Paul Butler, a nationally recognized expert on issues of race and criminal justice, will deliver the 2015 Charles H. Miller Lecture in Professional Responsibility at the University of Tennessee College of Law.
The lecture, “Criminal Justice after Ferguson: Five Amazing Facts about Race and Crime, with Complete Proof,” will take place April 13 at noon in Room 132 of the College of Law. Butler will discuss the legal, political, and social factors that he says have created mass incarceration and race disparities in criminal justice. He will also consider post-Ferguson proposals for reform by the United States Department of Justice and racial-justice social movements.
Butler, a professor of law at the Georgetown University Law Center, teaches in the areas of criminal law and race and the law. He also has served as a federal prosecutor with the US Department of Justice, where his specialty was public corruption.
His work has been profiled on 60 Minutes, Nightline, and the evening news broadcasts for ABC, CBS, and NBC, and he lectures regularly for the American Bar Association and the NAACP. Butler has written for The Legal Times and published numerous op-ed articles and book reviews. His scholarship has been published in the Yale Law Journal, the Harvard Law Review, the Stanford Law Review, and the UCLA Law Review. His book, Let’s Get Free: A Hip-Hop Theory of Justice, received the Harry Chapin Media Award.
The Charles Henderson Miller Lecture Series in Professional Responsibility was established in 1977 in honor of the late Professor Charles H. Miller, the founding director of the UT Legal Clinic.