Toward a Jurisprudence of the Civil Rights Acts

Robin L. West, Frederick Haas Professor of Law and Philosophy at Georgetown University, will present “Toward a Jurisprudence of the Civil Rights Acts” as the University of Georgia School of Law’s 110th Sibley Lecturer Oct. 23 at 3:30 p.m. in the Hatton Lovejoy Courtroom of Hirsch Hall. The event is free and open to the public. West, who specializes in constitutional law, contracts, interdisciplinary law, jurisprudence and philosophy, will discuss the meaning of the civil rights protected by the historic 1964 Civil Rights Act, as well as the meaning of “civil rights” more generally, contrasting both with constitutional rights developed over the last half century. West has served for more than 20 years as a law professor at Georgetown, where she is also the faculty director of the Georgetown Center for Law and Humanities. She teaches in the areas of torts and contracts and leads seminars on feminist legal theory, legal justice, jurisprudence, contemporary legal scholarship, law and humanities, and law and literature. Her scholarship has appeared in journals such as the Boston University Law Review, the Harvard Law Review, the University of Pennsylvania Law Review and the Yale Law Journal. In addition, West has authored “Normative Jurisprudence: An Introduction,” which was published by Cambridge University Press, and she is currently authoring and co-editing the forthcoming books “Teaching Law” and “Common Ground in the Abortion Debates,” respectively. West has served on the editorial boards of several interdisciplinary journals including The Georgetown Journal of Gender and the Law and has served on the Law and Society Association Board of Advisors. She has been recognized with numerous awards throughout her career, including the Association for the Study of Law, Culture and the Humanities 2009 James Boyd White Lifetime Achievement Award. She earned her bachelor of arts and her Juris Doctor from the University of Maryland and her master of science of laws from Stanford University. The Sibley Lecture Series, established in 1964 by the Charles Loridans Foundation of Atlanta in tribute to the late John A. Sibley, is designed to attract outstanding legal scholars of national prominence to Georgia Law. Sibley was a 1911 graduate of the law school