Patricia J. Williams Race and Private Law Inaugural Award Ceremony

Date: Friday, April 18 from 6 – 7:30 pm ET/5 – 6:30 pm CT/4 – 5:30 pm MT/3 – 4:30 pm PT

The AALS Section on Race and Private Law is holding its inaugural Patricia J. Williams award ceremony. This year’s honoree is Professor Mehrsa Baradaran, who will receive her award from Professor Patricia J. Williams for excellence in scholarship in the areas of race in private law.

Watch Recording Here

Award Winner

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Mehrsa Baradaran, Professor of Law, University of California Irvine School of Law

Mehrsa Baradaran is a professor of law at UC Irvine Law.

Previously, she was the Robert Cotten Alston Chair in Corporate Law at the University of Georgia School of Law and the Robert Braucher Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard School of Law. Baradaran writes about banking law, financial inclusion, inequality, and the racial wealth gap. Her scholarship includes the books The Quiet Coup: Neoliberalism and the Looting of America (Liveright/Norton Press 2024),The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap (Belknap/Harvard University Press 2017), and How the Other Half Banks: Exclusion, Exploitation, and the Threat to Democracy (Harvard University Press 2015). The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap was awarded the Best Book of the Year by the Urban Affairs Association, the PROSE Award Honorable Mention in the Business, Finance & Management category. Baradaran was also selected as a finalist at the 2018 Georgia Author of the Year Awards for the book in the category of history/biography. Baradaran has also published articles including “Jim Crow Credit” in the Irvine Law Review, “Regulation by Hypothetical” in the Vanderbilt Law Review, “It’s Time for Postal Banking” in the Harvard Law Review Forum, “Banking and the Social Contract” in the Notre Dame Law Review, “How the Poor Got Cut Out of Banking” in the Emory Law Journal, “Reconsidering the Separation of Banking and Commerce” in the George Washington Law Review and “The ILC and the Reconstruction of U.S. Banking” in the SMU Law Review. Of note, her article “The New Deal with Black America” was selected for presentation at the 2017 Stanford/Harvard/Yale Junior Faculty Forum. Baradaran and her books have received significant national and international media coverage and have been featured in the New York Times, the Atlantic, Slate, American Banker, the Wall Street Journal and Financial Times; on National Public Radio’s “Marketplace,” C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal” and Public Broadcasting Service’s “NewsHour;” and as part of TEDxUGA. The LA Times selected Baradaran in its list of top 100 Influential people . She has advised U.S. Senators and Congressmen on policy, testified before the U.S. Congress, and spoken at national and international forums like the U.S. Treasury and the World Bank. Baradaran was selected to serve on two Presidential Transition teams covering the US Treasury, Federal Reserve, and various banking agencies. She earned her bachelor’s degree cum laude from Brigham Young University and her law degree from NYU, where she served as a member of the New York University Law Review.

Speakers

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Patricia Williams, University Distinguished Professor of Law and Humanities, Northeastern University School of Law

Professor Williams, one of the most provocative intellectuals in American law and a pioneer of both the law and literature and critical race theory movements in American legal theory, holds a joint appointment between the School of Law and the Department of Philosophy and Religion in the College of Social Sciences and Humanities. She is also director of Law, Technology and Ethics Initiatives in the School of Law and the College of Social Sciences and Humanities.

Professor Williams has published widely in the areas of race, gender, literature and law. Her books, including The Alchemy of Race and Rights (Harvard University Press, 1991), illustrate some of America’s most complex societal problems and challenge our ideas about socio-legal constructs of race and gender. Her work remains at the cutting edge of legal scholarship. Drawing on her prior interrogation of race, gender and personhood, Professor Williams’ current research raises core questions of individual autonomy and identity in the context of legal and ethical debates on science and technology. Her work in the area of health and genetics, for example, questions how racial formation is shaped by the legal regulation of private industry and government. Her work on algorithms grapples with the auditing function of technology in our everyday lives — shaping how we understand who we are. Professor Williams has authored hundreds of essays, book reviews and articles for leading journals, popular magazines and newspapers, including the Guardian, Ms., The New York Times, The New Yorker and The Washington Post. For many years, she wrote a monthly column in The Nation. She has appeared on such radio and television shows as “All Things Considered,” “Fresh Air,” “Talk of the Nation” and “Today.” She has appeared in a number of documentary films, including “That Rush!” (1995), which she wrote and narrated. Directed by British film-maker Isaac Julien, this short study of American talk show hosts was featured as part of an installation at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London. The Alchemy of Race and Rights was named one of the 25 best books of 1991 by the Voice Literary Supplement; one of the “feminist classics of the last 20 years” that “literally changed women’s lives” by Ms. magazine; and one of the 10 best non-fiction books of the decade by Amazon.com. Professor Williams’ other books include The Miracle of the Black Leg: Notes on Race, Human Bodies, and the Spirit of the Law (The New Press, 2024), Giving A Damn: Racism, Romance and Gone with the Wind (HarperCollins, 2021), The Rooster’s Egg (Harvard Press, 1995), Seeing a Color-Blind Future: The Paradox of Race (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1998) and Open House: Of Family, Food, Piano Lessons, and the Search for a Room of My Own (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2004). Professor Williams has held fellowships at the School of Criticism and Theory at Dartmouth, the Humanities Research Institute of the University of California at Irvine, the Institute for Arts and Civic Dialogue at Harvard, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University and Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Studies at Harvard. She has received awards from the American Educational Studies Association and the National Organization for Women, among others. In 2019, she was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society. In 2000, Professor Williams was awarded a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship. Professor Williams’ current research agenda includes three books in progress: The Complete Mad Law Professor (compilation of The Nation columns); The Talking Helix (focused on bioethics and genetics); and Gathering the Ghosts (a literary and historical text based on Professor Williams’ family archival materials). In addition, she is working on a documentary film that knits together a narratively linked series of video images about the deaths of unarmed citizens beginning with Trayvon Martin. Professor Williams previously served as the James L. Dohr Professor of Law at Columbia Law School.

