Social Justice Program News
Workshop on Equit Offsets: Justice and the Environment -- March 19, 2008
The Social Justice Program and the Regulatory Program (together with the Climate Change Research Network and several other co-sponsors) will conduct a workshop on Wednesday, March 19, 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. Featured speakers include Vanderbilt Law School professors Michael Vandenbergh and Beverly Moran, Vanderbilt Political Science professor Beverly Ackerly, Chad Stone (Chief Economist at the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, Washington DC) and Dennis Whittle (Chairman and CEO of Global Giving). The workshop will examine the international, national and local implications of the equity offset concept and then explore whether there are ways to conduct a pilot project in Nashville that would generate carbon offsets through weatherizing subsidized housing or enabling the purchase of more fuel efficient HVAC and other equipment.
Symposium on "Debating Immigation" -- March 20-21, 2008
The Law School’s Social Justice Program, Constitutional Law Program, and Law and Human Behavior Program, and the Public Law Program of the Political Science Department will present a symposium on “Debating Immigration” at the Law School on March 20-21. Carol Swain is the symposium organizer; it follows the publication last year of a book of the same title that Carol edited for Cambridge University Press.
T. Alexander Aleinikoff, dean of Georgetown University Law Center, will give the opening keynote address, “Immigration, the Election and Beyond,” on March 20 at 4 p.m. Peter Schuck, Simeon E. Baldwin Professor of Law at Yale University, will give the closing keynote address, “Understanding America: A New Social Science Synthesis,” at 4 p.m. on March 21. Some of the questions expected to be addressed by the panelists include: What is the impact of immigration on projected population growth? What are the costs and benefits of immigration? Do immigrants take jobs from native-born workers? Who, if anyone, represents African American interests in the immigration debate? Why has the U.S. not developed a well-articulated public philosophy of immigration? What accounts for the tendency to frame the immigration debate in terms of legalities when the most pressing problems result from immigration itself? What is the biblical understanding of immigration?
