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United States and Rule of Law - Where Are We Now?

Debo Adegbile, Lora J Livingston, Ved P Nanda, Suzanne Spaulding, and Linda Strite Murnane

DEBO ADEGBILE is an New York University Law School graduate, civil rights lawyer and partner at WilmerHale. Adegbile was a child actor on Sesame Street during the 1970s. For over ten years he worked for civil rights organization the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, battling racial injustices, litigating in trial and appellate courts and rising to become acting president and director counsel. In 2013, he joined the United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary as senior counsel, where he was proposed as Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division; the Senate blocked the nomination on the basis that Adegbile served on the appeal team of a Black Panther member convicted of killing a Philadelphia police officer in 1981. In 2014, he returned to private practice and joined WilmerHale, where he focuses on appellate, government and regulatory litigation, and civil rights investigations.  

THE HONORABLE LORA LIVINGSTON retired judge for the 261st District Court in Travis County was the first African American woman to preside over a Travis County District Court when she was elected in 1999. Judge Livingston is an active presence on the boards of the Texas Center for the Judiciary, State Bar of Texas Judicial Section, and Texas Access to Justice Commission and established the Travis County Self-Help Center, a resource providing self-represented litigants with legal information.

SUZANNE SPAULDING is Senior Adviser for Homeland Security and Director of the Defending Democratic Institutions project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). She also serves as a member of the Cyberspace Solarium Commission. Previously, she served as undersecretary for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), where she led the National Protection and Programs Directorate. She was general counsel for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and minority staff director for the House of Representatives Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. She also spent six years at the Central Intelligence Agency, where she was assistant general counsel and the legal adviser to the director’s Nonproliferation Center. She was executive director of two congressionally created commissions, on weapons of mass destruction and on terrorism. Following the attacks of 9/11. In 2002, she was appointed by Governor Mark Warner of Virginia to the Secure Commonwealth Panel to advise the governor and the legislature regarding preparedness issues.

VED NANDA (1934-2024) was Distinguished University Professor in the Sturm College of Law. For nearly 60 years, Professor Nanda taught at the law school, and he founded the International Legal Studies Program in 1972. He served as director of the Ved Nanda Center for International and Comparative Law since its inception in 2006.  Ved Prakash Nanda was born on November 20, 1934, in Gujranwala. He later received a Bachelor of Law in 1955 and a Master of Law in 1958 from the University of Delhi, where he finished first in his class. He moved to Chicago in 1960 to attend Northwestern University where he earned his LLM, then to New Haven as a postgraduate fellow at Yale Law School. He then worked in the Legal Division of the United Nations in New York. He began his long tenure teaching at the University of Denver College of Law (now the Sturm College of Law) in 1965.

COLONEL LINDA STRITE MURNANE (Ret.) moderator of the panel, extensive biography is detailed at the ABA Trailblazers Project at Stanford Law.

Participants