2012 Center for Social Justice and Public Service Conference: Race, Sexuality, and Social Justice
April 13, 2012 – 8:30 a.m.
Bannan Hall, Santa Clara University
Schedule
Speaker Bios
This three-part conference, held at Santa Clara Law School on April 13, 2012, the Ohio State University Moritz College of Law in fall 2012, and University of Maryland School of Law in spring 2013, explored questions about the relation between race and sexuality. These conversations seek to develop new knowledge and fresh scholarship through which deeper understandings of ourselves and others, as well as new pathways for coalition, may emerge. While significantly an academic project, though not exclusively a project in law, the conferences aspire to generate concrete interventions for progressives to explore directions in politics, society, and law toward a more just future in both race and sexual equality.
The conversation continued in Maryland in 2013. Here is a link to those proceedings.
For more information, contact the Center for Social Justice and Public Service at socialjustice@scu.edu or 408.551.1720.
Conference Schedule
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8:00 am: |
Buffet Breakfast |
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8:45 am: |
Welcome: Marc Spindelman & Stephanie M. Wildman |
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9:00 – 9:30 am: |
Keynote Address: john powell |
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9:30 -11:00 am |
Panel I: Families and Youth: Conflicts Across Difference
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11:00 -11:15 am |
Break |
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11:15 am – Noon |
Authentic Conversations Across Difference: Are We Willing To Have Them? |
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Noon – 1:00 pm |
Box lunches and small group discussion about authentic conversation |
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1:00 -1:30 pm |
Reconvene with Frances Kendall and reports from the groups |
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1:30 – 3:00 pm |
Panel II: Identities, Culture, and Economic Justice: Facing Difference; Making Change
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3:00 – 3:15 pm |
Break |
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3:15- 4:45 pm |
Roundtable: Race and Sexuality: Hard Issues and Next Steps Adam Chang, Martha Ertman, john powell, Gerald Torres, Frank Valdes Moderator: Marc Spindelman |
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4:45 pm |
Reception |
Speaker Bios
Patricia A. Cain (Santa Clara University School of Law)
Patricia A. Cain (Santa Clara University School of Law)Patricia A. Cain is the Inez Mabie Distinguished Professor of Law at Santa Clara University and the Aliber Family Chair in Law, Emeritus, at the University of Iowa. She is a graduate of Vassar College and received her J.D. from the University of Georgia. She began her academic career at the University of Texas at Austin, where she was a member of the faculty for 17 years, before moving to Iowa in 1991, and then to Santa Clara in 2007. She is the author of Rainbow Rights: The Role of Lawyers and Courts in the Lesbian and Gay Civil Rights Movement (Westview Press) (2000) and Sexuality Law, 2nd Edition (Carolina Academic Press) (2009) (with Arthur S. Leonard).
Professor Cain is a member of the American Law Institute and a fellow of the American College of Trust and Estate Counsel. She teaches courses in federal taxation, property, wills and trusts, and sexuality and the law. Most of her recent scholarship focuses on tax planning for same-sex couples. She has recently launched a blog called Same Sex Tax Law. See law.scu.edu/category/same-sex-tax/
Adam R. Chang
Adam R. ChangAdam R. Chang is a third-year law student at the William S. Richardson School of Law (University of Hawai`i in Manoa). As the Community Organizer for the Lambda Law Student Association and a member of the Board of Citizens for Equal Rights, Adam regularly speaks about LGBT intersectionalities as well as HIV in the LGBT, Asian, and Pacific Islander communities in Honolulu and San Francisco. Adam recently externed with the Honorable Justice Sabrina S. McKenna, the first openly gay Supreme Court Justice in Hawai`i and will serve on the Board of the American Civil Liberties Union of Hawai`i beginning January 2012.
Adam has written on the development of “critical coalition theory” stemming from a growing relationship between the Muslim and LGBT communities in the United States, and organized a related panel titled “Giving Voice: Overcoming Islamophobia and Homophobia.”
