The New York Times’ Supreme Court correspondent is part of the spring lineup for the School of Law’s ninth annual Public Interest Law and Policy Speakers Series.
Titled “Access to Justice: The Social Responsibility of Lawyers,” the series brings to WUSTL outstanding academics and practitioners in areas such as international human rights, the economics of poverty, civil liberties, racial justice, capital punishment, clinical legal education, and government and private public service.
The goals of the series are to provide a forum for the law school and the wider University community to engage in a discussion of the legal, social and ethical issues that bear upon access to justice; to highlight the professional responsibilities of law students and lawyers to provide access to justice; and to promote scholarship in this area.
The spring series kicked off Jan. 17 with a lecture by Sherrilyn Ifill, J.D., titled “Twenty-first Century Challenges to Racial Justice Lawyering.” Ifill, associate professor at the University of Maryland School of Law, was the Black Law Students Association Martin Luther King Jr. Commemorative Speaker.
The remaining presentations, listed below, will be held in the Bryan Cave Moot Courtroom of Anheuser-Busch Hall and are free and open to the public.
• 11 a.m. Feb. 21: Adrienne Davis, J.D., the Reef C. Ivey II Professor of Law at the University of North Carolina, will discuss “Reparations as Transitional Justice.”
Davis focuses her scholarship on the interplay of property and contract doctrine with race, gender and sexuality in the 19th century.
Drawing on legal, literary and historical sources, Davis’ work shows how property and contract law incorporate and influence social norms.
Davis is the Webster Society Annual Speaker and a University Distinguished Visiting Scholar.
• 4 p.m. March 7: Linda Greenhouse, Supreme Court correspondent for The New York Times, will speak on “The New Supreme Court: Continuity and Change.”
Greenhouse, the annual School of Law Tyrrell Williams Lecturer, began covering the Supreme Court for the Times in 1978. She has served in that role ever since, except for two years in the mid-1980s when she covered the U.S. Congress.
Previously, she covered local and state government and politics for the Times in New York and was chief of the newspaper’s legislative bureau in Albany. She has appeared as a panelist on the PBS public affairs program “Washington Week” since 1980.
• 11 a.m. March 28: Robert A. Williams Jr., J.D., the E. Thomas Sullivan Professor of Law and American Indian Studies and director of the Indigenous Peoples Law and Policy Program at the University of Arizona, will present “Like a Loaded Weapon: The Rehnquist Court, Indian Rights and the Legal History of Racism in America.”
Williams, a University Distinguished Visiting Professor, is the author of several books and articles on federal Indian law and indigenous peoples’ human rights.
An enrolled member of the Lumbee Indian Tribe of North Carolina, he is the judge pro tempore for the Tohono O’odham Indian Nation.
Series coordinators are Karen L. Tokarz, J.D., LL.M., professor of law and executive director of clinical education and alternative dispute resolution programs, and Peter J. Wiedenbeck, J.D., associate dean of faculty and the Joseph H. Zumbalen Professor of the Law of Property.
For more information, call 935-6419.