“The Miner’s Canary and Black Lives Matter” is this year’s Robert L. Harris, Jr. ADVANCEments in Science Distinguished Lecture, featuring:
Lani Guinier, Bennett Boskey Professor of Law, Harvard Law School
Gerald Torres, Jane M.G. Foster Professor of Law, Cornell Law School
Authors of The Miner’s Canary: Enlisting Race, Resisting Power, Transforming Democracy (Harvard University Press, 2002), described by Publisher’s Weekly as “one of the most provocative and challenging books on race produced in years.”
DATE: Monday, April 18, 2016
TIME: 3:30 p.m. to 4:30 p.m.
LOCATION: Alice Statler Auditorium, Statler Hall, Reception to follow in the adjacent auditorium
*** Free and Open to the public***
Guinier and Torres will revisit their argument that those who observe the ways in which institutions fail Black people can understand both systemic racism and the dysfunction of public and private institutions. They argue that Blacks and other people of color are first to experience the normalization of resource inequality that results in stunted lives, deformed democratic institutions, and a society that is both a market state and a national security state all the way down. In this talk they posit that acting to oppose systemic racism is not a negative act; instead, it is the positive act of preserving those parts of our economic and cultural life that serve the many rather than just the few and which can be mobilized to build alternatives to inequality.
Lani Guinier is the Bennett Boskey Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. She became the first woman of color appointed to a tenured professorship at the Harvard Law School. Before Harvard, she was a tenured professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School where she had been on the faculty for a decade. Professor Guinier worked in the Civil Rights Division at the U.S. Department of Justice and then headed the voting rights project at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund in the 1980s. She has published many scholarly articles and books, including The Tyranny of the Majority (1994); Becoming Gentlemen: Women, Law School and Institutional Change (1997) (with co-authors Michelle Fine and Jane Balin); Lift Every Voice: Turning a Civil Rights Setback into a New Vision of Social Justice (1998); and The Tyranny of the Meritocracy: Democratizing Higher Education in America (2015). In her scholarly writings and in op-ed pieces, she addresses issues of race, gender, and democratic decision-making, and seeks new ways of approaching questions like affirmative action while calling for candid public discourse on these topics.
Gerald Torres is the Jane M. G. Foster Professor of Law at Cornell, a leading figure in critical race theory, environmental law, and federal Indian Law. He previously served as the Bryant Smith Chair in Law at the University of Texas School of Law and taught at The University of Minnesota Law School, where he served as Associate Dean. Torres is also a former president of the Association of American Law Schools (AALS). He has served as deputy assistant attorney general for the Environment and Natural Resources Division of the U.S. Department of Justice in Washington, D.C., and as counsel to then U.S. attorney general Janet Reno. Torres has also served on the board of the Environmental Law Institute, the National Petroleum Council and on EPA’s National Environmental Justice Advisory Council. He is currently Vice Chair of Earth Day Network and Board Chair of the Advancement Project as well as serving on the Board of the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Texas League of Conservation Voters. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the American Law Institute. Torres was honored with the 2004 Legal Service Award from the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF) for his work to advance the legal rights of Latinos. Torres’ many articles include “Translation and Stories” (Harvard Law Review, 2002), “Who Owns the Sky?” (Pace Law Review, 2001),”Taking and Giving: Police Power, Public Value, and Private Right” (Environmental Law, 1996), and “Translating Yonnondio by Precedent and Evidence: The Mashpee Indian Case” (Duke Law Journal, 1990).
A downloadable poster for this event is available here.