Reconstructing the Reconstruction Amendments

Reconstructing the Reconstruction Amendments
Friday, February 2, 2024 | 10 a.m. - 4 p.m. ET
NYU School of Law, Vanderbilt Hall, Greenberg Lounge
40 Washington Square South, New York, NY 10012

Watch the recordings for Panel 1, Lunch Fireside Chat, and Panel 2.

Read Kimberly Mutcherson’s accompanying piece for Ms. Magazine on “Reconstructing the Reconstruction Amendments,” published on March 5.

This year, the Birnbaum Women’s Leadership Center’s annual symposium is a celebration of the scholarship of Peggy Cooper Davis, NYU Law’s John S. R. Shad Professor of Lawyering and Ethics, and her path breaking work on Neglected Stories: The Constitution and Family Values. Leading scholars and advocates will discuss the myriad ways the Roberts Court is undermining the Reconstruction Amendments, in large part by ignoring the history that led to their formation – and, importantly, explore what work is needed to counter the Court’s dangerous decisions.

Confirmed panelists and speakers to date include NYU Law Frederick I. and Grace Stokes Professor of Law and BWLC Faculty Director Melissa Murray; BWLC Visiting Fellow and Professor of Law and former co-Dean at Rutgers Law School in Camden, Kimberly Mutcherson; NYU Law Director of Clinical & Advocacy Programs and Margaret B. Hoppin Professor of Clinical Law, Deborah Archer; Columbia University’s DeWitt Clinton Professor Emeritus of History, Eric Foner; Director of Georgetown Law’s Institute for Public Representation Civil Rights Law Clinic, Aderson Francois; Penn Carey Law’s Arlin M. Adams Professor of Constitutional Law, Serena Mayeri; Penn Carey Law's George A. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology and the Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights, Dorothy Roberts; UNC School of Law's Professor of Law, Wade Edwards Distinguished Scholar, and Director of the Critical Race Lawyering Civil Rights Clinic, Erika Wilson; and President and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, Maya Wiley.

The BWLC gratefully acknowledges Dechert LLP for its generous sponsorship of our annual symposium. This event is co-hosted by NYU Law’s Center on Race, Inequality and the Law, and the Meltzer Center for Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging.

This event has been approved for 2.5 New York State CLE credits in the category of Areas of Professional Practice. The credit is both transitional and non-transitional; it is appropriate for both experienced and newly admitted attorneys. Links to CLE written materials are at the bottom of the page.

Schedule (All times E.T.)

10:00 - 10:15 a.m. Light breakfast

10:15 - 10:30 a.m. Welcome & Opening Remarks

10:30 - 11:45 a.m. Panel 1 -  The Roberts Court and the Reconstruction Amendments: How Did We Get Here?

The first panel includes panelists with expertise in civil rights advocacy, law, and history. The panel will provide a primer to attendees who have little or no knowledge of the history and purpose of the Reconstruction Amendments and will serve as refresher to attendees who are more familiar with these amendments.

• Deborah Archer,  Associate Dean for Experiential Education and Clinical Programs, the Margaret B. Hoppin Professor of Clinical Law, and Faculty Director of the Community Equity Lab, NYU Law
• Aderson Francois '91, Anne Fleming Research Professor; Professor of Law; Director of Institute for Public Representation Civil Rights Law Clinic, Georgetown Law
• Serena Mayer, Arlin M. Adams Professor of Constitutional Law, Penn Carey Law
• Moderator: Kimberly Mutcherson, Visiting Fellow-in-Residence, Birnbaum Women's Leadership Center; Professor of Law and former co-Dean, Rutgers Law School Camden

12:00 p.m. Lunch served

12:30 - 1:30 p.m. - Lunch Keynote

• Melissa Murray, Frederick I. and Grace Stokes Professor of Law; Faculty Director, Birnbaum Women’s Leadership Center, NYU Law, in conversation with Maya Wiley, President and CEO, Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights

1:45 - 3:00 p.m. Panel 2 - Reconstructing the Reconstruction Amendments: A Path Forward 

Building on the historical knowledge imparted in the first panel, the second panel will dive deeper into the work of the Roberts Court and how it has weakened the Reconstruction Amendments in significant ways through its decisions, especially, but not only, in its most recent terms.

