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It's great to be here for this particular occasion to honor the work of Ruthann Robson, from whom I have, over the course of many years, learned so much. First, I've learned from her the critical importance of doing work that is based on and reflects a set of political and ethical commitments to people who live under regimes of domination and inequality. Her scholarship, to me, is a model of engaged adversary scholarship. She has never fallen into the trap, so common to those of us who are professionalized in the legal academy, of thinking that this work does not matter in the lives of real people. Secondly, through her work, specifically in lesbian legal theory, Ruthann has taught me the importance, to use Shane Phelan's phrase, of "getting specific." This sort of global, universal — the universal gay — term captures, or is supposed to capture, both men and women and those who see themselves on the very complex continuum between those two categories. That specificity is something that Ruthann's work teaches to the degree that no other scholar writing has been able to achieve. Finally, because she writes in so many different polyvalent discourses, one of the things I've learned from Ruthann's work is the necessity and the validity of writing in different voices. She is a fiction writer. She is a journalist. She is a scholar. The fluidity with which she has moved across these different discourses in an effort to tell the stories of lesbians in and outside the law is really admirable, and this refusal to be locked into the straitjacket of reigning modes of discourse is incredible. She understands that, again, better than any practicing scholar I know.

Nearly one hundred years ago, W.E.B. DuBois predicted that the problem of the 20th century would be the problem of the color line. Were he writing today, DuBois might well conclude that in the U.S., the problem of the coming century will be the problem of the color-bind. Although Americans arguably remain "the most 'race-conscious' people on earth," our national conversation about "race" now stands at an impasse. Our ways of talking, or refusing to talk, about race increasingly speak past the racialized dilemmas of educational equity, affirmative action, poverty, welfare reform, housing, lending, labor and employment discrimination, health and medical care access, environmental justice, immigration and asylum, or crime, policing and punishment. The current deadlock in U.S. public discourse on racial justice reveals itself not only to the arena of power politics; our predicament can be seen, too, in the creeping "paralysis of perspective" 4that threatens to devitalize serious critical reflection on race and racism at the threshold of the 21st century. Nonetheless, the broad sweep of our history and our present plight both suggest that "racialization" continues to be a central fact of American life. Obviously, the claim that race remains a structuring principle in U.S. institutions and social relations need in no way assume an unbroken, unmodified continuity in the content or meanings of "racial formation in the United States." DuBois' time is not our own. We can admit the complex, changing and contested character of contemporary racial formations and still recognize that race will likely figure in U.S. law and policy for many decades to come. Acknowledging the continuing relevance of race, this paper asks whether the governing grammar of contemporary American debates about the content of racial justice will be adequate for the pressing tasks of the new century. Taking my point of reference from the ongoing controversy over the place of "color-blindness" and "race-consciousness" in U.S. constitutional discourse, I ...

This paper undertakes a comparative exploration of affirmative action discourse in German and American constitutional equality law. The first task for such a project is to acknowledge an important threshold dilemma. The difficulty in question derives not so much from dissimilarities between the technical legal structures of German and American affirmative action policy. The problem stems rather from the different social grounds and groupings on which those legal structures have been erected. Because German "positive action"' applies only to women, gender and its cultural meanings have constituted the paradigmatic subject of the policy. The legal discussion of positive action has always taken its point of reference from broader political debates about the position of women as a social group in contemporary German society. Indeed, in Germany, positive action discourse is a discourse about the status of and relations between men and women.

In 1932, Eugene Angelo Braxton Hemdon, a young Afro-American member of the Communist Party, U.S.A., was arrested in Atlanta and charged with an attempt to incite insurrection against that state's lawful authority. Some five years later, in Herndon v. Lowry, Herndon filed a writ of habeas corpus asking the U.S. Supreme Court to consider the constitutionality of the Georgia statute under which he had been convicted. Two weeks before his twenty-fourth birthday, the Court, voting 5-4, declared the use of the Georgia political-crimes statute against him unconstitutional on the grounds that it deprived Herndon of his rights to freedom of speech and assembly and because the statute failed to furnish a reasonably ascertainable standard of guilt. Herndon v. Lowry is generally acknowledged as one of the great civil liberties decisions of the 1930s, one of the notable "success stories" of the Supreme Court's First Amendment jurisprudence. It marked the first time the Supreme Court had mentioned the Holmes-Brandeis "clear and present danger" formula in the ten years since its decision in Whitney v. California. It was also the first case in which the Supreme Court used the test to uphold the civil liberties claims of an individual against censorial state action, the first time the Supreme Court reviewed a sedition conviction from the South, and the first political-crimes conviction reviewed by the Court that involved an African-American defendant.

Regarding the progress of his sons, Benjamin Kendall and Daniel Kendall; objects to the charge for ball dancing. ; Transcription by Bradley Hood. Transcriptions may be subject to error.

Asks that his sons be allowed home for a visit. ; Transcription by Jessica Toccoli. Transcriptions may be subject to error.

The Legacy of Brown v. Board of Education presents historical commentary on the impact of the ruling by the attorneys from the case including Jack Greenberg, Robert Carter, Constance Baker Motley along plus former President Bill Clinton and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. An insighful original account of the case, fifty years after it was decided. ; https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/books/1099/thumbnail.jpg

"For several years," write the editors of What's Left of Theory, "a debate on the politics of theory has been conducted energetically within literary studies. The terms of the debate, however, are far from clear. What is meant by politics? What is meant by theory?" What's Left of Theory is a vigorous engagement with that thorniest of critical questions: how today are theory and progressive thought connected? Michael Warner, activist and critic, examines 'zones of privacy and zones of theory' while law professor Janet Halley considers theory and its applicability to sex harassment. Jeff Nunokawa examines Oscar Wilde, Marjorie Levinson reads Elizabeth Bishop alongside National Geographic; John Brenkman considers 'extreme criticism', Michael Berube the 'future of contingency'; William Connolly addresses the matter of secularism, Gayatri Spivak explores what she calls 'theory-remains', and Jonathan Culler demonstrates once again his gift for explaining the complex in an essay that identifies 'the literary in theory'. Editors Butler, Guillory, and Thomas have brought together not only outstanding questioners, but outstanding questions. As their introduction puts it, "Are there ways of pursuing a politically reflective literary analysis that have definitively left theory behind, and must 'theory' be left behind for left literary analysis to emerge? Has the study of literature passed beyond its encounter with theory? If so, in passing beyond theory, has it remained unchanged? Does the recent cry for a 'return to literature' signal the surpassing of theory, the fact that literature remains after theory? Does literature remain (the same) after theory?" For students of literature and the humanities in general, these questions are not only left: they endure. ; https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/books/1258/thumbnail.jpg