Social Justice Diversity Lectures
Spring 2016: Justin Driver, University of Chicago Law School
Fall 2015: Jennifer Chacón, UC Irvine School of Law
Spring 2015: Daria Roithmayr, USC Law School
Fall 2014: Ian Haney López, UC Berkeley Law School
Spring 2014: Beverly I. Moran, Vanderbilt University Law School
Fall 2013: Cynthia Lee, George Washington University Law School
Spring 2013: Beverly I. Moran, Vanderbilt University Law School
Fall 2012: Jerry Kang, UCLA School of Law
Spring 2012: Margaret Chon, Seattle University School of Law
Fall 2011: Gerald Torres, University of Texas School of Law
Spring 2011: Angela Riley, UCLA School of Law
Fall 2010: Darren Hutchinson, American University Washington College of Law
Spring 2010: Robert Chang, Seattle University School of Law
Fall 2009: Devon Carbado, UCLA School of Law
Spring 2009: Tanya Hernandez, George Washington University
Fall 2008: Sylvia Lazos, UNLV Boyd School of Law
Spring 2008: Laura Gómez, University of New Mexico School of Law
Fall 2007: Dean Christopher Edley, U.C. Berkeley Law School (Boalt Hall)
Spring 2007: Berta Hernández-Truyol, University of Florida Levin College of Law
Fall 2006: Mari Matsuda, Georgetown University Law Center
Spring 2006: Elvia Arriola, Northern Illinois University School of Law
Fall 2005: john a. powell, Ohio State University Moritz College of Law
Fall 2005: Charles Ogletree, Jr., Harvard Law School
Spring 2005: David Cruz, USC Law School
Fall 2004: Cheryl Harris, UCLA School of Law
Fall 2004: Lani Guinier, Harvard Law School
Spring 2004: Neil Gotanda, Western State University College of Law>
Fall 2003: Vernellia R. Randall, University of Dayton School of Law
Spring 2003: Juan Perea, University of Florida, Levin School of Law
Fall 2002: Marc Fajer, University of Miami School of Law
Spring 2016 Social Justice Diversity Lecture – Justin Driver – University of Chicago Law School
“Recognizing Race”
Professor Justin Driver received his undergraduate degree from Brown University, a master’s degree in teaching from Duke University, and a master’s degree in modern history from Magdalen College, University of Oxford, where he studied as a Marshall Scholar. In 2004, he graduated from Harvard Law School, where he was an Articles Editor and Book Reviews Chair of the Harvard Law Review. Professor Driver served as a law clerk to Judge Merrick B. Garland, United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, and Justice Sandra Day O’Connor and Justice Stephen Breyer of the Supreme Court of the United States.
Professor Driver’s principal research interests include constitutional law, constitutional theory, and the intersection of race with legal institutions. Prior to joining the University of Chicago Law School faculty, Driver was a visiting professor at Harvard, Stanford, and the University of Virginia.
Fall 2015 Social Justice Diversity Lecture – Professor Jennifer Chacón – UC Irvine School of Law
"The Naturalization of Racial Profiling"
Jennifer M. Chacón holds a J.D. from Yale Law School (1998) and an A.B. in International Relations from Stanford University (1994). She is currently Professor in the School of Law at the University of California, Irvine, where she is also the former Senior Associate Dean of Academic Affairs. She is the author of more than 30 law review articles, book chapters, expert commentaries and shorter articles and essays discussing immigration, criminal law, constitutional law and citizenship issues.
Professor Chacón has served on the Nominations Committee of the Law and Society Association and chaired the 2014 Immigration Law Professors Workshop Planning Committee. She is admitted to practice in New York and is a member of the New York City Bar Association, where she has served on the Committee on State Affairs and has contributed to the work of the Immigration and Nationality Law Committee.
Professor Chacόn was an associate with the New York law firm of Davis Polk and Wardwell from 1999-2003. She clerked for the Honorable Sidney R. Thomas of the Ninth Circuit from 1998-1999. Before teaching at U.C. Irvine, she was a professor at the U.C. Davis School of Law, and she has held visiting appointments at Harvard Law School and Stanford Law School.
Spring 2015 Social Justice Diversity Lecture – Daria Roithmayr, USC Law School
“Reproducing Racism: How Everyday Choices Lock In White Advantage”
Daria Roithmayr teaches and writes in the area of critical race theory and comparative law, focusing on the area of structural racial inequality in the U.S. and South Africa. Her interdisciplinary work draws from complex systems theory, antitrust, law and economics, sociology, history and a range of other areas. She joined USC Law in fall 2006 to teach Civil Procedure and Critical Race Theory.
