Notre Dame Con Studies Public Lecture Series

Ronald D. DeSantis serves at the forty-sixth Governor of Florida. A graduate of Yale University, Governor DeSantis subsequently earned his J.D. degree from Harvard Law School and a commission in the United States Navy. As an active-duty Judge Advocate General (JAG) officer, he supported operations at the terrorist detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and deployed to Iraq as an adviser to U.S....

Jay Bhattacharya is a Professor of Health Policy at Stanford University and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economics Research. He directs Stanford’s Center for Demography and Economics of Health and Aging. Dr. Bhattacharya’s research focuses on the health and well-being of vulnerable populations, with a particular emphasis on the role of government programs, biomedical innovation,...

Aurelian Craiutu is Professor and Chair of the Department of Political Science at Indiana University, Bloomington. His most recent book is Why Not Moderation? Letters to Young Radicals, from Cambridge University Press. In previewing his talk, Craiutu says "Moderation is a contested concept that, with surprisingly few exceptions, is absent from our public debates. Today, the single famous line...

Antón Barba-Kay is Distinguished Fellow at the Center on Privacy and Technology at Georgetown Law, as well as Senior Fellow at the Institute for Practical Ethics at UC San Diego. A Web of Our Own Making —his book about what the internet is and what a difference it makes—was published in 2023 by Cambridge University Press. One of the dominant commonplaces of the early 21st century was that digital...

Is there an obligation to obey the law? If so, why? What about when the reasons behind the law don't apply? What about unjust laws? In his new book by Notre Dame Press, The Nature of Law, Villanova professor Daniel Mark critiques prevailing theories of legal authority and offers a reconstruction of the nature of law to account for its unique features. In his talk, Dr. Mark will explore competi...

Is democracy dying, in America and abroad? Pundits say so, and polls show that most Americans believe that their country’s system of governance is being “tested” or is “under attack.” But is the future of democracy necessarily so dire? In The Civic Bargain , Brook Manville and Josiah Ober push back against the prevailing pessimism about the fate of democracy around the world. Instead of an epitaph...