For Immediate Release

For more information, contact Kate Worster 641-269-3404

August 27, 2007

President Osgood to Deliver Opening Convocation

Grinnell College students and faculty alike usually find their days packed with classes, research, and study. At 11 a.m. on many Thursdays, however, the community pauses for Scholars' Convocation, a lecture series that spans the curriculum and brings in many provocative and erudite speakers.

Grinnell President Russell K. Osgood will present the first Scholars' Convocation of the 2007-08 academic year at 11 a.m. on Sept. 6: "Judicial Independence in 18th-Century Britain and America." (Osgood is also teaching a course with the same title this semester.) The convocation will take place in the Joe Rosenfield '25 Center, Room 101.

The lecture will explore the development of the notion that judges are or should be independent of other parts of government, including the royal governors, the monarchy, and the legislature. "This area of legal and institutional development has important repercussions that reach to the current day," Osgood says. His discussion will span the period beginning with the reign of Queen Anne in Britain and carry through the early federal period in North America.

Russell K. Osgood graduated from Yale in 1969. After service in the U.S. Navy, he returned to Yale in 1971, where he earned a J.D. in 1974. Osgood maintained a private legal practice in Boston before joining the law faculty at Boston University in 1978. In 1980, he became a member the faculty of Cornell Law School, where he served as dean and editor of the Law and History Review. Osgood's scholarly work focuses on American legal history, employee benefits and pension law, and income taxation.

Osgood's presidency at Grinnell began in 1998. He has led the College through a campus planning process that has resulted in several new facilities. His leadership has also helped drive the College's strategic planning process, currently being implemented. The College has undertaken a series of major advances, including the addition of Mentored Advanced Projects, Japanese language instruction, the Faulconer Art Gallery, the Center for Prairie Studies, and the Center for International Studies.

The Scholars' Convocation series, now in its 28th year, fosters the shared educational atmosphere at Grinnell, and its interdisciplinary and accessible nature encourages an intellectual encounter that reaches beyond the traditional bounds of academic disciplines.

- 30 -