Before joining USC Law, Professor Roithmayr taught for nine years at the University of Illinois College of Law. She has also visited at Michigan, Minnesota, and the University of Pretoria in South Africa. Among her publications are the forthcoming Them That’s Got Shall Get: Why Racial Inequality Persists, “Locked in Segregation” (Virginia Journal of Social Policy and Law, 2004); and “Access, Adequacy, and Equality: The Constitutionality of School Fee Financing in Public Education” (South African Journal of Human Rights, 2003). She is currently working on a book that analogizes persistent racial inequality to persistent market monopoly.
Professor Roithmayr received her B.S. from UCLA, and her J.D., magna cum laude, from the Georgetown University Law Center, where she was a member of Order of the Coif and served as senior notes editor of the Georgetown Law Journal. She clerked for The Honorable Marvin J. Garbis, judge of the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland. Professor Roithmayr twice served as special counsel to Senator Edward Kennedy on Supreme Court nominations, and in 2005 was special counsel for People for the American Way, advising the group on the U.S. Supreme Court nomination of Judge John Roberts. She also served as special counsel for the Attorney General of Mississippi on the state’s anti-tobacco lawsuit. Since 2000, she has been a consultant for the Education Rights Project in South Africa.
Fall 2014 Social Justice Diversity Lecture – Ian F. Haney-López
“Dog Whistle Politics: Race and Surging Wealth Inequality for All”
Ian Haney López is the John H. Boalt Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, where he teaches in the areas of race and constitutional law. His current research emphasizes the connection between racial divisions and growing wealth inequality in the United States. His most recent book, Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class, lays bare how conservative politicians exploit racial pandering to convince many voters to support policies that ultimately favor the very rich and hurt everyone else.
Ian is also the author of White by Law as well as Racism on Trial, books that explore the legal construction of race. A constitutional law scholar, he has written extensively on how once-promising legal responses to racism have been turned into restrictions on efforts to promote integration. He has been a visiting law professor at Yale, New York University, and Harvard, where he served as the Ralph E. Shikes Visiting Fellow in Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. He holds a master’s in history from Washington University, a master’s in public policy from Princeton, and a law degree from Harvard. In 2011, Ian received an Alphonse Fletcher Fellowship, awarded to scholars whose work furthers the integration goals of Brown v. Board of Education, and he currently serves as a Senior Fellow at Demos.
Spring 2014 Social Justice Diversity Lecture – Beverly I. Moran, Vanderbilt University Law School
“Excellence and Diversity”
Beverly I. Moran is a leading tax scholar whose work includes a path-breaking analysis of the disparate impact of the federal tax code on blacks and an innovative text on the taxation of charities and other exempt organizations. Her research interests also include law and development, interdisciplinary scholarship, and comparative law. Professor Moran has won a number of teaching awards and grants, including a Fulbright award, a grant from the Annie E. Casey Foundation, and a grant from the Ford Foundation. She has served on the executive committee of the Association of American Law Schools, the Board of Governors of the Society of American Law Teachers, and as the first director of the Vanderbilt University Center for the Americas. Professor Moran has been a visiting professor at the University of Colorado, the University of Asmara in Eritrea, the People’s University in Beijing, the Peking University, and the University of Giessen in Germany. She was a 2008–09 American Council on Education Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Fall 2013 Social Justice Diversity Lecture – Cynthia Lee, George Washington University Law School
“Making Race Salient: Trayvon Martin and Implicit Bias in a Not yet Post-Racial Society”
Cynthia Lee is the Charles Kennedy Poe Research Professor of Law at The George Washington University Law School where she teaches Criminal Law, Criminal Procedure, Adjudicatory Criminal Procedure, and Professional Responsibility. She is currently visiting at UC Hastings College of Law. She is the author of Murder and the Reasonable Man: Passion and Fear in the Criminal Courtroom(NYU Press 2003), a book that examines the reasonableness requirement in the doctrines of self-defense and provocation, and Criminal Law: Cases and Materials (with Angela Harris) (West 2d ed). She is also the editor of Searches and Seizures: The Fourth Amendment, Its Constitutional History and the Contemporary Debate (Prometheus Books 2011).