• Eric Foner, DeWitt Clinton Professor Emeritus of History, Columbia University
• Dorothy Roberts, George A. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology and the Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights, Penn Carey Law
• Erika Wilson, Professor of Law, Wade Edwards Distinguished Scholar, and Director of the Critical Race Lawyering Civil Rights Clinic, UNC School of Law
• Moderator: Kimberly Mutcherson, Visiting Fellow-in-Residence, Birnbaum Women's Leadership Center; Professor of Law and former co-Dean, Rutgers Law School Camden

3:00 - 4:00 p.m. Closing Remarks and Reception

Panelist Bios

Deborah N. Archer

Deborah N. Archer is Associate Dean for Experiential Education and Clinical Programs, the Margaret B. Hoppin Professor of Clinical Law, and Faculty Director of the Community Equity Lab. Deborah is also the President of the American Civil Liberties Union and a leading expert in civil rights, civil liberties, and racial justice. She is an award-winning teacher and legal scholar whose articles have appeared in leading law reviews. Deborah has also offered commentary for numerous media outlets, including MSNBC, National Public Radio, CBS, Monocle, The Atlantic, and The New York Times.

Deborah is a graduate of Yale Law School, where she was awarded the Charles G. Albom Prize, and Smith College. She previously worked as an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union and the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc., where she litigated in the areas of voting rights, employment discrimination, and school desegregation. Deborah is also a former chair of the American Association of Law School's Section on Civil Rights and the Section on Minority Groups. She previously served as Chair of the New York City Civilian Complaint Review Board, the nation’s oldest and largest police oversight agency.

Deborah has been honored by numerous community organizations and legal institutions, including Yale Law School, Columbia Law School, Boston University School of Law, New York University, Smith College, New York Law School, the American Association of Law Schools, and the Law and Society Association. In 2021, the Law and Society Association awarded her the John Hope Franklin Prize, Honorable Mention for her article "'White Men's Roads Through Black Men's Homes': Advancing Racial Equity Through Highway Reconstruction" which appeared in the Vanderbilt Law Review. Deborah also received a 2021 Podell Distinguished Teaching Award, the 2020-2021 Jacob K. Javits Professorship from New York University, the 2021 Stephen Ellmann Memorial Clinical Scholarship Award from the American Association of Law Schools, the Otto L. Walter Distinguished Writing Award from New York Law School, and the Haywood Burns/Shanara Guilbert Award from the Northeast People of Color Legal Scholarship Conference.

Eric Foner

Eric Foner, DeWitt Clinton Professor Emeritus of History, specializes in the Civil War and Reconstruction, slavery, and 19th-century America. He is one of only two persons to serve as President of the Organization of American Historians, American Historical Association, and Society of American Historians. He has also been the curator of several museum exhibitions, including the prize-winning "A House Divided: America in the Age of Lincoln," at the Chicago Historical Society. His book, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery won the Pulitzer, Bancroft, and Lincoln prizes for 2011. His latest book is Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad.

Aderson B. Francois

Since fall 2016, Aderson Francois, Professor of Law, has directed the Civil Rights Section of the Institute for Public Representation (IPR) and the Voting Rights Institute. Prior to joining the Georgetown faculty, Professor Francois directed the Civil Rights Clinic at Howard University School of Law, where he also taught Constitutional Law, Federal Civil Rights, and Supreme Court Jurisprudence. His scholarly interests include voting rights, education law, and the history of slavery and Reconstruction. His practice experience encompasses federal trial and appellate litigation concerning equal protection in education, employment discrimination, voting rights, marriage equality, and the right to a fair criminal trial. Professor Francois received his J.D. from New York University School and clerked for the late Honorable A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr., Chief Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. In 2008, the Transition Team of President Barack Obama appointed Professor Francois Lead Agency Reviewer for the United States Commission on Civil Rights. He has provided pro bono death penalty representation to inmates before the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, served as a Special Assistant in with the United States Commission on Civil Rights in Washington, D.C., and practiced commercial litigation in the New York Offices of Paul Weiss Rifkind Wharton & Garrison. He has testified before Congress on civil rights issues and drafted numerous briefs to the United States Supreme Court, the Supreme Court of California, the Supreme Court of Iowa, and Maryland’s highest court. Before joining Howard’s faculty, Professor François was the Assistant Director of the Lawyering Program at New York University School of Law.

Serena Mayeri

Serena Mayeri is the Arlin M. Adams Professor of Constitutional Law; Professor of History at Penn Carey Law. Mayeri’s scholarship focuses on the historical impact of progressive and conservative social movements on legal and constitutional change.

