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2007-2008

Social Justice Thursdays

Spring 2008

 

Fall 2007

 

 

Spring 2008

Critical Analysis of Law & Economics --January 18, 2007

Faculty Facilitator: Angela Harris

Professor of Law; Executive Committee Member, Center for Social Justice. Before joining the Boalt faculty in 1988, Angela Harris served as a law clerk to Judge Joel M. Flaum of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit, and as an attorney in the San Francisco office of Morrison & Foerster. She was a visiting professor at Stanford Law School in 1991, Yale Law School in 1997 and Georgetown Law Center in 2000. Harris's writing and research focus on feminist legal theory and critical race theory. Her recent publications include Gender and Law: Theory, Doctrine, Commentary (with Katherine Bartlett, 1998) and Race and Races: Cases and Resources for a Diverse America (with Juan Perea, Richard Delgado and Stephanie Wildman, 2000).

 

Constitutional Law --February 21, 2008

Faculty Facilitator: Goodwin Liu

Goodwin Liu's primary areas of expertise are constitutional law, education policy, civil rights, and the Supreme Court. His latest work in progress, "Education, Equality, and National Citizenship," seeks to anchor a federal legislative duty to remedy educational inadequacy and inequality in the Fourteenth Amendment's Citizenship Clause.

Liu is the author of "The Parted Paths of School Desegregation and School Finance Litigation," forthcoming in Law & Inequality (2005); "School Choice to Achieve Desegregation" in Fordham Law Review (2005) (with William L. Taylor); " Brown , Bollinger , and Beyond" in Howard Law Journal' s 2004 volume commemorating the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education; "Separation Anxiety: Congress, the Courts, and the Constitution" in Georgetown Law Journal (2003) (with Hillary Rodham Clinton); and "The Causation Fallacy: Bakke and the Basic Arithmetic of Selective Admissions" in Michigan Law Review (2002). With Christopher Edley, he is co-director of a multi-year, multi-disciplinary project called "Rethinking Rodriguez: Education as a Fundamental Right" in Boalt's newly launched Chief Justice Earl Warren Institute for Race, Ethnicity, and Diversity.

 

Property Law --February 28, 2008

Faculty Facilitator: Philip Frickey

After law school, Philip Frickey clerked for Judge John Minor Wisdom of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit and for Justice Thurgood Marshall of the U.S. Supreme Court. He then practiced law for three years in Washington, D.C., before joining the faculty of the University of Minnesota Law School, where he taught for 17 years. He joined the Boalt faculty in 2000. He was appointed to the Alexander F. and May T. Morrison Chair in 2006. Previously, he held the Richard W. Jennings '39 Chair. Professor Frickey is a nationally recognized scholar in the fields of statutory interpretation, legislative process, federal Indian law, and constitutional law.

 

Fall 2007

 

INTRODUCTION TO LEGAL EDUCATION --September 7, 2007

Readings:

-- Kimberle Williams Crenshaw, Foreword: Toward a Race-Conscious Pedagogy in Legal Education , 4 S. Cal. Rev. L. & Women's Stud. 33 (1994.)

-- Jerome McCristal Culp , Autobiography and Legal Scholarship and Teaching: Finding the Me in the Legal Academy , 77 Va. L. Rev. 539 (1991).

Faculty Facilitator: Bernida Reagan

Bernida M. Reagan, was appointed Director of the Port of Oakland's Division of Social Responsibility in February 2002. She is responsible for developing and implementing a comprehensive approach for directing the Port's involvement in the communities which the Port serves. The Social Responsibility Division includes the Employment Resources Development Program, Contract Compliance and implementation of the Social Justice components of the Maritime and Aviation Project Labor Agreement. She has served as the founding Director of the East Bay Community Law Center (EBCLC), a non-profit legal service office founded by students at Boalt Hall School of Law in 1988. As a member of the Alameda County Women's Hall of Fame (1996), she received the State Bar of California Legal Services Achievement Award for Northern California in 1996. She is a co-recipient of the 2002 William Pincus Award for Outstanding Contributions to the Cause of Clinical Legal Educational and the Achievement of Justice and the 2002 recipient of the California State Bar's Loren Miller award of outstanding leadership in Legal Services. She has practiced public interest law for 23 years.

 

INTRODUCTION TO LEGAL EDUCATION (cont.'d) --September 21, 2007

Readings:

-- Stephanie M. Wildman, The Classroom Climate in Looking at Law School (Stephen Gillers, ed. ) 1997.

Faculty Facilitators: Victoria Ortiz & Mary Louise Frampton

Victoria Ortiz is currently the assistant dean for student services. After graduating from law school in 1988, she became an associate at Paul Weiss and later clerked for Judge Margaret Taylor of the Civil Court of the City of New York. She has taught high school in New York City, worked for the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union, and held major positions in institutions of higher learning. From 1993 to 1995, Ortiz served as dean of students at the City University of New York School of Law, and during part of that time she was also acting director of admissions. In 1995 she came to California to become the associate dean of humanities at New College of San Francisco.

