Seattle University’s Dean Spade To Give 2009-2010 Thomas Lecture February 8

WATCH THE VIDEO OF DEAN SPADE’S LECTURE

Seattle University law professor Dean Spade will deliver the James A. Thomas Lecture on Monday, February 8, 2010, at Yale Law School. The lecture, titled “Beyond Recognition,” will take place at 4:30 p.m. in the Faculty Lounge. It is free and open to the public. A reception will follow in the Alumni Reading Room.

"In the lecture," said Professor Spade, "I will be talking about the limitations of current popular legal equality demands emerging under the 'trans rights' framework. Taking up some of the interventions of Critical Race Theory and women of color feminism as well as Michel Foucault's concept of biopolitics, I will examine some of the pittfalls of law reform-centered social movement strategies and suggest alternative frameworks for imagining a critical trans politics."

Dean Spade is Assistant Professor of Law at Seattle University School of Law. Prior to joining the faculty of Seattle University, he was a Williams Institute Law Teaching Fellow at UCLA Law School and Harvard Law School, teaching classes related to sexual orientation and gender identity law and law and social movements.

In 2002, Dean founded the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, an innovative law collective that provides free legal help to low-income people and people of color facing gender identity and/or expression discrimination.

He received a Dukeminier Award for his 2008 article, “Documenting Gender,” and the 2009-2010 Haywood Burns chair at CUNY Law School.

He holds a B.A. from Barnard College and a J.D. from the UCLA School of Law.

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.