Symposium
Speakers
Elsa
Barkley Brown
Susan L. Bayly
Robert Fullinwider
Charles R. Lawrence III
Mari J. Matsuda
Linda Williams
Rhonda M. Williams
Elsa
Barkley Brown, an Associate Professor at the University of
Maryland, holds a joint appointment in History and Women’s Studies
and is an affiliate faculty with Afro-American Studies. Before
coming to Maryland in 1997, she taught in the Center for Afro-American
and African Studies and the Department of History at the University
of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Her research focuses on African American
political culture, with an emphasis on gender. Along with many
publications, she is co-editor of the two-volume Black Women
in America: An Historical Encyclopedia (1993), which received
the Leticia Woods Brown Memorial Publication and Edited Book Prize
from the Association of Black Women Historians, as well as the
Anna Julia Cooper Award for Distinguished Scholarship in Black
Women’s Studies.
Susan
L. Bayly is a graduate of Douglas College, Rutgers University,
and of the Georgetown University Law School. Before coming to
the University of Maryland in 1985, Ms. Bayly was a criminal prosecutor;
a special assistant attorney general in the criminal appeals division
of the Maryland Attorney General’s Office, and in private civil
litigation practice. Since 1985, Ms. Bayly has been University
General Counsel. She works in the areas of general employment
issues; discrimination and sex harassment; State Ethics laws;
constitutional issues such as free speech and equal protection;
contracts; research grants, including partnering arrangements
with private industry; and issues relating to the acceptable use
of University computer resources. Ms. Bayly is an active member
of several bar associations, including the Maryland State Women’s
Bar Association (president 1995-1996), and the Prince George’s
County Bar Association (president-elect 1998-1999).
Robert
Fullinwider is a Senior Research Scholar in the Institute
for Philosophy and Public Affairs, a research unit in the School
of Public Affairs at the University of Maryland. He has directed
research projects on military manpower policy, civic and moral
learning, multicultural education, and many other topics. He has
also written extensively on affirmative action, beginning with
his first article in 1975. He notes, as my book, The Reverse
Discrimination Controversy: A Moral and Legal Analysis was
going to press in 1979, the Supreme Court decided the Bakke case.
"What bad timing," I thought, "now the controversy
is over and no one will read my book. Well, I was both right and
wrong. Nobody read my book but the controversy never went away!"
Charles
R. Lawrence III is a professor of law at the Georgetown University
Law Center. He received his B.A. from Haverford College in 1965
and his J.D. from the Yale Law School in 1969. He practiced law
with Public Advocates, a San Francisco public interest law firm,
and in 1975 began his teaching career at the University of San
Francisco Law School. From 1986-1993 he was professor of law at
the Stanford Law School and in 1993 he joined the Georgetown faculty.
Professor Lawrence is the author of numerous articles on issues
of race relations, antidiscrimination law and equal protection,
and is among the leading voices in the emergent genre of critical
race theory. He is co-author of The Bakke Case: The Politics
of Inequality (1979); and Words That Wound: Critical Race
Theory, Assaultive Speech, and the First Amendment (1993).
His most recent book, co-authored with Professor Mari Matsuda,
is We Won’t Go Back: Making the Case for Affirmative Action
(1997).
Mari
J. Matsuda is a writer and law professor. Her books include
Where is Your Body and Other Essays on Race, Gender and Law;
Words That Wound: Critical Race Theory, Assaultive Speech,
and the First Amendment; and We Won’t Go Back: Making the
Case for Affirmative Action. Professor Matsuda grew up in
Los Angeles and Hawaii, and her writings reflect her experience
in multicultural settings. Her many law review articles are among
the most widely read and cited in the legal academy, and she is
known both for the originality of her analysis and her unique
narrative voice. She is an activist as well as a scholar: a volunteer
attorney in civil rights cases and a board member in public interest
and social change organizations. She was initiated into the civil
rights movement by her parents, who took her to demonstrations
before she could walk, and she is a lifetime participant in non-violent
protest in support of labor rights, peace, and equality. She has
worked as a hotel maid, a legal messenger, a law clerk to a judge
on the Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals, a labor lawyer, and
as a professor at the University of Hawaii, the University of
California, Los Angeles, and now at Georgetown University Law
Center.
Linda
Williams is an Associate Professor in the Department of Government
and Politics at the University of Maryland. Her research interests
include race, class, gender, and politics; press, politics, and
public policy; the American welfare state; urban politics; and
public opinions and elections.
Rhonda
M. Williams is a political economist, associate professor,
and interim director of Afro-American Studies at the University
of Maryland in College Park. Her interests include the race and
gender dimensions of economic inequality, affirmative action,
and economic discrimination. Williams’s work has appeared in the
Review of Black Political Economy, American Economic Review,
Feminist Studies, The Review of Economics and Statistics, Review
of Radical Political Economics, and numerous edited volumes.
Her essay, Living at the Crossroads: Explorations in Race, Nationality,
Sexuality and Gender recently appeared in Wahneema Lubiano’s edited
volume The House That Race Built: Black Americans, U.S. Terrain
(1997).
