PSW Week 10 (!) Reading

[Anjali Motgi]

Y'all,

This semester is really truckin' along--we're in the double-digits! Can you believe it?

Next week, we will be joined by Professor Amalia Kessler, a graduate of this law school and a visiting professor from Stanford. PSW is one of her only open lectures this semester (non-1Ls, this means next Tuesday is a rare opportunity to see Kessler in action while she's here!). She'll be presenting a chapter from her new book, Inventing American Exceptionalism: The Origins of American Adversarial Legal Culture, 1800-1877. This chapter (titled "Market Freedom and Adversarial Adjudication: The Nineteenth-Century American Debates Over (European) Conciliation Courts and the Problem of Procedural Ordering") traces the emergence of the notion that there is value to the competitive assertion of conflicting interests in the courtroom. As you'll note in her introductory letter to PSW (the first page of the attached PDF), Professor Kessler suggests that you focus on Sections I, II and IV of the chapter if you're pressed for time.

For those of you who may not be familiar with Professor Kessler or her work, a brief bio:

Amalia D. Kessler is the Sidley Austin-Robert D. McLean ’70 Visiting Professor of Law at Yale Law School and the Lewis Talbot and Nadine Hearn Shelton Professor of International Legal Studies at Stanford Law School. An expert in the areas of civil procedure and litigation, comparative law, and legal history, she also has an appointment (by courtesy) with the Stanford University department of history. Before joining the Stanford Law faculty in 2003, Professor Kessler was a trial attorney in the Civil Division of the U.S. Department of Justice and clerked for Judge Pierre N. Leval of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. She holds an A.B. from Harvard, an M.A. and Ph.D. from Stanford, and a J.D. from Yale Law School (1999), where she was senior editor of The Yale Law Journal and articles editor of the Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities.

Two other quick announcements:

• Next week at 6:00 pm in Room 121, before the start of PSW, Bridget Fahey and Professor Ian Ayres will be discussing ACS's involvement in the ALICE project, an effort to catalog state legislation on a variety of issues, and will be explaining how interested students (1Ls, I'm lookin at you!) can get involved. I encourage you to head over to the Workshop early if you think you may want to participate in this supercool project! And look out for more notices about the project and meeting over the Wall and the ACS list.
• We RETURN next week to our regular room and meeting time, 6:30 pm on Tuesday in SLB 121. See ya there!

Toodle-oo,

Anjali

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Anjali Motgi

Yale Law School, J.D. expected 2014

214.924.4731 | anjali...@gmail.com