IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law will celebrate Constitution Day from 4-5 p.m. on Monday, September 15, 2014 with a panel discussion on “The Press, The Supreme Court, and the Constitution.”

The program will be held in Chicago-Kent’s Judge Abraham Lincoln Marovitz Courtroom at Downtown Campus, located at 565 West Adams Street.

Panelists include Associate Professor Sonja West, University of Georgia School of Law; Associate Professor RonNell Andersen Jones, Brigham Young University Law School, and Dahlia Lithwick, senior editor and legal affairs correspondent for Slate magazine.

The panelists have all worked as attorneys and journalists and have served as clerks in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. West also clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, and Jones clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. IIT Chicago-Kent Associate Professor (on leave) and Illinois Solicitor General Carolyn Shapiro will serve as moderator. She clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer and for Judge Richard Posner in the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals.

The program is free and open to the public. The 2014 Constitution Day program is co-sponsored by the Jack Miller Center (JMC) and IIT Chicago-Kent’s Institute on the Supreme Court of the United States (ISCOTUS). For more information, contact Professor Christopher Schmidt at cschmidt@kentlaw.iit.edu or 312.906.5389. This event precedes the Constitution Day lecture at 3 p.m. Wednesday, September 17, 2014 by Chicago-Kent Professor and First Amendment scholar Steven J. Heyman.

In 2004, Congress passed legislation requiring that every institution of higher education receiving federal funds hold an educational program about the Constitution on September 17, the day delegates to the Constitutional Convention met in Philadelphia in 1787 to sign the completed Constitution. With a lead gift from the Andrea Waitt Carlton Family Foundation, Nashville, Tenn., the Jack Miller Center launched its Constitution Day Initiative (CDI) in 2011 to increase awareness of the Constitution Day mandate and to assist campuses in developing substantive educational programs.