Schmidt Named Director of ISCOTUS

[Via IIT Chicago-Kent News]

IIT Chicago-Kent Professor Christopher W. Schmidt has been named director of the law school’s Institute on the Supreme Court of the United States (ISCOTUS). Professor Schmidt succeeds ISCOTUS founding director Carolyn E. Shapiro, who was recently appointed Illinois Solicitor General.

Established in 2011, ISCOTUS provides information, educational resources, and scholarship on the nation’s highest court. The Institute on the Supreme Court of the United States combines the law school’s core strengths: cutting-edge legal scholarship and technological innovation. The institute comprises three major components: the ISCOTUS Academic Center; the Oyez Project and ISCOTUSnow; and the Civic Education Project.

A member of the IIT Chicago-Kent faculty since 2008, Professor Schmidt teaches in the areas of constitutional law, legal history, comparative constitutional law, and sports law. He has written about the political and intellectual context surrounding the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education, the Tea Party as a constitutional movement, the Supreme Court’s recent decision in the health care case, and the rise of free agency in Major League Baseball. He is currently writing a book on the legal history of the student lunch counter sit-in movement of 1960.

Professor Schmidt is also a faculty fellow at the American Bar Foundation where he serves as the editor of Law & Social Inquiry. Professor Schmidt has received fellowships from the American Society for Legal History, the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia, and the Center for American Political Studies at Harvard. He is the recipient of the 2014 Association of American Law Schools’ Scholarly Papers Competition for his paper “Divided by Law: The Sit-Ins and the Role of the Courts in the Civil Rights Movement.”

Professor Schmidt earned a J.D. from Harvard Law School, a Ph.D. in the history of American civilization and an M.A. in history from Harvard University, and a B.A. from Dartmouth College. While in law school, he served as executive articles editor for the Harvard Civil Rights–Civil Liberties Law Review.

For more information, contact Gwendolyn Osborne, Director of Public Affairs, (312) 906-5251.