Professor Kenji Yoshino to Deliver Thomas Lecture on Identity and Diversity, Rescheduled for April 6

Professor Kenji Yoshino ’96 will give the James A. Thomas Lecture at Yale Law School on April 6. (The event, originally scheduled for February 2, was postponed due to weather.) The lecture is titled “Uncovering Talent: A New Model of Inclusion.” The event will begin at 4:30 pm in Room 127.

Kenji Yoshino is the Chief Justice Earl Warren Professor of Constitutional Law at NYU School of Law. He clerked for the Honorable Guido Calabresi ’58 on the Second Circuit Court of Appeals before teaching at Yale Law School from 1998 to 2008. After receiving tenure at Yale in 2003, he served as deputy dean (2005–06) and became the inaugural Guido Calabresi Professor in 2006. His fields are constitutional law, anti-discrimination law, and law and literature.

“Long after diversity and inclusion initiatives have been in place, progress toward full demographic representation remains stalled,” said Yoshino. His lecture will consider how the pressure to “cover,” or downplay aspects of one’s identity, presents a significant hindrance to true diversity. “Using data from the Yale community and beyond, I will address the incidence of covering, the costs of covering for individuals and groups, and look to possible solutions,” Yoshino continued.

Yoshino is the author of Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights and A Thousand Times More Fair: What Shakespeare’s Plays Teach Us About Justice. His third book, Speak Now: Marriage Equality on Trial, will be published by Random House in April 2015. In 2011, he was elected to the Harvard Board of Overseers for a six-year term. He also serves on the Board of the Brennan Center for Justice, the Advisory Board for the Center for Talent Innovation, and Deloitte’s Inclusion External Advisory Council.

The James A. Thomas Lecture was established in 1989 in honor of Dean James A. Thomas ’64 and his many years of service to Yale Law School. It brings to the Law School a scholar whose work addresses the concerns of communities or groups currently marginalized within the legal academy or society at large. The lecture is open to the Yale Law School community.