Skip to main content
LSU Law Logo

Speakers

Panel 1: History of the Fourteenth Amendment

Moderator:

Professor Ray Diamond, Jules F. and Frances L. Landry Distinguished Professor of Law and James Carville Alumni Professor of Law at LSU Paul M. Hebert Law Center

Presenters:

Professor Christopher Green, Associate Professor of Law and H.L.A. Hart Scholar in Law and Philosophy at the University of Mississippi School of Law

Professor Green has been on the faculty of the University of Mississippi School of Law since 2006. He practiced law with Phelps Dunbar in Jackson, Miss., specializing in appellate litigation, and clerked for Judge Rhesa H. Barksdale of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. Professor Green teaches Constitutional Law, Federal Jurisdiction, Administrative Law, Criminal Law, Property, Real Estate Transactions and Commercial Paper.

Professor Green has published Equal Citizenship, Civil Rights, and the Constitution: The Original Sense of the Privileges or Immunities Clause (Routledge 2015), and was the chief co-editor on the second edition of Gaylord, Green, & Strang, Federal Constitutional Law, volume 5: The Fourteenth Amendment (Carolina 2017).

His published articles include “This Constitution”: Constitutional Indexicals as a Basis for Textualist Semi-Originalism, 84 Notre Dame L. Rev. 1607 (2009); Reverse Broken Windows, 65 J. Leg. Educ. 265 (2015); Loyal Denominatorism and the Fourteenth Amendment: Normative Defense and Implications, Duke J. Const. L. & Pub. Pol’y (forthcoming 2017); Duly Convicted: The Thirteenth Amendment as Procedural Due Process, 15 Geo. J. L. & Pub. Pol’y 73 (2017); Clarity and Reasonable Doubt in Early State-Constitutional Judicial Review, 57 S. Tex. L. Rev. 169 (2015); Incorporation, Total Incorporation, and Nothing But Incorporation?, 24 Wm. & Mary Bill Rts. J. 93 (2015); Constitutional Theory and the Activismometer: How to Think About Indeterminacy, Restraint, Vagueness, Executive Review, and Precedent, 54 Santa Clara L. Rev. 403 (2014); The Original Sense of the (Equal) Protection Clause: Subsequent Interpretation and Application, 19 Geo. Mason U. Civ. Rts. L.J. 219 (2009) (cited in McDonald v. Chicago, 561 U.S. 742, 859 n.2 (2010) (Stevens, J., dissenting)); and The Original Sense of the (Equal) Protection Clause: Pre-Enactment History, 19 Geo. Mason U. Civ. Rts. L.J. 1 (2008); and Originalism and the Sense-Reference Distinction, 50 St. Louis U.L.J. 555 (2006).

His current research projects include the Fourteenth Amendment, the Article VI oath, the application of philosophy to constitutional theory, and the punishment of corporations.

Professor Earl Maltz, Distinguished Professor at Rutgers School of Law

Professor Earl Maltz is a Distinguished Professor at Rutgers School of Law in Camden, New Jersey, where he teaches constitutional law, torts, and a seminar on the Supreme Court.

Professor Maltz is the author of nine books and many articles on constitutional law and legal history.  His most recent book, The Coming of the Nixon Court:  The 1972 Term of the Supreme Court and the Transformation of Constitutional Law, was published in 2016 by the University Press of Kansas.

Professor Orville Vernon Burton, Creativity Professor of Humanities, Professor of History, Pan-African Studies, Sociology, and Computer Science at Clemson University

Professor Orville Vernon Burton is the Judge Matthew J. Perry, Jr. Distinguished Professor of History, Professor Sociology, Pan African Studies, and Computer Science, Clemson University, Emeritus University Distinguished Teacher/Scholar, University Scholar, Professor of History, African American Studies, and Sociology, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.  From 2008-2010, he was the Burroughs Distinguished Professor of Southern History and Culture at Coastal Carolina University.  He was the founding Director of the Institute for Computing in Humanities, Arts, and Social Science (I‑CHASS) at the University of Illinois, where he is emeritus University Distinguished Teacher/Scholar, University Scholar, and Professor of History, African American Studies, and Sociology.  At the University of Illinois, he continues to chair the I-CHASS advisory board and is also a Senior Research Scientist at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) where he served as Associate Director for Humanities and Social Sciences from 2002-2010.  He serves as Executive Director of the College of Charleston’s Low Country and Atlantic World Program (CLAW). Burton serves as vice-chair of the Board of Directors of the Congressional National Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Foundation.  In 2007 the Illinois State legislature honored him with a special resolution for his contributions as a scholar, teacher, and citizen of Illinois. A recognized expert on race relations and the American South, and a leader in Digital Humanities, Burton is often invited to present lectures, conduct workshops, and consult with colleges, universities, and granting agencies.

