The 2022 Judge Horace J. Johnson, Jr. Lecture on Race, Law and Policy will be presented by Professor Robert P. George and Dr. Cornel West.
Professor Robert P. George is the McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and the director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University. He served as chairman of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom and on the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and the President’s Council on Bioethics. He was also a U.S. member of UNESCO’s World Commission on the Ethics of Scientific Knowledge and Technology and a Judicial Fellow at the U.S. Supreme Court, where he received the Justice Tom C. Clark Award. His essays and reviews have appeared in the Yale Law Journal, the Harvard Law Review, the Columbia Law Review, the Review of Politics and the Review of Metaphysics. His books include Making Men Moral: Civil Liberties and Public Morality and In Defense of Natural Law (both published by Oxford University Press) and The Clash of Orthodoxies and Conscience and Its Enemies (published by ISI Books).
Dr. Cornel West is the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Chair at Union Theological Seminary. He teaches on the works of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, as well as courses in philosophy of religion, African American critical thought and a wide range of subjects - including but by no means limited to, the classics, philosophy, politics, cultural theory, literature and music. West is the former Professor of the Practice of Public Philosophy at Harvard University and Professor Emeritus at Princeton University. He has written 20 books and has edited 13. He is best known for his classics - Race Matters and Democracy Matters - and for his memoir, Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud. His book Black Prophetic Fire offers an unflinching look at African American leaders of the 19th and 20th centuries as well as their visionary legacies. He has a passion to communicate to a vast variety of publics in order to keep alive the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr.
Registration is required by Monday, January 24.
With support from UGA's Presidential Task Force on Race, Ethnicity and Community, the School of Law and School of Public and International Affairs have established the Judge Horace J. Johnson, Jr. Lecture on Race, Law and Policy in honor of the late jurist, who was a trailblazer for the Black community in Georgia. Johnson was a pioneer throughout his life. He was one of five students who helped desegregate Newton County, Georgia, schools in the 1960s. He graduated from the UGA School of Law in 1982. After briefly working in Atlanta, Johnson became the first Black attorney to practice in his home county. In 2002, he became the first Black Superior Court judge to serve in the Alcovy Judicial Circuit when then-Gov. Roy Barnes appointed him to the post. He remained in this role until his death in July 2020.