OXFORD,
Miss. – One of the nation’s leading scholars in the fields of legal
ethics and gender will deliver a public address at 4 p.m. Thursday
(April 2) at the University of Mississippi.
Deborah Rhode,
Ernest W. McFarland Professor of Law at Stanford University, will speak
on “Challenges for the Legal Profession: Diversity and Access to
Justice” in the William N. Ethridge Jr. Moot Court Room of the Lamar
Law Center. The author of 20 books, Rhode is among the most frequently
cited scholars in legal ethics.
“She is one of the most highly
regarded scholars in the country,” said Michael Hoffheimer, professor
of law. “She does influential, cutting-edge research on law and ethics,
and on women in the law. No issue is more critical than diversity for
securing the integrity of the rule of law, so her topic will be of
great public interest.”
Rhode served as a law clerk for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall before joining the Stanford faculty. She is a columnist for the National Law Journal and vice chair of the board for Legal Momentum (formerly the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund).
She is the founder and former director of Stanford’s Center on Ethics, and the former director of the Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford. She formerly served as president of the Association of American Law Schools and chair of the American Bar Association’s Commission on Women in the Profession.
She received the American Bar Association’s Michael Franck award for contributions to the field of professional responsibility; the American Bar Foundation’s W. M. Keck Foundation Award for distinguished scholarship on legal ethics, and the American Bar Association’s Pro Bono Publico Award for her work on expanding public service opportunities in law schools.
“We are very pleased to have a teacher and scholar of Professor Rhode’s stature to lecture on such an important subject as ethics,” said Law Dean Samuel M. Davis. “The legal profession does face a number of challenges, and no one is better equipped or qualified than Professor Rhode to speak to those challenges. She is a trailblazer herself, so it is fitting that she is speaking in the Matthews Lecture Series honoring the memory of a trailblazer in her own right.”
The Matthews Lecture in Law series honors U.S. District Court Judge Burnita Shelton Matthews, a native of Mississippi and the first woman to serve as a U.S. federal district judge. Among nearly 20 past lecturers in the series are Frank Wu, dean of Wayne State University Law School; Walter Wadlington, a retired University of Virginia law professor; author John Grisham; and Judge Manfred Lachs.
For more information or for assistance related to a disability, contact Connie Lamb at 662-915-6900 or clamb@olemiss.edu. For more information on the UM School of Law, visit http://www.law.olemiss.edu/ .