On Monday, August 11, 2025, Princeton University professor Kim Lane Scheppele was Chautauqua Institution’s 21st annual Robert H. Jackson Lecturer on the Supreme Court of the United States.
Professor Scheppele’s lecture focused on Robert H. Jackson and constitutional separation of powers. She discussed Robert Jackson’s experiences with and legal work defending presidential power from 1934-1941 when he was a senior official in President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. She then illuminated how Jackson’s 1945-1946 experience prosecuting Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg following World War II caused him as a Supreme Court justice to reassess those views, how his Nuremberg-informed commitment to limits on executive power is reflected in his landmark 1952 concurring opinion in Youngstown Sheet & Tube Company v. Sawyer, the “Steel Seizure Case,” and how the U.S. Supreme Court today is misrepresenting Jackson and Youngstown and dangerously changing U.S. constitutional law to expand executive power.
Click here to watch Professor Scheppele’s Jackson Lecture:
(I am honored to have introduced Professor Scheppele’s lecture.)
Kim Lane Scheppele is the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Sociology and International Affairs in the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs and the University Center for Human Values. She is also a faculty fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. Her primary field is the sociology of law and she specializes in ethnographic and archival research on courts and public institutions. She is one of the leading U.S. and global experts on authoritarian uses of power, including courts. Click here for her Princeton webpage.
The annual Jackson Lecture at Chautauqua Institution is a leading expert’s consideration of the Supreme Court, its Justices, significant decisions, and related topics in the weeks following the Court’s start of its annual summer recess.
Chautauqua Institution’s twenty-one Jackson Lecturers have been:
- 2005: Geoffrey R. Stone, University of Chicago professor;
- 2006: Linda Greenhouse, New York Times writer and Yale Law School lecturer;
- 2007: Seth P. Waxman, WilmerHale partner and former Solicitor General of the United States;
- 2008: Jeffrey Toobin, legal writer and book author;
- 2009: Paul D. Clement, Clement & Murphy PLLC partner and former Solicitor General of the United States;
- 2010: Jeff Shesol, historian, communications strategist, and former White House speechwriter;
- 2011: Dahlia Lithwick, senior editor at Slate and Amicus podcast host; 2012: Pamela Karlan, Stanford University professor;
- 2013: Charles Fried, Harvard University professor and former Solicitor General of the United States;
- 2014: Akhil Reed Amar, Yale University professor;
- 2015: Laurence H. Tribe, Harvard University professor;
- 2016: Tracey L. Meares, Yale University professor;
- 2017: Judge Jon O. Newman, of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit;
- 2018: Justice Rosalie Silberman Abella, of the Supreme Court of Canada;
- 2019: Donald B. Verrilli, Jr., Munger, Tolles & Olson LLP partner and former Solicitor General of the United States;
- 2020 (online): Ruth Marcus, then a Washington Post associate editor and columnist and now a New Yorker magazine writer;
- 2021 (online): Melissa Murray, New York University professor and Strict Scrutiny podcast co-host;
- 2022: Reva Siegel, Yale University professor;
- 2023: Justin Driver, Yale University professor; 2024: Kate Shaw, University of Pennsylvania professor; and
- 2025; Kim Lane Scheppele, Princeton University professor.
