2026 Liberty Lecture - Lawyers v. The Law: The Project to Unmake American Democracy and How to Fight Back

The 2026 Liberty Lecture will be delivered by Professor Scott Cummings. The topic of the lecture is ‘Lawyers v. The Law: The Project to Unmake American Democracy and How to Fight Back’.

Scott Cummings is the Robert Henigson Professor of Legal Ethics at the UCLA School of Law, where he teaches and writes about the legal profession, legal ethics, social movements, and democracy. A recipient of the UCLA Distinguished Teaching Award, Professor Cummings is the founding faculty director of the UCLA Program on Legal Ethics and Democracy, which promotes empirical research and innovative programming on the challenges facing lawyers in the twenty-first century, and a member of the UCLA David J. Epstein Program in Public Interest Law and Policy. In 2021, Professor Cummings was selected as the Fulbright Distinguished Chair at the European University Institute and a fellow at the Stanford Center for the Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences to study the role of lawyers in strengthening the rule of law. He was awarded a 2023 Guggenheim Fellowship to study the role of lawyers in democratic backsliding and an honorary doctorate from the University of Southern Denmark for his work. His book on the role of lawyers in the rise of American backsliding will be published in 2027 by the University of Chicago Press.