Douglas Laycock, one of the nation’s leading authorities on religious liberty, will give the 24th Annual University of Michigan Senate’s Davis, Markert, Nickerson Lecture on Academic and Intellectual Freedom on Nov. 6.
The lecture is at 4 p.m. in the Honigman Auditorium at the Law School. It is free and open to the public.
Laycock, Robert E. Scott Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Virginia School of Law and professor of religious studies, will discuss “Religious Liberty and the Culture Wars.”
The lecture is named for three U-M faculty members — Chandler Davis, Clement Markert and Mark Nickerson — who in 1954 were called to testify before a House Un-American Activities Committee. All invoked their constitutional rights and refused to answer questions about their political associations.
All three were suspended from the university. Markert subsequently was reinstated, and Davis and Nickerson were dismissed.
Before joining the Virginia faculty in 2010, Laycock was the Yale Kamisar Collegiate Professor of Law at U-M. He taught for 25 years at the University of Texas and for five years at the University of Chicago.
Laycock has testified frequently before Congress and has argued many cases in the courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court, most recently in the latter, Holt v. Hobbs. He is the author of the leading casebook “Modern American Remedies”; the award-winning monograph “The Death of the Irreparable Injury Rule”; and many articles in leading law reviews.
He has co-edited a collection of essays, “Same-Sex Marriage and Religious Liberty,” and he recently published “Religious Liberty, Volume I: Overviews and History,” and “Volume II: The Free Exercise Clause.” These two volumes are the first half of a four-volume collection of his many writings on religious liberty.
Laycock is vice president of the American Law Institute, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the 2009 winner of the National First Freedom Award from the Council on America’s First Freedom.
He earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Michigan State University and his juris doctorate from the University of Chicago Law School.
The 2014 Davis, Markert, Nickerson Lecture on Academic and Intellectual Freedom is sponsored by the Academic Freedom Lecture Fund, and the American Association of University Professors University of Michigan-Ann Arbor Chapter and Michigan Conference.
It also is sponsored by the Office of the President, Office of the Provost, Office of the Vice President for Global Communications, Law School, the Federalist Society at the Law School, the Senate Advisory Committee on University Affairs and an anonymous donor.
