Seattle University School of Law has announced that Devon Carbado, the Honorable Harry Pregerson Professor of Law at University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) School of Law, will deliver the inaugural Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic Distinguished Lecture on April 12, 2024, from 1 to 2:30 p.m. in Sullivan Hall.
Taking place annually, the Delgado/Stefancic Lecture honors the lifetime contributions of Seattle U Law Professors Delgado and Stefancic to critical outsider jurisprudence by bringing to the Seattle U Law community a scholar who has made significant contributions to critical scholarship.
“We are delighted to inaugurate this annual lecture series with such a distinguished scholar as Devon Carbado. Professors Delgado and Stefancic have epitomized outstanding critical justice scholarship for decades. I can think of no better way of celebrating their impressive legacy than by spotlighting and celebrating the scholarship of exceptional scholars like Devon who follow in their footsteps,” said Dean Anthony E. Varona.
Acclaimed law professors who previously served on the faculty, Delgado and Stefancic returned to Seattle U Law in the summer of 2022. As leading authors and theorists on race and social change in the United States, they have published numerous books and articles over their remarkable careers that have explored groundbreaking legal frameworks, including critical race theory.
“Richard Degaldo and Jean Stefancic have fundamentally shaped the production of knowledge within and beyond the parameters of legal education,” Carbado said. “Separately and together, they have insisted that we grapple not only with the reality that knowledge production has never been a normatively free enterprise, but also that, historically, the production of knowledge has been deeply bound up with various regimes of inequality, including racism. They have undertaken this important work in courageous and interdisciplinary ways, and in the context of doing so, lifted up the voices of those on the bottom of society."
Carbado, who is currently a visiting professor of law at New York University School of Law during the spring semester, is the former associate vice chancellor of BruinX for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion at UCLA who teaches constitutional criminal procedure, constitutional law, critical race theory, and criminal adjudication. He has won numerous teaching awards, including being elected Professor of the Year by the UCLA School of Law classes of 2000 and 2006, receiving the law school's Rutter Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2003, and the University's Distinguished Teaching Award, the Eby Award for the Art of Teaching, in 2007.
In 2005, Carbado was an inaugural recipient of the Fletcher Foundation Fellowship. Modeled on the Guggenheim fellowships, it is awarded to scholars whose work furthers the goals of Brown v. Board of Education. In 2018, he was named an inaugural recipient of the Atlantic Philanthropies Fellowship for Racial Equity.
Carbado writes in the areas of employment discrimination, criminal procedure, implicit bias, constitutional law, and critical race theory. His scholarship has appeared in law reviews at UCLA, University of California, Berkeley, Harvard University, University of Michigan, Cornell University, and Yale University, among other venues.
He is the co-author of, “Acting White? Rethinking Race in ‘Post-Racial’ America,” and the co-editor of several volumes, including “Race Law Stories,” “The Long Walk to Freedom: Runaway Slave Narratives,” and “Time on Two Crosses: The Collective Writings of Bayard Rustin.” A board member of the African American Policy Forum, Carbado was the Shikes Fellow in Civil Liberties and Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School in 2012.
Carbado graduated from Harvard Law, where he was editor-in-chief of the Harvard Black Letter Law Journal, a member of the Board of Student Advisors, and winner of the Northeast Frederick Douglass Moot Court Competition. Carbado joined the UCLA School of Law faculty in 1997; he served as vice dean for Faculty and Research from 2006-07 and again from 2009-10.