Alumni-Faculty Forum: Constitutional Controversies: The Supreme Court’s Impact on American Society

Location:  McCosh Hall, Room 50

Moderator:

Stephen Macedo *87
Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Politics and the University Center for Human Values, Princeton University

Panelists:

Roy Englert ’78
Partner, Kramer Levin Naftalis & Frankel

Paul Schiff Berman ’88
Walter S. Cox Professor of Law, George Washington University Law School

Sarah Miller Harris ’03
Partner, Williams & Connolly LLP

María Perales Sánchez ’18
Immigrants’ Rights Activist; Law Student at Yale Law School

Moderator

Stephen Macedo *87
Stephen Macedo’s research concerns the pressures on social justice exerted by various forms of globalization, especially immigration, as well as the nature and various sources of America’s current democratic dysfunction. He is currently writing a book on COVID-19 policy and discussion around it as a window onto our political dysfunction. Other books include “Just Married: Same-Sex Couples, Monogamy and the Future of Marriage”; “Diversity and Distrust: Civic Education in a Multicultural Democracy”; “Liberal Virtues: Citizenship, Virtue, and Community in Liberal Constitutionalism” and numerous other co-authored, edited or co-edited books. He was the founding director of Princeton’s Program in Law and Public Affairs from 1999 to 2001, and served as director of the University’s Center for Human Values from 2001 to 2009. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he also is immediate past president of the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy. He joined the Princeton faculty in 1999.

Panelists

Roy Englert ’78
After majoring in mathematics at Princeton, Roy Englert attended Harvard Law School. He graduated with honors in 1981 and was executive editor of the Harvard Law Review. He had the good fortune to work with the Honorable Ruth Bader Ginsburg his first year out of law school. He joined the Office of the Solicitor General, U.S. Department of Justice, in 1986 and argued his first case before the Supreme Court in 1987. He has argued 21 cases before that Court. He chairs the Supreme Court and Appellate Practice at Kramer Levin.

Paul Schiff Berman ’88
Paul Schiff Berman is one of the world’s foremost theorists on the interactions among legal systems. He is the author of nearly seventy scholarly works, including Global Legal Pluralism: A Jurisprudence of Law Beyond Borders (Cambridge 2012) and the Oxford Handbook of Global Legal Pluralism (Oxford 2020). Berman also has served as Dean of the law schools at George Washington University and Arizona State University. After graduating summa cum laude from Princeton, majoring in Cultural Anthropology and Theater, Berman earned his JD from New York University, serving as managing editor of the NYU Law Review and receiving the University Graduation Prize for the graduating law student with the highest cumulative grade point average. He later clerked for Chief Judge Harry T. Edwards of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg of the Supreme Court of the United States.

Sarah Miller Harris ’03
Sarah Harris is a partner in Williams & Connolly’s Supreme Court and Appellate practice, and has argued five Supreme Court cases in the last three terms. Her practice ranges from constitutional and administrative-law issues to intellectual property, bankruptcy and civil procedure. She previously served as deputy assistant attorney general in the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel and clerked for Justice Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court. She went to Harvard Law and holds a Ph.D. and M.Phil. from the University of Cambridge. She is also the author of a book on the CIA’s relationship with anti-Communist intellectuals in the early Cold War. Sarah and her husband have three children and live in Alexandria, Virginia.

María Perales Sánchez ’18
Marí Perales Sánchez is a rising 2L at Yale Law School. She previously served as the senior policy manager at Centro de los Derechos del Migrante, where she led gender-focused advocacy and policy efforts and fights to ensure migrant workers’ perspectives are represented in policies that impact them directly. At Yale, she is an executive articles director for the Yale Journal of Law and Liberation, and her research focuses on comparative constitutional mechanisms and social justice. Marí is a Deferred Actions for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipient and a proud first-generation, low-income immigrant student from Mexico. In 2017, she joined her alma mater, Princeton University, in suing the Trump Administration for the rescission of the DACA program. In 2020, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled in favor of the case. Marí was named as one of 25 Women to Watch 2020 by the Baltimore Sun, which nominated for Marylander of the Year in 2019.