Burton is a prolific author and scholar (twenty authored or edited books and more than two hundred articles); and author or director of numerous digital humanities projects.  The Age of Lincoln (2007) won the Chicago Tribune Heartland Literary Award for Nonfiction and was selected for Book of the Month Club, History Book Club, and Military Book Club.  One reviewer proclaimed, “If the Civil War era was America’s ‘Iliad,’ then historian Orville Vernon Burton is our latest Homer.”  The book was featured at sessions of the annual meetings of African American History and Life Association, the Social Science History Association, the Southern Intellectual History Circle, and the latter was the basis for a forum published in The Journal of the Historical Society. His In My Father’s House Are Many Mansions: Family and Community in Edgefield, South Carolina (1985) was featured at sessions of the Southern Historical Association and the Social Science History Association annual meetings.  The Age of Lincoln and In My Fathers’ House were nominated for Pulitzers.  His most recent book, is Penn Center:  A History Preserved (2014)

Recognized for his teaching, Burton was selected nationwide as the 1999 U.S. Research and Doctoral University Professor of the Year (presented by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and by the Council for Advancement and Support of Education).  In 2004 he received the American Historical Association’s Eugene Asher Distinguished Teaching Prize.  At the University of Illinois he won teaching awards at the department, school, college, and campus levels.  He was the recipient of the 2001-2002 Graduate College Outstanding Mentor Award and received the 2006 Campus Award for Excellence in Public Engagement from the University of Illinois.  He was appointed an Organization of American Historians Distinguished Lecturer for 2004-16.

Burton’s research and teaching interests include the American South, especially race relations and community, and the intersection of humanities and social sciences.  He has served as president of the Southern Historical Association and of the Agricultural History Society.  He was elected to honorary life membership in BrANCH (British American Nineteenth-Century Historians). Among his honors are fellowships and grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Pew Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the National Humanities Center, the U.S. Department of Education, National Park Service, and the Carnegie Foundation.  He was a Pew National Fellow Carnegie Scholar for 2000-2001. He was elected to the Society of American Historians and was one of ten historians selected to contribute to the Presidential Inaugural Portfolio (January 21, 2013) by the Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies.  Burton was elected into the S.C. Academy of Authors in 2015 and in 2016 received the Governor’s Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Humanities from the South Carolina Humanities Council.

Dr. Pablo Davis

Pablo J. Davis earned the J.D. cum laude from the University of Memphis Cecil C. Humphreys School of Law in May 2017.  As a member of the University of Memphis Law Review’s Senior Editorial Board, he served as Symposium Editor; in that role he organized the 2017 Memphis Law Symposium, “The Fragile Fortress: Judicial Independence in the 21st Century,” featuring the participation of four active federal judges; a former U.S. Attorney General and federal judge; the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Costa Rica; and a number of legal scholars.  The proceedings of the symposium have been published as U. Mem. L. Rev., Vol. 47, No. 4 (Summer 2017).  His published legal writings include an inquiry into emerging legal frameworks for asset return within civil forfeiture regimes in a transnational setting; a comment on a Tennessee Supreme Court case involving a constitutional challenge to the state’s “spiritual treatment” exemption to the child abuse and neglect statute; and a brief essay on the origins and continued relevance of judicial independence as a theme in U.S. legal and political life.  Since July 31, 2017 he has served as a Judicial Law Clerk in the Chambers of The Honorable Bernice B. Donald, United States Circuit Judge for the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals.

Previously, Dr. Davis earned the Ph.D. in History, specializing in Latin America, from The Johns Hopkins University, where he earlier earned the M.A.  He also earned the M.A. in History from Columbia University, and the B.A. in History cum laude from The University of Maryland, College Park.  He has taught Latin American, U.S., and Comparative History of the Americas at various institutions, including The George Washington University, Franklin & Marshall College, The University of Virginia, and The University of Memphis.  He has particularly enjoyed teaching comparative history, including such original courses as Comparative Frontiers of the Americas, Comparative Armed Forces of the Americas, and ethnic history, including U.S. Great Migrations Since 1900, a triple comparative inquiry into the out-migrations of Southerners, both African American and White, and of Puerto Ricans, into other regions of the United States; and History of Hispanic/Latino Communities in the U.S.

