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Speaker List

Professor Cathy Caruth
Cornell University

Professor Cathy Caruth is the Frank H.T. Rhodes Professor of Humane Letters in the Department of English at Cornell University. She was formerly the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Comparative Literature and English at Emory University. Her Publications include, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History (1996); Editor, with introductions Trauma: Explorations in Memory (1995) (1996); Co-editor, Critical Encounters: Reference and Responsibility in Deconstructive Writing (1995); Special Editor, Psychoanalysis, Culture and Trauma (Two Issues of American Imago: A Journal for Psychoanalysis, Culture and the Arts (1991); Empirical Truths and Critical Fictions: Locke, Wordsworth, Kant, Freud (1990)

Professor Gregory C. Keating
University of Southern California

Professor Gregory Keating is the William T. Dalessi Professor of Law and Philosophy, joined the USC Law faculty in 1991 and was promoted to full professor in 1996; he also holds a joint appointment with the USC Department of Philosophy. He teaches torts, legal ethics, and seminars in legal and political philosophy.

Professor Keating graduated summa cum laude, and Phi Beta Kappa from Amherst College, earned an M.A. and Ph.D. in political philosophy from Princeton University, and graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School. After graduating from Harvard, he practiced law in Massachusetts for five years before joining USC Law Faculty. He has been a visiting professor at Harvard Law School and at the Buchmann Faculty of Law, Tel Aviv, Israel.

Professor Keating is an editor of a leading torts casebook and writes on torts, professional responsibility and legal theory. He has published articles on the morality of reasonable risk imposition and the law of negligence more generally; on the history of and moral justification for strict liability in tort; on why justice requires that we take inefficiently great precaution against significant risks of death and devastating injury; and on issues of professional responsibility, with particular attention to the problems that confront practicing lawyers. Some of his recent titles include “Putting Duty in its Place, with Dilan A. Esper, (Loyola Law Review, 2008) (Symposium: Frontiers of Tort Liability), “Pricelessness and Life: An Essay for Guido Calabresi” (Maryland Law Review, 2005) (Symposium: Calabresi’s Costs of Accidents), and “Rawlsian Fairness and Regime Choice in the Law of Accidents” (Symposium: “Rawls and the Law,” Fordham Law Review, 2004).

A former teaching fellow at Harvard and Princeton universities, Professor Keating served as an officer of the Section on Jurisprudence of the American Association of Law Schools. He also has consulted with the County of Los Angeles on issues of professional responsibility and conflicts of interest.

Professor Linda Ross Meyer
Quinnipiac School of Law

Professor Linda Ross Meyer, Professor at Quinnipiac School of Law, joined the faculty in 1994 from Vanderbilt Law School, where she taught for two years after clerking for Justice Sandra Day O’Connor at the United States Supreme Court. Her publications are primarily in criminal law and legal theory. Her book, “The Justice of Mercy,” was published in October 2010 by Michigan University Press. She regularly teaches torts, criminal law, jurisprudence, theories of punishment, a Supreme Court seminar, and animal law.

Professor John Fabian Witt
Yale Law School

Professor John Fabian Witt is Allen H. Duffy Class of 1960 Professor of Law at Yale Law School. He is the author of widely acclaimed work in the history of American law and in torts, including Patriots and Cosmopolitans: Hidden Histories of American Law (Harvard University Press, 2007), which explores law and nationhood at key moments in American history from the Founding to the Cold War, and the prize-winning book, The Accidental Republic: Crippled Workingmen, Destitute Widows, and the Remaking of American Law (Harvard University Press, 2004), as well as articles in the Columbia Law ReviewThe Harvard Law ReviewThe Yale Law Journal, and other scholarly journals. His writing has appeared in The New York TimesSlate, and The Washington Post. He is currently writing a book on the laws of war in American history from the Revolution to the turn of the twentieth century. He was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in 2010 for his project on the laws of war in American history. Professor Witt is a graduate of Yale Law School and Yale College and he holds a Ph.D. in history from Yale. Before returning to Yale, he was the George Welwood Murray Professor of Legal History at Columbia University. He served as law clerk to Judge Pierre N. Leval on the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.