Attorney General Eric Holder to lecture at UM Feb. 9

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder will present a lecture titled “Justice Through Service: Extending America’s Greatest Tradition” at The University of Montana on Wednesday, Feb. 9. The event will be held at 2 p.m. in the University Theatre and is free and open to the public.

The lecture is part of the UM School of Law’s Judge William B. Jones and Judge Edward A. Tamm Judicial Lecture Series.

Holder will speak for about 15 minutes and then will answer questions asked by prominent Washington, D.C. attorney Robert Bennett, who helped found the Jones-Tamm series at UM. The questions were submitted by UM law students and faculty members.

President Barack Obama nominated Holder in December 2008, and he was sworn in as the 82nd attorney general of the United States by Vice President Joe Biden in February 2009. Holder previously served as deputy attorney general ― the first African-American to hold the position ― under President Bill Clinton, and as U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia.

While attending law school at Columbia University, he clerked for the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund and the Department of Justice’s Criminal Division. Before he was named attorney general, Holder was a litigation partner at Covington & Burling LLP in Washington, D.C.

The UM School of Law established the Jones-Tamm Lecture Series in 1997 to honor the memory of William B. Jones and Edward A. Tamm, two distinguished federal judges with strong ties to Montana. Jones practiced in the state from 1931 to 1937 during the early years of his career, while Tamm graduated from Butte Central High School and studied at Carroll College in Helena and UM before embarking on his judicial career in Washington, D.C.

Though they spent the majority of their careers in Washington, Jones and Tamm never forgot their Montana connections, and the lecture series named for them now attracts leading jurists and scholars to UM to address relevant legal topics, such as judicial ethics, judicial decision-making and selection and education of judges.