 

Mary Louise Frampton, director of the Thelton E. Henderson Center for Social Justice, has a long record of involvement in social justice issues. She recently retired from a Central Valley civil rights practice that focused on issues of discrimination in employment. Prior to the establishment of that firm in 1974, Frampton was the directing attorney of the Madera office of California Rural Legal Services. She was on the first board of directors of the California Women Lawyers Association, was the founder of the San Joaquin Valley Chapter of the Federal Bar Association and helped establish the first local chapter of the federal Inns of Court. Frampton has been involved in a number of important social justice causes over the course of her career. In the 1970s she was instrumental in establishing National Land for People, an organization of small farmers and farm workers. As the group's lawyer, she won a series of landmark federal cases that forced the federal government and large agribusiness corporations to comply with the 160 acre limitation law and end the diversion of federally subsidized water away from small family farmers. Such victories enabled small farmers and farm workers to purchase desirable agricultural land and become economically independent. Frampton authored an article on that legal struggle for the UC Davis Law Review .

 

PROCEDURE/CONSTITUTIONAL LAW --October 5, 2007

Readings:

-- Robert S. Chang, Toward an Asian American Legal Scholarship: Critical Race Theory, Post-Structuralism, and Narrative Space , 81 Cal. L. Rev. 1241, 1 Asian L.J. 1 (1994).

Faculty Facilitator: Norman Spaulding

A nationally recognized scholar in the area of professional responsibility and the legal profession, Norman Spaulding has focused much of his work on when lawyers go wrong, probing the causes of professional failure and malaise from a historical perspective. In 2004 the Association of American Law Schools presented him with its Outstanding Scholarly Paper Prize for "Constitution as Counter-Monument: Federalism, Reconstruction and the Problem of Collective Memory," which was published in the Columbia Law Review. Before joining the Stanford Law School faculty in 2005, he was a professor of law at the University of California at Berkeley School of Law (Boalt Hall) and an associate at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, where he did environmental litigation. Professor Spaulding served as a law clerk to Judge Betty Fletcher of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and Judge Thelton Henderson of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.

 

PROPERTY/CONTRACT LAW: Has Commodification Gone Too Far?--October 19, 2007

Readings:

-- Patricia J. Williams, Alchemical Notes: Reconstructing Ideas from Deconstructed Rights , 22 Harv. C.R. C.L. L. Rev. 401 (1987).

Faculty Facilitators:

Marjorie Shultz & Henry Hecht

After earning her master's degree from the University of Chicago, Marjorie Shultz taught history and political science at George Williams College in Illinois for five years. She then worked in Washington, D.C., researching a book on political change, serving as a research and development officer for Antioch School of Law, and participating in various political campaigns. She was also active in the founding of the National Women's Political Caucus. After graduating from Boalt Hall, Shultz joined the law school's faculty in 1976. She has authored numerous articles on medical research, informed consent, and health care law, as well as commentaries on the intersection of contracts, feminism and family issues.

 

Henry Hecht served as an assistant special prosecutor on the Watergate Special Prosecution Force from 1973 to 1976 and was a special counsel with the San Francisco firm of Heller Ehrman LLP from 1977 to 1983. He joined the Boalt faculty in 1983 and has been an adjunct law professor at the Golden Gate University School of Law and the University of California, Hastings College of the Law. He is also an independent consultant on skills training for lawyers and co-founder of The Hecht Training Group, a group of attorneys who have each taught lawyering skills for more than 20 years. Using the "learning by doing" method, his Training Group has presented workshops on deposition, negotiation, motion practice, and trial skills.

 

CRIMINAL LAW --November 2, 2007

Readings:

-- Margaret E. Montoya, Máscaras, Trenzas, y Greñas: Un/masking the Self While Un/braiding Latina Stories and Legal Discourse, 15 Chicano-Latino L. Rev. 1, 2-26, 17 Harv. Women's L. J. 185, 186-209 (1994).

Faculty Facilitator:

Victoria Ortiz

Victoria Ortiz is currently the assistant dean for student services. After graduating from law school in 1988, she became an associate at Paul Weiss and later clerked for Judge Margaret Taylor of the Civil Court of the City of New York. She has taught high school in New York City, worked for the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union, and held major positions in institutions of higher learning. From 1993 to 1995, Ortiz served as dean of students at the City University of New York School of Law, and during part of that time she was also acting director of admissions. In 1995 she came to California to become the associate dean of humanities at New College of San Francisco.

 

TORTS --November 16, 2007

Readings:

-- B William L.F. Felstiner, Richard L. Abel, Austin Sarat, The Emergence and Transformation of Disputes: Naming, Blaming, Claiming . . . , 15 Law & Soc. Rev.631(1980-81)

Faculty Facilitator:

Steve Sugarman

Stephen Sugarman joined the Boalt faculty in 1972. He regularly teaches Torts, and occasionally teaches Sports Law, Educational Policy and Law, and other courses in the social justice curriculum. Sugarman has written four books with Boalt colleague John Coons: Private Wealth and Public Education (Harvard 1970); Education by Choice: The Case for Family Control (California 1978); Scholarships for Children (IGS 1992); and, most recently, Making School Choice Work for All Families (PRI 1999). He and Coons also argued the landmark case Serrano v. Priest before the California Supreme Court.