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Acclaimed legal scholar and Pulitzer Prize for History finalist to speak at BSC

Acclaimed legal scholar and Pulitzer Prize for History finalist to speak at BSC

For Immediate Release
Oct. 11, 2017

Dr. G. Edward WhiteBIRMINGHAM, Ala.—Dr. G. Edward White, an acclaimed legal historian and professor at the University of Virginia School of Law, will deliver the 2017 William M. Acker Jr. Visiting Lecture at Birmingham-Southern College.

White will speak on Thursday, Nov. 2, at 7 p.m. in the Bruno Great Hall of the Norton Campus Center. The title of his talk is “The Marshall Court as a Premodern Institution.” The hour-long event is free and open to the public.

White joined the law faculty at the University of Virginia in 1972 after a clerkship with U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren and a year as visiting scholar at the American Bar Foundation; he is now University Professor and David and Mary Harrison Distinguished Professor of Law. His 17 published books have won numerous honors, including final listing for the Pulitzer Prize in history. His seminal work, “The Marshall Court and Cultural Change, 1815-35,” provided key insight into the U.S. Supreme Court during a major shift in the court’s philosophical approach that involved more discretion in decision-making. A review in the Washington Post called it “a one-volume education in the formative period of American law.”

White has been a Guggenheim Fellow and a two-time senior fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, a fellow of the Society of American Historians, and a member of the American Law Institute. He earned his bachelor’s degree at Amherst College, his master’s and Ph.D. at Yale University, and his JD at Harvard Law School.

White’s visit is made possible by BSC’s William M. Acker Jr. Visiting Lecture Program. Launched in 2011, the program—created by a generous gift from the Hon. William M. Acker Jr. ’49, a retired U.S. senior district judge for the Northern District of Alabama—brings distinguished speakers to campus with a focus on the history of the American Republic. 

The lecture serves as a prelude to BSC’s new joint accelerated law degree program with Samford University’s Cumberland School of law. The program will allow students to start law school as undergraduates and complete a law degree a year earlier than usual.