"Seize the Little Moment: How International Human Rights has Illuminated 8th Amendment Youth Justice  in the United States" 

Bernardine Dohrn, founding Director of the Children and Family Justice Center and Clinical Associate Professor at Northwestern University School of Law (retired), will speak on Thursday, February 20 at the Social Sciences Research Building, Room 122 (1126 E. 59th Street) from 5:00 to 6:30pm. 

Professor Dohrn will discuss how U.S. activists, lawyers and the U.S. Supreme Court have noted US isolation from -- and elaborated upon -- global standards of justice for young people given extreme sentences, such as juvenile death penalty and juvenile life without parole.

In this presentation, Dohrn will be joined by Randolph Stone, Director of the Criminal and Juvenile Justice Project and Clinical Professor at the University of Chicago Law School, who will provide commentary after Dohrn’s presentation.

Professor Dohrn is a Visiting Lecturer with the University of Chicago Human Rights Program this winter quarter teaching a class titled, “Women, Children, Gender and Human Rights" (HRMT 28000/38000).

Presented by the Human Rights Program and the Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture, Professor Dohrn’s presentation is the fourth installment of our “Hard Times: Black Appeals Local and Global” lecture series.

​[download the event poster here]

The “Hard Times: Black Appeals Local and Global” project consists of a year-long series of public lectures with by-invitation dinners afterwards to generate discussion about the history and future of human rights activism in the black diaspora and beyond. This project is part of the Human Rights Program’s Human Rights at Home initiative. It takes off from our interest in An Appeal to the World,the 1947 petition to the United Nations by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). The petition’s authors included Dr. W.E.B. DuBois, Earl B. Dickerson, Milton Konvitz, William R. Ming, Jr., Leslie S. Perry, and Rayford Logan. We are particularly interested in the participation of Dickerson and Ming, for both are graduates of the University of Chicago Law School and important figures in the history of the South Side.