Jean Elshtain to deliver Lecture on American Constitutional Law

SAN MARCOS – Jean Bethke Elshtain, Ph.D., holder of the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor of Social and Political Ethics at the University of Chicago, will deliver a free public lecture at Texas State University-San Marcos April 28.

Elshtain will present “The Problems with Legal Moralism” for the 2003-2004 Randall W. Bland Lecture on American Constitutional Law and Theory at 7 p.m. in the LBJ Student Center Ballroom on the Texas State campus. The lecture series is open to the public and is supported by the Department of Political Science, the University Lectures Committee and the Intercollegiate Studies Institute.

Elshtain is a political philosopher whose work shows the connections between our political and our ethical convictions. She taught at the University of Massachusetts and at Vanderbilt University where she was the first woman to hold an endowed professorship in the College of Liberal Arts in the history of that institution. A former Visiting Professor at Harvard and Yale, Elshtain holds nine honorary degrees and in 1996 was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. A contributing editor of The New Republic, Elshtain has authored and/or edited 20 books and is the author of more than 500 essays in journals of scholarship and of civic opinion. In recent months her work has appeared in a variety of publications including Neswday, Dedalus, Book & Culture, Ethics and International Affairs and in Catholic University Law Review. She has delivered several hundred guest lectures in universities in the United States and abroad, of which over three dozen have been endowed lectureships.

Elshtain has been a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton; a Scholar in Residence, Bellagio Conference and Study Center, Como Italy; a Guggenhein Fellow; and a Fellow of the National Humanities Center. In the autumn of 2003, she held the Maguire Chair in Ethics at the Library of Congress. With E. J. Dionne, she is co-chair of the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. Elshtain also serves on the Scholars Council of The Library of Congress; on the Board of Trustees of the James Madison Program in American Constitutional Ideals at Princeton University; The Board of Trustees of the National Humanities Center; and the Board of the National Endowment for Democracy. Elshtain is Chair of the Council on Civil Society and Chair of the Council on Families in America.

For more information, contact the Political Science Department at (512) 245-2143.