California Law Review Symposium Includes Essay by Professor Fiss

The California Law Review published a symposium in its December 2018 issue including an essay by Sterling Professor Emeritus of Law Owen Fiss. The essay, titled “The Accumulation of Disadvantages,” focuses on the disparate impact principle of Griggs v. Duke Power Co. and the attempt of the legal system to counteract the dynamics responsible for the perpetuation of racial inequalities.

Fiss originally presented the talk at the annual Brennan Center Jorde Symposium at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law and the University of Chicago Law School.

Responding to Fiss as part of the symposium are essays by Harry N. Wyatt Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School Justin Driver, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of California Goodwin Liu ’98, University of Michigan Law School Professor Richard Primus ’98, and Nicholas deB. Katzenbach Professor of Law Reva B. Siegel ’86.

The Brennan Center Jorde Symposium was created in 1996 to sponsor top scholarly discourse and writing from a variety of perspectives on issues that were central to the legacy of William J. Brennan, Jr. A unique feature of the Symposium is that, each year, the honored lecturer presents the same lecture at two different sites, one in the fall, and another in the spring, with a different pair of prominent commentators at each site. Both lectures and the four commentaries are published annually in the California Law Review.

Fiss was educated at Dartmouth, Oxford, and Harvard. He clerked for Thurgood Marshall (when Marshall was a judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit) and later for Justice William J. Brennan, Jr. He also served in the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice from 1966 to 1968. Before coming to Yale, Professor Fiss taught at the University of Chicago. At the Law School he teaches procedure, legal theory, and constitutional law.