Fall 2007 Social Justice Diversity Lecture
Thursday, October 4 from 4 to 5 p.m. in the Wiegand Arts & Sciences room
Dean Christopher Edley, Jr. (Boalt Hall)
"Circumventing Civil Rights Exhaustion Through Regulatory Social Justice: The Case of Achievement Disparities in K-12 Education"
Wine and Cheese Reception immediately following the lecture. Co-hosted with the Black Law Student Association and the PI&SJ Coalition.
This activity has been approved for Minimum Continuing Legal Education (MCLE) credit by the State Bar of California in the amount of one hour. Santa Clara University School of Law certifies that this activity conforms to the standards for approved education activities prescribed by the rules and regulations of the State Bar of California governing minimum continuing legal education.
Dean Christopher Edley, Jr. joined Boalt Hall as Dean and Professor of Law in 2004, after 23 years as a professor at Harvard Law School. He earned a law degree and a master’s degree in public policy from Harvard. His academic work is primarily in the areas of civil rights and administrative law. He has taught Federalism, Budget Policy, Defense Department Procurement Law, National Security Law, and Environmental Law. Dean Edley was co-founder of the Harvard Civil Rights Project, a renowned multidisciplinary research and policy think tank focused on issues of racial justice.
Dean Edley’s talk is titled Circumventing Civil Rights Exhaustion Through Regulatory Social Justice: The Case of Achievement Disparities in K-12 Education. Some have argued that this decade is, or should be, a “post civil-rights” era in which claims for racial and ethnic justice must be quietly embedded in broader claims for social justice or distributive equity. Even if this notion is incorrect – descriptively or strategically – we should augment the traditional antidiscrimination approach with comprehensive no-fault regulatory designs. An illustration of this idea is the federal No Child Left Behind [NCLB] statute, the bipartisan 2001 amendments to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. Though replete with warts, NCLB’s effort to force remediation of racial disparities without a predicate of fault reflects this emerging model for regulatory social justice.