Campus News

CNN's Jeffrey Toobin to Deliver Prichard Lecture at UK

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LEXINGTON, Ky. (March 24, 2015)  Author and journalist Jeffrey Toobin will deliver the 2015 Edward F. Prichard Lecture, sponsored by University of Kentucky Libraries Wendell H. Ford Public Policy Center. He will speak on “The Obama White House and the Supreme Court.”

The Prichard Lecture will take place 3 to 5 p.m. Wednesday, March 25, in the UK Athletics Auditorium of William T. Young Library. The presentation is free and open to the public.

The timely talk will offer the UK community valuable insight on the current climate of the court on major political issues. "With pending cases concerning health care, marriage, campaign finance, privacy and voting rights, the Supreme Court has the power to affect every American in profound ways, and few people are better situated to discuss these dynamics than Jeffrey Toobin," said Tracy Campbell, co-director of the Ford Center.

Toobin is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the senior legal analyst for CNN. Previously he worked for ABC News, where his work received an Emmy. He is the author of profiles of Supreme Court justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Chief Justice John G. Roberts, as well as articles on nearly every major legal controversy and trial of the past two decades.

Before joining The New Yorker, Toobin served as an assistant United States attorney in Brooklyn and an associate counsel in the Office of Independent Counsel Lawrence E. Walsh. His books include "Opening Arguments," "The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court," "Too Close to Call: The Thirty-Six-Day Battle to Decide the 2000 Election" and "A Vast Conspiracy: The Real Story of the Sex Scandal that Nearly Brought Down a President." Toobin's most recent book is "The Oath: The Obama White House and the Supreme Court."

The Prichard Lecture is made possible, in part, by an endowment created by the family of Edward F. Prichard Jr.

The Ford Public Policy Research Center supports research and public and educational programming dealing with issues relating to public policy, politics and Congress. The center provides UK faculty, involved in teaching and research in these areas, the opportunity to work closely with the Ford Center on specific or general topics. Exhibits are made available on the UK campus as well as other institutions and agencies throughout Kentucky. In addition, the Ford Center works closely with the UK Libraries’ Special Collections Research Center to support digitizing primary source materials pertaining to public policy, politics and Congress and placing them on the Web. The center also supports interns in processing related collections.

The Ford Center is a member of the Association of Centers for the Study of Congress. Co-directors of the center are Deirdre Scaggs, UK Libraries associate dean for special collections and Tracy Campbell, professor in the UK Department of History.

MEDIA CONTACT: Whitney Hale, 859-257-8716; whitney.hale@uky.edu