The Fred T. Korematsu Center for Law and Equality Advancing Justice through Knowledge and Advocacy Mission
The Fred T. Korematsu Center for Law and Equality Advancing Justice through Knowledge and Advocacy Mission
The Center’s mission is to advance social justice by fostering critical thinking about discrimination in U.S. society and through targeted advocacy to foster equality and freedom. Its research unit will focus on understanding the relationship between law and categories of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class, disability, age, and religion, especially with regard to their intersections. It will bring together scholars from various disciplines and will support interdisciplinary scholarship. Its advocacy unit will apply this understanding to combat discrimination through targeted advocacy efforts. Its education unit will help train the next generation of scholar/teacher/activists through post-graduate teaching and advocacy fellowships.
What the Center Will Do
The work will be divided into three units: (1) research, (2) advocacy, and (3) and education projects.
1. Research Unit.
We will host workshops and conferences that will lead to edited collections of original work to be published in book form, eventually producing one book each year. Our first book project is denoted the “After Race” project. We will be doing a call for papers shortly. The first book will be edited by Robert Chang, Richard Delgado, and Jean Stefancic. Contributors will be designated Non-resident Korematsu Faculty Fellows for a three-year period during which they will be in conversation with each other and will meet for occasional workshops culminating in a conference at the end of the three-year period. A new three-year cycle will begin each spring. The second book project will begin in Spring 2010 and will include a guest editor, Greg Robinson, a historian based in Canada. It will look at group cooperation and conflict, historical perspectives and contemporary issues.
2. Advocacy Unit.
We will engage in an array of advocacy efforts to foster the goals of the Center. This will include developing a civil rights amicus practice. This year, we signed onto amicus briefs before the California Supreme Court and the U.S. Supreme Court in the areas of marriage equality, voting rights, language access in education, employment discrimination, and immigration. We are developing a two-semester amicus clinic that will begin in Fall 2010. It will have a classroom component in the fall focusing on civil rights litigation strategy followed by an amicus clinic where students will be supervised by faculty members and will work in coordination with lawyers to draft amicus briefs in litigation matters that further the Korematsu Center’s mission. This course will eventually be taught by a clinical teaching fellow, currently scheduled to begin in 2012, earlier if resources permit.
3. Education Unit.
The Center will broaden its reach through education and pipeline projects. With regard to our J.D. students, the Center will work to enhance course offerings in the area of Law and Equality. We will also engage in projects to enhance the diversity in legal academia. The primary projects here are creating teaching and advocacy fellowships in the area of law and equality and to host on a biennial basis a conference to promote diversity in law school deanships. The Korematsu Center will be hosting, with the Society of American Law Teachers, a conference on Promoting Diversity in Law School Deanships in Fall 2009. We will be bringing in our first Korematsu Teaching Fellow in Fall 2010.
The Jerome McCristal Culp, Jr., Collection on Race, Gender and Sexuality in Law and Life
The Center will also have as a resource the Jerome McCristal Culp, Jr., Collection on Race, Gender and Sexuality in Law and Life. Consisting primarily of the late Jerome Culp’s private collection, the approximately 4000 books will be housed in a special area in the Law Library at Seattle University School of Law.
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