Christopher A. Bracey is an internationally recognized expert in the fields of U.S. race relations, individual rights, and criminal procedure. He teaches and researches in the areas of the legal history of U.S. race relations, constitutional law, criminal procedure, civil procedure, and civil rights. A magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of North Carolina, Professor Bracey received his law degree from Harvard Law School, where he served as a supervising editor on the Harvard Law Review, a general editor on the Harvard Civil Rights–Civil Liberties Law Review, and an editor on the Harvard Blackletter Law Journal. He clerked for the Honorable Royce C. Lamberth of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, and subsequently joined the Washington, D.C. office of Jenner & Block, where he litigated a variety of civil and criminal matters. He is the author of Saviors or Sellouts: The Promise and Peril of Black Conservatism, from Booker T. Washington to Condoleezza Rice (Beacon Press 2008) and co-author of The Dred Scott Case: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives (Ohio University Press 2009). His articles and essays have appeared in a number of leading law reviews, including Northwestern University Law Review, University of Southern California Law Review, Yale Law Journal Pocket Part, University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law, Journal of Law and Criminology, and Alabama Law Review, among others.
Chad Flanders has taught at Saint Louis University School of Law since 2009. He teaches and writes in the areas of criminal law, constitutional law, and the philosophy of law. In the 2012–2013 academic year Professor Flanders was a Fulbright Lecturer at Nanjing University, China, and during 2013–2014 Flanders was a visiting professor at DePaul University School of Law. Professor Flanders received his doctorate in philosophy from the University of Chicago in 2004 and his law degree from Yale Law School in 2007. After law school, Professor Flanders served as a law clerk to the Honorable Warren Matthews of the Alaska Supreme Court and the Honorable Michael McConnell of the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals. Since arriving at SLU, Professor Flanders has published more than 20 articles or essays in journals such as the Florida Law Review, the California Law Review, the Missouri Law Review, and the Alaska Law Review, and his work on Bush v. Gore has been cited by state and federal courts.
Phillip Goff is an Associate Professor of Social Psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles, on leave this year as a Visiting Scholar at the Harvard Kennedy School. He is the co-founder and president of the Center for Policing Equity (CPE), and an expert in contemporary forms of racial bias and discrimination, as well as the intersections of race and gender. Most recently, Dr. Goff led the CPE in becoming one of three Principal Investigators for the Department of Justice’s new National Initiative for Building Community Trust and Justice. The National Initiative will contribute information to another major project by the CPE, the National Justice Database, the first national database on racial disparities in police stops and use of force. Dr. Goff’s model of evidence-based approaches to fairness has been supported by the National Science Foundation, Department of Justice, Kellogg Foundation, Open Society Institute, Open Society Institute-Baltimore, Atlantic Foundation, William T. Grant Foundation, the COPS Office, and Major Cities Chiefs, the NAACP LDF, NIMH, SPSSI, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the Mellon Foundation, among many others.
Colin Gordon is Professor of History and Public Policy at the University of Iowa. He is the author of Growing Apart: A Political History of American Inequality (Institute for Policy Studies, 2013); Mapping Decline: St. Louis and the Fate of the American City (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008); Dead on Arrival: The Politics of Health in Twentieth Century America (Princeton University Press, 2003), and New Deals: Business, Labor and Politics, 1920–1935 (Cambridge University Press, 1994). He has written for the Nation, In these Times, Z Magazine, Atlantic Cities, and Dissent (where he is a regular contributor).
Katherine Goldwasser is a Professor of Law at Washington University in St. Louis. Before entering academia she served for four years as a federal prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Illinois. She specializes in the areas of criminal procedure and trial practice and regularly teaches courses in those areas, including a course in which she supervises students who work with prosecutors in the U.S. Attorney’s Offices for both the Eastern District of Missouri and the Southern District of Illinois. She received her BA from the University of Illinois and her JD from Temple University School of Law.
