"The Reader" author to discuss law and conscience

“What would you have done?”

It"s the question Hanna Schmitz asks the judge interrogating her as she sits on trial for her role in letting Jewish women prisoners burn to death while she was a concentration camp guard during World War II.

It"s also the question readers surely find themselves asking as narrator Michael Berg recounts his relationship with Hanna in The Reader, a best-selling novel about law and morality, love and betrayal and lingering guilt, written by professor Bernhard Schlink of Humboldt University in Germany.

Winner of the Boston Review"s Fisk Fiction Prize and an Oprah Book Club selection, The Reader was adapted into a 2008 movie for which Kate Winslet won a best actress Academy Award.

The book"s underlying themes and challenges are the types of dilemmas Schlink plans to address when he gives the Tulane Law School Eason-Weinmann Lecture on Tuesday (March 24). The public lecture, titled “At Wit"s End: On Conscience at the Fringes of Law,” is scheduled for 5 p.m. in the Wendell H. Gauthier Appellate Moot Court Room 110, with a reception following the lecture.

Schlink, a former judge, is one of Germany"s most distinguished experts on constitutional and public international law. He is a law faculty member at Humboldt University in Berlin. He"s also one of his country"s most successful novelists and its first author to lead The New York Times Best Seller list.

The Eason-Weinmann Lecture is funded by the Eason Weinmann Center for International and Comparative Law which was created in 1981 with the help of a generous gift from John Giffen Weinmann and Virginia Eason Weinmann, his wife. John Weinmann, a 1952 Tulane law graduate and member of the law school"s Hall of Fame, is a former chair of the Board of Tulane.