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Fri, Oct 27, 2023 9:30am - 4:00pm
CSU College of Law
Cleveland State Law Review Symposium: Democracy’s Promise and the Fight for its Future

On Friday, October 27, 2023, Cleveland State Law Review is hosting an in-person Symposium to convene academics, legal practitioners, community advocates, and judges for a robust and timely conversation about democracy’s promise and the fight for its future. The Symposium will feature four panels and a distinguished Keynote Speaker, each of which will discuss different aspects of democracy and its intersections with race, education, and civil engagements. These conversations are more relevant than ever given the forthcoming 75th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, the 10th anniversary of Shelby County v. Holder, and the Supreme Court’s recent decisions on affirmative action, racial gerrymandering, and the independent state legislature theory. 

CLE Credits:  4 hours pending

 

Registration:  $60 (CLE Credit), $25 (No CLE Credit)   REGISTER

CSU Faculty, Staff & Students: Free  REGISTER

 

Agenda

9:30 – 9:40a.m.

Welcome Remarks – Dean Lee Fisher, Cleveland State University College of Law 

9:40– 10:45 a.m.
Panel 1 – Democracy’s Promise: Brown v. Board of Education and its Democratic Aspirations

First, in honor of its 70th Anniversary in 2024, we will look back at Brown v. Board of Education and its democratic aspirations. The panel will focus on the relationship between equal education, citizenship, and democracy.

Panelists:

  • Judge Solomon Oliver, Jr., Federal Judge, Northern District of Ohio
  • Reginald Oh, Professor of Law, Cleveland State University College of Law
  • Caitlin Millat, Professor of Law, Arizona State University 
  • Matthew Nelsen, Professor of Political Science, University of Miami, Florida
  • Moderated by Kayla Griffin, President, Cleveland NAACP and Ohio State Director for All Voting is Local
10:45 – 10:55 a.m.              

Break

10:55 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.
Panel 2 – Democracy for Whom? Current and Emerging Threats to Voting Rights, Redistricting, and Election Administration

In our second panel we will explore the Supreme Court’s role in reinforcing or undermining democracy. The panel may examine recent Court decisions, such as Crawford v. Marion County Election Board, Shelby County v. Holder, and Rucho v. Common Cause, cases which affected who can fully participate in our democracy. It may also examine the Court’s decision in the racial gerrymandering case, Allen v. Milligan. 

Panelists:

  • Jonathan Entin, Professor of Law, Case Western Reserve University School of Law
  • Elizabeth Bonham, Civil Rights Attorney, FG+G Firm
  • Michael Gentithes, Associate Dean, University of Akron School of Law
  • Atiba Ellis, Professor of Law, Case Western Reserve Univesity School of Law
  • Moderated by Brian Glassman, Professor Emeritus,    Cleveland State University College of Law
12:00 – 12:45 p.m.              

Networking Lunch

12:45 – 1:20 p.m.
Keynote Address by Chief justice maureen o'connor

Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor was the tenth Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Ohio and the first woman to lead the state judicial branch of government. She was the first chief justice to retire from the office and upon her retirement was the longest-serving statewide elected woman in Ohio history. As chief justice, O’Connor led significant reforms and improvements in the Ohio judicial system and was a leader nationally. She is a past president of the National Conference of Chief Justices and former chair of the National Center for State Courts Board of Directors. Since leaving the bench, O'Connor has turned much of her focus to advocating for redistricting reform and ensuring that Ohio enacts fair maps.

1:20 – 1:25 p.m.

Break

1:25 – 2:30 p.m.                  
Panel 3 – Democracy and the Ohio Constitution: Recapturing the Innovative Spirit of the 1912 Ohio Constitutional Convention

Our third panel will focus on Ohio and whether its constitution contains the tools for recapturing the state’s democratic values. The Ohio-focused panel may examine recent developments in partisan gerrymandering, the adoption of partisan appellate judicial ballots, challenges to the state’s constitutionally guaranteed home rule, and recent efforts to require a 60% approval rate for constitutional amendments.

Panelists:

  • Steven Steinglass, Dean Emeritus & Professor Emeritus, Cleveland State University College of Law
  • Mark Wagoner, Partner (and former Ohio State Senator), Shumaker, Loop & Kendrick, LLP
  • Justice Melody Stewart, Justice, Supreme Court of Ohio
  • Justice Michael Donnelly, Justice, Supreme Court of Ohio
  • Moderated by Brent Larkin, Columnist, Cleveland.com (former Director of The Plain Dealer’s editorial page)
2:30 – 2:40 p.m.                  

Break

2:40 – 3:45 p.m.                  
Panel 4 – We The People: Our Fight for Democracy’s Future

Through this panel, we will discuss avenues for political participation and good citizenship in Ohio and elsewhere, and present tangible ways the members of the public and legal community can take a more active role in creating a More Perfect Union for all.   

Panelists:

  • Jen Miller, Executive Director, Ohio League of Women Voters
  • Quinn Yeargain, Professor, Widener Law
  • Bree Easterling, Social Justice Outreach and Organizing Specialist, Policy Matters Ohio
  • Former-Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor, former Chief Justice, Supreme Court of Ohio
  • Moderated by Lee Fisher, Dean and Joseph C. Hostetler-BakerHostetler Chair in Law, Cleveland State University College of Law
3:45 – 3:50 p.m.                  

