Boalt Hall Professor of Law to Deliver Meador Lecture at UA Law School

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. — Jonathan Simon, professor of law at Boalt Hall School of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, will present the Meador Lecture on Risk and the Law on Oct. 17 at 11 a.m. in the Moot Courtroom of The University of Alabama School of Law. The title of his lecture is “Risk and Reflexivity: What Socio-Legal Studies Adds to the Study of Risk and the Law.”

Simon is the author of Poor Discipline: Parole and the Social Control of the Underclass, 1890-1990 (1993) and the co-editor of Embracing Risk: The Changing Culture of Insurance and Responsibility (with Tom Baker, 2002) and Cultural Analysis, Cultural Studies, and the Law: Moving Beyond Legal Realism(with Austin Sarat, 2003). He has also published numerous articles and book chapters covering a variety of legal topics.

Before joining the Boalt Hall faculty in 2003, Simon was a professor at the University of Miami School of Law. He has been a visiting professor of law at Yale Law School and New York University School of Law. Previously, he was an assistant professor at the University of Michigan from 1990-1992. Prior to that, he clerked for Judge William C. Camby Jr. of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Simon received his J.D. in 1987 and his Ph.D. in 1990 from the University of California at Berkeley.

The “Risk and the Law” lecture series brings the nation’s leading experts in the field to the UA School of Law to discuss various aspects of risk assessment and management. Two previous lectures have been delivered: Lisa Heinzerling of the Georgetown Law Center in October 2004 and Cass Sunstein of the University of Chicago Law School in March 2005. Simon is the last speaker in the series.

The “Risk and the Law” series is part of the Daniel J. Meador Lecture Series, which was established in 1994 to honor the UA law school’s former professor and dean. Meador, a member of the UA law school class of 1951 and professor emeritus at the University of Virginia School of Law, delivered the inaugural lecture.