Program in Law & Government
About Us
The Program in Law & Government is Vanderbilt Law School’s largest and most intellectually diverse initiative, with 24 law faculty and an additional 10 affiliated university faculty. The program offers classes, lectures, panel discussions, and conferences each year designed to expose students to a wide range of scholarly perspectives – legal, political, historical, philosophical, and economic – that inform the practice of public law in the United States and abroad.
Annual Supreme Court Review
The Annual Supreme Court Review features prominent legal scholars who preview important cases in the upcoming term and discuss recent cases, proposed reforms, and other issues related to the nation’s highest court.
Recent panels addressed abortion cases from Roe to Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, Heller, and the legal precedent of supporting vaccine mandates.
Judicial Law Clerk, Judge Claria Horn Boom in the Eastern and Western Districts of Kentucky
Taylor Lawing '24
“The passion I developed for administrative law was what I was looking for in a law school that I felt like many others had found in other 1L courses.”
Interdisciplinary
Law is not the exclusive province of lawyers or aspiring lawyers. Recognizing this, the program is interdisciplinary, drawing on a wide range of scholarly perspectives - legal, political, historical, philosophical, and economic - that bear on the study and practice of public law in the United States and abroad.
The program also strives to reach beyond the law school. One aspect of this aspiration is a new educational series that provides public officials with forums for discussing and learning about the latest developments in American constitutional law.
Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator for Political Economy and Regulation (VPA)
A Discovery Vanderbilt initiative, VPA focuses on a small number of cutting-edge topics in political economy and regulation, bringing research, education, and policy proposals in these areas from infancy to maturity and periphery to centrality. VPA operates at a pace that aligns with the urgency of today's challenges.