Event Information

Join us on Thursday, August 19, 2021, for a not-to-be missed CLE and book signing on racial justice that will remind you why you went to law school in the first place.  Legendary South Carolina civil rights attorney Armand Derfner and Clemson University Professor Orville Vernon Burton teamed up to write a book on "Justice Deferred: Race and the Supreme Court."  The book is just being released by the Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press.  Join Armand and Professor Burton (Judge Matthew J. Perry Jr. Distinguished Professor of History) to hear about their study of race and the Court.  In writing the book, they comprehensively charted the Court's race jurisprudence, addressing nearly 200 cases.  In the book, they probe the parties involved, the justices' reasoning, and the impact of individual rulings.  We will learn of heroes such as Thurgood Marshall; villains, including Roger Taney; and enigmas like Oliver Wendell Holmes and Hugo Black.  USC Professor Todd Shaw will moderate a no-holds-barred discussion between Armand and Professor Burton.  Next, we will have a distinguished panel of South Carolina Civil Rights Law practitioners speaking about current civil rights cases of interest in the areas of police misconduct, voting and election law, reproductive rights, and more.  To cap off the CLE, we have set aside time for a book signing, where you can meet the authors and enjoy some refreshments.  The cost of the CLE includes a copy of this groundbreaking book.  This CLE is sponsored by the South Carolina Bar-CLE Division and South Carolina Bar Civil Rights Task Force.

This seminar qualifies for 3.0 MCLE credit hours. S.C. Supreme Court Commission Course #: 217759

Justice Deferred: Race and The Supreme Court
Authors: Orville Vernon Burton and Armand Derfner

In the first comprehensive accounting of the US Supreme Court's race-related jurisprudence, a distinguished historian and renowned civil rights lawyer scrutinize a legacy too often blighted by racial injustice.

The Supreme Court is usually seen as protector of our liberties: it ended segregation, was a guarantor of fair trials, and safeguarded free speech and the vote. But this narrative derives mostly from a short period, from the 1930s to the early 1970s. Before then, the Court spent a century largely ignoring or suppressing basic rights, while the fifty years since 1970 have witnessed a mostly accelerating retreat from racial justice.

From the Cherokee Trail of Tears to Brown v. Board of Education to the dismantling of the Voting Rights Act, historian Orville Vernon Burton and civil rights lawyer Armand Derfner shine a powerful light on the Court's race record?a legacy at times uplifting, but more often distressing and sometimes disgraceful. For nearly a century, the Court ensured that the nineteenth-century Reconstruction Amendments would not truly free and enfranchise African Americans. And the twenty-first century has seen a steady erosion of commitments to enforcing hard-won rights.

Justice Deferred is the first book that comprehensively charts the Court's race jurisprudence. Addressing nearly two hundred cases involving America's racial minorities, the authors probe the parties involved, the justices' reasoning, and the impact of individual rulings. We learn of heroes such as Thurgood Marshall; villains, including Roger Taney; and enigmas like Oliver Wendell Holmes and Hugo Black. Much of the fragility of civil rights in America is due to the Supreme Court, but as this sweeping history also reminds us, the justices still have the power to make good on the country's promise of equal rights for all.

Orville Vernon Burton is the prizewinning author of several books, including The Age of Lincoln. He is the Judge Matthew J. Perry, Jr., Distinguished Professor of History at Clemson University and Emeritus University Scholar and Professor of History at University of Illinois. 
Armand Derfner has been a civil rights lawyer for over fifty years. He has been counsel for, among others, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund and helped desegregate university systems and legislatures across the South. He argued his first Supreme Court case in 1968.