Celebrating over 60 years of Mitchell Lecture programs.
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.
2025 - John Fabian Witt, "Antagonists and Enablers: A First Draft History of Biden and the Supremes"
2023 - Devon W. Carbado, "Race, the Supreme Court, and Police Power"
2022 - Duncan Kennedy, "Law Distributes: Housing and Credit in Poor Black Neighborhoods"
2018 (Fall) - John B. Braithwaite, "Tempered Power, Variegated Capitalism, Law and Society"
2018 (Spring) - Jack M. Balkin, "The First Amendment in the Second Gilded Age"
2016 (Spring) - Gillian Hadfield, Bryant Garth, and David Wilkins; Susan Carle, Kevin R. Johnson, and Michael Hunt, "Legal education for a changing legal profession"
2015 - Elizabeth Joh, Frank Pasquale and Virginia Eubanks, "Who Rules Big Data? Law, Knowledge, and Power"
2013 - Madhavi Sunder, "Learning by Doing, looking at fandom, commerce and the freedom to play"
2012 - Peggie R. Smith, Hendrik Hartog, and Jennifer Klein, "When Caring is Work: Home, Health, and the Invisible Workforce"
2011 - John Q. Barrett, Eric L.Muller and Mary Dudziak, "From Nuremberg to Buffalo, October 4, 1946: Justice Robert H. Jackson’s enduring lessons of morality and law in a world at war"
2010 - Henry Richardson, III, "The Origins of African-American Interests in International Law"
2009 - John Payton, "Race, Law and Politics in America: Have we become a post-racial society?"
2007 - Irene Zubaida Khan, "The Rule of Law and the Politics of Fear: Human Rights in the 21st Century"
2007 - Hon. James Robertson, "Quo Vadis Habeas Corpus?"
2005 - Marc Galanter, "Planet of the APs: Are corporations and other artificial persons taking over the legal system?"
2004 - Sheldon Zedeck, Frank H. Wu,Charles E. Daye, Margaret E. Montoya and David L. Chambers
2003 - C. Edwin Baker
2002 - Barry Cushma