Amity Shlaes

Best-selling author Amity Shlaes will deliver a lecture titled, “The Great Chicken Flap: How the Schechter Poultry Case Changed America and Showed Its Possibilities” on Tuesday, April 22 at 4 p.m. in IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law’s Abraham Lincoln Marovitz Courtroom, 565 W. Adams Street (between Clinton and Jefferson streets) in Chicago.

The lecture, which is co-sponsored by IIT Chicago-Kent, is the first in the Liberty Lecture Series sponsored by the Jack Miller Center for Teaching America’s Founding Principles and History. The lecture is free and open to the public.

Shlaes’ topic, A.L.A. Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States, is a landmark 1935 U.S. Supreme Court case that declared unconstitutional a central piece of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal legislation. In reviewing the conviction of a poultry company for breaking the Live Poultry Code, the Court held that the code violated the Constitution’s separation of powers because it was written by agents of the president with no genuine congressional direction.

Shlaes has been a syndicated columnist for more than a decade and is currently a columnist for Forbes magazine. She directs the Four Percent Growth Project at the George W. Bush Institute. For the past five years, Shlaes has taught economics of the 1930s in the MBA program at New York University Stern School of Business. She is author of The Forgotten Man (2007), a national bestseller that National Review called “the finest history of the Great Depression ever written,” and The Greedy Hand: How Taxes Drive Americans Crazy and What to Do About It, also a national bestseller.

Shlaes graduated magna cum laude from Yale University. She has written for Bloomberg News, The Financial Times, The New Yorker, The American Spectator, Commentary, The Spectator (UK), Foreign Affairs, Forbes, National Review, and The New Republic. Shlaes served as a member of The Wall Street Journal editorial board, specializing in economics.