DePaul Law Professor Susan Bandes to Lecture on Empathy and the Rule of Law
Next week, Susan Bandes, Centennial Distinguished Professor of Law at DePaul, will deliver a lecture at W&L Law titled “Empathy, Compassion and the Rule of Law.” The talk is a companion lecture to the University’s year-long interdisciplinary seminar series “Questioning Passion.”
The lecture is scheduled for Tuesday, April 5 at 5:00 pm in the Millhiser Moot Court Room, Sydney Lewis Hall on the campus of Washington and Lee University. The event is free and open to the public.
Bandes is widely known as a scholar in the areas of federal jurisdiction, criminal procedure and civil rights, and more recently, as a pioneer in the emerging study of the role of emotion in law. She edited the leading text on the topic, “The Passions of Law.” Her pro bono work has focused on criminal justice reform, with a particular focus on the death penalty.
Her legal career began in 1976 at the Illinois Office of the State Appellate Defender. In 1980, she became staff counsel for the Illinois A.C.L.U., where she litigated a broad spectrum of civil rights cases, and helped draft and secure passage of the Illinois Freedom of Information Act. She joined the DePaul faculty in 1984, and was named a distinguished research professor in 2003. She has received numerous awards from both the law school and the university for her teaching, scholarship and service.
Bandes presents her work frequently at academic symposia and workshops, as well as to non-academic legal groups such as the American Constitution Society. Her recent pro bono activities include acting as co-reporter for the Constitution Projects bipartisan Death Penalty Initiative, which produced the report Mandatory Justice: Eighteen Reforms to the Death Penalty, and serving on the advisory board to the Chicago Appleseed Fund for Justice study of the criminal justice system in Cook County, IL.
