August 10, 2017 (REVISED August 28, 2017) Library of Congress Marks Constitution Day with Award-Winning Professor

In commemoration of Constitution Day, the Law Library of Congress will host constitutional law and history professor Michael J. Klarman of Harvard Law School.

The discussion will take place at 1 p.m. on Tuesday, Sept. 12, in room LJ-119 of the Library’s Thomas Jefferson Building, 10 First Street S.E., Washington, D.C. The program is free and open to the public. Tickets are not required.

Klarman will discuss and sign his book “The Framers’ Coup: The Making of the United States Constitution” (Oxford University Press, 2016), which is a comprehensive history of how the framers drafted and ratified the United States Constitution despite their clashing interests. The book was a finalist for the George Washington Book Prize and the American Bar Association’s Silver Gavel Award.

The event will also be livestreamed on the Library’s Facebook page at facebook.com/libraryofcongress and its YouTube site (with captions) at youtube.com/LibraryOfCongress.  

Professor Michael J. Klarman is the Kirkland and Ellis Professor at Harvard Law School, where he joined the faculty in 2008. Klarman has won numerous awards for his teaching and scholarship, which are primarily in the areas of constitutional law and constitutional history. In 2009, he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Klarman received his Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts in political theory from the University of Pennsylvania, Juris Doctor from Stanford Law School and Doctor of Philosophy in legal history from the University of Oxford, where he was a Marshall scholar. After law school, Professor Klarman clerked for the Honorable Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit (1983-84). He joined the faculty at the University of Virginia School of Law in 1987 and served there until 2008 as the James Monroe Distinguished Professor of Law and Professor of History.

Klarman has also served as the Ralph S. Tyler Jr., visiting professor at Harvard Law School, distinguished visiting Lee professor of law at the Marshall Wythe School of Law at the College of William and Mary, visiting professor at Stanford Law School and visiting professor at Yale Law School.

Klarman’s first book, “From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court and the Struggle for Racial Equality” (Oxford University Press, 2004), received the 2005 Bancroft Prize in history. He is also the author of “Brown v. Board of Education and the Civil Rights Movement” (Oxford University Press, 2007) and “Unfinished Business: Racial Equality in American History” (Oxford University Press, 2002), which is part of Oxford’s Inalienable Rights series. In 2012, he published “From the Closet to the Altar: Courts, Backlash, and the Struggle for Same-Sex Marriage” (Oxford University Press, 2012).

Constitution Day was established by Congress in 2004 to recognize the ratification of the U.S. Constitution on Sept. 17, 1787.

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