Social Justice Program
Vanderbilt Law School's Social Justice Program promotes a wide variety of educational and scholarly activities aimed at exploring the role of law in creating, perpetuating and eradicating hierarchies of power and privilege in our society. The program seeks to address inequalities based on race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation and social and economic status, as well as the responsibility of the legal profession to protect the interests of marginalized, subordinated, and underrepresented clients and causes.
The Social Justice Program does not recommend a particular course of study. However, students are encouraged to select from among a variety of courses included in the Social Justice Curriculum. These include selected clinical courses, seminars, externships and directed research projects, as well electives from the general curriculum.
The program also sponsors and co-sponsors a variety of other activities with the aim of ensuring that issues of social justice are openly and regularly discussed by faculty and students both inside and outside the classroom and as part of the scholarly agenda of the faculty. Some of these activities are described in Social Justice Program Events.
Faculty
The program is directed by a interdisciplinary group of law faculty with a wide range of teaching and research interests related to social justice.
Lisa Bressman - Social Justice Program Chair
Ellen Clayton
Alex Hurder
Susan Kay, Associate Dean for Clinical Affairs
Terry Maroney
Beverly Moran
Kelly Lise Murray
Alistair Newbern
Yoli Redero
Daniel Sharfstein
Chris Slobogin
Carol Swain
David Williams
Law Students for Social Justice
Program faculty work closely with Law Students for Social Justice, a student organization devoted to issues, activities and projects related to issues of social justice.
Professor Daniel Sharfstein, a legal historian whose scholarship focuses on race and law, has won the 2012 J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize for his book, The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White (Penguin Press, 2011). The book offers a sensitive account of the fine line people of mixed race have tread in the United States since the nation’s beginning.