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Angela Onwuachi-Willig will serve as the 2014 Constitution Day Speaker at Drake. The title will be, “Re-Articulating the Harm of Discrimination: An Examination of Brown v. Board of Education at 60.”
Educational institutions across the country observe Constitution Day as way of commemorating the signing of the U.S. Constitution on Sept. 17, 1787.
“In Brown, the Supreme Court outlawed segregation and the idea of separate but equal. But discrimination still exists in the U.S.,” says Mark Kende, James Madison Chair in Constitutional Law and director of the Constitutional Law Center. “Drake is lucky to have one of the nation’s most prominent legal scholars and analysts of discrimination in the country offer her insights on the 60th anniversary of the Court’s decision. With the debates on race created by events in nearby Ferguson, Missouri and by recent Supreme Court decisions generally opposing affirmative action, there could not be a better time to have our speaker here than this year’s Constitution Day.”
Onwuachi-Willig is the Charles and Marion Kierscht Professor of Law at the University of Iowa. She joined the Iowa Law faculty in 2006 after three years on the tenure track at the University of California, Davis School of Law. She graduated from Grinnell College, Phi Beta Kappa, with a B.A. in American Studies, and received her J.D. from the University of Michigan Law School, where she was a Clarence Darrow Scholar, a Note Editor on the Michigan Law Review and an Associate Editor of the founding issue of the Michigan Journal of Race and Law.
After law school, she 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. She also worked as a labor and employment associate at Jones Day in Cleveland, Ohio and Foley Hoag in Boston, Massachusetts. Her articles have appeared in or are forthcoming in many prestigious law journals, including the Yale Law Journal, California Law Review, Michigan Law Review, Georgetown Law Journal, and Vanderbilt Law Review.
Professor Onwuachi-Willig also has published numerous newspaper opinion-editorials. Her book According to Our Hearts: Rhinelander v. Rhinelander and the Law of the Multiracial Family (Yale University Press, 2013) has received rave reviews. Professor Onwuachi-Willig has received many accolades for her work. In 2006, Professor Onwuachi-Willig was honored by the Minority Groups Section of the Association of American Law Schools (AALS) with the 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. In December of 2010, Professor Onwuachi-Willig was elected to the American Law Institute and she was selected as a finalist for the Iowa Supreme Court. In 2011, she was named one of America’s top young legal professionals by the National Law Journal, which placed her on its “Minority 40 under 40” list.
Professor Onwuachi-Willig is a past Chair of the Association of American Law Schools (AALS) Minority Groups Section and the AALS Law and Humanities Section, a past Chair of the AALS Committee for the Recruitment and Retention of Minorities, and a former member of the Board of Governors for the Society of American Law Teachers. She currently serves as Chair-Elect of the AALS Employment Discrimination Section.
This event will be held at 3 p.m., Monday, Sept. 15, in Sussman Theater on Drake’s campus. It is free and open to the public.
*This program is eligible for one hour of Iowa and one hour of Federal CLE credit (156729).