Adam received his Bachelor’s degree from the University of California in Davis, majoring in African Studies and International Relations. Adam has worked for Refugees International in Washington D.C., as well as for Upwardly Global in San Francisco, a non-profit group helping immigrants succeed in the workplace. Last summer, Adam received the Samuel L. Cohen Human Rights Fellowship to work at the National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights in Oakland, CA, where he worked to address Islamophobia in immigrant communities.
Martha Ertman (University of Maryland Law School)
Martha Ertman (University of Maryland Law School)Martha Ertman is on the faculty of the University of Maryland Law School. She teaches Contracts and Commercial Law, and writes about the reach of contract theory and doctrine, in particular as it relates to intimacy and other issues relating to human bodies. In addition to editing Rethinking Commodification: Cases and Readings in Law and Culture (with Joan Williams) (2005), recent pieces explore feminist perspectives on contract law and contractual aspects of polygamy. She is currently working on a book, Love & Contracts: The Heart of the Deal.
Angela P. Harris (UC Davis School of Law)
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Angela P. Harris (UC Davis School of Law)Angela P. Harris joined the UC Davis School of Law faculty in 2011. She began her career at the UC Berkeley School of Law in 1989, and has been a visiting professor at the law schools of Stanford, Yale, and Georgetown. In 2010–11, at the State University of New York–University at Buffalo School of Law, she served as vice dean of research and faculty development. She writes widely in the field of critical legal theory, examining how law sometimes reinforces and sometimes challenges subordination on the basis of race, gender, sexuality, class, and other dimensions of power and identity.
Harris received her bachelor’s degree from the University of Michigan and a master’s degree in social science (with a specialization in the sociology of culture) from the University of Chicago, where she also received her J.D. She clerked for Judge Joel M. Flaum on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, and then briefly practiced with the firm of Morrison & Foerster in San Francisco. Along with her friend Luke Cole, she taught the first seminar on environmental justice at Berkeley Law. At the University at Buffalo, along with Professor Stephanie Phillips, she pioneered a seminar called “Mindfulness and Professional Identity: Becoming a Lawyer While Keeping Your Values Intact.” She is the recipient of the Rutter Award for Distinction in Teaching from Berkeley Law.
Harris is the prolific co-author of casebooks, including Criminal Law: Cases and Materials; Race and Races: Cases and Materials for a Diverse America; Gender and Law; and Economic Justice. Among other awards for her mentorship of students and junior faculty, she received the 2008 Clyde Ferguson Award from the Minority Section of the Association of American Law Schools.
Frances E. Kendall (Diversity Consultant)
Frances E. Kendall (Diversity Consultant)Frances E. Kendall, Ph.D., is a nationally known consultant who has focused for more than 30 years on organizational change, diversity, and white privilege. Her clients include colleges and universities, corporations, and nonprofits. Because she believes that personal and organizational change is possible, she is committed to facilitating the core changes necessary to create work environments that are hospitable to all people. Author of Diversity in the Classroom and Understanding White Privilege: Creating Pathways to Authentic Relationships Across Race, Kendall received her M.S. from Bank Street College of Education and her Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She was recently named a Pioneer of Diversity by Profiles in Diversity Journal, and was selected as an inaugural Legend of Diversity by the International Society of Diversity and Inclusion Professionals.
Shannon Price Minter (National Center for Lesbian Rights)
Shannon Price Minter (National Center for Lesbian Rights)Shannon Price Minter is the legal director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights, one of the nation’s leading advocacy organizations for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people. Minter argued the California marriage equality case before the California Supreme Court and has litigated many other impact cases throughout the country. He is the co-author of Family Law for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender People (West 2011) and the co-editor of Transgender Rights (University of Minnesota Press 2006). He has taught at Berkeley, Stanford, Santa Clara, the University of San Francisco, Golden Gate, and Whittier law schools. Minter serves on the boards of Equality California, Faith in America, Gender Spectrum, FORGE, and the Transgender Law & Policy Institute. He is originally from Texas and received his J.D. from Cornell Law School in 1993.
Mignon R. Moore (UCLA Department of Sociology)
Mignon R. Moore (UCLA Department of Sociology)Mignon R. Moore is associate professor of sociology at UCLA. Before joining the UC system, she completed her graduate work at the University of Chicago, held a Ford Foundation postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Michigan, and taught for five years at Columbia University. Professor Moore is the recipient of several honors, including a visiting scholar position at the Russell Sage Foundation in New York, an early Faculty Career Award from the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, and a national award from the Human Rights Campaign for her professional work and outreach with LGBT communities of color. In 2011–12 she was elected chair of the Race, Gender and Class section of the American Sociological Association.
Moore’s research lies in the fields of sexuality, race, family, gender, aging, and adolescence, and has been published in such refereed journals as the American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Journal of Marriage and Family, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Journal of Lesbian Studies, and the Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race.Her 2011 book, Invisible Families: Gay Identities, Relationships and Motherhood among Black Women (University of California Press), examines how lesbian women of color form and raise families and experience their gay identities while retaining connections to their racial/ethnic communities.
john a. powell (Moritz School of Law, Ohio State University)
john a. powell (Moritz School of Law, Ohio State University)john a. powell is an internationally recognized authority in the areas of civil rights, civil liberties, and issues relating to race, ethnicity, poverty and the law. He is the executive director of the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at Ohio State University. He also holds the Williams Chair in Civil Rights and Civil Liberties at the Moritz College of Law. He has written extensively on a number of issues including racial justice and regionalism, concentrated poverty and urban sprawl, the link between housing and school segregation, opportunity-based housing, gentrification, disparities in the criminal justice system, voting rights, affirmative action in the United States, South Africa, and Brazil, and racial and ethnic identity and the current demographic shift.
Previously, he founded and directed the Institute on Race and Poverty at the University of Minnesota. He also served as the national legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, where he was instrumental in developing educational adequacy theory. Prior to that he served as the director of Legal Services of Greater Miami. He has worked and lived in Africa, where he was a consultant to the governments of Mozambique and South Africa. He has also lived and worked in India and done work in South America and Europe. He is one of the co-founders of Poverty and Race Research Action Council and serves on the board of several national organizations. Professor powell has taught at Columbia University School of Law, Harvard Law School, University of Miami School of Law, American University, the University of San Francisco School of Law, and the University of Minnesota Law. He joined the faculty at OSU in 2002.
Russell K. Robinson (UC Berkeley School of Law)
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Russell K. Robinson (UC Berkeley School of Law)Russell K. Robinson graduated with honors from Harvard Law School (1998), after receiving his B.A. summa cum laude from Hampton University (1995). Robinson clerked for Judge Dorothy Nelson of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals (1998–99) and for Justice Stephen Breyer of the U.S. Supreme Court (2000–01). He has also worked for the U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Legal Counsel (1999–2000) and the firm of Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer and Feld in Los Angeles, practicing entertainment law (2001–02).
Professor Robinson’s scholarly and teaching interests include antidiscrimination law, race and sexuality, law and psychology, constitutional law, and media and entertainment law. His publications include: “Casting and Caste-ing: Reconciling Artistic Freedom and Antidiscrimination Norms,” 95 Cal L. Rev. 1 (2007); “Uncovering Covering,” 101 Nw. U. L. Rev. 1809 (2007); “Perceptual Segregation,” 108 Colum. L. Rev. 1093 (2008); “Structural Dimensions of Romantic Preferences,” 76 Fordham L. Rev. 2787 (2008); and “Racing the Closet,” 61 Stan. L. Rev. 1463 (2009). He is also working on an article regarding the legal regulation of sexuality in prison, which will be published in California Law Review in 2011.
Margaret Russell (Santa Clara University School of Law)
Margaret Russell (Santa Clara University School of Law)Margaret Russell is on the faculty of the Santa Clara University School of Law, where she teaches courses in constitutional law, civil procedure, civil rights and civil liberties. Her most recent work is The First Amendment: Freedom of Assembly and Petition (Prometheus Books 2010), of which she is the editor. She also writes and speaks frequently on current developments in racial justice, marriage equality, and freedom of expression. Russell is a member of the American Law Institute. She serves on the boards of the national American Civil Liberties Union and the Habeas Corpus Resource Center. She is also a member of two Northern District of CA judicial nomination and magistrate selection committees. Russell received J.D. and J.S.M. degrees from Stanford Law School and an A.B. cum laude from Princeton University.