Dr. Davis is also an experienced professional translator and interpreter with long experience in those fields, particularly between Spanish and English, as well as with excellent command of French and Portuguese. He is Certified by the Tennessee Administrative Office of the Courts as an Interpreter for the Language of Spanish, and Certified by the American Translators Association from English into Spanish.  It was service as a primarily judicial/legal interpreter and translator that eventually led him to study law.  Dr. Davis has written a weekly bilingual column since July 2012, “Mysteries & Enigmas of Translation ,” in the Mid-South region’s oldest Spanish language/bilingual publication, La Prensa Latina. Many of those columns are collected at http://interfluency.wordpress.com.

 

Panel 2: Citizenship

Moderator:

Professor Raff Donelson, Associate Professor of Law at LSU Paul M. Hebert Law Center

Presenters:

Professor Paul Finkelman, Fulbright Chair in Human Rights and Social Justice at the University of Ottawa, Canada; John E. Murray Visiting Professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law

Professor Paul Finkelman currently holds the Fulbright Chair in Human Rights and Social Justice at the University of Ottawa, in Canada.  He is also the John E. Murray Visiting Professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law.  He received his Ph.D. in history from the University of Chicago in 1976 and was later a Fellow in Law and Humanities at Harvard Law School. In 2016, he held the Ariel F. Sallows Chair in Human Rights at the University of Saskatchewan.   In 2012, he held the John Hope Franklin Chair in Legal History at Duke Law School.  He has also held chairs at LSU Paul M. Hebert Law School, University of Tulsa College of Law, and the University of Miami History department.  He is the President William McKinley Professor Emeritus at Albany Law School.   He is the author of more than 200 scholarly articles and the author or editor of more than fifty books. His next book, Supreme Injustice:  Slavery in the Nation’s Highest Court, will be published by Harvard University Press in 2018.

He is a specialist in American legal history, U.S. Constitutional law, race and the law, the law of American slavery, the First Amendment, religious liberty, the history of the Second Amendment, African American history, the American Civil War, and legal issues surrounding baseball.  His work has been cited four times by the United States Supreme Court, numerous other courts, and in many appellate briefs.  He has lectured on slavery, human trafficking, and human rights issues at the United Nations, throughout the United States, and in more than a dozen other countries.  In 2014, he was ranked as the fifth most cited legal historian in American legal scholarship in Brian Leiter’s “Top Ten Law Faculty Scholarly Impact, 2009-2013.”  He was an expert witness in the famous Alabama Ten Commandments Monument Case (Glassroth v. Moore) and in the law suit over the ownership of Barry Bonds’ 73rd home run ball (Popov v. Hayashi).

Alysa Landry

Alysa Landry is an English instructor at Navajo Technical University, a tribal college located on the Navajo Nation in Crownpoint, New Mexico. She also works as an independent journalist, writing exclusively about the world’s indigenous populations, and is a doctoral student in Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Gratz College (online). A native of New Mexico, Alysa also has lived and worked in Alaska, Arizona, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Utah.

Alysa holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in journalism, a master’s of fine arts degree in creative nonfiction and a graduate certificate in genocide and Holocaust studies. She has traveled to Israel, Germany and Poland to study the history of racism and hate, and is particularly interested in comparative genocide and Native American experiences.

In 2008, Alysa was a Dart Center Ochberg Fellow, a prestigious program that trains journalists to write responsibly and credibly about trauma. She also has received funding or training from the Carter Center, the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies and the College on Problems of Drug Dependence.

Alysa’s work is regularly honored by the Native American Journalists Association. She also has earned awards from the Arizona Press Association, the New Mexico Medical Society and the New Mexico Associated Press. In 2008, she was part of a team of journalists to win Columbia University’s Best Practices Award for a portfolio of work about racial and cultural diversity. Alysa’s journalism, academic and creative writing has also appeared in various newspapers, magazines, textbooks and civil rights-themed publications. She specializes in topics of civil rights, history, mental health, trauma, religion, politics and education.

