News Release
McGlinchey Stafford Announces 2018 Dermot S. McGlinchey Lecture at Tulane Law School
Read Time: 1 minMcGlinchey Stafford is pleased to announce the annual Dermot S. McGlinchey Lecture on Federal Litigation at Tulane Law School. Richard H. Pildes, New York University School of Law Sudley Family Professor of Constitutional Law, will deliver the 2018 lecture, titled “Defending Political Elites in the Era of Participatory Democracy.”
This year’s lecture will take place at 5:00 p.m. on Wednesday, March 14, 2018, at Tulane Law School, located at 6329 Freret Street in New Orleans. The event is free of charge and open to the public.
Professor Pildes is one of the nation’s leading scholars of constitutional law and an authority on legal issues affecting democracy. A former law clerk to Justice Thurgood Marshall, he has been elected into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Law Institute, and has also received recognition as a Guggenheim Fellow and a Carnegie Scholar. His acclaimed casebook The Law of Democracy: Legal Structure of the Political Process systematically explores legal and policy issues concerning the structure of democratic elections and institutions, such as the role of money in politics, the design of election districts, the regulation of political parties, the structure of voting systems, the representation of minority interests in democratic institutions, and similar issues, and helped create an entirely new field of study in the law schools. He has written extensively on the rise of political polarization in the United States, the Voting Rights Act, the dysfunction of America’s political processes, the role of the Supreme Court in overseeing American democracy, and the powers of the American President and Congress, and he has criticized excessively “romantic” understandings of democracy.
In addition to his scholarship on these issues, he has written on national security law, the design of the regulatory state, and American constitutional history and theory. A well-known public intellectual, Pildes also has successfully argued voting-rights cases before the United States Supreme Court and was part of the Emmy-nominated NBC breaking-news team for coverage of the 2000 Bush v. Gore contest.
The annual McGlinchey Lecture was established in 1996 by the McGlinchey Stafford law firm to honor its founder, the late Dermot S. McGlinchey. Mr. McGlinchey was an eminent champion of equal access to the courts, and the annual lecture that bears his name is dedicated to the fields of litigation practice, judicial adjudication, and justice under law, his areas of expertise. Mr. McGlinchey was a leading lawyer of his generation, noted civic activist, and ardent supporter of Tulane Law School. Mr. McGlinchey received his undergraduate and law degrees from Tulane and remained active in the Tulane community throughout his life. Mr. McGlinchey balanced his 35-year legal career with substantial commitments to professional, civic, and charitable endeavors in New Orleans, and received numerous accolades for his leadership within the legal profession and the greater community.