Episode 66: 2020 Pre-Election Roundtable with Bill Kristol, Nancy Maveety, and Lawrence Douglas
On today's program, a special 2020 pre-election roundtable discussion with a distinguished panel of guests--- Bill Kristol, Nancy Maveety, and Lawrence Douglas. With so much hanging in the balance, these three experts analyze the situation from different and valuable viewpoints. While no one can predict what will happen, our guests offer various takes on what might, come Election Day-- and crucially, beyond.
BILL KRISTOL has been a leading participant in American political debates and a widely respected analyst of American political developments for three decades. Having served in senior positions in the Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush Administrations, Kristol understands government from the inside; as a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard University, he has studied American politics and society from the outside. After serving in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations, Kristol founded The Weekly Standard in 1995 and edited the influential magazine for over two decades. Now, as founding director of Defending Democracy Together, an organization dedicated to defending America’s liberal democratic norms, principles, and institutions, Kristol is in the midst of the national debate on issues ranging from American foreign policy to the future of the Republican Party and the meaning of American conservatism. Kristol frequently appears on all the major television talk shows, and also is the host of the highly regarded video series and podcast, Conversations with Bill Kristol. Kristol received his undergraduate degree and his Ph.D. from Harvard University.
NANCY MAVEETY is professor and chair of the Department of Political Science at Tulane University. She is the author of Representation Rights and the Burger Years (Michigan, 1991) and Sandra Day O'Connor: Strategist on the Supreme Court (Rowman Littlefield, 1996). She is also the editor of The Pioneers of Judicial Behavior (Michigan, 2003), which is on the public law generals exam list in the politics department at Princeton. She is presently working on a book on the Rehnquist Court with a National Science Foundation grant to review the Blackmun papers. Maveety was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to Estonia in 2001 which resulted in the article, "Constrained: Constitutional Courts as Conduits for Democratic Consolidation" in the Law and Society Review (June 2004). In addition to her non-fiction writing, she is also the author of a presciently titled novel called The Stagnant Pool: Scholars Below Sea Level, (University Press of the South, 2000). Her specialities include U.S. Supreme Court studies, judicial decision making, and comparative judicial politics.
LAWRENCE DOUGLAS is James J. Grosfeld Professor of Law, Jurisprudence and Social Thought; Chair of Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought at Amherst College. He is the author of seven books, including The Memory of Judgment: Making Law and History in the Trials of the Holocaust (Yale, 2001) and The Right Wrong Man: John Demjanjuk and the Last Great Nazi War Crimes Trial (Princeton, 2016), a New York Times “Editor’s Choice.” His most recent book is Will He Go? Trump and the Looming Electoral Meltdown in 2020 (Twelve/Hachette 2020).