Spring 2013 Social Justice Diversity Lecture – Beverly I. Moran, Vanderbilt University Law School
“Excellence and Diversity”
Beverly I. Moran is a leading tax scholar whose work includes a path-breaking analysis of the disparate impact of the federal tax code on blacks and an innovative text on the taxation of charities and other exempt organizations. Her research interests also include law and development, interdisciplinary scholarship, and comparative law. Professor Moran has won a number of teaching awards and grants, including a Fulbright award, a grant from the Annie E. Casey Foundation, and a grant from the Ford Foundation. She has served on the executive committee of the Association of American Law Schools, the Board of Governors of the Society of American Law Teachers, and as the first director of the Vanderbilt University Center for the Americas. Professor Moran has been a visiting professor at the University of Colorado, the University of Asmara in Eritrea, the People’s University in Beijing, the Peking University, and the University of Giessen in Germany. She was a 2008–09 American Council on Education Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Fall 2012 Social Justice Diversity Lecture – Jerry Kang, UCLA School of Law
“Thinking Race: Implicit Bias and Stereotype Threat”
Jerry Kang is Professor of Law at UCLA School of Law. He is also Professor of Asian American Studies (by courtesy) at UCLA, and the inaugural Korea Times — Hankook Ilbo Chair in Korean American Studies.
Professor Jerry Kang’s teaching and research interests include civil procedure, race, and communications. On race, he has focused on the nexus between implicit bias and the law, with the goal of advancing a “behavioral realism” that imports new scientific findings from the mind sciences into legal discourse and policymaking. He is also an expert on Asian American communities, and has written about hate crimes, affirmative action, the Japanese American internment, and its lessons for the “War on Terror.” He is a co-author of Race, Rights, and Reparation: The Law and the Japanese American Internment (Aspen 2001). On communications, Professor Kang has published on the topics of privacy, pervasive computing, mass media policy, and cyber-race (the techno-social construction of race in cyberspace). He is also the author of Communications Law & Policy: Cases and Materials (3rd edition Foundation 2009), a leading casebook in the field.
During law school, Professor Kang was a supervising editor of the Harvard Law Review and Special Assistant to Harvard University’s Advisory Committee on Free Speech. After graduation, he clerked for Judge William A. Norris of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, then worked at the National Telecommunications and Information Administration on cyberspace policy.
Spring 2012 Social Justice Diversity Lecture –
Margaret Chon, Seattle University School of Law
“Intellectual Property: What Do Diversity and Social Justice Have to Do with It?”
Margaret Chon is the Donald & Lynda Horowitz Professor for the Pursuit of Justice at Seattle University School of Law. In 2011–12, she will be a Global Emile Noël Research Fellow at the Jean Monnet Center for International and Regional Economic Law and Justice at New York University Law School, where she will explore dimensions of knowledge governance through international intellectual property law. Her current scholarship focuses on the relation of knowledge goods to the production of other global public goods necessary for human development and flourishing. A graduate of the University of Michigan Law School, she is also an alumna of the University of Michigan School of Public Health and Cornell University College of Arts and Science.
Fall 2011 Social Justice Diversity Lecture –
Gerald Torres, University of Texas School of Law
“Legalities: The Experience of Justice and Plural Legal Systems”
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.”
Spring 2011 Social Justice Diversity Lecture –
Angela Riley, UCLA School of Law
“The Future of Indigenous Peoples”
Angela Riley teaches and writes in the area of indigenous peoples’ rights, with a particular emphasis on cultural property and Native governance. Her work has been published in the Yale Law Journal, Columbia Law Review, California Law Review, Washington Law Review, and others. She received her undergraduate degree at the University of Oklahoma and her law degree from Harvard. After clerking for Chief Judge T. Kern of the Northern District of Oklahoma, she worked as a litigator at Quinn Emanuel in Los Angeles, specializing in intellectual property litigation. Professor Riley joined Southwestern Law School in 2003 and, that same year, was selected to serve on her tribe’s Supreme Court, becoming the first woman and youngest Justice of the Supreme Court of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation of Oklahoma. She is also an Evidentiary Hearing Officer for the Morongo Band of Mission Indians. The students of Southwestern voted her Professor of the Year in 2007, and she was named the Rosenberg Professor of Law in 2007-08.
Professor Riley joined the UCLA School of Law faculty as Professor of Law and began serving as Director of the UCLA American Indian Studies Center in July 2010. The American Indian Studies Center is one of the premier academic institutes in the United States focusing on interdisciplinary research related to American Indians.
