2021 Willamette Law Review and Housing Land Advocates Symposium

Dates: March 4 (8:00 AM to 1:00 PM) and March 5 (8:30 AM to 12:00 PM)
All times presented are in Pacific Standard Time.

This year's symposium is free and will cover a range of state and federal housing issues, including housing in the Western United States and problems of housing equity and CLE credit will be available. Professor Richard Rothstein, an expert in the history of American housing issues, will give the keynote address on housing and segregation in the United States. The second day will include panels discussing federal housing issues and the future of residential land use regulations.

Featured Speaker Richard Rothstein

Richard Rothstein, Distinguished Fellow at the Economic Policy Institute and author of The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America (Liveright, 05/02/17) will be the featured speaker at the Willamette Law Review Symposium.

About Richard Rothstein

Richard Rothstein is the author of THE COLOR OF LAW: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America.  A Distinguished Fellow of the Economic Policy Institute, the Thurgood Marshall Institute of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and of the Haas Institute at the University of California (Berkeley).  In addition to his recent book, The Color of Law, he is the author of many other articles and books on race and education, which can be found on his web page at the Economic Policy Institute. Previous influential books include "Class and Schools: Using Social, Economic and Educational Improvement to Close the Black-White Achievement Gap," and "Grading Education: Getting Accountability Right." He welcomes questions and comments at riroth@epi.org.

TITLE: The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America
AUTHOR: Richard Rothstein
PUBLICATION DATE: May 2, 2017
PAGES: 368
ISBN: 978-1-63149-285-3

Lecture summary

Racial segregation characterizes every metropolitan area in the U.S. and bears responsibility for our most serious social and economic problems – it corrupts our criminal justice system, exacerbates economic inequality, and produces large academic gaps between white and African American schoolchildren. We’ve taken no serious steps to desegregate neighborhoods, however, because we are hobbled by a national myth that residential segregation is de facto—the result of private discrimination or personal choices that do not violate constitutional rights. The Color of Law demonstrates, however, that residential segregation was created by racially explicit and unconstitutional government policy in the mid-twentieth century that openly subsidized whites-only suburbanization in which African Americans were prohibited from participating. Only after learning the history of this policy can we be prepared to undertake the national conversation necessary to remedy our unconstitutional racial landscape.

DATE: Thursday, March 4, 2021

Press Release (PDF)

"The Color of Law" Summary Handout (PDF)

Symposium Schedule: 

Thursday, March 4, 2021

Friday, March 5, 2021