Volume 6, Issue 2, Spring/Summer 2008

Authors

Derrick Bell

For fifty years, Derrick Bell has worked in every aspect of civil rights, first as a litigator with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund from 1960 until 1965, then as an administrator with the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. He was then appointed to the Harvard Law School faculty in 1969 as a teacher and writer. He left Harvard in 1981 to become dean of the University of Oregon Law School and returned to Harvard in 1986, serving there until 1992. Professor Bell came to New York University School of Law in 1991 as a visiting professor. Instead of accepting a tenured appointment, Bell suggested a series of one-year visits that would allow him to teach full time. He has now completed his eighteenth year as a visitor.

Bell is most proud of his participatory teaching method based on the pedagogically sound principle that students learn more by doing than by either reading or listening. The Derrick Bell Reader, edited by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic (2005), is his most recent book. His civil rights law text, Race, Racism & American Law, first published in 1973, is now in its fifth edition (2004).

Avi Brisman

Avi Brisman received a BA from Oberlin College, an MFA from Pratt Institute, and a JD with honors from the University of Connecticut School of Law, where he was a notes and comments editor for the Connecticut Law Review, a member of the moot court board, and the president of the Public Interest Law Group. After law school, Mr. Brisman served as a law clerk to the Honorable Ruth V. McGregor, then vice chief justice and current chief justice of the Arizona Supreme Court, and then as a law clerk to the Honorable Alan S. Gold, United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida. Following his clerkships, Mr. Brisman served as the Civil Rights Legal Fellow for the Metro Atlanta Task Force for the Homeless in Atlanta, Georgia. He is currently working towards a PhD in anthropology from Emory University.

John Brittain

John C. Brittain is the chief counsel and senior deputy director of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law in Washington, D.C., a forty-five-year-old public interest legal organization started by President John F. Kennedy to enlist private lawyers to take pro bono civil rights cases. Brittain, a former law school dean at Texas Southern University in Houston, law professor at the University of Connecticut School of Law, and public interest civil rights lawyer with a career spanning thirty-nine years, received the NAACP's highest honor for a lawyer, the coveted William Robert Ming Advocacy Award for pro bono legal service.

He is a school desegregation specialist and was lead counsel in Sheff v. O'Neill, a landmark case decided by the Connecticut Supreme Court in 1996. In addition, Brittain is a part of a legal team that filed a friend of the court brief on behalf of the NAACP in the Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 and Meredith v. Jefferson County Board of Education cases decided by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2007 concerning voluntary race-conscious student assignment plans. He loves reading books, running in national masters competitions, and sailing.

Jennifer M. Dillard

Jennifer M. Dillard holds a JD from Georgetown University Law Center (2008) and a BA in English and history from Vanderbilt University (Phi Beta Kappa, 2005). She is the author of "A Slaughterhouse Nightmare: Psychological Harm Suffered by Slaughterhouse Employees and the Possibility of Redress Through Legal Reform," Georgetown Journal on Poverty Law & Policy (2008). She was a Peggy Browning Fellow at the Communications Workers of America (2006), and she is a 2008-2009 clerk for the Honorable Stephen H. Glickman of the District of Columbia Court of Appeals.

Joel F. Dillard

Joel F. Dillard holds a JD from Georgetown University Law Center (2008) and a BA in chemistry from Vanderbilt University (2005). He was the editor in chief of the Georgetown Journal on Poverty Law & Policy, Volume 15. His research interests include legal ethics, patent law, labor law, and poverty law. He is a 2008-2009 clerk for the Honorable Timothy B. Dyk of the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.

Erica Frankenberg

Erica Frankenberg is a postdoctoral fellow in education at Michigan State University and a researcher at the Civil Rights Project, where she focuses on school integration. She received her doctorate in education policy from Harvard University. Her research interests focus on racial desegregation and inequality, and the connections between school segregation and other metropolitan policies. She is the coeditor of Lessons in Integration: Realizing the Promise of Racial Diversity in America's Schools (with Gary Orfield, 2007) from the University of Virginia Press. Recently, Frankenberg helped coordinate and write a social science statement filed with the Supreme Court regarding the benefits of integrated schools, and some of her work has been cited by the Supreme Court in its recent educational diversity cases. Her other publications include journal articles, book chapters, and reports about trends, causes, and consequences of school segregation.

Callie Kozlak

Callie is the educational opportunities project associate for the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law in Washington, D.C. She managed the production of the US Human Rights Network-Education Working Group shadow report to the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD). Concurrently, Callie coordinated the production of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights CERD shadow report Unequal Opportunity: A Critical Assessment of the U.S. Commitment to the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. Callie traveled to Geneva, Switzerland, in February of 2008 to follow the United Nations CERD periodic review of the United States government and has coordinated the Lawyers' Committee's domestic advocacy around the CERD review process.

Angela Mae Kupenda

Angela Mae Kupenda is a law professor at Mississippi College School of Law in Jackson, Mississippi. Her research interests are in the areas of race, gender, and class in the law, as well as constitutional law. She publishes and presents extensively in the United States and internationally on these topics. Professor Kupenda graduated first in her law school class, clerked for two former chief judges of federal circuit courts, and practiced law in Washington, D.C., and in Mississippi. She has been an educator for almost twenty years, which includes her present appointment at Mississippi College School of Law and her appointments as the Distinguished Visiting Professor of Teaching Excellence at Franklin Pierce Law School, visiting professor at Notre Dame Law School, visiting associate professor at Boston College Law School, assistant professor in the business schools at the University of Mississippi and Jackson State University, and Scholar in Residence at Pine Manor College in Massachusetts.

Claire Molesworth

Claire Molesworth is a 2008 graduate of Seattle University School of Law, where she served as managing editor for the Seattle Journal for Social Justice. Ms. Molesworth received her BA in history from Barnard College, Columbia University (1999). Prior to law school, she worked for nonprofit arts organizations, including Seattle Arts & Lectures. Ms. Molesworth currently works as a law clerk at Graham & Dunn PC, where she will continue her practice after law school.

Justin Walsh

Justin P. Walsh is a 2008 graduate of Seattle University School of Law, where he served as the recent developments and technology editor for the Seattle Journal for Social Justice. Mr. Walsh received his BS in business management from University of Phoenix in 2004. Prior to law school, Mr. Walsh served as a commissioner on the King County Civil Rights Commission, an experience that prompted the writing of his article.