Legal philosopher from UCLA to deliver lecture on compelled association
TALLAHASSEE—The second of two 2005 Tobias Simon Distinguished Lectures will be presented at the law school on January 27, at 3:30 p.m. in Room 101 of B.K. Roberts Hall.
Seana Shiffrin, an associate professor of philosophy and law at UCLA, will deliver a lecture titled “What’s Really Wrong With Compelled Association?” Professor Shiffrin will discuss the Boy Scouts v. Dale case—which challenges New Jersey's effort to apply an anti-discrimination statute to compel the Boy Scouts to retain a gay scoutmaster—and argue that the reasoning of the majority and the dissent were insensitive to real First Amendment values and that the case bypassed the most interesting questions about whether children's freedom of association interests differ from those of adults.
“Professor Shiffrin is one of the bright young stars in legal academe. We are excited that she will deliver the Simon Lecture,” says Fernando Tesón, the Tobias Simon Eminent Scholar at the Florida State University College of Law.
The first Distinguished Simon Lecture for 2005 will be delivered on January 25 by Horacio Spector, a Leading Latin American Scholar and dean of the Torcuato Di Tella University in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Professor Shiffrin holds a joint appointment with UCLA’s Department of Philosophy and the School of Law. A member the UCLA law school faculty since 1998, she teaches Contracts, Constitutional Rights and Individual Autonomy, and seminars on the legal theory of contracts, distributive justice, and gender. She has taught in the UCLA Department of Philosophy since 1993. She is an associate editor of Philosophy and Public Affairs and on the advisory board of Legal Theory.
Her research on legal theory addresses issues in contracts, torts, family law, constitutional law, intellectual property and criminal law. It has appeared in Philosophy and Public Affairs and Legal Theory and in assorted edited collections. Her research on the First Amendment has appeared in the NYU Law Review as well as in Constitutional Law Stories. She received her law degree from Harvard University in 1996 and her doctorate degree in philosophy from Oxford University in 1993.