The Radical Roots of Brown v. Board

This event has ended.

When Thursday, February 23, 2017
5:00 PM - 6:30 PM
Location Eaton Humanities (HUMN), Room 150 (on Norlin Quad)
For Faculty; Staff; Students

Law students, faculty, and staff are invited to attend a talk by John Fabian Witt (of Yale University): The Radical Roots of Brown v. Board: A Blueprint for Modern Constitutional Change.
The Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education is at the center of contemporary American constitutional law. And yet for at least a decade critics have charged that Brown adopted a thin, formal, and legalistic conception of civil rights inadequate to the task before it. By going to the roots of the efforts that eventually produced the decision, we can glimpse Brown’s radical beginnings – and make sense of why every constitutional transformation that has followed has sought to replicate its basic blueprint.
Author of Lincoln’s Code: The Laws of War in American History (2013 Bancroft Prize), John Fabian Witt is Allen H. Duffy Class of 1960 Professor of Law at Yale Law School and a professor in Yale’s history department, where he teaches the history of American law, the laws of war, and the law of torts. Other writings include Patriots and Cosmopolitans and the prize-winning The Accidental Republic. He recently published a book on the law of torts, Torts: Cases, Principles, and Institutions, and is currently editing a book on constitutional orders in emergencies, as well as writing a history of the Garland Fund: the 1920s philanthropic foundation whose work financed the efforts that culminated in Brown v. Board of Education. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a member of the Society of American Historians, and the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship. This talk is sponsored by Phi Beta Kappa as part of its 2016-17 Visiting Scholar Program. Note that this event is in the Eaton Humanities building on Norlin Quad (http://www.colorado.edu/campusmap/map.html?bldg=HUMN).

More Information

Contact David Boonin
david.boonin@colorado.edu