Symposia | GLJ

The Labor Movement & Civil Rights in the Modern Era

The Georgetown Law Journal is hosting its Volume 114 Symposium on “The Labor Movement and Civil Rights in the Modern Era.” Workers are encountering a series of major setbacks—including, but not limited to, executive orders banning DEI initiatives, erosion of discrimination protections, a hostile and underfunctioning NLRB, and mass terminations of federal employees—challenging workers’ rights in both the private and public sectors. GLJ’s symposium will focus on the state of the labor movement as navigating a series of civil rights issues and will highlight this moment in history as a means to consider worker rights beyond traditional protections. When legal protections are eroded, how can workers and advocates respond? This symposium seeks to answer that question with a look to history, an analysis of the present, and a reimagination of future labor advocacy.

The Symposium will provide a forum to examine and identify ways to redress systemic racial injustice in a myriad of legal fields through an Afrofuturist lens. The November 10 event will be in person with a live stream, featuring Black scholars across a wide range of disciplines—law, theology, literature, media studies, philosophy, and sociology. It will be the first symposium in the U.S. dedicated to this topic. The Journal has been working closely with Professor Bennett Capers of Fordham Law School, Professor Ifeoma Yvonne Ajunwa of Emory Law School, and Professor Etienne Toussaint of USC Law School to create the Symposium. The event is co-sponsored by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the AI and the Law Program at Emory Law School and the Fordham Center on Race, Law, and Justice.

In November 2021, The Georgetown Law Journal hosted its biennial symposium on the state of democracy in the United States. This timely topic tackles the fragility and the transitional nature of U.S. democracy and brings together scholarship that present novel theses on the future of the Supreme Court and its jurisprudence, equal protection and citizenship under the U.S. Constitution, and racial justice and requirements of peace. President and Director-Counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Sherrilyn Ifill delivers the Keynote for this symposium in conversation with Anita Krishnakumar, Professor of Law at Georgetown Law.

In October 2019, The Georgetown Law Journal hosted its biennial symposium with the theme Law and the Nation’s Health, in collaboration with the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law. This timely and important topic was intended both to address an issue central to the United States’ political climate, particularly given the upcoming 2020 presidential election, and celebrate the work of Georgetown University Law Center Professor, Lawrence O. Gostin.

The symposium brought together important and influential scholars of national and global health law and was organized around three key themes: the law of women’s health and equity; the law of universal health coverage; and the state of global health law. The symposium offered a forum for Georgetown University staff and students, scholars and practitioners of health law, and a broader universe of legislators and regulators to make a critical assessment of global and national health law, particularly as it plays into broader domestic and international debates on health care policy and legislation.

The Law of Nations and the United States Constitution

In November 2017, The Georgetown Law Journal hosted a two day panel discussion about the status of customary international law under the Constitution and the role of such law in U.S. courts. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito and four judges of the U.S. Courts of Appeals participated in the opening panel that explored the “Judicial Perspective” on the status of customary international law under the Constitution and the role of such law in U.S. Courts. The second day of panels reassessed the status of customary international law in U.S. courts in light of the framework presented in Professors Clark and Bellia’s book, “The Law of Nations and the United States Constitution.” Scholarship from this event was published in Volume 106, Issue 6 of the Georgetown Law Journal.

On Friday, November 20, 2015, The Georgetown Law Journal hosted its Volume 104 Symposium—Police/State: Race, Power, and Control—a full-day event bringing together acclaimed legal scholars, practitioners, and social activists to identify and analyze underlying causes of and potential solutions to the crises of racialized police violence in America.