Fall 2010 Social Justice Diversity Lecture –
Darren Hutchinson, American University Washington College of Law
“Resistance in the Afterlife of Identity”
Darren Hutchinson received a B.A., cum laude, from the University of Pennsylvania and a J.D. from Yale Law School. Prior to his career in law teaching, Professor Hutchinson practiced commercial litigation at Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen and Hamilton in New York City. He also clerked for the late Honorable Mary Johnson Lowe, a former United States District Judge in the Southern District of New York.
Professor Hutchinson teaches Constitutional Law, Equitable Remedies and seminars in Critical Race Theory and Equal Protection Theory. He has written extensively on issues related to Constitutional Law, Critical Race Theory, Law and Sexuality, and social identity theory. His numerous publications have appeared in several journals including the Cornell Law Review, the UCLA Law Review, the Illinois Law Review, the Tulane Law Review, the Michigan Journal of Race and Law, and the University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law. Professor Hutchinson is currently completing a book for New York University Press that examines the legal significance of the relationship between racial subordination and heterosexism.
Spring 2010 Social Justice Diversity Lecture –
Robert Chang, Seattle University School of Law
“Ricci, Race, and Representation”
Robert Chang is Professor of Law and is the founding director of the Fred T. Korematsu Center for Law and Equality at Seattle University School of Law. A graduate of Princeton and Duke Universities, he writes primarily in the area of critical race theory. He is the author of Disoriented: Asian Americans, Law, And The Nation-State (NYU Press 1999) as well as numerous articles, essays, and chapters on race and interethnic relations in the United States. His advocacy work includes being a primary contributor to an amicus brief signed onto by 63 Asian American organizations in the Marriage Equality Cases before the California Supreme Court. He was the 2009 recipient of the Clyde Ferguson Award, given by the Minority Groups Section of the Association of American Law Schools. He serves on the board of the Conference of Asian Pacific American Law Faculty and is a board member and co-chair of LatCrit (Critical Latina and Latino Legal Theory, Inc.).
Fall 2009 Social Justice Diversity Lecture –
Devon Carbado, UCLA School of Law
“After Obama: Three Post-Racial Challenges”
Devon Carbado, who recently served as the Vice Dean of the Faculty, teaches Constitutional Criminal Procedure, Constitutional Law, Critical Race Theory, and Criminal Adjudication. The UCLA School of Law Classes of 2000 and 2006 elected him Professor of the Year. He is the 2003 recipient of the Rutter Award for Excellence in Teaching, and recently awarded the University Distinguished Teaching Award, The Eby Award for the Art of Teaching. He is also a recipient of the Fletcher Foundation Fellowship, which modeled on the Guggenheims, is awarded to scholars whose work furthers the goals of Brown v. Board of Education.
Professor Carbado graduated from Harvard Law School in 1994. At Harvard, he was the Editor-in-Chief of The Harvard Black Letter Law Journal, a member of the Board of Student Advisors, and winner of the Northeast Frederick Douglass Moot Court Competition. After receiving his law degree, he joined Latham & Watkins in Los Angeles as an associate before his appointment as a Faculty Fellow and Visiting Associate Professor of Law at the University of Iowa College of Law.
Professor Carbado writes in the areas of critical race theory, employment discrimination, criminal procedure, constitutional law, and identity. He is editor of Race Law Stories (Foundation Press) (with Rachel Moran) and is working on a book on employment discrimination tentatively titled Acting White (Oxford University Press) (with Mitu Gulati). He is a former director of the Critical Race Studies Program at UCLA Law, a faculty associate of the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies, a board member of the African American Policy Forum, and a James Town Fellow.
Spring 2009 Social Justice Diversity Lecture –
Tanya Hernandez, George Washington University
“Employment Discrimination in the Age of ‘Diversity’”
Tanya Hernandez is the Leroy Sorenson Merrifield Research Professor of Law at George Washington University Law School, in Washington D.C. She has been a law professor for over a decade, and presently teaches Employment Discrimination, Critical Race Theory, Property and Trusts & Estates. Her scholarly interest is in the study of comparative race relations. Her work in that area has been published in the California Law Review, Cornell Law Review, Harvard Civil Rights & Civil Liberties Law Review, Yale Law Journal, and many other publications. Hispanic Business Magazine selected her as one of the 100 Most Influential Hispanics of 2007.
Fall 2008 Social Justice Diversity Lecture –
Sylvia Lazos, UNLV Boyd School of Law
“Democracy: Judges and Demography”
Visit here for more information on Professor Lazos’ talk.
