A law professor and expert on Abraham Lincoln will present “Lincoln, West Virginia, and the Law of Secession,” at noon Wednesday, Sept. 14 in the Marlyn E. Lugar Courtroom at West Virginia University’s College of Law.

Roger Billings, a professor at the Northern Kentucky University’s Salmon P. Chase College of Law, will use the Lincoln administration and Civil War history – including the creation of the state of West Virginia – as a spring-board for discussion on international law as it applies to secession today.

The event, which is free and open to the public, commemorates Constitution Day. A webcast can be viewed at www.law.wvu.edu/constitution2011.

“The secession of the South resulted in a new government, the Confederate States of America, which President Lincoln studiously refused to recognize,” Billings said. Recognition by Great Britain of a separate government, however, could have ended the Civil War in favor of South, he said.

Billings received his law degree from the University of Akron. He has written four textbooks and has participated in lawyer exchanges in Munich, Germany; Moscow and Salzburg, Austria. In 2004, he was designated a Fulbright Distinguished Professor at the University of Salzburg and has returned there each year as a visiting professor, teaching international trade law.

Billings collects books about Abraham Lincoln, whose life and career he has made a life-long study. He has conducted a long-term study of Lincoln’s travels to the Civil War battlefields. Currently his research focuses on Lincoln’s law career, and his book, Abraham Lincoln, Esquire: The Legal Career of America’s Greatest President, co-edited with Frank Williams, was published in 2010 by the University Press of Kentucky.

His favorite book is David Donald’s Lincoln. He has spoken about Lincoln to audiences across the country, including the New York City Bar Association, the Filson Historical Society, the Louisville Civil War Roundtable, the Illinois Judges Association and the Illinois State Historical Society.

Constitution Day, or Citizenship Day, is an American federal holiday that recognizes the ratification of the U.S. Constitution and all those who have become citizens. It is observed on Sept. 17, the day the U.S. Constitutional Convention signed the Constitution in 1787.

The law establishing the holiday was created in 2004 with the passage of an amendment by Sen. Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia. Before the law was enacted, the holiday was known as Citizenship Day.

-WVU-

bc/09/08/11

CONTACT: Brian Caudill; College of Law
304.293.7439; brian.caudill@mail.wvu.edu

Follow @WVUToday on Twitter.