Ashbrook Center hosting Law & Education conference April 4-5

ASHLAND, Ohio – The Ashbrook Center at Ashland University will be hosting a Law & Education conference that explores the role of parental rights in education as expressed by the Supreme Court of the United States on Friday and Saturday, April 4-5. There will be an opening keynote address Friday evening, three panels on Saturday and then a closing keynote. All sessions will take place in Ronk Lecture Hall at the Dwight Schar College of Education and are open to the public.

The conference kicks off Friday at 3 p.m., with a presentation from Lee Strang, J.D., a nationally recognized legal scholar. His keynote address is titled “The Place of Law in University Level Citizenship Education.” Strang is a professor of law at Ohio State University’s Moritz College of Law and the inaugural executive director of the Salmon P. Chase Center for Civics, Culture and Society. He specializes in the fields of constitutional law and interpretation, property law, religion and the First Amendment.

Saturday will feature three 90-minute panels, consisting of “Parental Rights” at 9 a.m., “Religious Liberty” at 10:45 a.m., and following a lunch break, “Republicanism and Education” at 1 p.m. The panels will each have three experts in the field discussing their respective scholarly work.

The closing keynote, which starts at 2:45 p.m., will be by James R. Stoner, Jr., Ph.D., a professor at Louisiana State University. He will present “Can Law Govern Education.” Stoner is the Hermann Noyse, Jr., Professor and Director of the Eric Voegelin Institute in the Department of Political Science at LSU. His teaching and research interests are in political theory, English common law and American constitutionalism.

The Law & Education conference being coordinated by the Ashbrook Center highlights the cutting-edge research and professional networks AU students have access to in the fields of law and politics. AU professors Adam Carrington, Ph.D., Joe Griffith, Ph.D., and Jeff Sikkenga, Ph.D., will each be part of a panel. Griffith’s work on parental rights was recently cited twice in an amicus brief submitted to the Supreme Court in the case of Mahmoud v. Taylor.

For more information, contact conference@ashbrook.org.