Elizabeth Alexander is a poet, essayist, playwright, and teacher. She is chair of the African American Studies Department at Yale University and the author of six books of poems: The Venus Hottentot: Body of Life; Antebellum Dream Book; American Sublime, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; Miss Crandall’s School for Young Ladies and Little Misses of Color, a young adult collection co-authored with Marilyn Nelson; and Crave Radiance: New and Selected Poems 1990–2010, which won the Paterson Prize for Poetry. Her two collections of essays are The Black Interior and Power and Possibility, and her play, Diva Studies, was produced at the Yale School of Drama. In 2009, she composed and delivered the poem “Praise Song for the Day” for the inauguration of President Barack Obama.
Jeannine Bell is a professor of law and the Louis F. Niezer Faculty Fellow at Indiana University’s Maurer School of Law. A nationally recognized scholar in the area of policing and hate crime, she has written extensively on criminal justice issues. She has authored or edited several articles and three books including Policing Hatred: Law Enforcement, Civil Rights, and Hate Crime and Hate Thy Neighbor, which explores hate crime in integrating neighborhoods. Her research is broadly interdisciplinary, touching on her work in both political science and law. She has served as a trustee of the Law and Society Association (LSA), as treasurer of LSA, and as a member of the American Political Association’s Presidential Taskforce on Political Violence and Terrorism.
Paul Butler is a professor of law at Georgetown University Law Center. He teaches in the areas of criminal law and race and the law. Prior to joining Georgetown’s faculty he was Associate Dean for Faculty Development and the Carville Dickinson Benson Research Professor of Law at George Washington University Law School. Professor Butler is one of the nation’s most frequently consulted scholars on issues of race and criminal justice. His book Let’s Get Free: A Hip-Hop Theory of Justice received the Harry Chapin Media award. His scholarship has been the subject of much attention in the academic and popular media. His work has been profiled on 60 Minutes, Nightline, and the ABC, CBS, and NBC evening news, among other places. He lectures regularly for the American Bar Association and the NAACP, and at colleges, law schools, and community organizations throughout the United States. Prior to joining the academy, Butler served as a federal prosecutor with the U.S. Department of Justice, where his specialty was public corruption. He is a graduate of Harvard Law School and Yale College.
Guy-Uriel Charles is the Charles S. Rhyne Professor of Law at Duke University and the founding director of the Duke Center on Law, Race and Politics. Previously he was a professor of law at the University of Minnesota Law School, where he was named Teacher of the Year for 2002–2003. Charles is a frequent public commentator on constitutional law, election law, campaign finance, redistricting, politics, and race. A co-founder of the Colored Demos blog, he has authored several published articles and was the founder and first editor in chief of the Michigan Journal of Race & Law while a law student at the University of Michigan. Charles has clerked for the Honorable Damon J. Keith of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit and is a past member of the National Research Commission on Elections and Voting.
Luis Fuentes-Rohwer is a professor of law and Harry T. Ice Faculty Fellow at Indiana University’s Maurer School of Law. His scholarship focuses on the intersection of race and democratic theory, as reflected in the law of democracy in general and the Voting Rights Act in particular. Fuentes-Rohwer is interested in the way that institutions—especially courts—are asked to craft and implement the ground rules of American politics. His dissertation, “The Rise of a Concept: Judicial Independence in the American National Context, 1787–1833,” examines the way that the concept of judicial independence gained traction soon after the U.S. Constitution came into being as a necessary counterpoint to the rise of political parties. His most recent work focuses on the political and constitutional status of the commonwealth of Puerto Rico under American rule.
Lani Guinier is the first woman of color appointed to a tenured professorship at Harvard Law School (1998) and is now the Bennett Boskey Professor of Law. Before her Harvard appointment, she was a tenured professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. Educated at Radcliffe College and Yale Law School, Guinier worked in the Civil Rights Division at the U.S. Department of Justice and then headed the Voting Rights Project at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund in the 1980s. Guinier has published many scholarly articles and books, including The Tyranny of the Majority and The Miner’s Canary: Enlisting Race, Resisting Power, Transforming Democracy (with Gerald Torres). In her scholarly writings and op-ed pieces, she has addressed issues of race, gender, and democratic decision making, and has sought new ways of approaching questions like affirmative action while calling for candid public discourse on these topics.
Jonathan Scott Holloway is a professor of African American studies, history, and American studies at Yale University. He specializes in postemancipation United States history with a focus on social and intellectual history. He is the author of Confronting the Veil: Abram Harris Jr., E. Franklin Frazier, and Ralph Bunche, 1919–1941 and the editor of Ralph Bunche’s A Brief and Tentative Analysis of Negro Leadership and Black Scholars on the Line: Race, Social Science, and American Thought in the Twentieth Century (with Ben Keppel). In 2009, Holloway won the William Clyde DeVane Award for Distinguished Scholarship and Teaching in Yale College. He is the recipient of an Alphonse Fletcher Sr. Fellowship and a nonresident fellow at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University.
