It is with great pleasure that I write to invite you to attend the College of Staten Island (CSI) Legal Studies Institute’s Fall Lecture Series and Benefit, “Race, Law, and Justice,” which features three presentations via Zoom by three distinguished legal scholars (Justin Driver, Kendall Thomas, and Sheryll Cashin). Please feel free share this.
One last thing. When you click through to claim or purchase a ticket, you will see my email address [michaelpari@gmail.com] in the first email window. PLEASE confirm that email address in the first “confirm email” window by typing my email address [michaelpari@gmail.com] in, instead of trying to type in your own. Below that, you will see a window for the payment method (if you are paying for a ticket), and then below that you will see spaces to type in your information, including your own email address. I will send you a Zoom link for the lecture the day before the event. Below this invitation, you will find titles and abstracts for the presentations and biographies for our speakers.
Very best regards,
Michael Paris
Associate Professor; Director, Legal Studies Institute [CSILSI.blogspot.com]
College of Staten Island (CUNY)
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Wednesday, October 21st
7:30 to 8:45 pm, via Zoom
“Racial Segregation and the Enduring Battle over Brown v. Board of Education,”
Justin Driver
Professor of Law
Yale Law School
Wednesday, November 4th
7:30 to 8:45 pm, via Zoom
“A Constitutional Right to Literacy?: A Critical Race Theory Perspective on Gary B. v. Whitmer,”
Kendall Thomas
Nash Professor of Law
Columbia Law School
Thrusday, November 19th
7:30 to 8:45 pm, via Zoom
“Segregation: A Short History of ‘Structural Racism’ and What to Do About It,”
Sheryll D. Cashin
Carmack Waterhouse Professor of Law, Civil Rights and Social Justice at the Georgetown University Law Center.
Lecture Abstracts and Speaker Biographies:
Wednesday, October 21st
7:30 to 8:45 pm, via Zoom
“Racial Segregation and the Enduring Battle over Brown v. Board of Education,”
Justin Driver
Professor of Law
Yale Law School
Abstract
Drawing on his recent book—At the Schoolhouse Gate: Public Education, The Supreme Court, and the Battle for the American Mind (Pantheon, 2018), Professor Driver will examine the contested meanings of Brown v. Board of Education over the past sixty-five years, with particular attention to how conservative scholars and judges developed arguments designed to curtail the opinion’s effects and confine its possible extensions. He offers a complex and nuanced account of Brown’s ambiguous and often contradictory legacies.
About Justin Driver:
Justin Driver is Professor of Law at Yale Law School. He teaches and writes in the area of constitutional law and is the author of The Schoolhouse Gate: Public Education, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for the American Mind. The book was selected as a Washington Post Notable Book of the Year, an Editors’ Choice of the New York Times Book Review, and received an honorable mention, Silver Gavel Award, American Bar Association, 2019.
A recipient of the American Society for Legal History’s William Nelson Cromwell Article Prize, Driver has a distinguished publication record in the nation’s leading law reviews. He has also written extensively for general audiences, including pieces in Slate, The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The New Republic, where he was a contributing editor. A member of the American Law Institute and of the American Constitution Society’s Academic Advisory Board, Driver is also an editor of the Supreme Court Review.
Previously, Driver was the Harry N. Wyatt Professor of Law at the University of Chicago. Driver is a graduate of Brown, Oxford (where he was a Marshall Scholar), Duke (where he received certification to teach public school), and Harvard Law School (where he was an editor of the Harvard Law Review). After graduating from Harvard, Driver clerked for Judge Merrick B. Garland, Justice Stephen Breyer, and Justice Sandra Day O’Connor.
Wednesday, November 4th
7:30 to 8:45 pm, via Zoom
“A Constitutional Right to Literacy?: A Critical Race Theory Perspective on Gary B. v. Whitmer,”
Kendall Thomas
Nash Professor of Law
Columbia Law School
Abstract
Professor Thomas will discuss the recent case of Gary B v. Whitmer. The case involves a lawsuit brought by a group of minor public school students from Detroit, Michigan.
In April, 2020 the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals interpreted the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause to confer a fundamental right to a “basic minimum education” that provides “access to literacy.” The decision reversed a July, 2018 Federal District Court decision dismissing the plaintiffs’ complaint. The District Court held that the asserted constitutional violation of the students’ right of “access to literacy” had no cognizable basis in the text of the Fourteenth Amendment or in the U.S. Supreme Court’s education jurisprudence.However, the Circuit Court panel found that the lower court was wrong to view the plaintiffs’ due process “access to literacy” claim as beyond the purview of the Constitution. It held that a “basic minimum education—meaning one that plausibly provides access to literacy—is a fundamental right” protected by the Fourteenth Amendment. Professor Thomas will offer a reading and critical race theory “rewriting” of the Sixth Circuit’s Gary B. opinion, one the proceeds in light of historically-constructed meanings of Brown v. Board and the inextricable linkages between public education and race in the United States.
About Kendall Thomas:
Kendall Thomasis a scholar of comparative constitutional law and human rights whose teaching and research focus on critical race theory, intersectionality, legal philosophy, feminist legal theory, and law and sexuality.
