Although it's been challenged since its inception, Obama's health care reform is facing its biggest test yet: the Commerce Clause of the Constitution. As the nation awaits the Supreme Court’s soon-to-be-announced decision on the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act, the National Constitution Center’s Peter Jennings Project and The Constitutional Sources Project (ConSource) present a timely program to illuminate the impact of this pivotal ruling. Joined by other key experts, distinguished law professors Jack Balkin of Yale Law School and Randy Barnett of Georgetown Law Center will explore the decision’s real-world consequences on the Constitution and other legislation built on Commerce Clause power. This event will be moderated by award-winning journalist John Hockenberry."
Bio
Jack Balkin
Jack M. Balkin is Knight Professor of Constitutional Law and the First Amendment at Yale Law School. Professor Balkin received his Ph.D in philosophy from Cambridge University, and his A.B. and J.D. degrees from Harvard University. He served as a clerk for Judge Carolyn D. King of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and practiced as an attorney at Cravath, Swaine, and Moore in New York City before entering the legal academy.
In addition to Yale, he has been a member of the law faculties at the University of Texas and the University of Missouri-Kansas City, and a visiting professor at Harvard University, New York University, the Buchman Faculty of Law at Tel Aviv University and the University of London.
Professor Balkin is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and writes political and legal commentary at the weblog Balkinization. He has also written widely on legal issues for such publications as the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, The New England Journal of Medicine, The American Prospect, Washington Monthly, CNN.com, The New Republic Online, and Slate.
Professor Balkin is the founder and director of the Information Society Project at Yale Law School, an interdisciplinary center that studies law and the new information technologies, and the director of Yale's Knight Law and Media Program. He is the author of over one hundred articles and the author or editor of eleven books. His work ranges over many different fields, including constitutional theory, telecommunications and Internet law, reproductive rights, freedom of speech, rhetoric, jurisprudence and legal reasoning, cultural evolution, the theory of ideology, and musical and legal interpretation.
Randy Barnett
Randy E. Barnett is the Carmack Waterhouse Professor of Legal Theory at the Georgetown University Law Center, where he teaches constitutional law and contracts. He has also taught torts, criminal law, cyberlaw, evidence, agency and partnership, and jurisprudence. He has been a visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania, Northwestern and Harvard Law School. In 2008, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Constitutional Studies.
After graduating from Northwestern University and Harvard Law School, Professor Barnett tried many felony cases as a prosecutor in the Cook County States' Attorney's Office in Chicago. In 2004, Professor Barnett appeared before the U.S. Supreme Court to argue the medical cannabis case of Gonzalez v. Raich after successfully arguing in the Ninth Circuit (to listen to the argument, click here). He coauthored an amicus brief in Lawrence v. Texas.
Professor Barnett lectures internationally, delivering the Kobe 2000 lectures in jurisprudence at the University of Tokyo and Doshisha University in Kyoto. He has also lectured on contract law theory at Waseda University (Tokyo) and on criminal justice theory at Kansai University (Osaka).
Professor Barnett's publications includes more than one hundred articles and reviews, as well as nine books, including Restoring the Lost Constitution: The Presumption of Liberty (Princeton, 2004), Constitutional Law: Cases in Context (Aspen, 2008), Contracts (Oxford Introductions to U.S. Law, 2010), Contracts: Cases and Doctrine (Aspen, 4th ed. 2008), and The Structure of Liberty: Justice and the Rule of Law (Oxford, 1998), which was translated into Japanese.
He regularly publishes opinion pieces in such publications as The Wall Street Journal, and appears on such programs as the CBS Evening News, The NBC Nightly News, Parker-Spitzer (CNN), The Glenn Beck Show (FNC) and the Ricki Lake Show. In 2007, Professor Barnett was featured in the documentaries, The Trials of Law School and In Search of the Second Amendment.
Stephanos Bibas
Stephanos Bibas studies the powers and incentives that shape how prosecutors, defense counsel, defendants, and judges behave in the real world of guilty pleas. His 2004 paper, “Plea Bargaining Outside the Shadow of Trial” (Harvard Law Review), explored the agency costs, structural forces, and psychological biases that cause plea bargaining to deviate from expected trial outcomes. He also studies the divorce between criminal procedure’s focus on efficiency and criminal law’s interest in healing victims, defendants, and communities. His new book (The Machinery of Criminal Justice, Oxford 2012) explains how criminal justice should do more to encourage acceptance of responsibility, remorse, apology, and forgiveness.
As director of Penn’s Supreme Court Clinic, Bibas litigates a wide range of Supreme Court cases. He and his co-counsel won a landmark victory in Padilla v. Kentucky in 2010, persuading the Court to recognize the right of noncitizen defendants to accurate information about deportation before they plead guilty. His academic work played a central role in the Supreme Court’s landmark case of Blakely v. Washington.
