Peter S. Canellos will be joined by Pitt Law Professor Stephanie Dangel to discuss his biography of Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan, THE GREAT DISSENTER
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**UPDATE: Professor Stephanie Dangel will be joining the conversation in Amy Wildermuth's stead**
The “superb” (The Guardian) biography of an American who stood against all the forces of Gilded Age America to fight for civil rights and economic freedom: Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan.
They say that history is written by the victors. But not in the case of the most famous dissenter on the Supreme Court. Almost a century after his death, John Marshall Harlan’s words helped end segregation and gave us our civil rights and our modern economic freedom.
Harlan’s dissents, particularly in Plessy v. Ferguson, were widely read and a source of hope for decades. Thurgood Marshall called Harlan’s Plessy dissent his “Bible”—and his legal roadmap to overturning segregation. In the end, Harlan’s words built the foundations for the legal revolutions of the New Deal and Civil Rights eras.
Spanning from the Civil War to the Civil Rights movement and beyond, The Great Dissenter is a “magnificent” (Douglas Brinkley) and “thoroughly researched” (The New York Times) rendering of the American legal system’s most significant failures and most inspiring successes.
Peter. S. Canellos is an award-winning writer and editor of Last Lion: The Fall and Rise of Ted Kennedy, which was a top-10 New York Times bestseller. He is also a longtime senior editor for Politico and formerly The Boston Globe, where he served as Washington Bureau Chief and Editorial Page Editor and oversaw two Pulitzer Prize-winning projects and seven finalists. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia Law School, he has spent much of his career furthering the development of young writers. He is a lead organizer of a global fellowship program at the International Women’s Media Foundation.
Professor Stephanie Dangel serves as Faculty Director of the Pitt Law School externship program and teaches courses in entertainment law, transactional drafting, social innovation and commercializing new technologies. While at Pitt Law School, she has delivered speeches and published articles on using law and social innovation training to prepare law students for 21st Century careers. Prior to joining Pitt Law School, Prof. Dangel enjoyed successful careers as a non-profit executive, documentary filmmaker, Kirkpatrick & Lockhart associate, and a law clerk for Justice Harry Blackmun of the United States Supreme Court.