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| David C. Hardesty, Jr. Festival of Ideas- Jack Bowman-Nath Series |
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| Start Date: | 1/24/2013 | Start Time: | 7:30 PM |
| End Date: | 1/24/2013 | End Time: | 9:00 PM |
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Event Description
Jack Bowman
WVU College of Law
Jackson & Kelly Professor of Law Emeritus
The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln: Emancipation & West Virginia Statehood
January 24 @ 7:30 p.m.
Mountainlair Ballrooms
Co-sponsored by the Nath Lecture Series and the
WVU Honors College
Abraham Lincoln’s issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation has been criticized over the years as an unconstitutional expansion of Presidential power, as well as an empty gesture that actually freed no slaves. Likewise, his approval of the legislation creating the State of West Virginia has raised constitutional questions and invoked criticism for what has been called West Virginia’s secession from Virginia. Lincoln approved this while putting down the attempted secession of southern states from the Union. Professor Bowman will look at the constitutional and political bases for both of these actions.
A former captain in the U.S. Army, Bowman is especially interested in the American Civil War, having ancestors who served on both sides of that struggle. As a lawyer and student of the life of Abraham Lincoln, he has long been interested in the legal questions that surrounded Lincoln’s issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation and his signing of the bill creating the state of West Virginia.
Bowman is a native West Virginian and a West Virginia University graduate where he served as student body president in 1959-60 and as Summit of Mountain (an honorary) in 1960-61. He was the first person in his family to attend college.
After serving as a professor of law at WVU for 23 years, he retired in 2002. During his tenure, he was named Professor of the Year by seven graduating classes, University-wide Professor of the Year in 1998, and in 1988 was named “Professor of the Year” for all of higher education in the state by the Faculty Merit Foundation of West Virginia.
Bowman is a Fellow of the American Bar Foundation, an honor bestowed upon only one-third of 1 percent of America’s lawyers, and is the only three-time recipient of the “Certificate of Merit,” the highest award the West Virginia State Bar can bestow on one of its members. In 1995, the American Bar Association and the American Law Institute awarded him the Harrison Tweed Award for outstanding contributions to continuing legal education in America.
In 2003 he was inducted into WVU’s Order of Vandalia, and in 2011 he was named an Outstanding Alumnus. He is also a former president of the West Virginia Bar Association and is a past chair of the Salvation Army’s Evangeline Booth College in Atlanta, Georgia. |
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