US Court of Appeals Judge Jeffrey Sutton will deliver the talk “Fifty-One Imperfect Solutions: States and the Making of American Constitutional Law” on October 15. Sutton is this year’s Lloyd Cutler Distinguished Visitor at the American Academy in Berlin, part of a long-running program endowed by WilmerHale in honor of firm founder Lloyd Cutler.
In conversation with the academy’s president, Ambassador Daniel Benjamin, Sutton will examine how US state constitutional law has affected both state and federal law and how it has undermined the balance between state and federal courts in protecting individual liberties. He will also offer several ideas for reform in four distinct areas—equal protection, criminal procedure, privacy, and free speech and free exercise of religion—by looking at them through the lens of varied state constitutions.
About the Lloyd Cutler Distinguished Visitorship: WilmerHale, along with many partners and friends, endowed the Lloyd Cutler Distinguished Visitorship Program to the American Academy in Berlin as a tribute to founding partner Lloyd Cutler, also a founding trustee of the academy. The program brings a prominent American lawyer, judge or legal scholar to the academy for one week each year to conduct workshops centered on American and international jurisprudence. The visitor also delivers a keynote lecture.
Cutler helped establish the academy in 1994 as a research and cultural institution that would foster greater understanding and dialogue between the United States and Germany. The organization is funded through the support of individuals and corporations on both sides of the Atlantic.
Previous visitors as part of the program include US Supreme Court Justices Stephen Breyer, Antonin Scalia and Sonia Sotomayor, as well as Yale Law School Dean Robert Post, Sterling Professor of International Law Harold Koh, Justice Mariano-Florentino Cuellar, veteran New York Times Supreme Court correspondent Linda Greenhouse, and Roberta Cooper Ramo, the first woman to hold the position of president of the American Law Institute and the first woman to serve as president of the American Bar Association.