The 2025 Roger Wilkins Lecture will be delivered by former U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) Special Counsel Jack Smith. The veteran prosecutor was appointed in 2022 by then-Attorney General Merrick Garland to investigate two major criminal charges against former President Donald Trump, including efforts to overturn the 2020 election and the mishandling of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago.
He resigned in January 2025 after moving to dismiss both cases citing barriers of prosecuting a sitting president following Trump’s reelection.
The lecture is called “Democracy, Integrity, and the Rule of Law.”
The event takes place Tuesday, September 16, at 4:30 p.m. at the Harris Theatre on George Mason University’s Fairfax Campus. The event is free and is open to all students, faculty, staff, alumni, and members of the George Mason community. Details and directions are at this website.
The annual Roger Wilkins Lecture was founded shortly after Wilkins’ death in 2017 and is cosponsored by the Philosophy, Politics, and Economics Program and the Schar School of Policy and Government.
Wilkins, who served at assistant attorney general under President Lyndon B. Johnson from 1966 to 1969, concluded his career in academia as a Robinson Professor of History and American Culture at George Mason for nearly 20 years.
In addition to his career in law and academia, Wilkins was also an influential journalist, writing columns for the Washington Post and the New York Times. He earned a Pulitzer Prize for Public Service at the Post in 1973—with Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein—for his coverage of the Watergate scandal.
In an interview, Smith said he was going to discuss “the rule of law, the importance of integrity in public service, and the traditions of the Department of Justice as well as some of the challenges our country is facing with the rule of law—and how I think we should face them.”
As it happens, Smith is very familiar with the Wilkins Lecture namesake.
“Roger Wilkins is one of the reasons I was attracted to doing this event,” he said. “He’s a legend at DOJ. He was one of the first African American high-ranking officials at DOJ in the ‘60s. He was also involved in the implementation of the Civil Rights Act and the passage of the Voting Rights Act, two of the most important statutes we have.”
Smith is also aware of Wilkins’ work as a journalist, particularly his coverage of the Watergate controversy that brought down the presidency of Richard M. Nixon.
“As a corruption prosecutor,” Smith said, “that’s something I was steeped in. So yes, I’m very honored to be speaking at a lecture in his name.”