News & Events
Advocacy Center welcomes first Advocate in Residence
The Center for Advocacy and Dispute Resolution is pleased to announce its first Advocate in Residence, Stephen B. Bright, who will serve as a visiting professor during the fall semester 2010. Professor Bright will be teaching the Wrongful Convictions seminar along with Professor Dwight Aarons. He also will be providing guest lectures in several classes and working with students and instructors in the Innocence Clinic. On Sept. 27, Bright delivered the Summers-Wyatt Lecture at the College of Law.
After graduating from the University of Kentucky College of Law, Bright worked as a legal services attorney at the Appalachian Research and Defense Fund in Lexington, Ky., and as a public defender at Public Defender Services in Washington, D.C. Thereafter, he served as executive director of the D.C. Law Students in Court Program before becoming the Director of the Southern Center for Human Rights in 1981.Bright is currently the president and senior counsel of the Center. Bright has taught at nine law schools including Harvard, Georgetown, Emory, and the University of Chicago, and presently is a visiting lecturer in law at Yale Law School. During his legal career, Bright has argued and won two cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, Synder v. Louisiana, 552 U.S. 472 (2008) and Amadeo v. Zant, 486 U.S. 214 (1988). Both cases involved racial discrimination in the composition of the juries. He has tried many cases, including capital cases, before judges and juries in several states and has argued before state and federal appellate courts. His work, and the work of the Southern Center for Human Rights which he directed from 1982 through 2005, has been the subject of a documentary film, "Finding for Life in the Death Belt," and two books, "Proximity to Death" and "Finding Life on Death Row."
Bright’s writings are included in the Yale, Texas, Notre Dame, Pennsylvania, Washington and Lee, NYU and Boston University Law Reviews. He has testified on many occasions before committees of both the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives. He has received some of the highest awards bestowed upon members of the legal profession, including the American Bar Association’s Thurgood Marshall Award in 1998, the American Civil Liberties Union’s Roger Baldwin Medal of Liberty in 1991, the National Legal Aid & Defender Association’s Kutak-Dodds Prize in 1992, the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers’ Lifetime Achievement Award in 2008, the John Minor Wisdom Award for Professionalism and Public Service, the Durfee Award and numerous honorary degrees.
Top view photos from the lecture, please click below: