Date: Tuesday, June 8, 2021, 5:00 – 6:00 PM EST
Webinar Description: This webinar, organized by the Section on Constitutional Law, hosts a conversation with four authors of important recent books in the field of constitutional law. The authors and their books are: Dorothy A. Brown, The Whiteness of Wealth: How the Tax System Impoverishes Black Americans–and How We Can Fix It (2021); Jamal Greene, How Rights Went Wrong: Why Our Obsession with Rights is Tearing America Apart (2021); Martha S. Jones, Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All (2020); and Andrew Koppelman, Gay Rights vs. Religious Liberty? The Unnecessary Conflict (2020). Each author will briefly describe his or her book, and then engage with audience questions.
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Andrea Freeman, J.D., Professor of Law, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa William S. Richardson School of Law
Professor Freeman writes and researches at the intersection of critical race theory and food policy, health, and consumer credit. Much of her work explores her pioneering theory of food oppression, which examines how facially neutral food-related law and policy, influenced by corporate interests, disproportionately harm marginalized communities. She is the author of Skimmed: Breastfeeding, Race, and Injustice and the recipient of the 2020-21 Fulbright King’s College London US Scholar Award.
Professor Freeman teaches Constitutional Law, Federal Courts, Race and Law, Food Law and Policy, and Comparative Social Justice and Constitutional Law. In Spring 2017, she visited at UC Berkeley School of Law. In Summer 2018, she was the Distinguished Scholar of Sustainable Agriculture and Food Systems at Vermont Law School. In 2018-19, she visited at the University of Denver Sturm College of Law. Before joining the faculty at Richardson in Fall 2013, she taught at Santa Clara University School of Law, University of San Francisco School of Law, and California Western School of Law.
An active community member, Professor Freeman serves on the Litigation Committee of the ACLU Hawai’i chapter. She volunteers with the Kokua Hawaii Foundation teaching Aina in the Schools. In 2015, she received the Community Faculty of the Year award from Richardson’s Advocates for Public Interest Law. Professor Freeman is the Secretary of the AALS Section on Constitutional Law and Past Chair of the Executive Committee of the AALS Section on Agriculture and Food Law. She is co-chair of the Law and Society Collaborative Research Network for Critical Race and the Law and a Founding Member of the Academy of Food Law and Policy.
After graduating from U.C. Berkeley School of Law, she clerked for Judge Jon O. Newman of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and former chief Judge José A. Fusté of the U.S. District Court for the District of Puerto Rico. Before law school, she worked in Toronto as a counselor for women and children who experienced domestic violence and in New York as a production manager in the independent film industry.
Lee J. Strang, J.D., John W. Stoepler Professor of Law & Values, University of Toledo College of Law
Professor Strang joined the faculty in 2008, was granted tenure in 2010, and was named John W. Stoepler Professor of Law & Values in 2015. Before that, he was a visiting Professor at Michigan State University College of Law. A graduate of the University of Iowa, where he was Articles Editor of the Iowa Law Review and Order of the Coif, Professor Strang also holds an LL.M. degree from Harvard Law School. During the fall, 2015, Professor Strang was a visiting scholar at the Georgetown Center for the Constitution. In 2016, he was appointed to the Ohio Advisory Committee of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. The University of Toledo awarded Professor Strang its Outstanding Faculty Research and Scholarship Award in 2017. During the 2018-2019 academic year, Professor Strang was a visiting fellow at the James Madison Program at Princeton University. Professor Strang received The University of Toledo’s Inclusive Excellence Award in 2021 for his contributions to the University’s diversity.
Prior to teaching, Professor Strang served as a judicial clerk for Judge Alice M. Batchelder of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. He was also an associate for Jenner & Block LLP in Chicago, where he practiced in general and appellate litigation.
A prolific scholar, Professor Strang has published dozens of articles in the fields of constitutional law and interpretation, property law, and religion and the First Amendment. His most recent book, Originalism’s Promise: A Natural Law Account of the American Constitution (Cambridge University Press 2019), is the first natural law justification for originalism. Among other scholarly projects, he is currently editing the third edition of his unique, multi-volume, “modular” case book Federal Constitutional Law for Carolina Academic Press, and writing a book on the history of Catholic legal education.
Professor Strang is a frequent presenter at scholarly conferences. He is a regular participant in debates at law schools across the country, contributor to the media, and speaker to political, civic, and religious groups. He also consults on a wide variety of constitutional law issues including free speech and religious exercise, state constitutional law cases, and property law topics.
Dorothy A. Brown J.D., Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Law, Emory University School of Law
Dorothy A. Brown is professor of law at Emory University School of Law. She is a nationally recognized scholar in tax policy, race, and class and has published extensively on the racial implications of federal tax policy. She is highly sought for her expertise in workplace inclusion issues, a respected speaker in the legal community, and a regularly engaged expert by media including Bloomberg, CNN, National Public Radio, The New York Times, National Law Journal, and Forbes.
