Posted on 05/12/2024 7:13:49 AM PDT by Jaysin
Christopher Edley Jr., a prominent legal and public policy scholar who co-founded the Harvard Civil Rights Project with Dr. Gary Orfield, died over the weekend. He was 71.
“Chris Edley was a smart, caring, determined advocate for justice who could move easily and powerfully through the mazes of top levels of law, politics, and research,” said Orfield, who is Distinguished Research Professor at UCLA Graduate School of Education and co-director of The Civil Rights Project at UCLA.
“Working with him to create the Civil Rights Project was fascinating,” Orfield told Diverse. “He could take a complicated, heated, and many-sided debate and go right to the essence of the problem and, seemingly without effort, come out with the three basic points and a suggestion about how to move forward, while easing the tension with a great sense of humor. Gone far too soon.”
Edley spent more than two decades as a professor at Harvard Law School, where he and Orfield founded the Civil Rights Project in the aftermath of a 1996 court ruling that squelched race-conscious admission policies at many universities. The case stemmed from a reverse affirmative action lawsuit filed by white student Cheryl Hopwood, who was denied admission to the University of Texas law school. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled against the UT practices.
In 2004, Edley joined UC Berkely as dean of the law school, but stepped down from the role in 2013 and took a medical leave to battle prostate cancer. He returned as the Honorable William H. Orrick, Jr. Distinguished Professor of Law at UC Berkeley School of Law and, in 2016, co-founded Opportunity Institute with Ann O’Leary, who served as chief of staff to California Gov. Gavin Newsom. The Berkeley-based nonprofit organization promotes social equity through education, using a cradle-to-career reach across four distinct demographic groups.
good riddance and he won't be missed.
"He was a leading figure in Democratic policy circles for four decades, serving as a senior member of five presidential campaigns, as an economic policy and budget official under Presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, and as a chair of the Obama-Biden transition team.[3] In 2011 he was appointed by U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan as co-chair of the congressionally chartered National Commission on Equity and Excellence in Education.[4]"
Conservatives tends to scorn civil rights law due to its frequent mobilization for Leftist causes. Nevertheless, the substantive legal principles offer protection and remedy against government misconduct that violates the Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment. From that perspective, conservative dislike of civil rights law is gravely mistaken.
There’s Democrat civil rights and American civil rights...but you know that.
When you read of conservative legal victories, most of them are due to the threat or actual filing of a federal civil rights action. It is a complicated field of law though, with nuances that require close study and attention to a torrent of case law decisions. Unfortunately, conservatives remain behind the curve with far too few first rate plaintiffs’ practitioners in civil right law.
I’ll agree with your principle but i think we’ll both agree that Mr. Edley, who spent almost a decade as Dean of the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, did not have the same definition of freedom and bill of rights that we normal Americans have.
UC Berkeley School of Law is literally the G-spot of American liberalism and it’s cancerous spread that is destroying the USA.
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