Thomas is the co-founder and director of the Center for the Study of Law and Culture at Columbia Law School, where he leads interdisciplinary projects and programs that explore how the law operates as one of the central ways to create meaning in society. He is a founder of Amend the 13th, a movement to amend the U.S. Constitution to end enforced prison labor.
His seminal writing on the intersection of race and law appears in Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Founded the Movement (1996), which he co-edited. He is also a co-editor of Legge Razza Diritti: La Critical Race Theory negli Stati Uniti (2005) and What's Left of Theory? (2000).
Thomas has taught at Columbia Law since 1986. He has been a visiting professor at Stanford Law School and a visiting professor in American studies and Afro-American studies at Princeton University. His writing has appeared in volumes of collected essays and in journals including National Black Law Journal, Widener Law Symposium Journal, and Columbia Journal of European Law. Thomas was an inaugural recipient of the Berlin Prize Fellowship of the American Academy in Berlin and a member of the Special Committee of the American Center in Paris. He has been chair of the Jurisprudence Section and the Law and Humanities Section of the Association of American Law Schools.
He also has written and spoken widely on the impact of AIDS and was a founding member of the Majority Action Caucus of ACT UP, Sex Panic!, and the AIDS Prevention Action League. A former board member of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, he now serves on the board of the NYC AIDS Memorial.
Thomas is also a professional jazz vocalist who performs at venues including Joe’s Pub and is on the board of advisors of the Broadway Advocacy Coalition.
Thrusday, November 19th
7:30 to 8:45 pm, via Zoom
“Segregation: A Short History of ‘Structural Racism’ and What to Do About It,”
Sheryll D. Cashin
Carmack Waterhouse Professor of Law, Civil Rights and Social Justice at the Georgetown University Law Center.
Abstract
Professor Cashin will talk about American, anti-black oppression and the way it ensnares citizen and nation. From Slavery to Jim Crow to the iconic Dark Ghetto, to use Kenneth Clark’s phrase, she illuminates a 21st century caste system at the intersection of geography, race and poverty. The habits of segregation, fear, loathing, disassociation and discrimination of poor black people in large numbers, instantiated in past eras, continues for the descendants, as Cashin addresses them. She argues that the dark hood is the primary institution for containment and othering of people whom society currently perceives as unworthy of inclusion. Meanwhile those who live in poverty-free, very white spaces enjoy entrenched advantages, and everyone else struggles to access opportunity in real estate markets premised on exclusion begun a century before, to contain descendants. She calls for reparation, arguing that governments that intentionally created ghettos must repair current damage. The ultimate goal is to change the lens through which society sees residents of poor black neighborhoods from presumed thug to presumed citizen and to transform the relationship of the state with these neighborhoods from punitive to wholistic.
About Sheryll D. Cashin:
Sheryll D. Cashin is the Carmack Waterhouse Professor of Law, Civil Rights and Social Justice at the Georgetown University Law Center. Currently she teaches Administrative Law, Race and American Law, and a writing seminar she recently designed about American segregation, education and opportunity. She has also taught Constitutional Law, Local Government Law, Property, and a seminar on urban development.
She is working on a new book about the role of residential segregation in producing racial inequality. Her book, Loving: Interracial Intimacy in America and the Threat to White Supremacy (Beacon, 2017), explores the history and future of interracial intimacy, how white supremacy was constructed and how “culturally dexterous” allies undermine it. Her book, Place Not Race (Beacon, 2014), recommended radical reforms of selective college admissions in order to promote robust diversity; it was nominated for an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Non-Fiction in 2015. Her book, The Failures of Integration (PublicAffairs, 2004) explored the persistence and consequences of race and class segregation. It was an Editors’ Choice in the New York Times Book Review. Cashin is also a three-time nominee for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for non-fiction (2005, 2009, and 2018). She has published widely in academic journals and written commentaries for the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Salon, The Root, and other media.
Professor Cashin serves as board member of the Poverty and Race Research Action Council. She is former Vice Chair of the board of Building One America, a network of local, multiracial coalitions that promote social inclusion, racial justice and sustainable economic opportunity, especially in distressed places. She served for a decade on the trustee boards of Vanderbilt University, The Duke Ellington School of the Arts, and the National Portrait Gallery. She worked in the Clinton Administration White House as an advisor on urban and economic policy, particularly concerning community development in inner-city neighborhoods.
Cashin is frequently asked to speak to academic and policy audiences as well as at book events for people who engage with her as an author. She has delivered keynote or endowed lectures at twenty universities. For her two decades of writing and advocacy for residential and school integration, the Fair Housing Justice Center honored her with the 2017 Acting for Justice Award for Outstanding Contributions to Civil Rights.
Professor Cashin was law clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall and Judge Abner Mikva of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. She graduated summa cum laude from Vanderbilt University with a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering. As a Marshall Scholar, she received a master’s in English Law with honors from Oxford University and received a J.D. with honors from Harvard Law School, where she was a member of the Harvard Law Review. Cashin was born and raised in Huntsville, Alabama, where her parents were political activists. She lives in Washington with her husband and twin boys.
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