Her book, Reasoning from Race: Feminism, Law, and the Civil Rights Revolution (Harvard University Press, 2011) received the Littleton-Griswold Prize from the American Historical Association and the Darlene Clark Hine Award from the Organization of American Historians.

Mayeri’s current book project, tentatively titled Marital Privilege: Challenging the Legal Status of Marriage, 1960-2003, examines the history of challenges to marriage’s primacy as a legal institution and a source of public and private benefits. Related articles have appeared in the California Law Review and the Yale Law Journal. Mayeri teaches courses in family law, employment discrimination, gender and the law, and legal history.

She holds a secondary appointment in the Department of History, and is a Core Faculty member in the Program on Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies. In 2016, Mayeri was named a Distinguished Lecturer by the Organization of American Historians. In 2019, she received the Robert A. Gorman Award for Excellence in Teaching.

Melissa Murray

Melissa Murray is the Frederick I. and Grace Stokes Professor of Law at NYU and faculty director of the Birnbaum Women’s Leadership Center. Murray is a graduate of the University of Virginia, where she was a Jefferson Scholar and an Echols Scholar, and Yale Law School, where she was notes development editor of the Yale Law Journal and earned special recognition as an NAACP-LDF/Shearman & Sterling Scholar. Following law school, Murray clerked for Sonia Sotomayor, then of the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, and Stefan Underhill of the US District Court for the District of Connecticut. Murray teaches constitutional law, family law, criminal law, and reproductive rights and justice, and her research focuses on the legal regulation of sex and sexuality and encompasses such topics as marriage and its alternatives, the marriage equality debate, the legal recognition of caregiving, and reproductive rights and justice. Her publications have appeared (or are forthcoming) in the California Law Review, Columbia Law Review, Harvard Law Review, and Yale Law Journal, among others. She is an author of Cases on Reproductive Rights and Justice, the first casebook to cover the field of reproductive rights and justice. She has also written for the New York Times, Vanity Fair, and the Huffington Post, and has offered commentary for NPR, MSNBC, and PBS, among other media outlets. In 2010, Murray was awarded the Association of American Law School’s Derrick A. Bell Award, which is given to a junior faculty member who has made an extraordinary contribution to legal education, the legal system, or social justice. Murray was previously on the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, where she was the recipient of the Rutter Award for Teaching Distinction. From March 2016 to June 2017, she served as interim dean of Berkeley Law.

Kimberly Mutcherson

Kimberly Mutcherson is a Professor of Law and former Co-Dean at Rutgers Law School in Camden. She was the first woman, the first Black person, and the first member of the LGBTQ community to be a Dean at Rutgers Law. Professor Mutcherson is a reproductive justice scholar whose work focuses on assisted reproduction and abortion among other topics. Cambridge University Press released her edited volume, Feminist Judgments: Reproductive Justice Rewritten in 2020. In 2023, Professor Mutcherson received the Trailblazer Award from the New Jersey Women Lawyer’s Association. Professor Mutcherson was a co-recipient of the 2021 M. Shanara Gilbert Human Rights Award from the Society of American Law Teachers and the 2020 Association of American Law Schools inaugural Impact Award as one of the creators of the Law Deans Antiracist Clearinghouse Project. Also in 2021, the Rutgers Law School Black Law Students Association honored her with the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Champions of Social Justice Award and the Association of Black Women Lawyers of New Jersey celebrated her as a Distinguished Changemaker. Professor Mutcherson received the Center for Reproductive Rights Innovation in Scholarship Award in 2013, a Chancellor’s Teaching Excellence Award in 2011, and the Women’s Law Caucus Faculty Appreciation Award in 2011 and 2014. Professor Mutcherson has been a Senior Fellow/Sabbatical Visitor at the Center for Gender and Sexuality Law at Columbia Law School and a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania. She earned her BA from the University of Pennsylvania and her JD from Columbia Law School. Upon graduation from Columbia, she received the Kirkland and Ellis Fellowship for post-graduate public interest work. Prior to entering academia, Professor Mutcherson was a consulting attorney at the Center for Reproductive Rights and a Staff Attorney at the HIV Law Project.

Dorothy E. Roberts

Dorothy Roberts is the George A. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology and the Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights at Penn Carey Law and is an acclaimed scholar of race, gender and the law, joined the University of Pennsylvania as its 14th Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor with joint appointments in the Departments of Africana Studies and Sociology and the Law School where she holds the inaugural Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander chair. She is also founding director of the Penn Program on Race, Science & Society in the Center for Africana Studies.

