Dartmouth Events

ONLINE ONLY! Sonali Chakravarti: How Woke Can a Juror Be?

UPDATE: THIS EVENT WILL BE ONLINE ONLY! Sonali Chakravarti delivers the William H. Timbers ’37 Lecture. Julie Rose, Associate Professor of Government, host.

Thursday, April 28, 2022
5:00pm – 6:00pm
Virtual Event
Intended Audience(s): Public
Categories: Lectures & Seminars

Zoom Link: https://dartgo.org/timberslecture

William H. Timbers ’37 Lecture

How Woke Can a Juror Be? The Jury in the Chauvin Trial, Critiques of Law Enforcement, and a New Model of Impartiality

Speaker:
Sonali Chakravarti
Professor of Government
Wesleyan University

Host:
Julie Rose
Associate Professor of Government
Dartmouth College

Lecture Info:
For three weeks in March and April of 2021, the process of jury selection for the trial of Derek Chauvin was live-streamed on CourtTV. We heard hesitations, nervousness, and expressions of feeling in response to questions about the viral video depicting George Floyd’s death under the knee of Derek Chauvin.  The open exploration of critiques of law enforcement and systemic racism during voir dire, jury selection, at the Chauvin trial is a sharp departure from previous cases where judges have been either hostile to critiques of the law or law enforcement or unsure about how to assess juror biases when they speak candidly about their perceptions of racial discrimination.  In normalizing the language of the critique of law enforcement during jury selection, three important changes occurred: (1)the first was that Black jurors were less likely to be dismissed for opinions they have long voiced, but which had been seen as the basis for legitimate dismissal, (2) the second was that it clarified what the standard of impartiality should mean for the court in the current era given widespread scrutiny of the racial discrimination within and outside of the law. Lastly, (3) the topics covered during voir dire served to underscore the range of life experiences that are valuable for the jury’s task of phronesis, Aristotle’s term for practical wisdom, that must precede the verdict.

Speaker Bio:
Sonali Chakravarti
is Professor of Government at Wesleyan University. Her work focuses on questions of citizenship, the law, and democratic institutions. Sonali is the author of two books—Radical Enfranchisement in the Jury Room and Public Life (Chicago, 2019) and Sing the Rage: Listening to Anger After Mass Violence (Chicago, 2014)—as well as numerous peer-reviewed articles. Her writing has also appeared in the Nation, the Boston Review, Dissent, and the Atlantic. Sonali has been the Ann Plato Post-Doctoral Fellow at Trinity College and Laurance S. Rockefeller Visiting Faculty Fellow at Princeton University. She earned a BA from Swarthmore College, and  a PhD in political science from Yale University.

Host Bio:
Julie Rose is an Associate Professor in the Department of Government at Dartmouth College. Her primary area of research and teaching is contemporary political philosophy, with a focus on questions of economic justice. She received her Ph.D. from Princeton University, and has held research fellowships at Brown, Stanford, and Harvard Universities. At Dartmouth, she teaches courses on Political Ideas, Ethics and Public Policy, Ethics, Economics, and the Environment, the Ethics of the Family, and Justice and Work. Her first book, Free Time (Princeton, 2016), argues that all citizens are entitled as a matter of justice to fair shares of free time. She is currently writing a second book on justice and economic growth, provisionally titled The Ends of Growth

For more information, contact:
Joanne Blais

Events are free and open to the public unless otherwise noted.