Race, Civil Liberties, and the Legal Profession

Race, Civil Liberties, and the Legal Profession

Tuesday, August 11 • 12:00 – 1:00 p.m.

Virtual Program Via Zoom

Free to SDCBA Members and the Legal Community 

In this program, Michele Goodwin, award-winning author, advocate, professor, and social commentator, will reflect on law as an institution and tool that historically protected and advanced racism. From the Antebellum period through Jim Crow, law’s role in advancing white supremacy and racial injustice was visible through the legalization of slavery, slave patrols, fugitive slave laws, laws that provided for the physical torture of enslaved persons on through Black Codes enacted during Reconstruction and “separate but equal laws.” Professor Goodwin will discuss why recognizing and reckoning with law as an accomplice and facilitator of discrimination and racism are overdue and urgent in protecting the rule of law. Her talk will close articulating why law’s role and responsibility in dismantling discrimination and racism are crucial in promoting the rule of law.

Participants will learn:

• History of law’s involvement in promoting and establishing racial discrimination.
• Law’s direct role in undermining progress toward racial equality and ending racial discrimination.
• Law’s role and responsibility in dismantling racism.

Michele Bratcher Goodwin is a Chancellor’s Professor at the University of California, Irvine and founding director of the Center for Biotechnology and Global Health Policy. She is an elected member of the American Law Institute as well as an elected Fellow of the American Bar Foundation and the Hastings Center.

Professor Goodwin’s scholarship is hailed as “exceptional” in the New England Journal of Medicine. She has been featured in Politico, Salon.com, Forbes, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, Chicago Sun-Times, NPR, HBO’s Vice News, and Ms. Magazine among others. A prolific author, her scholarship is published or forthcoming in The Yale Law Journal, Harvard Law Review, Cornell Law Review, NYU Law Review, California Law Review, and Northwestern Law Review, among others. Goodwin’s publications include five books and over 80 articles, essays and book chapters as well as numerous commentaries.

She serves on the executive committee and national board of the American Civil Liberties Union. She is a highly sought after voice on civil liberties, civil rights, reproductive rights and justice, and cultural politics. Prior to teaching law, she was a Gilder-Lehrman Post-Doctoral Fellow at Yale University.

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American Board of Trial Advocates

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South Asian Bar Association of San Diego

Women of Color in the Law