California Superior Court Judge James Rogan will speak on Feb. 18 in the Gillespie room of the Dow Center at 4 p.m. His talk will focus on his career and most recent book, “And Then I Met…Stories of Growing Up, Meeting Famous People, and Annoying the Hell Out of Them.”
A reception and book signing will be held after the talk at 5 p.m.
Rogan is a former member of the United States House of Representatives and served on the Judiciary Committee during former President Bill Clinton’s impeachment hearings. In 2001, Rogan spoke in Hillsdale’s Phillips Auditorium about his role in Clinton’s impeachment and the decisions he made that eventually cost him his seat in Congress.
When deciding to move forward with the impeachment process, Rogan received support from many friends but spoke specifically of the advice he received from President Larry Arnn.
Rogan quoted Arnn as saying, “You know, congressmen lose elections all the time. It’s very rare, though, that congressmen have the privilege of losing an election in defense of the Constitution.”
“Those words carried me through that difficult period,” Rogan said during his speech.
He ended his 2001 speech with a lesson in leadership, “The moment a politician decides that it’s more important to be re-elected than to stand his ground, he becomes weak and ineffective. The willingness to lose elections is a necessary prerequisite of statesmanship.”
Rogan wrote his book, “Catching Our Flag: Behind the Scenes of a Presidential Impeachment” based on a diary he kept during Clinton’s impeachment process.
California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger appointed Rogan to his current position as a judge on the Superior Court of California in 2006. He also holds a teaching position at the Fowler School of Law.
