Supreme Court's problems and how to fix them is topic of McGlinchey Lecture

The U.S. Supreme Court’s institutional challenges and its shadow docket will be the subject of this year’s McGlinchey Lecture on Federal Litigation to be held March 18.

The Lecture features Professor Stephen Vladeck, the Charles Alan Wright Chair in Federal Courts at the University of Texas at Austin School of Law and author of The New York Times best-seller “The Shadow Docket: How the Supreme Court uses stealth rulings to amass power and undermine The Republic.” He will speak on the topic, “The Most Unaccountable Branch: What’s Really Wrong with the Supreme Court—and How to Fix It.”

The event will be held at 5 p.m. in the Wendell H. Gauthier Moot Court Room 110, in the John Giffen Weinmann Hall, 6329 Freret St. A reception will follow.

Vladeck is an expert on the federal courts (including the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals which encompasses Louisiana), constitutional law, national security law, and military justice. He has argued more than a dozen cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, the Texas Supreme Court, and various lower federal civilian and military courts; has testified before numerous congressional committees, Executive Branch agencies, and the Texas legislature; has served as an expert witness both in U.S. state and federal courts and in foreign tribunals; and has received numerous awards for his influential and widely cited legal scholarship, his prolific popular writing, his teaching, and his service to the legal profession.

Vladeck is the co-host, together with Professor Bobby Chesney, of the popular and award-winning “National Security Law Podcast.” He is CNN’s Supreme Court analyst and a co-author of Aspen Publishers’ leading national security law and counterterrorism law casebooks. He also is editor and author of "One First," a popular weekly newsletter about the Supreme Court.

Vladeck joined the Texas faculty in 2016 after 11 years teaching at the University of Miami School of Law and American University Washington College of Law. He is a twice-elected member of the University of Texas Faculty Council (and of the Faculty Council's Executive Committee); an elected member of the American Law Institute; a Distinguished Scholar at the Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law; and a senior editor of the peer-reviewed Journal of National Security Law and Policy. He is the Supreme Court Fellow at the Project on Government Oversight's Constitution Project; a Distinguished Fellow of the National Institute of Military Justice; and a member of the Advisory Committee to the ABA Standing Committee on Law and National Security, the American Constitution Society's Board of Academic Advisors, and the advisory boards of the Electronic Privacy Information Center and the RAND History of U.S. Military Policy.

A 2004 graduate of Yale Law School, Vladeck clerked for the Honorable Marsha S. Berzon on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and the Honorable Rosemary Barkett on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit.

The McGlinchey Lecture was established in 1996 by the law firm of McGlinchey Stafford, to honor its founder, the late Dermot S. McGlinchey, a distinguished Tulane Law School graduate (L'57). McGlinchey was a dedicated supporter of the law school, and his many charitable contributions included service as the chairman of the school's building fund. He devoted much of his life to promoting equal access to the courts, and he revitalized the Louisiana Bar Foundation.