Justin Driver, Robert R. Slaughter Professor of Law and Counselor to the Dean at Yale Law School, delivered the 2022 Victor S. Johnson Lecture in Flynn Auditorium at 3:30 p.m. on Wednesday, Oct. 26. Driver’s talk focused on the implications of SFFA v. Harvard and SFFA v. UNC, two cases challenging affirmative action policies to be argued before the Supreme Court Oct. 31.
Professor Driver teaches and writes in the area of constitutional law. He is the author of The Schoolhouse Gate: Public Education, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for the American Mind. The book was selected as a Washington Post Notable Book of the Year and an Editors’ Choice of The New York Times Book Review. The Schoolhouse Gate also received the Steven S. Goldberg Award for Distinguished Scholarship in Education Law, and was a finalist for the American Bar Association’s Silver Gavel Award and Phi Beta Kappa’s Ralph Waldo Emerson Book Award.
A recipient of the American Society for Legal History’s William Nelson Cromwell Article Prize, Driver has been published in the nation’s leading law reviews and written extensively for general audiences, including pieces in Slate, The Atlantic, The New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post and The New Republic, where he was a contributing editor. He is a member of the American Law Institute and of the American Constitution Society’s Academic Advisory Board and an editor of the Supreme Court Review. In 2021, President Biden appointed Driver to serve on the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States.
Before joining the Yale Law faculty, Driver was the Harry N. Wyatt Professor of Law at the University of Chicago. Driver is a graduate of Brown, Oxford (where he was a Marshall Scholar), Duke (where he received certification to teach public school) and Harvard Law School (where he was an editor of the Harvard Law Review). After graduating from Harvard, he clerked for then-Judge Merrick Garland, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor (Ret.), and Justice Stephen Breyer (Ret.).
The annual Victor S. Johnson Lecture features a distinguished speaker who addresses the law and its relationship to public policy. The lecture is endowed by Victor S. (Torry) Johnson III, ’74 in honor of his grandfather.