Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow is IIT Chicago-Kent's 2011 Centennial Visitor

Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow has been named IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law's Centennial Visitor for 2011. Dean Minow will deliver the 2011 Centennial Lecture, "In Brown's Wake: Reassessing the School Equality Landmark," at 3:30 p.m. on April 12 in the Governor Richard B. Ogilvie Auditorium at Chicago-Kent College of Law, 565 West Adams Street (between Clinton and Jefferson streets) in Chicago. The lecture is free and open to the public, but reservations are requested. (RSVP to Dawn Young at dyoung@kentlaw.edu or 312.906.5003) A reception will follow the lecture.

Dean Minow joined the Harvard Law School faculty in 1981. She was named the William Henry Bloomberg Professor of Law in 2003 and became the Jeremiah Smith, Jr., Professor of Law in 2005. Dean Minow also serves as a lecturer in the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She was named to the deanship of the law school in July 2009, shortly after her predecessor, Elena Kagan (now a U.S. Supreme Court Justice), was confirmed as U.S. Solicitor General.

Dean Minow is a distinguished legal scholar whose interests range from international human rights to equality and inequality, from religion and pluralism to managing mass tort litigation, from family law and education law to the privatization of military, schooling, and other governmental activities. She is a senior fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows as well as a past member of the Harvard University Press Board of Syndics.

In addition to many articles in legal and other journals, Minow's publications include the books Partners, Not Rivals: Privatization and the Public Good (2002); Breaking the Cycles of Hatred: Memory, Law, and Repair (2002); Between Vengeance and Forgiveness: Facing History After Genocide and Mass Violence (1998); Not Only for Myself: Identity, Politics, and the Law (1997); and Making All the Difference: Inclusion, Exclusion, and American Law (1990). She is co-editor of casebooks on civil procedure, women and the law, and family law, as well as volumes including Government by Contract: Outsourcing and American Democracy (2009, with Jody Freeman); Just Schools: Pursuing Equality in Societies of Difference (2008, with Richard Shweder and Hazel Rose Markus); Engaging Cultural Differences: The Multicultural Challenge in Liberal Democracies (2002, with Shweder and Markus); and Law Stories: Law, Meaning, and Violence (1996, with Gary Bellow).

Dean Minow has taught courses on a wide range of subjects, including civil procedure, constitutional law (with a focus on the First Amendment, the structure of government, and the 14th Amendment), nonprofit organizations, family law, law and education, jurisprudence, and the legal profession.

After completing her undergraduate studies at the University of Michigan, Dean Minow received a master's degree in education from Harvard and her law degree from Yale. She clerked for Judge David Bazelon of the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and then for Justice Thurgood Marshall of the Supreme Court of the United States.

Chicago-Kent College of Law is the law school of Illinois Institute of Technology, a private, Ph.D.-granting institution with programs in engineering, psychology, architecture, business, design and law. The Centennial Visitor lecture series was inaugurated in fall 1987 as part of a year-long celebration to mark the founding of Chicago College of Law, forerunner of IIT Chicago-Kent, in 1888. Previous lecturers have included Hon. Harry T. Edwards of the U.S. Court of Appeals for District of Columbia Circuit; Hon. Stephen M. Schwebel of the International Court of Justice in the Hague, and economist Jagdish Bhagwati.