Derrick Bell Lecture Series to kick off at UO in February

The Derrick Bell Lecture Series, which is intended to become an annual event, will kick off Feb. 7 and 8, with events in Eugene and Portland, according to the University of Oregon School of Law.

Bell, who was dean of the UO law school for five years beginning in 1980, died in New York on Oct. 5, 2011, at age 80.

The new UO lecture series will honor the memory of Bell, who was a prominent civil rights attorney and legal scholar. He was the first and only African American dean in the history of the UO School of Law, and the first at a law school that is not historically a Black institution.

The inaugural speaker at the Bell Lecture Series will be Ian Haney-Lopez, who was a student of Bell's at Harvard Law School. Haney-Lopez is the John H. Boalt Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, where he teaches in the areas of race and constitutional law.

The lecture series recognizes the contributions Bell made to academia and the pursuit of equity. He wrote extensively about race in the United States and challenged the academic institutions at which he served to commit to diversity.

Bell's casebook, "Race, Racism and American Law" – currently in its eighth edition – is used widely in law schools across the country.

The lecture series is an opportunity for the law school to engage in discussions of diversity and equity with the campus community and beyond.

Haney-Lopez, who studies social and legal construction of race, has authored books including, "Racism on Trial: The Chicano Fight for Justice" (Harvard/Belknap 2003) and "White by Law: The LegalConstruction of Race" (NYU 1996, revised ed. 2006). His new book, "Dog Whistle Politics: How Fifty Years of Race-Baiting Wrecked the Middle Class," will be published by Oxford Press in 2013.

The Derrick Bell Lecture Series, sponsored by the UO School of Law and Wayne Morse Center for Law and Politics, will take place every year in February, coinciding with Black History Month.

Cosponsors include the District Court of Oregon; Eugene Weekly; Federal Bar Association in Portland; Oregon Humanities Center's O'Fallon Memorial Lecture in Law and American Culture; and the UO's Ethnic Studies Department; Center for Latina/o & Latin American Studies; Clark Honors College; Department of Educational Methodology, Policy & Leadership; Graduate School; History Department; Office of Equity and Inclusion; Planning, Public Policy and Management program; and Oregon Academic Extension.

The event schedule for 2013 includes:

February 7

February 8

- from the UO School of Law