Justice Roberts Room
Wachovia Building
123 South Broad Street

With a special lecture from Harvey Glickman, Professor Emeritus at Haverford College.

Dr. Glickman earned his Ph.D from Harvard and joined the Harverford faculty in 1960. He also taught at Princeton University, Dar Es Salaam University, Cape Town University, University of California, Berkeley, University of Pennsylvania, and Hebrew University, Jerusalem. He is the author of many scholarly articles. Dr. Glickman served as Secretary of the American Political Science Association and as consultant to several U.S. government agencies. He is currently a Fellow of the Foreign Policy Association.

Among his recent courses, Dr. Glickman has taught Challenges to Contemporary American Foreign Policy and U.S. Foreign Policy in the New World Disorder.

Members will be invited to participate in the discussion following Dr. Glickman's presentation, to elect JSPAN officers and board members, and to vote on policy statements.

Admission is free for JSPAN members, $10 for non-members,admission fee is applicable towards a new membership.

Advance reservations are mandatory. Please RSVP by calling 215-635-2554 or sending an email to jspan@jspan.org.

Refreshments will be served.

Facts to Consider:

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While there are bills in both houses of the state legislature, both have been stuck in the repsective judiciary committees. HB 871 and SB 1002 seek to provide "a limit on handgun purchases and sales; establishing the Violence Prevention Fund; and further providing for municipal regulation of firearms and ammunition."

JSPAN adopted general principles on immigration to support. These include, but are not limited to, expedient family unification and the creation of legal avenues for workers who wish to migrate to the United States in an orderly manner. It would include border protection policies that are consistent with humanitarian values and with the need to treat all individuals with respect even while preventing their illegal entry.

More than 200,000 people have died and over two million people have been displaced since the violence first erupted in 2003. Both the U.S. House of Representatives have called for a stronger peace keeping mission and approved billions of dollars in aid to help keep U.N. peacekeeping forces on the ground.

Judge Lawrence Kaplan, moderator for the event, greeted the crowd and explained the event was not a debate, as had been reported in the media, but was meant as a discussion on the capital punishment issue, especially in light of a number of recent capital cases both on the national and local level. Judge Kaplan spoke briefly about his interactions with JSPAN policy expert Ellen Berkowitz and the mission JSPAN has undertaken in opposing the death penalty.

Politicians often use their first days in office to make use of some of the political capital they earned from their election, and their initial moves frequently set the tone for the upcoming term. In 1933, Franklin Roosevelt famously used his first 100 days in office to enact some of the most important programs of the New Deal, and was able to alleviate some of the hardships produced by the Depression.

At first glance, it looks like Ehud Olmert and his newly appointed Defense Minister Amir Peretz have proceeded more cautiously. But it’s possible that some of their first moves – moves that have been overshadowed by the press coverage of Hamas and the conflict with Iran over nuclear weapons – could have important consequences.

Imagine if there was a small but significant minority of Americans whose loyalty was not to the United States but to the land that constitutes the United States. In one way it is not that hard to picture. Think of Wyoming, Vermont, and California and those other states that just knock your eyes out with their natural beauty. Nobody who visits those places can feel anything other than wonder and pride that such splendor exists in our country.

But take it a step farther. Imagine that there were Americans who said that they felt no attachment to the United States and no loyalty to its government or Constitution but only a religious connection to those "mountains, prairies and amber waves of grain." Not only that, they despised the government -- not just its policies but the government itself -- and considered it illegitimate.