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"Should the Constitution Bend in an Emergency?" with Kathleen Sullivan
November 11 th, 2004

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Should we expect the government to be confined within the same constitutional boundaries during periods of crisis as periods of calm?  Do we have a continuous constitution or one that must bend to emergency? Which branch of government should define the trigger and scope of that emergency?  How is our constitution like and unlike those of other nations on these questions?

Sullivan's lecture addresses these questions with special attention to our constitutional traditions of freedom of movement, equal protection of the law for all groups regardless of ethnicity, and privacy from government surveillance in the absence of individualized suspicion.

Kathleen Sullivan was named the Dean and Richard E. Lang Professor of Law at Stanford Law School in 1999. A celebrated constitutional law scholar, Prof. Sullivan has recently stepped down as Dean to head the new Stanford Constitutional Law Center. In addition to publishing articles on constitutional law and theory in a wide range of law reviews, she has contributed to The New York Times, The Washington Post, The American Prospect and The New York Review of Books. She has also commented on legal issues on the Lehrer NewsHour and litigated various constitutional cases before the U.S. Supreme Court and the lower federal courts.