Dean Spade (Seattle University School of Law)
Dean Spade (Seattle University School of Law)Dean Spade is an assistant professor at the Seattle University School of Law, teaching Administrative Law, Poverty Law, and Law and Social Movements. In 2002, he founded the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, a nonprofit collective that provides free legal help to intersex, trans and gender nonconforming low-income people and people of color, and works to build racial and economic justice-centered trans resistance. He is the author of Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics and the Limits of Law (South End Press, 2011).
Marc Spindelman (Michael E. Moritz College of Law)
Marc Spindelman (Michael E. Moritz College of Law)Marc Spindelman is a graduate of the University of Michigan Law School. Following law school, Professor Spindelman clerked for Judge (now Chief Judge) Alice M. Batchelder on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, and was an associate at Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft in New York City.
After leaving Wall Street, he was a Reginald F. Lewis Fellow for Law Teaching at Harvard Law School, taught as a visiting instructor at the University of Michigan Law School, and spent two years as a Greenwall Fellow in Bioethics and Health Policy at Georgetown University and Johns Hopkins University. While a Greenwall Fellow, Professor Spindelman was also an adjunct professor of law at the Georgetown University Law Center, a faculty associate at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health, and a research fellow at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research.
Since joining the faculty at the Moritz College of Law, Professor Spindelman has also been a visiting professor of law at the Georgetown University Law Center (2005), and at the University of Michigan Law School (2007–08).
His recent scholarship focuses on certain problems of inequality, chiefly in the context of sex and death. He regularly teaches courses on Constitutional Law (including Constitutional Law Theory), Family Law, Bioethics and Public Health Ethics, Health Law, and Sexual Violence.
Gerald Torres (University of Texas School of Law)
Gerald Torres (University of Texas School of Law)Gerald Torres holds the Bryant Smith Chair at the University of Texas at Austin and is former president of the Association of American Law Schools. He has visited at the Stanford Law School and at the Harvard Law School, where he served as the Oneida Nation Visiting Professor of Law. He served as counsel to Attorney General Janet Reno on environmental matters and Indian affairs at the U.S. Department of Justice. He also served as a consultant to several Indian tribes. He has written on Indian law, environmental law, and race and the law, and is co-author of The Miner’s Canary: Enlisting Race, Resisting Power, Transforming Democracy (with Harvard Law School Professor Lani Guinier, Harvard University Press), which Publishers Weekly called “one of the most provocative and challenging books on race produced in years.”
Francisco Valdes (University of Miami)
Francisco Valdes (University of Miami)Francisco Valdes earned a B.A. in 1978 from UC Berkeley, a J.D. with honors in 1984 from the University of Florida College of Law, and a J.S.M. in 1991 and a J.S.D. in 1994 from Stanford Law School.
Valdes’s work focuses on constitutional law and theory, Latina/o legal studies, critical outsider jurisprudence, and queer scholarship. Since 1995, Valdes has contributed regularly to LatCrit symposia and publications to help elucidate LatCrit approaches to knowledge production, critical theory, and academic activism. During this time, Valdes’s work on constitutional theory and queer scholarship also has been published in numerous law reviews, other academic journals, and various book anthologies. In 2002, Valdes edited (with Angela Harris and Jerome Culp) the collection of essays Crossroads, Histories and Directions: A New Critical Race Theory.
In 2002, Valdes received the Clyde Ferguson Award of the American Association of Law Schools, Minority Groups Section. In 2004, he also received the Extraordinary Service Award from the National Conference of the Regional People of Color Scholarship Conferences. Most recently, Valdes received in 2010 the Great Teacher Award from the Society of American Law Teachers. He regularly speaks at academic conferences and similar events, and teaches in the areas of U.S. constitutional law, outsider jurisprudence, law and popular culture, and comparative law.
