Social Justice Program Events

The Social Justice Program frequently sponsors lectures, workshops and conferences. Selected past events are described below.

"Massive Indifference: Routine Violation of the Constitutional Right to Counsel in Death Penalty and Other Cases," a lecture by Stephen Bright, Vanderbilt Social Justice Fellow. Stephen B. Bright is president and senior counsel of the Southern Center for Human Rights and teaches at Yale Law School. He served as director of the Center from 1982 through 2005, and has been in his present position since the start of 2006. He has taught at Yale since 1993. View a slideshow of the event. Watch the lecture.

"Defending the Constitution in Anti-Immigrant Times," Social Justice Fellow Lecture by Cecillia Wang of the ACLU. Cecillia Wang, who is the Managing Attorney for the California office of the ACLU Immigrants' Rights Project, was Vanderbilt's inaugural Social Justice Fellow. Wang spent several days at the law school meeting with students and sharing her experiences as a social justice attorney.

View a slideshow from a recent event discussing and celebrating the release of Daniel Sharfstein's new book, The invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White.

“Lessons Learned” Workshop - co-sponsored with the Center for the Study of Social Policy, the National Center for Youth Law, and the Vanderbilt Child and Family Policy Center on March 10-11, 2009. The main purpose of this workshop was to plan a national symposium on lessons to be learned from 30 years of class action litigation aimed at improving child welfare systems.

Geier v. Tennessee - Panel discussion about this landmark case, which resulted in the desegregation of public higher education institutions in Tennessee and involved a number of Vanderbilt Law alumni, held on February 7, 2009. The event brought back together many of the key participants in the case, including U.S .District Judge Thomas A. Wiseman, Jr. '54, who approved the consent decree; Tennessee Court of Appeals Judge Richard H. Dinkins '77 and George Barratt '57, who served as plaintiffs’ counsel; Deputy Attorney General Kate Eyler '79, who was counsel for the State of Tennessee; mediator Carlos Gonzalez '89; Justin Wilson '70, who was counsel for Tennessee Governor Don Sundquist, and Rita Geier '70, who was the named plaintiff.

"Bonded Labor for a New Millennium: Guestworkers and Indentured Servitude in Post-Katrina American Politics," a lecture by Jennifer J. Rosenbaum, counsel for the New Orleans Workers’ Center For Racial Justice, October 20, 2008.

"Equity Offsets: Justice and the Environment," a workshop co-sponsored with the Regulatory Program and Vanderbilt University's Climate Change Research Network on March 19, 2008. The purpose of the workshop was to explore how equity offsets can reduce greenhouse gas emissions by subsidizing the purchase of fuel-efficient goods and services by individuals with limited financial resources.

"Debating Immigration," a symposium co-sponsored by the Constitutional Law and Law and Human Behavior programs and the Vanderbilt Political Science Department's Public Law Program on March 20-21, 2008. The symposium followed the publication of a book of the same title edited by Program faculty member Carol Swain for Cambridge University Press.