Thurgood Marshall Memorial Lecture
“A Roadmap to Educational Excellence and Equity for Rhode Island”
Join Keynote Speaker Kimberly Jenkins Robinson for this virtual program.
Kimberly Jenkins Robinson is the Elizabeth D. and Richard A. Merrill Professor at the University of Virginia School of Law as well as a professor at both the School of Education and Human Development, and the Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy at the University of Virginia. She is an expert who speaks throughout the United States about K-20 educational equity, equal opportunity, civil rights, and federalism.
In 2019, New York University Press published the edited volume titled A Federal Right to Education: Fundamental Questions for Our Democracy. Robinson brought together some of the nation’s leading law and education scholars to examine why the United States should consider recognizing a federal right to education, how the United States could recognize such a right, and what the right should guarantee. In 2015, Harvard Education Press published her co-edited book with Professor Charles Ogletree Jr. of Harvard Law School titled The Enduring Legacy of Rodriguez: Creating New Pathways to Equal Educational Opportunity. Scholars analyzed the impact of the 1972 United States Supreme Court decision San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez, which held that the U.S. Constitution does not protect a right to education. Her scholarship has been published widely in leading journals, including the Harvard Law Review, the Stanford Law & Policy Review, the University of Chicago Law Review, the North Carolina Law Review, and the Boston College Law Review.
Professor Robinson is a member of the American Law Institute. She serves on the advisory boards for both Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab National Education Resource Database on Schools, and the Gates Foundation’s Intradistrict Resource Inequity Project.
She is the 2016 Recipient of the Steven S. Goldberg Award for Distinguished Scholarship in Education Law from the Education Law Association for Disrupting Education Federalism, which was published in the Washington University Law Review.
Before Robinson began her career as a professor, she practiced law in the General Counsel’s Office of the U.S. Department of Education, as an education litigation attorney with Hogan & Hartson law firm (now Hogan Lovells), and served as a clerk for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
Robinson graduated cum laude from Harvard Law School and with a B.A. in foreign affairs from the University of Virginia where she was an Echols Scholar and a recipient of the University Achievement Award.
Special Accommodations
Persons who, because of a special need or condition, would like to request an accommodation for an event should contact the Office of Programs & Events, as soon as possible, but no later than 72 hours before the event, so that appropriate arrangements can be made. lawevents@rwu.edu