Professor with extensive Supreme Court experience to share highlights from career serving KU, Kansas


 
LAWRENCE – Kansas Solicitor General Stephen McAllister will share his experiences arguing before the U.S. Supreme Court and other career highlights during his inaugural lecture as the E.S. & Tom Hampton Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Kansas.

McAllister is set to deliver “The Supreme Court and Kansas: A (Solicitor) General Talk about Studying, Teaching and Serving the Law” at 5:30 p.m. Monday, Oct. 6, at Alderson Auditorium in the Kansas Union. The lecture is free and open to the public.

A Kansas native, McAllister earned degrees from KU and its law school before clerking first for Judge Richard Posner of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit and then for Supreme Court Justices Byron R. White and Clarence Thomas. He worked for Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher in Washington, D.C., before returning to KU to join the law faculty in 1993.

McAllister served as dean of the law school from 2000-2005, and he currently teaches constitutional law, civil rights actions, state constitutional law and torts. He has written on a wide variety of constitutional topics, including affirmative action, capital punishment, federalism, freedom of speech, the powers of Congress, sex offender laws and Supreme Court history.

During his years at KU, McAllister has served a number of Kansas Attorneys General and the Kansas Legislature as a legal adviser and litigator, beginning with his work on the sex offender civil commitment case (Kansas v. Hendricks) that went to the Supreme Court in 1996, and continuing through today as he prepares for Oct. 14 arguments at the Supreme Court in the case of Kansas v. Nebraska and Colorado, a dispute over water in the Republican River Basin. In between, he has worked on cases involving a variety of constitutional issues, including the death penalty, the Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination, school finance and freedom of speech.

McAllister’s Supreme Court advocacy has resulted in two Best Brief awards presented by the National Association of Attorneys General. In November 2010, the Supreme Court appointed McAllister to brief and argue in defense of the judgment in a case called Bond v. United States after the United States decided it would not defend the lower court’s ruling. 

McAllister has played a role in bringing several Supreme Court justices to KU and Kansas, and he persuaded two justices to teach in the law school’s summer program in Turkey. In 2013, McAllister and his family spent two weeks with Justice Clarence Thomas and his wife in Innsbruck, Austria, where Thomas and McAllister co-taught a course.

McAllister assumed the Hampton professorship in September 2013. The E.S. & Tom W. Hampton Professorship was established in 1985 by the family, law firm and friends of Salina lawyers E.S. and Tom W. Hampton. E.S. Hampton was a 1929 graduate of the law school and senior partner at Salina firm Burch, Litowich and Royce. His son Tom graduated from KU Law in 1959 and joined his father’s practice. The professorship honors the Hamptons’ legacy and aims to attract and retain quality faculty at KU Law.

Wed, 10/01/2014

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Mindie Paget

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