Will Obama Deliver on Equality?

THIS EVENT HAS BEEN RESCHEDULED TO: 
THURSDAY 27 MAY at 6pm
 

UCL Institute for Human Rights  and The Equal Rights Trust 

invites you to a lecture 

Will Obama Deliver on Equality?

by
Professor Theodore M. Shaw
Columbia Law School

Chaired by
Professor Sir Bob Hepple QC
Emeritus Professor of Law; Emeritus Master of Clare Colllege, University of Cambridge, Chair of The Equal Rights Trust 

About this event: 
The election of President Obama signaled a dramatic, sudden, and for many, a still unthinkable watershed in U.S. history. Ironically, President Obama may have less maneuvering room on issues of race than his predecessors. Pilloried by an emboldened Right, and hamstrung by an ideologically fractured and often incoherent Democratic Party, he cannot afford to carry the water on issues of racial justice. He risks criticism from those who are all too ready to paint him as a “special interest President’ whose main agenda is identity politics. On the other hand, as he moves to avoid the trap of race politics, he risks ignoring the continuing place of race in American life. He is inevitably a target of progressives and conservatives on a range of issues, but  hamstrung on race in a  peculiar and profound manner.

The old U.S., with all of its historical baggage that it has yet to shed, has collided with the Twenty-First Century U.S., with its new demographics in which traditionally dominant constituencies have been and are being reshaped by immigration and empowerment of once subordinated groups. The challenge is not one that requires us to gouge out our eyes so as not to see the continued realities of racial inequality; the challenge is to see race, and having seen it, to find our way to a vision of an inclusive and just society. 

About the speaker:
Theodore M. Shaw was director-counsel and president of the NAACP Legal Defence and Educational Fund (LDF), the premier civil rights law firm in the United States, from 2004 to 2008. In March 2008 the Columbia Law School faculty appointed him as a professor of professional practice, teaching civil procedure and constitutional law.

Shaw, one of the nation’s leading voices in civil rights, joined LDF in 1982 and in 2004 became the fifth person to lead the organisation. While at LDF, he was lead counsel in a coalition that represented African-American and Latino students in the University of Michigan undergraduate affirmative action admissions case. That case, Gratz v. Bollinger, went before the United States Supreme Court in 2003, along with Grutter v. Bollinger, which challenged the use of affirmative action at The University of Michigan Law School. Shaw worked as a trial attorney in the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice from 1979 to 1982, where he litigated civil rights cases at the trial and appellate levels and at the U.S. Supreme Court.

Shaw previously has taught at Columbia, University of Michigan, Temple and CUNY law schools. He is the recipient of the Wien Prize for Social Responsibility from Columbia Law School; the A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr., Memorial Award from the National Bar Association Young Lawyers Division; and the Baldwin Medal from the Wesleyan University alumni body. Professor Shaw is a Trustee of The Equal Rights Trust.