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The 2022 Kellogg Biennial Lecture in Jurisprudence: Dr. Jeffrey Stout – The Tree of Democratic Liberty

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Join us for the 2022 Frederic R. and Molly S. Kellogg Biennial Lecture in Jurisprudence!

Dr. Jeffrey Stout will be the featured speaker of the event on October 27th from 3:30 – 5 p.m. EDT. His lecture will be titled, “The Tree of Democratic Liberty.” As Dr. Stout explains:

At a time when the United States electorate is sharply divided, it is an apt moment for a lecture on liberty: what the founders actually understood by liberty, the historical roots of this ideal, the fruit it bore in later democratic struggles, and its vulnerabilities today.

This event will be available in-person and online. The in-person lecture will be held in the Library’s Jefferson building in room LJ119. This event is free, but registration is required. Please register here.

About Dr. Jeffrey Stout

Dr. Jeffrey Stout wearing a black polo shirt.
Dr. Jeffrey Stout. Photo by Noah Stout.

Jeffrey Stout grew up in Trenton, New Jersey, and was involved in the civil rights and anti-war movements in his teens and twenties. While attending college at Brown University, he chaired a student strike, ran the Rhode Island Draft Information Center, and founded Issues, a journal of opinion. Upon graduating from Brown in 1972, he began his doctoral work at Princeton University, where he taught in the department of religion from 1975 until his retirement in 2018. At Princeton, he chaired his department and received awards for teaching and mentoring. He has served as a trustee of Princeton University Press, the Journal of Religious Ethics, and Anthology Film Archives.

Stout is a theorist and historian of democratic culture. His work is concerned with ethics, religious thought, political theory, law, and film. He is the author of The Flight from Authority, Ethics after Babel, Democracy and Tradition, and Blessed Are the Organized: Grassroots Democracy in America. Two of his books have received awards for excellence from the American Academy of Religion. He co-edited the Cambridge University Press Series on Religion and Critical Thought.

Stout served as president of the American Academy of Religion in 2007, and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2008. His 2017 Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh discussed the political implications of ancient, medieval, and modern conceptions of religion.

About the Kellogg Lecture Series

The Kellogg Biennial Lecture in Jurisprudence presents the most distinguished contributors to international jurisprudence, judged through writings, reputation, and broad and continuing influence on contemporary legal scholarship. Previous Kellogg lecturers have been Ronald DworkinJoseph RazAmartya SenMichael Sandel, Jeremy Waldron, and Martha Nussbaum.

The series is endowed through the generosity of Frederic R. and Molly S. Kellogg.

Frederic Rogers Kellogg was born in Boston and attended Harvard College and Harvard Law School. He served as an assistant U.S. attorney and later as an adviser to Attorney General Elliot L. Richardson during the Watergate crisis. He later earned a doctorate in jurisprudence at George Washington University and published two books on Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. A former Fulbright senior scholar in Poland and Brazil, and Sir Neil MacCormick fellow at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, he is currently a visiting professor at the Federal University of Pernambuco, Brazil.

Molly Shulman Kellogg was born in Dallas, Texas and grew up in Kilgore, Texas. She graduated from the University of Texas at Austin in 1963 and moved to Washington, D.C., where she served for 30 years as executive assistant to Congressman J.J. “Jake” Pickle of Austin. She serves on the General Henry Knox Museum board in Thomaston, Maine.

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Comments (4)

  1. Can’t wait to hear this

  2. It is 3:15pm on 27 October. The lecture will start in 15 minutes. We’re eager to watch it but the registration is now close. Canyou HELP???

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