On Wednesday, September 17, the Center for Political and Economic Thought at Saint Vincent College, in cooperation with the Alex G. McKenna School of Business, Economics and Government, will welcome Michael Krauss, Professor of Law at George Mason University. His lecture, which will be the first in the Center's 2008-2009 Government and Political Education Series, is entitled “To Heller and Beyond: Self-Defense, Collective Defense, and the Second Amendment.” The lecture will begin at 7:30 p.m. in the Robert S. Carey Performing Arts Center. Admission is free, and no reservations are required.

In 1994, Professor of Law Michael I. Krauss, became the law school’s first and only recipient of the university’s “Teacher of the Year” award for his engaging and challenging approach in the classroom. Born in the United States but raised in Canada, Professor Krauss speaks legalese in two languages. He earned his B.A. cum laude from Carleton University, his LL.B. summa cum laude from the Université de Sherbrooke, and his LL.M. from Yale Law School, where he was a Commonwealth Scholar. He was Columbia University’s Law and Economics Fellow in 1981. He has been teaching at George Mason since 1987 and has taught at the law schools of Seattle University, the University of Toronto, and the Université de Sherbrooke.

Hired as a law clerk by Justice Louis-Philippe Pigeon of Canada’s Supreme Court, Professor Krauss practiced law for Quebec City’s largest law firm before entering academia. He also served for five years on Québec’s Human Rights Commission. A Salvatori Fellow of the Heritage Foundation and an academic fellow of the foundation for the Defense of Democracies, Professor Krauss sits on the advisory boards of several think tanks. He served as president of the Virginia Association of Scholars and on the Board of Governors of the Education Section of the Virginia State Bar and is currently a member of the Board of Governors of the National Association of Scholars.

Professor Krauss teaches torts, legal ethics and jurisprudence, and has a strong interest in national security issues. His research on torts and ethics is nationally known. He co-authored the first edition of Legal Ethics in a Nutshell in May 2003. This book digests the Model Rules in an engaging and often critical fashion. The second edition was published in 2006. Professor Krauss is now under contract with West Publications to produce an innovative textbook on Products Liability in late 2008. He has been nominated for inclusion in What the Best Law Teachers Do (Harvard University Press forthcoming 2011).

The Government and Political Education Series is made possible by grants from the Aequus Institute, Massey Charitable Trust, Philip M. McKenna Foundation, and the Sarah Scaife Foundation. For more information about this and other lectures in the series, contact the Center for Political and Economic Thought at Saint Vincent College at 724-805-2563.

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