Senator Bob Corker will address the legal community, and the Liberty Bell Award will be presented at the Annual Law Day Breakfast on May 18. The breakfast will be held at The Westin, 801 Pine Street, Chattanooga, Tn. 37402.
In 2012, Tennesseans elected Senator Corker to his second term in the U.S. Senate, where he serves as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee and is an active member of the Banking Committee and Budget Committee. Senator Corker was Tennessee’s commissioner of finance and mayor of Chattanooga, but he spent most of his life in business.
Each year, the Chattanooga Bar Association honors an outstanding citizen in the Chattanooga area with the prestigious Liberty Bell Award for public service. The purpose of the Liberty Bell Award is to recognize community service that has strengthened the America system of freedom under law. In selecting the recipient of this award, the Chattanooga Bar Association considers such service as including activities which (1) promotes better understanding of our Constitution and the Bill of Rights; (2) encourage a greater respect for the law and the courts; (3) stimulates a deeper sense of individual responsibility so that citizens recognize their duties as well as their rights; (4) contribute to the effective functioning of our institutions of government; and (5) foster a better understanding and appreciation of the rule of law. Lawyers and judges are not eligible for the award; however, all other fields of endeavor are intended for the inclusion, namely education, business, sciences, communications, labor, government, religion, professions and youth organizations.
This year’s Law Day theme is Separation of Powers: Framework for Freedom. The U.S. Constitution established a system of government with distinct and independent branches—legislative, executive, and judicial—and it gave Congress, the Presidency, and a Supreme Court separate and distinct powers, so that these three separate branches share power and serve as checks on the powers of the others. “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition,” James Madison explained in Federalist 51, because he believed that the Constitution’s principles of separation of powers and checks & balances preserve political liberty. By preventing any one branch from becoming too powerful, they provide a framework for freedom.