On March 25, Cristina M. Rodriguez, Leighton Homer Surbeck Professor of Law at Yale Law School, delivered the Francis Biddle Memorial Lecture at Harvard Law, titled "Equality, the Polity, and Immigration."

Rodriguez' fields of research and teaching include constitutional law and theory, immigration law and policy, administrative law and process, and citizenship theory. In recent years, her work has focused on the relationships between administrative and executive governance and democratic politics and decisionmaking. She has turned to immigration law and related areas as vehicles through which to explore how the allocation and exercise of power (through federalism, the separation of powers, and the structure of the bureaucracy) shapes the management and resolution of legal and political conflict. Her work also has examined the effects of immigration on society and culture, as well as the legal and political strategies societies adopt to absorb immigrant populations.

The Biddle lecture is named for Francis Biddle, a 1911 HLS graduate, who served as chairman of the National Labor Relations Board, solicitor general, and U.S. attorney general during World War II. He was subsequently a judge at the International Military Tribunal at Nuremburg.

After Biddle’s death in 1968, his widow Katherine Garrison Chapin Biddle endowed the lecture in his honor, with a request that the selection of lecturers reflect “that civil liberties and civil rights were of particular concern to my husband and thus particularly appropriate subject areas for the lectures.”