Bryan Stevenson, noted death penalty lawyer and inaugural recipient of the Alexander Law Prize, spoke to the Santa Clara Law community in a Q&A session moderated by Professor David Ball on Thurday, January 14th, 2016.
Stevenson is a long-cherished friend of Santa Clara Law. He was the recipient of an honorary degree and commencement speaker in 2009. He was also the first recipient of the Katharine & George Alexander Law Prize in 2008. He is the founder of the Alabama-based Equal Justice Initiative.
Bryan Stevenson poses with Santa Clara Law 1L student Jonathan Choi, after the Q & A event.
His much-heralded TED talk, embedded above, received acclaim for the attention he brought to racial imbalances in the American justice system.
Later that evening, Stevenson spoke to Santa Clara University:
In his talk Thursday evening as part of SCU’s President’s Speaker Series, he noted that in the past 40 years, America has gone from imprisoning 300,000 people to 2.3 million currently – the highest rate in the world – and to having 70 million people with criminal records, which make rejoining society far harder.
He went on to describe four changes that he said those who seek justice must undertake. The first, he said, was to “get proximate” to the problem of injustice, by physically going to where injustice occurs and seeing and hearing the details in person.
“We don’t solve problems effectively when we stay too far away,” he said, adding that he himself was the beneficiary of such an approach as a child. Human-rights lawyers came to Stevenson’s childhood hometown, where schools were still segregated and black children could not attend high school. The lawyers sued to enforce integration, enabling a young Stevenson to go to high school and later college, law and graduate school. “Lawyers came to my community, and they got proximate,” he said.
The full feature story is available on Santa Clara University’s main website:
