Marshall University’s Amicus Curiae Lecture Series on Constitutional Democracy will end the 2023-2024 academic year with a lecture by POLITICO editor, author and lawyer Peter Canellos titled “John Marshall Harlan and the Power of Dissent.”
The event, which is free and open to the public, is set for 7 p.m. Thursday, April 11, at the Brad D. Smith Foundation Hall.
Canellos’s lecture will focus on the meaningful judicial career of U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan, a Kentuckian who served on the court during a time of deep division in the United States, 1877-1911. Harlan made his mark by dissenting from U.S. Supreme Court rulings that denied African Americans the rights they had won in the Civil War, including its famous “separate but equal” ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson that effectively created two separate societies for Black and white Americans. The majority also made rulings depriving Congress of the tools it needed to fight monopolies and rejected state efforts to protect workers’ rights. Justice Harlan dissented in these cases, articulating powerful reasoning and views that eventually became the law of the land.
Canellos explores those cases and the man himself, a Civil War veteran from a slave-owning family, who fought for the Union. Canellos is author of the “The Great Dissenter: The Story of John Marshall Harlan, America’s Judicial Hero,” which Publisher’s Weekly named one of the top 20 nonfiction books of 2021.
“Peter Canellos’s book about Justice Harlan illuminates an era that is relevant to our own, with the United States Supreme Court at the center of many contested issues,” said Patricia Proctor, director of the Simon Perry Center for Constitutional Democracy, which sponsors the lecture series. “It shows the value and power of people who stand for what is right, in the hope that others will recognize it and it will become the reality in the future.”
In addition to his work as an author, Canellos is managing editor for enterprise at POLITICO, overseeing the site’s magazine, investigative journalism and major projects. He has also been POLITICO’s executive editor, managing the newsroom during the 2016 presidential coverage. For many years, he was editorial page editor of The Boston Globe, where he oversaw two series that won Pulitzer Prizes and five other finalists. As a writer, he has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and won the George Polk Award, among many other honors. He is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia Law School.
The lecture series is sponsored by Marshall’s Simon Perry Center for Constitutional Democracy with support from the West Virginia Humanities Council. For more information, contact Proctor by e-mail at patricia.proctor@marshall.edu.