Professor Akhil Reed Amar will discuss the practice of filibustering — stalling, and in some cases even preventing a vote on a given piece of legislation — and how to end it, during the annual Brainerd Currie Lecture on Feb. 21 at Duke Law School. The lecture, which is free and open to the public, begins at 12:15 p.m. in Room 3041.

Amar, the Sterling Professor of Law and Political Science at Yale University, will explain his preferred version of the so-called "nuclear option" by which a simple Senate majority may modify or eliminate the Senate's entrenched filibuster practice in his lecture, titled “Lex Majoris Partis:  How the Senate Can End the Filibuster on any Day by Simple Majority Rule.”

Amar is the co-editor of a leading constitutional law casebook, Processes of Constitutional Decisionmaking. He is also the author of several books, including The Constitution and Criminal Procedure: First Principles (Yale Univ. Press, 1997), The Bill of Rights: Creation and Reconstruction (Yale Univ. Press, 1998), America’s Constitution: A Biography (Random House, 2005).

The 2013 Currie lecture builds on Amar’s most recent book, America’s Unwritten Constitution: The Precedents and Principles We Live By (Basic Books, 2012).

The Currie Lecture was established in 1967 in honor of Professor Brainerd Currie, a member of the Duke law faculty from 1946-49 and 1961-65.