Kinder Institute: “The Pursuit of Happiness in the Founding Era”
The Kinder Institute at the University of Missouri, a JMC partner program, will host JMC fellow Carli Conklin for a lecture on her new book, The Pursuit of Happiness in the Founding Era: An Intellectual History.
To round out AY 2018-19 programming, Kinder Institute and MU Law Associate Professor Carli Conklin will give a talk on her hot-off-the-press first book, The Pursuit of Happiness in the Founding Era: An Intellectual History, set to be published in May as part of the Institute’s Studies in Constitutional Democracy monograph series with University of Missouri Press. The book considers the pursuit of happiness across a variety of intellectual traditions and explores its usage in key legal texts of the Founding Era.
Thursday, May 9, 2019 • 3:30 PM
Jesse Hall, Room 410 • University of Missouri
Free and open to the public
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The Pursuit of Happiness in the Founding Era: An Intellectual History
By Carli Conklin
Scholars have long debated the meaning of the pursuit of happiness, yet have tended to define it narrowly, focusing on a single intellectual tradition, and on the use of the term within a single text, the Declaration of Independence. In this insightful volume, Carli Conklin considers the pursuit of happiness across a variety of intellectual traditions, and explores its usage in two key legal texts of the Founding Era, the Declaration and William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England.
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Carli Conklin currently serves as Associate Professor at the Law School at the University of Missouri. She studied law and history at the University of Virginia through a joint J.D./Ph.D. program in American Legal History. Her dissertation at the University of Virginia was an intellectual history of the meaning of the pursuit of happiness in the Declaration of Independence. Professor Conklin’s research interests are in American legal history, with a focus on dispute resolution and rights dialogues in early America. At the MU School of Law, she teaches Lawyering, Negotiation, International Human Rights Law, Law & Social Science, and Non-Binding Methods of Dispute Resolution. Professor Conklin also serves as Kinder Institute Associate Professor of Constitutional Democracy and Director of Undergraduate Studies, coordinating, among other things, the Society of Fellows program and the Constitutionalism and Democracy Honors College course series.
Professor Conklin is a JMC fellow.
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The Kinder Institute on Constitutional Democracy at the University of Missouri is an interdisciplinary, signature academic center on the Columbia campus, jointly operated by faculty from the Political Science and History Departments, in cooperation with other scholars across campus. It is dedicated to excellence in research, teaching, and community engagement on the subjects of American political thought, history, and institutions, with a particular emphasis on the ideas and events of the American Founding and their continued global impact and relevance today. It was created in 2015 by a generous gift from the Kinder Foundation, a family philanthropic foundation started by Rich and Nancy Kinder of Houston, Texas.
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