Annual Boden Lecture: Alan Jenkins

May 12, 2026
4:00 to 5:00 p.m., lecture, immediately followed by a public reception.

Ray and Kay Eckstein Hall
Lubar Center
1215 West Michigan Street
Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Complimentary parking is available on site.

1 CLE credit

Alan Jenkins
Harvard Law School

Why Stories Matter: Narrative, Law, and Justice. Stories shape law and policy and can help realize justice. Drawing on a range of legal topics, this lecture will show how justices, advocates, and activists use framing and narrative to define whose experiences count, what history means, and which futures seem possible. Tracing opinions, briefs, oral arguments, and public campaigns, the talk will reveal how metaphor, moral framing, and competing Reconstruction narratives influence doctrine on voting rights, criminal punishment, and equality. The lecture invites lawyers, scholars, and community members to become more self-aware storytellers—able not only to critique dominant narratives, but to craft new ones that advance justice in the courts and beyond.

Alan Jenkins is professor of practice at Harvard Law School, where he teaches courses including Supreme Court Jurisprudence, Race and the Law, and Communication. His immediate previous position was president and cofounder of The Opportunity Agenda, a social justice communication lab. Jenkins has held positions as an attorney in the Office of the Solicitor General of the United States, as Director of Human Rights at the Ford Foundation, and as associate Counsel to the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. He is a frequent commentator in print, broadcast, and social media, and is the coauthor of 1/6: The Graphic Novel. Jenkins served as a law clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Harry A. Blackmun and to U.S. District Judge Robert L. Carter. He holds a B.A. in Psychology and Social Relations from Harvard College, an M.A. in Media Studies from the New School for Public Engagement, and a J.D. from Harvard Law School.

This annual lecture remembers the late Robert F. Boden, dean of Marquette Law School from 1965 to 1984.