MONDAY, Feb. 17: "Toward a Jurisprudence of the Civil Rights Act" with Georgetown Law Professor Robin West

Movements for civil rights have continued to affect changes throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. From LGBT rights to women’s rights to the rights of minorities, each movement has made better futures possible by empowering those historically pushed out by the legal systems that govern civil society. How have these movements been able to gain ground and work with the law to promote the rights of citizens?

In this lecture, Robin West will present a conception of civil rights as rights to participate in the legal regimes that structure civil society, rather than as anti-discrimination rights per se. By outlining the history of the idea of civil rights and the ways in which they have since been protected and advanced, West will explore a number of theories about what it is that makes them so intrinsically important – and thus legally significant.

Robin West is the Frederick J. Haas Professor of Law and Philosophy and Faculty Director of the Georgetown Center for the Study of Law and Philosophy at Georgetown University Law Center. Professor West has written extensively on gender issues and feminist legal theory, constitutional law and theory, jurisprudence, legal philosophy, and law and literature. She is the author of, most recently, Teaching Law: Justice, Politics and the Demands of Professionalism, and Normative Jurisprudence: An Introduction, both from Cambridge University Press. West earned her B.A. and J.D. from the University of Maryland and her J.S.M. from Stanford.

Please join the Rockefeller Center, the Dartmouth Legal Studies Faculty Group, and the Dartmouth Lawyers Association for the William H. Timbers ’37 Lecture, “Toward a Jurisprudence of the Civil Rights Act,” with Robin West on Monday, February 17th at 4:30PM in Rocky 003.