School of Law's Ronald H. Brown Center for Civil Rights and Economic Development Sponsoring Annual Northeast People of Color Legal Scholarship Conference

Once again, the Ronald H. Brown Center for Civil Rights and Economic Development is sponsoring the annual Northeast People of Color Legal Scholarship Conference (NEPOC).  It will take place on October 23-24 at the University at Buffalo School of Law.  Professor Leonard Baynes, Elaine Chiu, Janice Villiers and Melinda Molina will be attending and making presentations.  Led by Dean Makau Mutua, UB Law School is the law school of the State University of New York and enjoys a diverse faculty and student body. 

Every year NEPOC draws together scholars from around the country to discuss legal issues and topics that are important to people of color.   This year, the theme of the conference is American’s New Class Warfare.  This theme broadly encompasses many possible topics and perspectives.

For example, the Right has long rallied against the inappropriate scrutiny of the wealthy. Indeed, the wealthy and in particular, the people commanding the heights of corporate America, are under more scrutiny today than usual, thanks to the global financial meltdown.  The poor too have been under extreme levels of scrutiny over the last several decades.  Given that our economic system is both racialized and gendered, such that young black men have been the hardest hit by the recession, and women continue to earn less money than men, how might the current burdens and policy solutions soften or reinforce these patterns? That is, how might an intersectional analysis of race, gender, class, sexuality, etc. as well as cross disciplinary approaches and heterodox economic theories aid in our understandings of the current moment?  And finally, what role is law playing in shaping the structures, power, interests, resource uses, individual and group identities and distributions of wealth and recovery?  These are some of the questions the panelists will explore.  The panels will feature a look at class and critical race theory, class struggle in 2009, class in the city, class in the marketplace, class in public policy and class in criminal justice.

View more information about the conference or contact Professor Elaine Chiu at chiue1@stjohns.edu.