Alysa lives in Farmington, N.M., with her husband and two dogs.

Professor Gabriel “Jack” Chin, Edward L. Barrett Jr. Chair and Martin Luther King Jr. Professor of Law at the University of California, Davis School of Law

Professor Jack Chin is Edward L. Barrett Jr. Chair and Martin Luther King Jr. Professor of Law at the University of California, Davis School of Law.  He is one of the few living people who participated in the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment; working with students, he persuaded the Ohio legislature to ratify it in 2003, after they rejected it in 1868.  He is the author of numerous articles on criminal law, immigration law, and race and law.  His article, Effective Assistance of Counsel and the Consequences of Guilty Pleas, 87 Cornell L. Rev. 697 (2002), co-authored with a student, was cited in the majority and concurrence in Padilla v. Kentucky, 130 S. Ct. 1473 (2010), and the majority and dissent in Chaidez v. United States, 133 S. Ct. 1103 (2013).  Justice Sotomayor cited his article The New Civil Death, 160 U. Pa. L. Rev. 1789 (2012) in her dissent in Utah v. Streiff, 136 S. Ct. 2056 (2016).  He is a graduate of Wesleyan and the Michigan and Yale law schools.

 

Panel 3: Equal Protection

Moderator:

Professor John Devlin, William Hawk Daniels Professor of Law and Robert & Pamela Martin Professor of Law at LSU Paul M. Hebert Law Center

Presenters:

Professor Mark Summers, Thomas D. Clark Chair in History at the University of Kentucky

Professor Mark Wahlgren Summers holds the Thomas D. Clark Chair in History at the University of Kentucky. He teaches whatever he can get away with: The Civil War and Reconstruction, the Gilded Age, the Old West, the American Frontier, the British Empire, and the basic American History survey course.  He has written nine or ten books, including The Era of Good Stealings, The Plundering Generation, The Press Gang, Party Games, A Dangerous Stir, The Ordeal of Reunion, and Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion.   He currently is delving into the gaudy career of “Big Tim” Sullivan, a Tammany Hall boss, and into the stolen elections that made Abraham Lincoln president – though not, of course, for the same book.

Professor Seth Davis, Assistant Professor of Law at University of California Irvine School of Law

Prof. Seth Davis is an expert on federal litigation and public administration. His scholarship focuses upon the hard choices that we don’t acknowledge or hope to avoid when we create rights of action and allocate lawmaking authority. Substantively, he focuses upon these hard choices as they arise in federal litigation, federal administrative law, and federal Indian law on the one side and property and tort on the other. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in leading law reviews, including the Columbia Law Review, the California Law Review, the Vanderbilt Law Review, the Boston University Law Review, and the Notre Dame Law Review, as well as in leading specialty law journals, including the Columbia Human Rights Law Review. Prof. Davis is also a co-author on the forthcoming 2017 supplement to Cohen’s Handbook of Federal Indian Law.

After graduating from Columbia Law School, Professor Davis clerked for the Honorable Douglas H. Ginsburg of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Following his clerkship, Prof. Davis served as a volunteer legal intern at the Legal Aid Society of the District of Columbia and then as a litigation associate at O’Melveny & Myers LLP, where he specialized in appellate litigation and financial services regulatory law and also developed a pro bono practice working with Indian Nations and intertribal organizations.

Professor Bertrall Ross, Chancellor’s Professor of Law at Berkeley Law

Professor Ross’s research interests are driven by a normative concern about democratic responsiveness and a methodological approach that integrates political theory and empirical social science into discussions of legal doctrine, the institutional role of courts, and democratic design. In the area of legislation, his current research seeks to address how courts should reconcile legislative supremacy with the vexing problem of interpreting statutes in contexts not foreseen by the enacting legislature. In election law, he is examining the constitutional dimensions and the structural sources of the marginalization of the poor in the American political process.

Prior to joining the Boalt Hall community, Bertrall was a Kellis Parker Academic Fellow at Columbia Law School. He clerked for the Honorable Dorothy Nelson of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and the Honorable Myron Thompson of the Middle District of Alabama. He received his J.D. from Yale Law School and has an M.Sc in the Politics of the World Economy from the London School of Economics, a Masters in Public Affairs from Princeton University Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, and a B.A. in International Affairs and History from the University of Colorado, Boulder.

