AERA Brown Lecture: Brown v. Board of Education and the Democratic Ideals

Brown v. Board of Education is one of the most important Supreme Court decisions in United States history. But how should we understand its significance today when public education is under assault and the democratic ideals of equality, opportunity, and justice are being threatened?

In the 2024 AERA Brown Lecture in Education Research, law professor Elise Boddie will explore Brown’s role as a guide for democracy in a time of peril. Drawing on lessons from educational pioneers past and present, she will discuss how we might reimagine freedom in education and American democracy itself.

Boddie is the James V. Campbell Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School. Her scholarship explores the regulation and production of race in spatial contexts and dynamic systems that perpetuate racial inequality. She teaches constitutional law, state and local government law, and civil rights.  In 2012, the Law and Society Association awarded Boddie the John Hope Franklin Prize for her article “Racial Territoriality,” which appeared in the UCLA Law Review. 

Before joining the Michigan Law faculty, she was a professor at Rutgers University. While at Rutgers, she founded and directed The Inclusion Project, which engaged with communities, students, faith leaders, educators, and researchers in a multisector initiative to build equitable education systems in New Jersey public schools.  She also has taught at New York Law School and at Fordham School of Law as a visiting assistant professor.

Boddie was elected to the American Law Institute in 2017 and as an American Bar Foundation Fellow in 2019. In 2021, President Biden appointed her to the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States. At the invitation of the American Law Institute, she participated in a small bipartisan group convened in the spring of 2022 to propose reforms to the federal Electoral Count Act. Boddie most recently served as the principal deputy assistant attorney general in the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice.

ASL and captioning will be provided. A discussion forum with an opportunity for in-person audience Q&A will follow the free lecture. A reception will immediately follow at the in-person event.

The annual AERA Brown Lecture in Education Research illuminates the important role of research in advancing understanding of equality and equity in education. The lecture was inaugurated in 2004 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision, in which the U.S. Supreme Court took scientific research into account.