Marian Miner Cook
Athenaeum

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Constitutionalizing Black Inequality

Mon, January 27, 2020
Dinner Program
Devon Carbado

Brown v. Board of Education is one of the most celebrated cases in United States constitutional history. In the popular imagination, the case marks a dichotomy between a “then”—a moment in which the Supreme Court constitutionalized Black inequality—and a “now”—a moment in which that inequality is no longer constitutionally sanctioned. In this Martin Luther King, Jr. Commemorative Lecture, Devon Carbado, professor of law at UCLA’s School of Law, will disrupt this dichotomy. With specificity, he will highlight some ways in which the Supreme Court continues to constitutionalize Black inequality and argue that Black lives still do not matter in the domain of constitutionally legitimate forms of state violence.

Devon W. Carbado is the Honorable Harry Pregerson Professor of Law at UCLA School of Law where he teaches constitutional criminal procedure, constitutional law, critical race theory, and criminal adjudication. He also formerly served as UCLA’s associate vice chancellor of BruinX for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion.

Carbado has won numerous teaching awards, including being elected Professor of the Year by the UCLA School of Law classes of 2000 and 2006; he received the Law School's Rutter Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2003 and the University's Distinguished Teaching Award, the Eby Award for the Art of Teaching in 2007. In 2005, Carbado was an inaugural recipient of the Fletcher Foundation Fellowship, which is awarded to scholars whose work furthers the goals of Brown v. Board of Education. In 2018, he was named an inaugural recipient of the Atlantic Philanthropies Fellowship for Racial Equity.

Carbado writes in the areas of employment discrimination, criminal procedure, implicit bias, constitutional law, and critical race theory. His scholarship appears in law reviews at UCLA, Berkeley, Harvard, Michigan, Cornell, and Yale, among others. He is the author of "Acting White? Rethinking Race in “Post-Racial” America" (Oxford University Press) (with Mitu Gulati) and the editor of several volumes, including "Race Law Stories" (Foundation Press) (with Rachel Moran), "The Long Walk to Freedom: Runaway Slave Narratives" (Beacon Press) (with Donald Weise), and "Time on Two Crosses: The Collective Writings of Bayard Rustin" (Cleis Press) (with Donald Weise). He is currently working on a series of articles on affirmative action and a book on race, law, and police violence.A board member of the African American Policy Forum, Carbado was the Shikes Fellow in Civil Liberties and Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School in 2012.

Carbado graduated from Harvard Law School in 1994. At Harvard, he was editor-in-chief of the Harvard Black Letter Law Journal, a member of the Board of Student Advisors, and winner of the Northeast Frederick Douglass Moot Court Competition. Carbado joined the UCLA School of Law faculty in 1997. He served as vice dean for faculty and research 2006-07 and again in 2009-10. 

Professor Carbado will deliver the 2020 Martin Luther King, Jr., Commemorative Lecture.

Marian Miner Cook Athenaeum

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