Dear John, Alliance for Justice’s Building the Bench Initiative is launching a new virtual conversation series highlighting the importance of experiential and demographic diversity for America's courts: May I Approach? Courts and the Power of Inclusion. Join us on Wednesday, July 1, 2020 at 6:00pm ET for the inaugural presentation, May I Approach? The Impact of Black Women as Appellate Judges. The conversation will explore the current landscape of diversity among appellate judges, the opportunities and systemic obstacles to increasing representation of black women on courts of appeal, and why we must broaden the demographic and experiential backgrounds represented on the bench. Building the Bench Advisory Council member Melissa Murray, Professor & Faculty Director of the Birnbaum Women's Leadership Network at NYU School of Law, and co-host of the Strict Scrutiny Podcast will moderate the conversation. Our distinguished panelists include The Honorable Justice Adrienne Nelson, the first African-American to sit on the Oregon Supreme Court; Danielle Holley-Walker, Dean of the Howard University School of Law; and The Honorable Bernice B. Donald, United States Circuit Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit, and the first Black woman elected judge in the State of Tennessee. Through its Building the Bench Initiative, AFJ strengthens and expands on the work it has done for more than forty years, fighting to ensure America’s courts are served by highly qualified judges who will safeguard the rights of all people. For more information visit https://www.afj.org/our-work/building-the-bench/. We hope you will join us Wednesday for May I Approach? The Impact of Black Women as Appellate Judges, and our future events in this exciting new series. --The AFJ team | |
