News & Events
Stephen Bright delivers lecture on Race and Poverty
The Center for Advocacy and Dispute Resolution announces that its first Advocate in Residence, Stephen B. Bright, delivered the Summers-Wyatt Lecture at the College of Law on Sept. 27. The lecture was entitled "The Intersection of Race and Poverty in Criminal Justice." Center Director Penny White says "there is no person better qualified than Steve Bright to address the issues of race and poverty and how they affect and influence our nation's criminal justice system."
Bright is the president and senior counsel at the Southern Center for Human Rights, a human rights organization that deals with human rights in the criminal justice and prison systems. He served as director of the Center from 1982 through 2005. His subject area is capital punishment and he has represented people facing the death penalty at trials and on appeals and prisoners in challenges to inhumane conditions and practices. During his legal career, Bright has argued and won two cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, Snyder v. Louisiana, 552 U.S. 472 (2008) and Amadeo v. Zant, 486 U.S. 214 (1988). Both cases involved racial discrimination in jury composition. Steve's 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. In addition, he has taught at nine law schools including Yale, Harvard, Georgetown, Emory, and the University of Chicago.