2026 Brendan Brown Lecture

Loyola University New Orleans College of Law's 2026 Brendan Brown Lecture will be held on Wednesday, October 28th. This event is free and open to the public.

The Brendan Brown Speaker Series was established in 1986 through the generosity of former College of Law Professor Brendan Francis Brown to sponsor a major annual lecture, colloquia, or other scholarly activities.

This year's lecture will feature Professor Danielle Conway, distinguished professor and former dean of Penn State Dickinson Law. Her lecture is titled, "Interrogating Filiopietism: Redesigning and Reconstructing Academic Freedom For Our Time."

Except for the intentional centering of the concept “filiopietism,” the words in the title of this talk are deceptively simple. Filiopietism—excessive or uncritical reverence for ancestors, forebears, and past traditions—is key to a discussion about redesigning and reconstructing academic freedom. Building on her 2027 AALS presidential theme, “Emancipate. Academic. Freedom.,” Conway focuses most heavily on formal legal education’s past traditions, many of which remain as a part of modern-day law school. She asks important questions about who gets to enter our legal education institutions, who gets to speak in these institutions, who gets the benefit and protections of academic freedom, and who are silenced in these institutions.

In Conway’s exploration, going back to the past is not the answer—the goal is to bring forward a new version of academic freedom that is more inclusive and more durable. Law schools are the very places where democracy is practiced and in which the rule of law is tested, expanded, and strengthened for the benefit of all. Because of this, academic freedom informs and supports the larger fundamental core value of freedom of expression. Ultimately, her scholarship and leadership indicate that, to be in this world and to be of this world, a redesign and reconstruction of the teaching and learning environment is needed. Only then can the concept of academic freedom that helps to protect the critical process of knowledge creation and dissemination for the benefit of us all truly flourish.

About the Speaker:

Danielle M. Conway is a distinguished professor of law at Penn State Dickinson Law. A leading expert in procurement law, entrepreneurship, intellectual property law, and licensing intellectual property, Conway joined Dickinson Law after serving for four years as dean of the University of Maine School of Law and 14 years on the faculty of the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa, William S. Richardson School of Law, where she was the inaugural Michael J. Marks Distinguished Professor of Business Law. Conway served as dean of the law school from 2019-2026.