Thomas B. Harvey is an attorney and the Executive Director and co-founder of ArchCity Defenders (ACD), a nonprofit law firm providing holistic legal services to the indigent in the St. Louis region and pursuing policy advocacy and impact litigation arising from its direct legal services. His work focuses on the way the legal system disproportionately impacts poor people and communities of color to create or maintain poverty. He is the lead author of a recently released White Paper that documented systemic abuses in the St. Louis region’s courts, showing that by disproportionately stopping, charging, fining, and incarcerating the poor and minorities these courts not only prey on the poor and violate the Constitution but also create and maintain poverty. Harvey has been interviewed by the Washington Post, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and BusinessWeek as well as featured on MSNBC and NPR to provide valuable context in explaining the distrust between the people of the region and the authorities following the killing of Mike Brown.
Kira Hudson Banks is an Assistant Professor in the department of psychology at Saint Louis University. Her research examines the experience of discrimination, its impact on mental health, and intergroup relations. Her courses have ranged from Abnormal Psychology to the Psychology of Racism. She has published in American Psychological Association journals such as American Psychologist, Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology, and Journal of Diversity in Higher Education. As a consultant, she has worked with schools, communities, institutions of higher education, and corporations to improve diversity and inclusion efforts and engage people in productive dialogue and action. She received her BA from Mount Holyoke College, where she was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa, and her MA and PhD from the University of Michigan.
Tracey L. Meares is the Walton Hale Hamilton Professor of Law at Yale Law School. She has a BS in general engineering from the University of Illinois and a JD from the University of Chicago Law School. Before arriving at Yale Law School, she was Max Pam Professor of Law and Director of the Center for Studies in Criminal Justice at the University of Chicago Law School. She has held positions clerking for the Honorable Harlington Wood, Jr., of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit and as a trial attorney in the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice. Since 2004, she has served on the Committee on Law and Justice, a National Research Council Standing Committee of the National Academy of Sciences. Additionally, she has served on two National Research Council Review Committees: one to review research on police policy and practices and another more recently to review the National Institute of Justice. In November of 2010, she was named by Attorney General Eric Holder to sit on the Department of Justice’s newly-created Science Advisory Board. In 2014 she was named by President Obama to join his newly created Task Force on 21st Century Policing.
Candice Norwood is a master’s student at American University studying international media, an interdisciplinary program that combines international relations and media production coursework. The majority of her academic research examines how modern news coverage and digital media shape race and gender relations. Norwood graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2013 with a BS degree in news-editorial journalism and a minor in Spanish. Following graduation, she worked in Madrid, Spain, as an assistant English teacher during the 2013–2014 school year. She has reported stories for a variety of news organizations including NPR, Newsday, U-T San Diego, and C-SPAN. She has published several news articles and one of her stories, “Never Give Up,” was featured in Slices of Life, edited by Walt Harrington (News Gazette 2013). She plans to continue working in news production with a focus on international human rights.
Kimberly Jade Norwood is a Professor of Law at Washington University School of Law in Saint Louis. She has a BS degree from Fordham University and a JD from the University of Missouri-Columbia. She clerked for a federal district judge after law school and practiced law as a litigator at a major law firm before joining the faculty of the Washington University School of Law in 1990. Professor Norwood teaches Torts, Products Liability, Race, Education and the Law, and Education Equality, Justice, and Reform. She has taught abroad, including in China, Ghana, Japan, and The Netherlands. In 2007 she created a high school to law school pipeline program at Washington University School of Law, which has received both national and local acclaim and is still in operation. She has published several pieces on the meaning of being Black in America, on the academic toll Black students have suffered when confronting the stigma of acting White, and on the urban education plight of Black children in public schools in America. She is the Editor and Contributor of the book Color Matters: Skin Tone Bias and the Myth of a Postracial America. She is a recipient of the 2015 Washington University Distinguished Faculty Award.