Her path breaking work in law and public policy focuses on urgent social justice issues in policing, family regulation, science, medicine, and bioethics. Her major books include Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-first Century (New Press, 2011); Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare (Basic Books, 2002), and Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (Pantheon, 1997). She is the author of more than 100 scholarly articles and book chapters, as well as a co-editor of six books on such topics as constitutional law and women and the law.

Her work has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, National Science Foundation, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Harvard Program on Ethics & the Professions, and Stanford Center for the Comparative Studies in Race & Ethnicity. Recent recognitions of her scholarship and public service include 2019 Rutgers University- Newark Honorary Doctor of Laws degree, 2017 election to the National Academy of Medicine, 2016 Society of Family Planning Lifetime Achievement Award, 2016 Tanner Lectures on Human Values, 2015 American Psychiatric Association Solomon Carter Fuller Award.

Erika K. Wilson

Erika K. Wilson is a Professor of Law and the Wade Edwards Distinguished Scholar at the University of North Carolina (“UNC”) School of Law. Her areas of expertise include civil litigation, civil rights, clinical legal education, critical race theory, education law, and public policy. Professor Wilson's scholarship has appeared in the Harvard Law Review, Columbia Law Review, Yale Law Journal Forum, Cornell Law Review, and UCLA Law Review, among others. In 2016, Professor Wilson’s work was selected for presentation at the Harvard Yale Stanford Junior Faculty Forum. In 2017 and 2022, she was awarded the James H. Chadbourn Award for Excellence in Scholarship from the UNC School of Law. In 2020 she also founded the Critical Race Lawyering Clinic, a clinic that teaches law students how to bridge the gap between Critical Race Theory as an academic discipline and the practice of law. 

Maya Wiley

Maya Wiley is the president and CEO of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights and The Leadership Conference Education Fund. A nationally respected civil rights attorney, Wiley has been a litigator at the ACLU, NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Inc., and the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York. She has been a program creator in philanthropy, non-profits, government, and higher education. She helped create a criminal justice program for a major foundation in South Africa. Wiley co-founded and led a national policy advocacy organization, the Center for Social Inclusion, now a part of Race Forward, a national policy strategy organization working to end structural racism. She became the first Black woman to be Counsel to a New York City Mayor, Bill de Blasio, where she worked to protect and expand civil rights, Minority and Women-Owned Business contracts and broadband access. Wiley became a Senior Vice President for Social Justice at the New School University, where she also founded the Digital Equity Laboratory. While there, she chaired the New York City Civilian Complaint Review Board (CCRB). As chair, she led the release of the “hold” on proceedings against Daniel Pantaleo whose illegal chokehold killed Eric Garner, and Co-Chaired the Mayor’s School Diversity Advisory Group that authored two major reports on integrating New York City public schools. Wiley has received numerous awards, and has been a public voice for rights, justice, and democracy, through written opinion editorials and as a former legal analyst for NBC News and MSNBC.  

CLE Materials

Panels 1 and 2:
●    After Suffrage: The Unfinished Business of Feminist Legal Advocacy (Mayeri, Penn Carey Law Review, 2019)
●    Speak to Your Dead, Write for Your Dead: David Galloway, Malinda Brandon, and a Story of American Reconstruction (Francois, Georgetown Law Journal, 2022)
●    Political Participation: African American Political Participation from the Antebellum Period Through Reconstruction, (Archer, Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass, 2006)
●    The Supreme Court and the History of Reconstruction and Vice-Versa (Foner, Columbia Law Review, 2012).
●    Foreword: Abolition Constitutionalism (Roberts, Penn Carey Law, 2019)
●    Racism, Abolition, and Historical Resemblance (Roberts, Harvard Law Review (2022-2023).
●    Enforcement of the Reconstruction Amendments (Tsesis, Loyola University of Chicago, School of Law, 2021)
●    Reconstruction's Lessons (Carle, Columbia Journal of Race and Law, 2023)
●    Brief of Professors of History and Law as Amici Curiae in Support of Respondents, SFFA v. Harvard and SFFA v. UNC.

In an effort to reduce paper consumption, a limited quantity of printed copies will be available on the day of the event. We highly encourage you to download your own digital copy via the links above.