GW Law faculty will provide their expertise on the key cases facing the U.S. Supreme Court in its upcoming October term on Thursday, September 18, at the law school.
Taking advantage of GW Law’s prime location blocks away from the White House, U.S. Capitol Building, and the Supreme Court, the Supreme Court Preview is an annual tradition that provides students, faculty, alumni, and members of the public with the information they need to know about the highest court in the nation.
This year’s preview will be moderated by Chris Geidner, a Supreme Court and law reporter who writes the popular Substack, Law Dork. He will be joined by GW Law faculty Associate Dean Alan Morrison, Professor Spencer Overton, and Professor Naomi Schoenbaum.
Participants
Alan B. Morrison
Associate Dean Morrison is the Lerner Family Associate Dean for Public Interest and Public Service Law and a Professorial Lecturer in Law at GW. For most of his career, Dean Morrison worked for the Public Citizen Litigation Group, which he co-founded with Ralph Nader in 1972 and directed for over 25 years. His work involved law reform litigation in various areas including open government, opening up the legal profession, suing agencies that fail to comply with the law, enforcing principles of separation of powers, protecting the rights of consumers, and protecting unrepresented class members in class action settlements.
He has argued 20 cases in the Supreme Court, including victories in Goldfarb v. Virginia State Bar (holding lawyers subject ot the antitrust laws for using minimum fee schedules); Virginia State Board of Pharmacy v. Virginia Citizens Consumer Council (making commercial speech subject to the First Amendment); and INS v. Chadha (striking down over 200 federal laws containing the legislative veto as a violation of separation of powers).
Spencer Overton
Professor Overton is the Patricia Roberts Harris Research Professor of Law. He is the author of the book Stealing Democracy: The New Politics of Voter Suppression, the law review article Overcoming Racial Harms to Democracy from Artificial Intelligence, and several other publications on democracy and race. He also directs GW Law’s Multiracial Democracy Project, which is currently working on research projects on the implications of artificial intelligence and alternative election systems for truly representative democracy in the United States.
Professor Overton has testified several times before Congress on policies to stop online disinformation and deep fakes, voter suppression, and the Voting Rights Act. He is also a frequent commentator on election law issues on MSNBC, NPR, and other media outlets, and he has held several senior leadership roles during President Barack Obama’s campaign, transition and administration.
Naomi Schoenbaum
Professor Schoenbaum is the William Wallace Kirkpatrick Dean’s Research Professor of Law. Her primary interests are employment law, anti-discrimination law, and gender and the law. Her research contains three main strands. She studies law at the juncture of employment and faculty, looking at the legal regulation of subjects such as geographic mobility, workplace relationships, and the shared economy. Professor Schoenbaum also studies the law of sex equality, including legal implications of new conceptions of sex and the law’s failure to unsex biological phenomena, such as pregnancy and breastfeeding. Finally, Professor Schoenbaum’s work considers the design of employment discrimination law, with current work addressing the problem of hiring discrimination.
Her scholarship has appeared in the Alabama Law Review, Columbia Law Review, Minnesota Law Review, Wisconsin Law Review, and Yale Law Journal Forum, among other journals. She has also written for popular publications such as The New Republic, The Atlantic, and Slate.