The Woodrow Wilson School will co-host the Brennan Center Thomas M. Jorde Symposium featuring Richard Pildes, the Sudler Family Professor of Constitutional Law at New York University School of Law, at 4:30 p.m. on Wednesday, April 14, in Dodds Auditorium, Robertson Hall. Pildes will present a talk titled, "Ungovernable America? The Causes and Consequences of Polarized Politics." He will be joined by commentators, Paul Frymer, Acting Director of the Program in Law and Public Affairs; Nolan McCarty, Associate Dean of the Woodrow Wilson School and the Susan Dod Brown Professor of Politics and Public Affairs; and Sean Wilentz, the Sidney and Ruth Lapidus Professor in the American Revolutionary Era and Professor of History at Princeton. A public reception will immediately follow the talk.

The Brennan Center Jorde Symposium, an annual event, is in honor of its major benefactor Thomas M. Jorde, former Brennan clerk and Professor of Law at the University of California at Berkeley. Each year, a lecturer presents the same lecture at two different sites, one in the fall, and another in the spring, with a different pair of prominent commentators at each site. 

Richard Pildes is the Co-Director of NYU’s Center on Law and Security. He is a leading scholar on voting rights and legal issues concerning the design of democratic processes and institutions. He is a co-author of the casebook “The Law of Democracy,” which created this field of study in the law schools. He is a co-editor of “The Future of the Voting Rights Act,” the definitive academic study of how the Voting Rights Act (VRA) should be designed to respond to the issues of today. His academic scholarship is regularly cited in Supreme Court decisions. That scholarship includes studies of the role of political parties in the functioning of America’s separated-powers system of government; the experience with alternative voting systems (such as cumulative voting); the history of disfranchisement in the United States; the adaptation of the VRA to modern demographic contexts; the role of Congress and the President under the Constitution in areas of national security, war, and foreign affairs; and the role of political competition in the legal regulation of democracy.

Paul Frymer teaches and writes on topics in American law and politics, particularly as they intersect with issues of democratic representation, race and civil rights, and labor and employment. He is a former LAPA fellow (2004-2005), and taught at both UC Santa Cruz and UC San Diego. He is the author of two books: “Uneasy Alliances: Race and Party Competition in America” and “Black and Blue: African American, the Labor Movement, and the decline of the Democratic Party.”

Nolan McCarty’s research interests include U.S. politics, democratic political institutions, and political game theory. He is the co-author of two books: “Political Game Theory” (2006, Cambridge University Press with Adam Meirowitz) and “Polarized America: The Dance of Ideology and Unequal Riches” (2006, MIT Press with Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal). McCarty was the program co-chair of the 2005 Midwest Political Association Meetings and was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences during academic 2004-05 year. During academic year 2007-2008, he was the acting dean of the Woodrow Wilson School.

Sean Wilentz studies U.S. social and political history and teaches both undergraduate and graduate courses on U.S. history, focusing on the 19th century. He has also taught courses on American literature
and 20th-century American culture and politics.  His most recent book is "The Age of Reagan: A History, 1974-2008," a reconsideration of U.S. politics since the Watergate affair. A contributing editor to The New Republic and Newsweek, Professor Wilentz lectures frequently and has written some three hundred articles, reviews, and op-ed pieces for publications such as the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books, the American Scholar, The Nation, Le Monde, and Salon.
 
This event is co-sponsored by the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, the Program in Law and Public Affairs and the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law.  It is free and open to the public.