Professor D. Wendy Greene, Professor at Samford Cumberland School of Law

Professor Doris “Wendy” Greene teaches Constitutional Law, Employment Law, Employment Discrimination, Equitable Remedies, Real Property, Race and American Law, Critical Race Theory, and a specialty course on Workplace Appearance Discrimination, Dress Codes, and the Law. Since entering the legal academy in 2007, Professor Greene has developed an international reputation for her cutting-edge scholarship on what she has coined “grooming codes discrimination” and has similarly become a leading expert on “misperception discrimination” in the workplace. She, too, is one of a few U.S. law professors actively engaged in the study of comparative slavery, racial classification, and race relations in the Americas and Caribbean. Notably, in 2010, Professor Greene’s comparative work on racial slavery and racial identity in Brazil and the United States was featured at Howard University in Washington, DC in her role as the Logan Lecturer on the African Diaspora and/or Black History.

Professor Greene’s scholarly works, which appear in reputed general and specialty law journals, are not simply widely cited but have also enjoyed significant real-world application. Her articles have shaped educational modules and professional training on workplace diversity and inclusion as well as the legal positions of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), federal and administrative law judges in race discrimination cases. In 2016, the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals quoted Professor Greene’s award-winning article, Title VII: What’s Hair (and Other Race-Based Characteristics) Got to Do With It?), in EEOC v. Catastrophe Management Solutions, Inc., as legal authority on the social construction of race. Naturally, Professor Greene is a sought-after speaker. Having delivered her expertise on racial slavery and race relations in the Americas and Caribbean; identity, anti-discrimination, and equality law; and critical race theory at over 70 professional conferences in Canada, Europe, Latin America, the United States, and the Caribbean, she frequently addresses student, professional, and community organizations on topics related to: academic success in law school; diversity in the legal profession and legal education; and careers and professional development in legal academia.

For her professional service, innovative teaching and scholarship, Professor Greene has garnered both national and institutional recognition. In 2015, Professor Greene’s article, Categorically Black, White, or Wrong: “Misperception Discrimination” and the State of Title VII Protection, was awarded the Law and Society Association John Hope Franklin Prize: a distinctive national honor recognizing “exceptional scholarship in the field of Race, Racism, and the Law.” At Cumberland, Greene has twice earned the Lightfoot, Franklin, & White Award for Best Faculty Scholarship in 2009 (for her article, Title VII: What’s Hair (and Other Race-Based Characteristics) Got to Do With It?),and 2014 (for her articles Categorically Black, White, or Wrong: “Misperception Discrimination” and the State of Title VII Protection; and A Multidimensional Analysis of What Not To Wear in The Workplace: Hijabs and Natural Hair. In 2011, she was conferred the Harvey S. Jackson Excellence in Teaching Award for Upper Level Courses. In 2014, Professor Greene was one of 12 “standout” academicians named an “Emerging Scholar” by Diverse: Issues in Higher Education and honored by her alma mater, Xavier University of Louisiana, as an inaugural young alumni award recipient. Professor Greene has also enjoyed the privilege of serving as the Inaugural Scholar in Residence at St. Thomas University School of Law (Miami) in 2014 and as the Scholar in Residence at Texas Southern University Thurgood Marshall School of Law in 2015.

In addition to maintaining a dynamic teaching and scholarly agenda, between 2012 and 2014 Professor Greene served as Cumberland’s Director of Faculty Development and between 2010 and 2012 as Co-Chair of Cumberland’s Faculty Development Committee. She is actively involved in myriad professional communities and the community-at-large. Greene is the immediate past Chair of the Association of American Law Schools (AALS) Section on Women in Legal Education and an Executive Committee member of the AALS Section on Employment Discrimination, having served since 2013. Among other committees, Professor Greene has also served on: the 2015 American Society for Legal History Program Committee; the ACLU of Alabama Board of Directors; the Birmingham Civil Rights Summer Voting Rights Series Steering Committee; the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute Human Rights Symposium Community Advisory Committee; the Lutie Lytle Black Women Law Faculty Writing Workshop Planning Committee; the National Bar Association Law Professors Division Executive Committee; and the Southeast/Southwest People of Color Legal Scholarship Conference Executive Committee. In 2012, Professor Greene served as the Conference Chair of the SE/SW People of Color Legal Scholarship Conference, drawing approximately 60 academics, practitioners, and laws students to Cumberland. The leadership of the National Bar Association Law Professors Division and the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute has publicly recognized Professor Greene for her devoted service and commitment to civil rights advocacy respectively. Moreover, she was recently selected to serve on the National Chair’s Education Task Force for the National Black Law Students Association.

