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Yale Law Professor Robert W. Gordon to Lecture at Ethics Institute

Robert W. Gordon, Chancellor Kent Professor of Law and Legal History at Yale Law School, will deliver the keynote speech at Washington and Lee University’s Legal Ethics Institute on Friday, March 27, at 4:30 p.m. in Classroom A at the Washington and Lee University School of Law (Lewis Hall).

The title of Gordon’s talk is “Are Lawyers Guardians or Subverters of the Rule of Law?” It is free and open to the public.

Gordon will discuss why lawyers’ interests and ethical orientations “sometimes reinforce and sometimes subvert the rule of law, and how professional ethics and actions might be brought into closer alignment with public values.”

Gordon is currently visiting professor at Stanford Law School. He has written extensively on contract law, legal thought and on the history and current ethics and practices of the American Bar Association (ABA). He has served on several ABA and Connecticut Bar Task Forces on professional ethics and practice and on the Advisory Board of the Legal Profession Program of the Open Society Institute (Soros Foundation). He also is a past president of the American Society for Legal History.

Gordon’s law teaching career began at SUNY/Buffalo Law School. He later taught at the University of Wisconsin and Stanford Law Schools, and as a visitor at Harvard, Oxford and the University of Toronto, before joining the Yale faculty in 1995.

He received his A.B. from Harvard University and his J.D. from Harvard Law School.