The Fall 2025 Mitchell Lecture
Reflections on Legal Education and the Post-War Middle Class
Friday, November 14, 2025
Lecture at 2:30 p.m. | Panel Discussion at 3:30 p.m. | Reception at 4:30 p.m.
Charles B. Sears Law Library, John Lord O’Brian Hall, UB (North Campus)
Free and open to the public. Registration required.
Featuring:
John Henry Schlegel
UB Distinguished Professor, Floyd H. & Hilda L. Hurst Faculty Scholar
University at Buffalo School of Law
Prof. John Henry Schlegel is a UB Distinguished Professor and Floyd H. & Hilda L. Hurst Faculty Scholar at the University at Buffalo School of Law. He joined the UB Law faculty in 1973, teaching for more than five decades primarily in the areas of corporate and commercial law and regional economic development.
A legal historian, his scholarship has focused on the history of legal education and the evolution of American Legal Realism in the 1920s and 30s.
He is the author of numerous books and articles, including, most recently, While Waiting for Rain: Community, Economy and Law in a Time of Change (University of Michigan Press, 2022).
Join us as we celebrate Prof. Schlegel on his 50+ years of distinguished teaching and scholarship at a reception to follow the lecture.
The 2025-26 MITCHELL LECTURE COMMITTEE
Prof. Paul Linden-Retek (Chair)
Prof. Michael Boucai
Prof. Alexandra Harrington
Prof. David Westbrook
Lisa Mueller
Daniel Ortega
Brandon Tubinis
About the Lecture
The history of American legal education, the one that “everybody knows,” begins with Christopher Columbus Langdell, the first Dean of the Harvard Law School, who discovered, not a continent, but case law, the large class, and the cold call and used them to wrestle legal education from practicing lawyers who apparently didn’t understand what they did every day. Thereafter, Legal Realism moved the focus of the classroom from what the case law was to what it should be, and their grandchildren attended to matters of ethnicity, race and gender. Matters of social class, while not verboten, are seldom adverted to in this story. Reflections on Legal Education and the Post-War Middle Class attempts to repair this historical absence by inserting aspects of class into the story both generally and more specifically in explaining behavior by contemporary law students that their professors complain about while they teach as if without students.
“Everybody knows” is a reference to the Leonard Cohen song.
Registration
Justice Robert H. Jackson delivering the first Mitchell Lecture in 1951.
The Mitchell Lecture Series was endowed in 1950 by a gift from Lavinia A. Mitchell, in memory of her husband, James McCormick Mitchell. An 1897 graduate of the Buffalo Law School, Mitchell later served as chairman of the Council of the University of Buffalo, which was then a private university.
Justice Robert H. Jackson delivered the first Mitchell Lecture in 1951, titled "Wartime Security and Liberty Under Law." The lecture was published that year in the first issue of the Buffalo Law Review.
Mitchell Lecture programs have brought many distinguished speakers to the University at Buffalo School of Law, including Derrick Bell, Paul Freund, Lawrence Friedman, Carol Gilligan, Sheila Jasanoff, Duncan Kennedy, Karl Llewellyn, Stuart Macaulay, Catharine MacKinnon, and Richard Posner.