Brown joined Emory Law in 2008, focusing on federal tax law and critical race theory in her courses and scholarship. She comes to Emory from Washington and Lee University School of Law, where she taught courses in administrative law, critical race theory, federal income tax, and partnership tax and was the director of the Frances Lewis Law Center. She also has taught at George Mason University and the University of Cincinnati.
Before becoming a professor of law, Brown worked as an adviser to J. Stephen Swift of the US Tax Court, as an associate with Haynes & Miller in Washington, DC, and as an investment banker at New York’s Drexel, Burnham & Lambert. She also was a special assistant to the Federal Housing Commissioner at the US Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Jamal Greene, J.D., Dwight Professor of Law, Columbia Law School
Jamal Greene is a constitutional law expert whose scholarship focuses on the structure of legal and constitutional argument. He teaches constitutional law, comparative constitutional law, the law of the political process, First Amendment, and federal courts.
Greene is the author of the book, How Rights Went Wrong: Why Our Obsession with Rights is Tearing America Apart (HMH, March 2021). He is also the author of numerous law review articles and has written in-depth about the Supreme Court, constitutional rights adjudication, and the constitutional theory of originalism, including “Rights as Trumps?” (Harvard Law Review foreword for the 2017–2018 Supreme Court term), “Rule Originalism” (Columbia Law Review, 2016), and “The Anticanon” (Harvard Law Review, 2011), an examination of Supreme Court cases now considered examples of weak constitutional analysis, such as Dred Scott v. Sandford and Plessy v. Ferguson.
During the 2018–2019 academic year, Greene served as senior visiting scholar at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, where he commissioned and oversaw new scholarly research relating to free speech and new communications platforms. He has been a visiting professor at Harvard Law School and has served as Columbia Law’s Vice Dean for Intellectual Life. He currently serves as co-chair of the Oversight Board, an independent body set up to review content moderation decisions on Facebook and Instagram.
Greene is a sought-after media commentator on the Supreme Court and on constitutional law. His articles have appeared in The New York Times, Slate, New York Daily News, and The Los Angeles Times. In 2019, he served as an aide to Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Ca.) during the Senate confirmation hearings of Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Before training as a lawyer, he was a baseball reporter for Sports Illustrated.
Prior to joining Columbia Law in 2008, Greene was the Alexander Fellow at New York University School of Law. He served as a law clerk to Judge Guido Calabresi on the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and for Justice John Paul Stevens on the U.S. Supreme Court. He is a member of the American Law Institute and sits on the Board of Academic Advisors of the American Constitution Society.
Martha S. Jones, J.D., Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor, Professor of History, Professor at the SNF Agora Institute, Johns Hopkins University
Professor Martha S. Jones is the Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor, Professor of History, and a Professor at the SNF Agora Institute at The Johns Hopkins University. She is a legal and cultural historian whose work examines how black Americans have shaped the story of American democracy.
Professor Jones is the author of Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All (2020), selected as one of Time’s 100 must-read books for 2020. Her 2018 book, Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America (2018), was winner of the Organization of American Historians Liberty Legacy Award (best book in civil rights history), the American Historical Association Littleton-Griswold Prize (best book in American legal history), the American Society for Legal History John Phillip Reid book award (best book in Anglo-American legal history) and the Baltimore City Historical Society Scholars honor for 2020. Professor Jones is also author of All Bound Up Together: The Woman Question in African American Public Culture 1830-1900 (2007) and a coeditor of Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women (University of North Carolina Press (2015), together with many articles and essay.
Professor Jones is a public historian, writing for broader audiences at the New York Times, Washington Post, the Atlantic, USA Today, Public Books, Talking Points Memo, Politico, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and Time. She is an exhibition curator for “Reframing the Color Line” and “Proclaiming Emancipation” at the William L. Clements Library, and an expert consultant for museum, film and video productions with the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, the Charles Wright Museum of African American History, PBS American Experience, the Southern Poverty Law Center, Netflix, and Arte (France.)
Professor Jones holds a Ph.D. in history from Columbia University and a J.D. from the CUNY School of Law which bestowed upon her the degree of Doctor of Laws honoris causa in 2019. Prior to her academic career, she was a public interest litigator in New York City, recognized for her work a Charles H. Revson Fellow on the Future of the City of New York at Columbia University.
Professor Jones is an immediate past co-president of the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians, and today serves on the boards of the Society of American Historians, the National Women’s History Museum, the US Capitol Historical Society, the Johns Hopkins University Press, the Journal of African American History and Slavery & Abolition.
Andrew M. Koppelman, J.D., John Paul Stevens Professor of Law, Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law
Andrew Koppelman is John Paul Stevens Professor of Law, Professor (by courtesy) of Political Science, and Philosophy Department Affiliated Faculty at Northwestern University. He received the Walder Award for Research Excellence from Northwestern, the Hart-Dworkin award in legal philosophy from the Association of American Law Schools, and the Edward S. Corwin Prize from the American Political Science Association. His scholarship focuses on issues at the intersection of law and political philosophy. He has written more than 100 scholarly articles and seven books, most recently Gay Rights vs. Religious Liberty? The Unnecessary Conflict, Oxford University Press, 2020.
