Marian Miner Cook
Athenaeum

A distinctive
feature of social and
cultural life at CMC

 

Reverence for Law

Wed, September 23, 2026
Dinner Program
John Roth

Sixty years after joining the CMC faculty, John K. Roth returns to explore how the rule of law fares in the United States as the crucial 2026 and 2028 elections approach. With American democracy endangered by corruption that uses and abuses law, Roth recalls Abraham Lincoln’s 1838 Lyceum Address, using it as a point of departure to encourage renewed commitment to reverence for law. Reverence is a virtue. As Lincoln and the nation’s founders understood, a democratic republic will not long endure if virtue, including reverence for law, is in short supply, especially among its leaders. No Athenaeum talk can solve that problem, but this one makes a start. 

John K. Roth is the Edward J. Sexton Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Claremont McKenna College, where he taught for forty years. He is the author or editor of more than sixty books, including most recently Saving the American Dream: Meditations for Dark Times

During his CMC tenure, he joined Gordon Bjork and the late Ward Elliott to found the College’s PPE (Philosophy, Politics, and Economics) Program. The founding director of the Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights (now the Mgrublian Center for Human Rights), Roth was named the 1988 US National Professor of the Year by the Council for Advancement and Support of Education and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. 

Roth’s CMC honors include the George C. S. Benson Distinguished Service Award, the highest bestowed by the Claremont McKenna College Alumni Association; the Donald C. McKenna Humanitarian Award; and induction into the Claremont-Mudd-Scripps Athletics Hall of Fame. 

Professor Roth’s Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Mgrublian Center for Human Rights.

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Marian Miner Cook Athenaeum

Claremont McKenna College
385 E. Eighth Street
Claremont, CA 91711