A native of Columbia, SC, Professor Greene is a graduate of Xavier University of Louisiana (cum laude, B.A. with Honors in English and a double minor in African American Studies and Spanish); Tulane University Law School (J.D.); and The George Washington University School of Law (LL.M.). Prior to law teaching, she was employed with a D.C. lobbying firm and a Houston, Texas boutique labor and employment law firm.

 

Panel 4: Future of the Fourteenth Amendment

Moderator:

Professor Bill Corbett, Frank L. Maraist Professor of Law and Wex S. Malone Professor of Law at LSU Paul M. Hebert Law Center

Presenters:

Professor F. Michael Higginbotham, Joseph Curtis Professor of Law and former Interim Dean, University of Baltimore School of Law

F. Michael Higginbotham is a renowned law professor, author and international political consultant. A civil rights, human rights and constitutional legal expert, he has appeared in media worldwide.

Professor Higginbotham graduated from Beverly Hills High School in 1975, received a Bachelor of Arts degree magna cum laude from Brown University in 1979, a Juris Doctor degree from Yale University in 1982, and a Master of Laws degree with honors from Cambridge University in 1985 where he was a Rotary Scholar.

Higginbotham is the author of the book Race Law: Cases, Commentary, and Questions (Durham: Carolina Academic Press, 2001). Now in its third edition, Race Law is widely used in colleges and law schools throughout the United States and in several foreign countries. His latest book, Ghosts of Jim Crow: Ending Racism in Post-Racial America, was published by NYU Press on March 18, 2013.

Higginbotham was recently selected one of the 100 most influential black attorneys in the United States by On Being a Black Lawyer.  In 2011, he was named a winner of the Daily Record’s Leadership in Law Award.  He is a member of the Maryland Appellate Judicial Nominations Commission and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He is the former Chair of the O’Malley/Brown Transition Team Minority Affairs Working Group, the former Chair of the Maryland Attorney General’s Task Force on Electronic Weapons, the former Chair of the Association of American Law Schools Committee on Recruitment and Retention of Minority Faculty, and the former Chairman of the Board of the Public Justice Center. He is a Co-founder of the Baltimore Scholars Program. Higginbotham is a member of the District of Columbia Bar and holds an Honorary Doctor of Humanities degree from Shenandoah University.

Higginbotham has published numerous articles in journals including the Yale Law and Policy Review, the Harvard Blackletter Law Journal, the New York University Law Review, the Columbia University International Law Journal, the University of Hawaii Law Review, the Howard University Law Journal, and the University of Illinois Law Review. He has published numerous editorials in newspapers including the New York Times, the Chronicle Review, the Boston Globe, the Baltimore Sun, and the Washington Afro-American.

Professor Wendy Brown Scott, Professor of Law at North Carolina Central School of Law

A graduate of Harvard University and New York University School of Law, Professor Wendy Scott made history as the first African-­American to serve as Dean for the Mississippi College School of Law. Scott became the 8th law dean at MC Law and served with distinction from 2014-2016.

Prior to joining the MC Law faculty, Scott taught at the North Carolina Central School of Law for 8 years, serving as the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs from 2009 to 2012. She previously taught at Tulane Law School in New Orleans for 17 years and served as Vice Dean for Academic Affairs. She has also been an adjunct professor at Hunter College, Brooklyn Law School, and CUNY Law School.

Prof. Scott teaches Constitutional Law, Civil Procedure, Evidence, Native American Law, and Gender and the Law. Her scholarship focuses on constitutional theory and school desegregation. Her work on the desegregation of public colleges and universities has been widely cited. She is currently completing a book on the dissenting opinions of Justice Thurgood Marshall with co-author University of Wisconsin School of Law Professor Linda S. Greene.

Early in her career, Scott practiced employment law as a Staff Attorney for the Legal Action Center of the City of New York and as an Associate at Vladeck, Waldman, Elias & Engelhard in New York City. She directed litigation as the Associate Counsel for the Center for Law and Social Justice, a community law office in Brooklyn, New York.