Stanford Law School 559 Nathan Abbott Way Stanford, CA 94305
Speaker Information
Philip C. Bobbitt
Herbert Wechsler Professor of Federal Jurisprudence, Columbia Law School
Biography
Philip C. Bobbitt is the Herbert Wechsler Professor of Federal Jurisprudence and director for the Center for National Security at Columbia Law School. He is one of the nation’s leading constitutional theorists. Bobbitt’s interests include not only constitutional law but also international security and the history of strategy.
The author of eight books, Bobbitt is a former trustee of Princeton University and a former member of the Oxford University Modern History Faculty and the War Studies Department of Kings College, London.
Bobbitt is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. He is a life member of the American Law Institute; a member of the Council on Foreign Relations; the Pacific Council on International Policy; and the International Institute for Strategic Studies (London). He is also a member of the Commission on the Continuity of Government.
He has served as law clerk to the Honorable Henry J. Friendly; associate counsel to the president; the counselor on international law at the State Department; legal counsel to the Senate Iran-Contra Committee; and senior director for Critical Infrastructure and senior director for strategic planning at the National Security Council.
Before joining the Law School’s faculty, Bobbitt was A.W. Walker Centennial Chair in Law at the University of Texas Law School.
He serves on the editorial board of Biosecurity and Bioterrorism. He was the Florence Rogatz Visiting Professor of Law at Yale Law School in 2014; the Samuel Rubin Visiting Professor of Law at Columbia Law School in 2007; and the James Barr Ames Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School in 2005.
He serves as a distinguished senior lecturer at the University of Texas.
Charles Kesler is a Senior Fellow of the Claremont Institute, Editor of the Claremont Review of Books, host of Claremont’s The American Mind video series, and the Dengler-Dykema Distinguished Professor of Government at Claremont McKenna College.
Dr. Kesler also teaches in the Claremont Institute’s Publius Fellows Program and Lincoln Fellows Program. He received his B.A. in Social Studies and his M.A. and Ph.D. in Government from Harvard University. From 1989 to 2008, Dr. Kesler was director of CMC’s Henry Salvatori Center for the Study of Individual Freedom in the Modern World.
He is the recipient of the prestigious 2018 Bradley Prize, a high honor bestowed upon distinguished individuals who have influenced American scholarship and debate.
From September 2000 to March 2001, he served as vice chairman of the Advisory Committee to the U.S. Congress's James Madison Commemoration Commission.
He was selected in June 2000 as a member of the Scholars Commission on the Jefferson-Hemings Issue sponsored by the Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society.
Dr. Kesler is the author of I Am the Change: Barack Obama and the Crisis of Liberalism (Broadside Books); the editor of Saving the Revolution: The Federalist Papers and the American Founding (Free Press); co-editor, with John B. Kienker, of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness: Ten Years of the Claremont Review of Books (Rowman & Littlefield); and co-editor, with William F. Buckley, Jr., of Keeping the Tablets: Modern American Conservative Thought (HarperCollins). He has written extensively on American constitutionalism and political thought, and his edition of The Federalist Papers (Signet Classics) is the best-selling edition in the country.
