Under the Blacklight

Why The Court Matters: RBG’s Legacy and the Fight She Leaves Behind

This Wednesday, 9/30, join a group of pre-eminent scholars as they discuss the relationship between the law and social justice and mine the towering legacy of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Together, this distinguished panel will take up how the battle over the courts may well decide the future of our democracy.

Co-Sponsored by The New Republic

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Hosted by Kimberle Crenshaw

Guests:

Devon Carbado is the Honorable Harry Pregerson Professor of Law at UCLA School of Law and the former Associate Vice Chancellor of BruinX for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion. He teaches Constitutional Criminal Procedure, Constitutional Law, Critical Race Theory, and Criminal Adjudication. He has won numerous teaching awards, including being elected Professor of the Year by the UCLA School of Law classes of 2000 and 2006 and received the Law School's Rutter Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2003 and the University's Distinguished Teaching Award, the Eby Award for the Art of Teaching in 2007. In 2005 Professor Carbado was an inaugural recipient of the Fletcher Foundation Fellowship. Modeled on the Guggenheim fellowships, it is awarded to scholars whose work furthers the goals of Brown v. Board of Education. In 2018, he was named an inaugural recipient of the Atlantic Philanthropies Fellowship for Racial Equity.

Erwin Chemerinsky became the 13th Dean of Berkeley Law on July 1, 2017, when he joined the faculty as the Jesse H. Choper Distinguished Professor of Law. Prior to assuming this position, from 2008-2017, he was the founding Dean and Distinguished Professor of Law, and Raymond Pryke Professor of First Amendment Law, at University of California, Irvine School of Law, with a joint appointment in Political Science. Before that he was the Alston and Bird Professor of Law and Political Science at Duke University from 2004-2008, and from 1983-2004 was a professor at the University of Southern California Law School, including as the Sydney M. Irmas Professor of Public Interest Law, Legal Ethics, and Political Science. He also has taught at DePaul College of Law and UCLA Law School.

Suzanne Goldberg is the founding director of Columbia Law School’s trailblazing Sexuality and Gender Law Clinic, and has led the clinic since joining the faculty in 2006. One of the country’s foremost experts on gender and sexuality law and a leading advocate and attorney for the LGBTQ+ community, she is also co-director of the Law School’s Center for Gender and Sexuality. At Lambda Legal, she worked on immigration, employment discrimination, and family law matters as well as two cases that became cornerstone gay rights victories at the U.S. Supreme Court: Lawrence v. Texas, the landmark decision that struck down Texas’s sodomy law, and Romer v. Evans, which overturned an anti-gay Colorado constitutional amendment. She has continued this advocacy as a professor at Columbia, filing briefs in nearly every marriage equality case in the United States.

Cheryl Harris is the Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Foundation Chair in Civil Rights and Civil Liberties at UCLA School of Law where she teaches Constitutional Law, Civil Rights, Employment Discrimination, Critical Race Theory and Race Conscious Remedies. The interconnections between racial theory, civil rights practice, politics, and human rights have been important to her work. She was a key organizer of several major conferences that helped establish a dialogue between U.S. legal scholars and South African lawyers during the development of South Africa’s first democratic constitution. This work played a significant role in the production of her acclaimed and influential article, “Whiteness as Property” (Harvard Law Review).

Sherrilyn Ifill is the President and Director-Counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. (LDF), the nation’s premier civil rights law organization fighting for racial justice and equality. LDF was founded in 1940 by legendary civil rights lawyer (and later Supreme Court justice) Thurgood Marshall, and became a separate organization from the NAACP in 1957. The lawyers at the Legal Defense Fund developed and executed the legal strategy that led to the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education, widely regarded as the most transformative and monumental legal decision of the 20th century. Ifill is the second woman to lead the organization.

Melissa Murray is a leading expert in family law, constitutional law, and reproductive rights and justice. Murray’s award-winning research focuses on the legal regulation of intimate life and encompasses such topics as the regulation of sex and sexuality, marriage and its alternatives, the marriage equality debate, the legal recognition of caregiving, and reproductive rights and justice. Her publications have appeared in the California Law Review, Columbia Law Review, Harvard Law Review, Michigan Law Review, Pennsylvania Law Review, Virginia Law Review, and Yale Law Journal, among others. She is an author of Cases on Reproductive Rights and Justice, the first casebook to cover the field of reproductive rights and justice, and a co-editor of Reproductive Rights and Justice Stories.

**** Registration for this conversation is through Eventbrite. All interested attendees will receive a link to the live-stream on the day of the event. This event will also be recorded. ****