Jamal Greene
Articles Editor, Yale Law Journal. Law clerk to Judge Guido Calabresi, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, 2005-06. Law clerk to Justice John Paul Stevens, Supreme Court of the United States, 2006-07. Alexander Fellow, New York University School of Law, 2007-08. Joined the Columbia faculty in 2008. Member, American Bar Association.
Awarded Burton H. Brody Prize for best paper on constitutional privacy (2005); Smith-Doheny Legal Ethics Writing Prize (2004); and Edgar M. Cullen Prize for best paper by a first-year law student (2003). From 1999-2002, Professor Greene was a reporter for Sports Illustrated.
John Hockenberry
John Hockenberry is an award-winning journalist with twenty-five years experience in radio, broadcast television and print. He is the host of WNYC and PRI’s The Takeaway, a correspondent for PBS Frontline, and a noted presenter and moderator at conferences such at TED, Aspen Ideas, and the World Science Festival.
Ilya Shapiro
Ilya Shapiro is a senior fellow in constitutional studies at the Cato Institute and editor-in-chief of the Cato Supreme Court Review. Before joining Cato, he was a special assistant/advisor to the Multi-National Force in Iraq on rule of law issues and practiced international, political, commercial, and antitrust litigation at Patton Boggs and Cleary Gottlieb.
Shapiro has contributed to a variety of academic, popular, and professional publications, including the Wall Street Journal, Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, L.A. Times, USA Today, Washington Times, Legal Times, Weekly Standard, and National Review Online, and from 2004 to 2007 wrote the "Dispatches from Purple America" column for TCS Daily.com. He also regularly provides commentary on a host of legal and political issues for various TV and radio outlets, including CNN, Fox News, ABC, CBS, NBC, Univision, "The Colbert Report," and American Public Media's "Marketplace."
He lectures regularly on behalf of the Federalist Society and other educational and professional groups, is a member of the board of visitors of the Legal Studies Institute at The Fund for American Studies, was an inaugural Washington Fellow at the National Review Institute, and has been an adjunct professor at the George Washington University Law School.
Before entering private practice, Shapiro clerked for Judge E. Grady Jolly of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, while living in Mississippi and traveling around the Deep South. He holds an A.B. from Princeton University, an M.Sc. from the London School of Economics, and a J.D. from the University of Chicago Law School (where he became a Tony Patiño Fellow). Shapiro is a member of the bars of New York, the District of Columbia, and the U.S. Supreme Court. He is a native speaker of English and Russian, is fluent in Spanish and French, and is proficient in Italian and Portuguese.
Neil Siegel
Neil S. Siegel is Professor of Law and Political Science and co-director of the Program in Public Law at Duke University School of Law. Professor Siegel teaches in the areas of U.S. constitutional law, constitutional theory, and federal courts. His research interests include constitutional law, constitutional theory, law and politics, and the economic analysis of constitutional law.
Professor Siegel served as special counsel to Senator Joseph R. Biden during the confirmation hearings of John G. Roberts and Samuel A. Alito. During the October 2003 term, he clerked for Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg at the U.S. Supreme Court. He also served as Bristow Fellow in the Office of the Solicitor General at the U.S. Department of Justice and as law clerk to Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit.
Professor Siegel received his B.A. (Economics and Political Science), summa cum laude, in 1994 and his M.A. (Economics) in 1995 from Duke University. He graduated in 2001 with joint degrees from the University of California, Berkeley, receiving his J.D. (first in class) from Berkeley Law and a Ph.D. in Jurisprudence and Social Policy. While at Berkeley Law, he served as the Senior Articles Editor of the California Law Review.
Randy E. Barnett, Professor of Legal Theory at the Georgetown University Law Center, discusses the chilling effect President Obama's criticism of the Supreme Court regarding his signature health care legislation.
System for the advance financing of medical expenses through contributions or taxes paid into a common fund to pay for all or part of health services specified in an insurance policy or law. The key elements are advance payment of premiums or taxes, pooling of funds, and eligibility for benefits on the basis of contributions or employment without an income or assets test. Health insurance may apply to a limited or comprehensive range of medical services and may provide for full or partial payment of the costs of specific services. Benefits may consist of the right to certain medical services or reimbursement of the insured for specified medical costs. Private health insurance is organized and administered by an insurance company or other private agency; public health insurance is run by the government (seesocial insurance). Both forms of health insurance are to be distinguished from socialized medicine and government medical-care programs, in which doctors are employed directly or indirectly by the goverment, which also owns the health-care facilities (e.g., Britain's National Health Service). See alsoinsurance.