Jason Q. Purnell, PhD, MPH, is Assistant Professor in the George Warren Brown School of Social Work, Faculty Director for Thriving Communities in the Center for Social Development, and Faculty Scholar in the Institute for Public Health at Washington University in St. Louis. His research examines the sociocultural and socioeconomic factors that drive disparities in health behaviors and health outcomes, with a specific focus on the health implications of education and economic status. Dr. Purnell is lead investigator on For the Sake of All, a multi disciplinary, academic-community project to improve the health and well-being of African Americans in St. Louis through the presentation of research, community mobilization, and key stakeholder engagement.
L. Song Richardson is a professor of law at the University of California, Irvine, School of Law. Her interdisciplinary research uses lessons from cognitive and social psychology to study criminal procedure, criminal law, and policing. Professor Richardson’s scholarship has been published by law journals at Yale, Cornell, Northwestern, Southern California, and Minnesota, among others. Her article, “Police Efficiency and the Fourth Amendment” was selected as a “Must Read” by the National Association of Criminal Defense Attorneys. Her co-edited book, The Future of Criminal Justice in America, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2014. Professor Richardson’s legal career has included partnership at a boutique criminal law firm, work as a state and federal public defender in Seattle, Washington, and Assistant Counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. Professor Richardson is the proud 2011 Recipient of the American Association of Law School’s Derrick Bell Award, which recognizes a junior faculty member’s extraordinary contribution to legal education through mentoring, teaching, and scholarship.
Brendan Roediger is a professor of law at Saint Louis University School of Law. He heads the school’s Civil Advocacy Clinic, which focuses on court-reform and the representation of low-income individuals in the St. Louis region. Professor Roediger is active in litigation and advocacy directed at eliminating racial profiling, revenue-based policing, and unconstitutional court practices in Ferguson and throughout the St. Louis region. His work on these issues has been featured in national media sources such as The New York Times, ABC, MSNBC, and NPR. Professor Roediger has taken an important role in the legal response to the events in Ferguson, working with local and national organizations to provide legal representation to activists and to monitor and combat civil rights violations.
Terry Smith is a Distinguished Research Professor at DePaul College of Law. Prior to joining DePaul’s faculty, he taught for 16 years at Fordham Law School, clerked on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, and practiced labor and employment law at Kirkland & Ellis. A specialist in labor and employment law as well as voting rights, Professor Smith is the author of numerous law review articles and the book Barack Obama, Post-Racialism, and the New Politics of Triangulation (2012). Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan; 2012 edition (May 31, 2012)
Vetta L. Sanders Thompson, PhD, is a Professor at Washington University in St. Louis, in the George Warren Brown School of Social Work, Public Health Program and Urban Studies Program. Her research has focused on racial identity, psychosocial implications of race and culture for mental health and health communication, services utilization, and health disparities among ethnic minorities. Dr. Thompson has completed funded research examining cultural competence in the provision of mental health services, colorectal cancer screening promotion and communication, and HPV attitudes and vaccination in the African American community and experiences of discrimination among users of Consumer Operated Services Programs. She received her bachelor’s degree in Psychology and Social Relations from Harvard University and her master’s and doctorate in psychology from Duke University, where she also completed the Clinical Training program. Dr. Thompson is a licensed psychologist and health service provider in the state of Missouri.
Howard M. Wasserman is Professor of Law at FIU College of Law, where he has taught since 2003. He graduated magna cum laude from Northwestern University School of Law, where he was an associate articles editor of the Law Review and was named to the Order of the Coif. Following law school, he clerked for Chief Judge James T. Giles of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania and Judge Jane R. Roth of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. He also has been a visiting professor at Saint Louis University School of Law and Florida State University College of Law. Professor Wasserman’s scholarship focuses on procedure in constitutional litigation and he has written extensively on the role of video evidence in civil rights enforcement. He is the author of Understanding Civil Rights Litigation (2013). Publisher: LEXISNEXIS (September 4, 2013)