Stanley Fish, a prominent public intellectual who is a renowned scholar in both law and literature, will deliver the fall 1999 Robert S. Stevens Lecture at Cornell Law School this Friday, Nov. 5. His talk is titled "The Persistence of Theory: The First Amendment at the End of the 20th Century." It will take place in the MacDonald Moot Court Room in Myron Taylor Hall at 3 p.m. and is free and open to the public.

Fish is dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the author of There's No Such Thing as Free Speech, and It's a Good Thing Too (Oxford, 1994) and the forthcoming The Trouble with Principle (Harvard, Dec. 1999).

In describing the 1994 book, one reviewer wrote: "A vigorous debunker of the pieties of both the left and the right, Fish takes aim at the ideological gridlock paralyzing academic and political exchange in the '90s."

In a review of the forthcoming book, Fish is referred to as, "an equal-opportunity antagonist.... a theorist who has taken on theorists, an academician who has riled the academy, a legal scholar and political pundit who has ruffled feathers left and right.... Sparing no one, he shows how our notions of intellectual and religious liberty -- cherished by those at both ends of the political spectrum -- are artifacts of the very partisan politics they supposedly transcend."

An intellectual powerhouse with a wide range of interests, Fish was Arts and Sciences Professor of English and Professor of Law at Duke University from 1986 to 1998. From 1993 through 1998, he also was executive director of Duke University Press. At Johns Hopkins University he was the Kenan Professor of English and Humanities, 1974-85. Before that he taught at the University of California at Berkeley, 1962-74. He earned his M.A. in 1960 and his Ph.D. in 1962 from Yale University.

Fish's literary output also is impressive. In addition to the books listed above, his published works include: Is There a Text in This Class? Interpretive Communities and the Sources of Authority (Harvard, 1982); Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric and the

Practice of Theory in Literary and Legal Studies (Duke, 1990); and Professional Correctness: Literary Studies and Political Change (Harvard, 1999). He also has written numerous scholarly works, among them Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost (Harvard, 2nd edition, 1998).

The Stevens Lecture Series was established by Phi Alpha Delta law fraternity in 1955 in honor of former Cornell Law School Dean Robert S. Stevens. The series provides Cornell law students with an opportunity to expand their legal education beyond classroom lessons on substantive and procedural law. Former Stevens lecturers include senior U.S. District Court Judge Constance Baker Motley; Jack M. Balkin, professor of law at Yale University Law School; Jesse H. Choper, professor of law at the University of California at Berkeley; and Robert S. Summers, professor of law at Cornell Law School.