2023 Gaspar G. Bacon Lecture

Professor Melissa Murray of the New York University School of Law was the guest of the BU History Department on April 27, 2023 for its Gaspar G. Bacon Lecture.  Her talk, “Dobbs, Democracy, and Distrust,” outlined the majority’s reasoning in the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision overturning Roe v. Wade.  Professor Murray focused on the argument advanced in Justice Alito’s opinion that the 1973 Roe decision disrupted due democratic deliberation–a conception of democracy, she observed, that is incoherent and myopic.  “The most disappointing aspect of the Dobbs decision,” she stated, “is its cynicism.”

The Bacon Lecture is made possible by an endowment established in the 1940s.  Its benefactor, Gaspar G. Bacon, was a Boston attorney, President of the Massachusetts State Senate, Lieutenant Governor of Massachusetts, and a candidate for Governor in 1934.  He was a lecturer at Boston University and is the author of The Constitution of the United States in Some of Its Fundamental Aspects (1928).  He specified that this annual lecture be devoted to the U.S. Constitution.