Sandel to deliver Kellogg Lecture on Jurisprudence

Political philosopher and Harvard professor Michael J. Sandel will deliver the 2015 Frederic R. and Molly S. Kellogg Biennial Lecture on Jurisprudence at 3 p.m. on Thursday, Oct. 29 in Room 119 of the Library’s Thomas Jefferson Building at 10 First Street S.E., Washington, D.C. The lecture, titled “Justice, Neutrality and Law,” will focus on such questions as whether the law should affirm certain moral judgments, or be neutral on moral and spiritual questions.

The event, which will be hosted at the Library of Congress and presented jointly by the Law Library of Congress and the Library’s John W. Kluge Center, is free and open to the public, but seating is limited. Tickets are not required.

Sandel is the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Government at Harvard University, where he has taught political philosophy since 1980. Sandel’s writings—on justice, ethics, democracy, and markets—have been translated into 27 languages. His legendary course “Justice” is the first Harvard course to be made freely available online and on television (www.justiceharvard.org/). It has been viewed by tens of millions of people around the world, including in China, where Sandel was recently named the “most influential foreign figure of the year.” (China Newsweek)

Sandel’s books include “What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets”; “Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do?”; “The Case against Perfection: Ethics in the Age of Genetic Engineering”; and “Democracy’s Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy.” They relate the enduring questions of political philosophy to the most vexing moral and civic questions of our time.

Sandel, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, has been a visiting professor at the Sorbonne (Paris), delivered the Tanner Lectures on Human Values at Oxford University and served on the President’s Council on Bioethics (2002-2005). A graduate of Brandeis University (1975), he received his doctorate from Oxford University (D.Phil.,1981), where he was a Rhodes Scholar.

The Kellogg Biennial Lecture on Jurisprudence presents the most distinguished contributors to international jurisprudence, judged through writings, reputation, and broad and continuing influence on contemporary legal scholarship. Previous Kellogg Lecturers have been Ronald Dworkin, Joseph Raz, and Amartya Sen. The series is endowed by Frederic R. and Molly S. Kellogg.

Frederic Rogers Kellogg was born in Boston and attended Harvard College and Harvard Law School. He served as an assistant U.S. attorney and later as an adviser to Attorney General Elliot L. Richardson during the Watergate crisis. He later earned a doctorate in jurisprudence at the George Washington University and published two books on Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. A former Fulbright Visiting Professor at the Federal University of Pernambuco, Brazil, he is currently a Sir Neil MacCormick Fellow at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland.

Molly Shulman Kellogg was born in Dallas and grew up in Kilgore. She graduated from the University of Texas at Austin in 1963 and moved to Washington, D.C., where she served for 30 years as executive assistant to Congressman J.J. “Jake” Pickle of Austin. She co-chairs the board of the General Henry Knox Museum in Thomaston, Maine.

Founded in 1800, the Library of Congress is the nation’s first-established federal cultural institution. The Library seeks to spark imagination and creativity and to further human understanding and wisdom by providing access to knowledge through its magnificent collections, programs, publications and exhibitions. Many of the Library’s rich resources can be accessed through its website at www.loc.gov.

Established by an act of Congress in 1832, the Law Library makes its resources available to members of Congress, the Supreme Court, other branches of the U.S. government and the global legal community, and sustains and preserves a universal collection of law for future generations. With more than 2.6 million volumes, the Law Library contains the world’s largest collection of law books and other resources from all countries and provides online databases and guides to legal information worldwide through its website at www.loc.gov/law/.

Through an endowment from John W. Kluge, the Library of Congress established the Kluge Center in 2000 to bring together top scholars to stimulate and energize one another, to distill wisdom from the Library's rich resources, and to interact with policymakers in Washington. For more information about the Kluge Center visit loc.gov/kluge/.