the foreword he wrote for the Harvard Law Review's 2020 Supreme Court issue.