April 8, 2004 "The Lawyer as Citizen" To Be Subject of Law Day Program

The Law Library of Congress and the American Bar Association (ABA) Division for Public Education will commemorate Law Day with a panel discussion on "Representing the American Lawyer as Citizen." The event will be held at the Library from 4:45 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. on Tuesday, April 27, in the Montpelier Room, sixth floor, Madison Building, 101 Independence Ave. S.E. The event is free and open to the public. No tickets are required.

"The Lawyer as Citizen" is the fifth and final program in the Leon Jaworski Public Program Series on "Representing the Lawyer in American Culture." This year's event is being held in cooperation with the ABA Standing Committee on the Law Library of Congress, the Federation of State Humanities Councils and the Friends of the Law Library of Congress.

This program is part of the Library's annual celebration of Law Day and one of the ABA's principal national events for the commemoration of Law Day 2004. The ABA instituted Law Day on May 1 in the late 1950s to draw attention to both the principles and practices of law and justice. President Dwight D. Eisenhower established Law Day in 1958.

Lincoln Caplan, Knight Senior Journalist at Yale Law School and editor of Legal Affairs magazine, will moderate the panel. He will be joined by panelists Philip Howard, an attorney at Covington & Burling, and founder and chairman of Common Good; Wendy Kaminer, lawyer, social critic and contributing editor of The Atlantic; Austin Sarat, William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College; and L. Douglas Wilder, Distinguished Professor, Center for Public Policy, and Department of Political Science, Virginia Commonwealth University. ABA president-elect Robert Grey will preside. ABA National Law Day Chair David Collins and Law Librarian of Congress Rubens Medina are also scheduled to participate in the event.

The mission of the Law Library is to provide research and legal information to Congress, the federal courts and executive branch agencies, and to offer reference services to the public. It contains the world's largest collection of law books and other resources from all countries and provides digitized information with online databases and guides to legal information worldwide.