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Carliss Chatman, Associate Professor of Law, Southern Methodist University Dedman School of Law

Carliss Chatman teaches an array of business law, commercial law, and ethics classes including: Contracts and Sales and Leases; Agency and Unincorporated Entities, Corporations, Business Associations, and Securities Regulation; Professional Responsibility; and a Transactional Skills Simulation course with a Mergers and Acquisitions focus that incorporates corporate law and UCC Article 9. Her scholarship interests are in the fields of corporate law, ethics, and civil procedure. Her scholarship is largely influenced by 11 years of legal practice in complex commercial litigation, mass tort litigation and the representation of small and start-up businesses in the United States and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. As a result, her scholarship is intersectional with a focus on issues at the heart of commercial litigation: the interplay of business entities, government, and natural persons.

Professor Chatman’s work is also influenced by over two decades of service on non-profit boards and involvement with community organizations. Through leadership positions, she has developed expertise in corporate governance and non-profit regulation. She has also been instrumental in strategic planning and fundraising efforts. Professor Chatman has actively advocated on behalf of non-profit organizations at state and federal legislatures. Prior to teaching law, Professor Chatman was a commercial litigation attorney in Houston, Texas. In practice, she focused on trial law, appeals and arbitration in pharmaceutical, healthcare, mass torts, product liability, as well as oil, gas and mineral law. In addition to negotiating settlements and obtaining successful verdicts, Professor Chatman has also analyzed and drafted position statements regarding the constitutionality of statutes and the impact of statutory revisions for presentation to the Texas Legislature. Professor Chatman is a 2004 graduate of the University of Texas School of Law, where she was a member of the Texas Journal of Women and the Law, and served on the Student Recruitment and Orientation Committee. She received her bachelor’s degree in 2001 from Duke University with honors in English.

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Chaumtoli Huq, Professor of Law, CUNY School of Law

Chaumtoli Huq is a leading expert on employment and labor law, migration and human rights with a focus on social movements in the US and South Asia and the founder/Editor of an innovative law and media non-profit focused called Law@theMargins (www.lawatthemargins.com).

Her scholarship explores interrelated issues under the broad theme of Transnational Labor Law and Social Movements which includes how law and social movements interact to create emancipatory visions of global labor and human rights laws. She has produced short documentaries related to her work in Bangladesh called Sramik Awaaz: Workers Voices, and has also created a digital archive of her work on tea workers in Bangladesh called Chai Justice (https://chaijustice.com/). Huq has devoted her professional career to public service focusing on issues impacting workers in the US and South Asia. Along with holding leadership roles at Legal Services of NYC and MFY Legal Services, she also served as Director of the first South Asian Workers’ Rights Project at the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, the first staff attorney to the New York Taxi Workers Alliance. She is the 2019 Access to Justice Leadership Award by the South Asian Bar Association of New York, the 2020 Daynard Public Interest Visiting Fellowship awarded to nationally recognized public interest leaders. She was a 2023 Fulbright US Scholar in Malaga, Spain and Visiting Scholar in Sicily researching South Asian migration to Europe.

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Marissa Jackson Sow, Associate Professor of Law, University of Richmond School of Law

Professor Jackson Sow teaches and writes in the areas of contracts, constitutional law, international law, human rights, post-structuralism, political economy, visual culture, and rhetoric. Her most recent works were published in the California Law Review, Michigan Law Review Online, and the University of California Irvine Law Review. Professor Jackson Sow earned her J.D. from Columbia Law School, her Master of Laws from the London School of Economics and Political Science, and her B.A. from Northwestern University. Immediately prior to returning to academia, Professor Jackson Sow served as a Leadership in Government Fellow for the Open Society Foundations and a 2020 Fellow for the Fellowship Programme for People of African Descent hosted by the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, and she is currently an awardee of the Open Society Foundation’s Fellowship Advancement Fund. She was previously a law clerk to the late Honorable Sterling Johnson, Jr. in the Eastern District of New York, and the late Honorable Damon J. Keith on the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals.