The annual Adam Smith Lecture in Jurisprudence will be given this year by Professor Kathleen Thelen at 3pm on Friday 21 May. The title of the lecture is: Employer Organization in the United States: Historical Legacies and the Long Shadow of the American Courts.  The lecture will be delivered online with details to be circulated nearer the time.

Kathleen Thelen is Ford Professor of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her work focuses on the origins and evolution of political-economic institutions in the rich democracies. She is the author of Varieties of Liberalization and the New Politics of Social Solidarity (2014) and How Institutions Evolve (2004), and co-editor of Advances in Comparative Historical Analysis (with James Mahoney, 2015), and Beyond Continuity (with Wolfgang Streeck, 2005). Her awards include the Aaron Wildavsky Enduring Contribution Prize (2019); the Michael Endres Research Prize (2019), the Barrington Moore Book Prize (2015), the Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award of the APSR (2005), the Mattei Dogan Award for Comparative Research (2006), and the Max Planck Research Award (2003). She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2015 and to the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences in 2009. She was awarded honorary degrees at the Free University of Amsterdam (2013), the London School of Economics (2017), the European University Institute in Florence (2018), and the University of Copenhagen (2018).

The Adam Smith Lecture in Jurisprudence is hosted annually by the Glasgow Legal Theory research group in commemoration of the course of lectures on jurisprudence delivered by Adam Smith at the University of Glasgow in 1762-3. Past Lecturers include Wolfgang Streeck (MPIFG), Christine Desan (Harvard Law) and Scott Veitch (University of Hong Kong).

First published: 2 February 2021

<< News and Events