Taeku Lee is a professor of political science and law and chair of the department of political science at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author or editor of several books including Mobilizing Public Opinion; Transforming Politics, Transforming America (with S. Karthick Ramakrishnan and Ricardo Ramírez); Why Americans Don’t Join the Party (with Zoltan Hajnal); and Asian American Political Participation (with Janelle Wong, S. Karthick Ramakrishnan, and Jane Junn), among others. Lee is co-principal investigator of the National Asian American Survey. He has been an assistant professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School and the Robert Wood Johnson Scholar at Yale. He holds an AB from the University of Michigan, a master’s in public policy from Harvard University, and a PhD from the University of Chicago. Born in South Korea, Lee grew up in rural Malaysia, Manhattan, and suburban Detroit, and is a proud graduate of K–12 public schools.
Glenn C. Loury is a distinguished economist and is the Merton P. Stoltz Professor of the Social Sciences and a professor of economics and public policy at Brown University. He has contributed to a variety of areas in applied microeconomic theory including welfare economics, game theory, industrial organization, natural resource economics, and the economics of income distribution. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and the John von Neuman Award, and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, he was for many years a contributing editor at the New Republic and at the American Interest, and he currently serves on the editorial advisory board of the Boston Review. His books include One by One from the Inside Out: Essays and Reviews on Race and Responsibility in America (winner of the American Book Award); The Anatomy of Racial Inequality; and Race, Incarceration, and American Values, among others.
Kenneth W. Mack is a professor of law at Harvard University. He worked as an electrical engineer at Bell Laboratories before turning to law and history, receiving his JD from Harvard and his MA and PhD in history from Princeton. He is a former law clerk to Federal District Judge Robert L. Carter. He is also a faculty associate in the Joint Center for History and Economics at Harvard University and the University of Cambridge. He is a recipient of the Alphonse Fletcher Sr. Fellowship. Mack is the author of Representing the Race: The Creation of the Civil Rights Lawyer and numerous scholarly articles in leading law and history journals. He has also written opinion pieces for the national press and leading online journals of opinion. During the 2008 and 2012 presidential election cycles, he offered commentary on the candidates in a number of national media outlets, and during the last two presidential inaugurations he offered live commentary seen worldwide on the BBC.
Angela Onwuachi-Willig is the Charles M. and Marion J. Kierscht Professor of Law at the University of Iowa, where she joined the faculty in 2006 after three years at the University of California Davis School of Law. She has clerked for Judge Solomon Oliver, now Chief U.S. District Judge for the Northern District of Ohio, and Judge Karen Nelson Moore, U.S. Circuit Judge for the Sixth Circuit. A former labor and employment lawyer in Cleveland and Boston, Onwuachi-Willig was selected as a 2011 finalist for the Iowa Supreme Court and in that same year was named one of America’s top young legal professionals by the National Law Journal. Her first book, According to Our Hearts: Rhinelander v. Rhinelander and the Law of the Multiracial Family, is an examination of the present and historical legal contexts for multiracial couples and families in the United States.
Orlando Patterson, a historical and cultural sociologist, is John Cowles Professor of Sociology at Harvard University. His academic interests include the culture and practice of freedom, the comparative study of slavery and ethno-racial relations, the sociology of underdevelopment with special reference to the Caribbean, and the problems of gender and familial relations in the black societies of the Americas. A prolific writer, Patterson has been published widely in journals of opinion and the national press. His books include Slavery and Social Death, The Ordeal of Integration, and Freedom in the Making of Western Culture, for which he won the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 1991. A public intellectual, Professor Patterson was, for eight years, special advisor for social policy and development to Prime Minister Michael Manley of Jamaica.
Cristina Rodríguez is the first Latina tenured law professor at Yale Law School. For two years she served as deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel in the U.S. Department of Justice, and prior to that she was on the faculty at the NYU School of Law. Her fields of research include immigration law, constitutional law and theory, administrative law and process, language rights and language policy, and citizenship theory. Before beginning her academic career, Rodríguez was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University, where she earned a master of letters in modern history. After graduating from law school, she served as a clerk to Judge David S. Tatel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, and to Justice Sandra Day O’Connor of the U.S. Supreme Court.
Gerald Torres holds the Bryant Smith Chair in Law at the University of Texas at Austin. He is an expert in agricultural law, environmental law, and critical race theory. He has been a visiting professor at Harvard and Stanford law schools, and with Lani Guinier is the author of The Miner’s Canary. He has served as the deputy assistant attorney general for the Environment and Natural Resources Division of the U.S. Department of Justice and as counsel to former U.S. attorney general Janet Reno. A past president of the Association of American Law Schools, Torres was honored with the 2004 Legal Service Award from the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF) for his work to advance the legal rights of Latinos. He is currently board chair of the Advancement Project, one of the nation’s most prominent social and racial justice organizations.