Stuart Rabner, chief justice of the New Jersey Supreme Court, will engage in a public conversation with Princeton Provost Christopher Eisgruber, a noted legal scholar, at 4:30 p.m. Wednesday, March 3, in Dodds Auditorium, Robertson Hall, on the Princeton University campus. The event is free and open to the public.
Rabner will deliver informal remarks titled "The New Jersey Supreme Court: A Perspective From the Bench" before his conversation with Eisgruber. The event is the annual John Marshall Harlan '20 Lecture in Constitutional Adjudication, which celebrates the legacy of Harlan, the ninth Princeton alumnus to serve as a U.S. Supreme Court justice. Current justices Samuel Alito and Sonia Sotomayor are the 10th and 11th Princeton alumni to serve on the Supreme Court.
[**Media interested in attending should RSVP no later than noon Tuesday, March 2, by e-mailing Emily Aronson.
Rabner has served as the eighth chief justice of the state Supreme Court since June 2007. He served as chief counsel to former New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine and as state attorney general before being appointed chief justice by Corzine. Rabner also served as a federal prosecutor at the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of New Jersey. Before joining the U.S. Attorney's Office in 1986, he was a law clerk to U.S. District Court Judge Dickinson R. Debevoise.
Rabner graduated in 1982 from Princeton as a major in the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and graduated from Harvard Law School in 1985.
Eisgruber, who graduated from Princeton as a major in physics in 1983, is the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Public Affairs in the Wilson School and the University Center for Human Values. He is the author of "The Next Justice: Repairing the Supreme Court Appointments Process," and other books on the Constitution. Before joining the Princeton faculty in 2001, Eisgruber clerked for Judge Patrick Higginbotham of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and for Justice John Paul Stevens of the U.S. Supreme Court. He also served for 11 years on the faculty of New York University School of Law.
Eisgruber is a Rhodes scholar with a master of letters from Oxford University, and he holds a law degree from the University of Chicago Law School.
The event is sponsored by Princeton's Program in Law and Public Affairs (LAPA). For more information, visit the LAPA website.