Sylvia Lazos teaches Constitutional Law, Legislation, and a seminar on race, gender, and sexuality at the UNLV William S. Boyd School of Law. Professor Lazos has written exhaustively on how constitutional norms can accommodate a new American reality that is increasingly multicultural, multiracial and multiethnic. She attended St. Mary’s University, in San Antonio, Texas, graduating magna cum laude with B.A. and M.A. degrees in Economics. She received her J.D from the University of Michigan Law School.
Professor Lazos’s current research interests focus on the importance of the judiciary being diverse, the impact of rapid immigration growth on intergroup relations, and how to fashion constitutional interpretive norms to promote better cross-racial understanding. She is currently part of a cross-disciplinary faculty effort at the University of Nevada Las Vegas to establish a Center for the Research of Race and Social Justice, which would engage in groundbreaking research effort across-disciplines on wide ranging subject related to race and ethnicity class and social justice.
Spring 2008 Social Justice Diversity Lecture –
Laura Gómez, University of New Mexico School of Law
“Manifest Destinies: The Making of the Mexican American Dream”
Laura Gómez is Professor of Law & American Studies at the University of New Mexico since 2005. Professor Gómez teaches and writes in the broad areas of law, race, and gender. Previously she taught for 12 years at the UCLA School of Law, where she was a founder of the Critical Race Studies Concentration. She attended Harvard College and earned her J.D. and Ph.D. in Sociology concurrently at Stanford University. Professor Gómez has held residential fellowships at the School for American Research (2004-05) and the Stanford Humanities Center (1996-97). She is the author of two books: MANIFEST DESTINIES: THE MAKING OF THE MEXICAN AMERICAN RACE (New York University Press, 2007) and MISCONCEIVING MOTHERS: LEGISLATORS, PROSECUTORS AND THE POLITICS OF PRENATAL DRUG EXPOSURE (Temple University Press, 1997).
Fall 2007 Social Justice Diversity Lecture –
Dean Christopher Edley, Jr., U.C. Berkeley Law School (Boalt Hall)
“Circumventing Civil Rights Exhaustion Through Regulatory Social Justice: The Case of Achievement Disparities in K-12 Education”
Spring 2007 Social Justice Diversity Lecture –
Berta Hernández-Truyol, University of Florida Levin College of Law
“International Human Rights as an Instrument of Social Justice”
Fall 2006 Social Justice Diversity Lecture –
Mari Matsuda, Georgetown University Law Center
“The Last Public Place: On Schools and Democracy”
Summary of Lecture (PDF) by Jennifer Alesio, ’08
Spring 2006 Social Justice Diversity Lecture –
Elvia Arriola, Northern Illinois University School of Law
“Women, Violence, and the Global Economy”
Professor Elvia Arriola’s Presentation (PDF)
Fall 2005 Social Justice Diversity Lecture –
john a. powell, Ohio State University Moritz College of Law
“A New Racial Paradigm and the Threat of White Space”
Summary of Lecture (PDF) by Hasan McGee ’07
Fall 2005 Social Justice Diversity Lecture –
Charles J. Ogletree, Jr., Harvard Law School
“President Bush, the Supreme Court, and the Future of Race Matters”
Summary of Lecture (PDF) by Hasan McGee ’07 and Sonja Zavala ’06
Spring 2005 Social Justice Diversity Lecture –
David Cruz, USC Law School
Fall 2004 Social Justice Diversity Lecture –
Cheryl Harris, UCLA School of Law
“Brown, Grutter and the Elusive Nature of Equality”
Fall 2004 Social Justice Diversity Lecture –
Lani Guinier, Harvard Law School
“The Miner’s Canary”
Summary of Lecture (PDF) by Peter Castle ’06
Spring 2004 Social Justice Diversity Lecture –
Neil Gotanda, Western State University College of Law
“Unfinished Business: Race, Rights and Judicial Review on the Sixtieth Anniversary of U.S. v. Korematsu”
Fall 2003 Social Justice Diversity Lecture –
Vernellia R. Randall, University of Dayton School of Law
“Social Justice and Reparations: Repairing the Slave Health Deficit”
Spring 2003 Social Justice Diversity Lecture –
Juan Perea, University of Florida, Levin School of Law
“History, Race, and the Border”
Fall 2002 Social Justice Diversity Lecture –
Marc Fajer, University of Miami School of Law
“Social Justice and the Meaning of Equality:
Some Lessons from the Fair Housing Act”