Break

3:50 – 4:00 p.m.                  

Closing Remarks

 

Speakers

Lee Fisher is the Dean and Joseph C. Hostetler-BakerHostetler Chair in Law at Cleveland State University College of Law at Cleveland State University. Fisher’s diverse career has spanned the private, public, nonprofit, and academic sectors. In additionto serving as Dean, he is Senior Fellow, Cleveland State University’s Levin College of Urban Affairs, and Urban Scholar, College of Urban Planning and Public Affairs and the Great Cities Institute, University of Illinois at Chicago. Fisher served as President/CEO of CEOs for Cities, nationwide innovation network for city success, for six years. In addition to serving as Attorney General, Fisher has served as Ohio Lt. Governor; Director, Ohio Department of Development; Chair, Ohio Third Frontier Commission; State Senator; and State Representative. He also served as President and CEO of the Centers for Families andChildren. Fisher is a graduate of Oberlin College and served on the Oberlin College Board of Trustees for 12 years. He earned his law degree from Case Western Reserve University School of Law; he was the first recipient of the School of Law’s Distinguished Recent Graduate Award and was inducted in the School of Law’s Society of Benchers. He also earned his Master of Nonprofit Organization from the CWRU Mandel Center for Nonprofit Organizations.

 

Reginald Oh brings to the law school nine years of teaching experience and a lengthy roster of publications and presentations inthis country and abroad. Professor Oh is a prolific scholar whose work is most often a careful examination of distributive justice, including the ways in which justice succeeds or fails when gender and race are involved. At Cleveland State University, Professor Oh teaches Constitutional Law, Civil Procedure, a Constitutional Law Seminar on the Fourteenth Amendment, and a seminar on Legal Issues in Education. Professor Oh is also a widely sought and widely traveled lecturer; in a two-year span he spoke at more than 30 national and international conferences. In July 2007, he presented "Race, Racism and Belonging" at theInternational Congress for Law and Mental Health in Padua, Italy; in March 2007 he lectured on "Reading Brown through Loving: Racial Segregation and the Promotion of White Supremacy" at the University of Iowa College of Law, and "Racial Segregation and the Thirteenth Amendment" at the Tenth Annual Conference for the Association of the Study of Law, Culture, and the Humanities at Georgetown University.

 

Matt Nelsen is an assistant professor within the Department of Political Science at the University of Miami. His work examines how local-level institutions, especially schools and neighborhoods, act as microcosms of democracy and has been featured within Perspectives on Politics, Political Behavior, The Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics, Psychological Inquiry, The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, and the Washington Post. Matt's book, The Color of Civics: Civic Education for a Multiracial Democracy, explores how civic education courses shape the political attitudes and behaviors of high schoolers along the lines of race and ethnicity. More specifically, he finds that content and teaching practices that center the local knowledge and grassroots political action of marginalized groups have the ability to forge more empowering civic learning experiences for young people. This work grew out of his dissertation, which received three awards from the American Political Science Association, including the E.E. Schattschneider Award for best doctoral dissertation in the field of American government. 

 

Caitlin Millat is an Associate Professor of Law at Arizona State University’s Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law. Prior to joining ASU, Millat was a Climenko Fellow and Lecturer in Law at Harvard Law School. Professor Millat’s scholarship focuses on education law and policy, gender and the law, and children and the law. Prior to fellowship at Harvard, Millat clerked for the Honorable Victor Bolden in the District of Connecticut and for the Honorable Norman Stahl in the First Circuit. Before beginning her law career at New York University School of Law, Professor Millat was an elementary school teacher and Dean in Brooklyn, NY. Millat received her Master's in Education from CUNY-Hunter College and her bachelor's in Journalism and English from New York University.  

 

Judge Solomon Oliver , Jr. is a Senior Judge on the United States District Court for the Northern District of Ohio. He was appointed to the court by President William Jefferson Clinton in 1994. He served as Chief Judge of the court from 2010-2017. From 1982 until his appointment to the court, he was a professor at Cleveland State University College of Law, where he served as Associate Dean from 1991-1994. From 1976-1982, Oliver was an Assistant U. S. Attorney for the Northern District of Ohio, where he served as Chief of the Civil Division and Chief of Appellate Litigation. Prior to his service in the U.S. Attorney’s Office, he was a law clerk to Judge William H. Hastie of the U. S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals. For the last six years, Judge Oliver has served as a member of the teaching faculty at Harvard Law School’s Winter Trial Advocacy Workshop.

 

Kayla Griffin is the Ohio State Director of All Voting is Local and current President of the Cleveland NAACP. Griffin previously served as the special project director for the Division of Recreation for the City of Cleveland, implementing youth and young-adult violence prevention, intervention, and opportunity initiatives. With a background in community organizing, Griffin advocates for voter rights and election protection as the chair of the Norman S. Minor Bar Association community engagement committee and serves the Cleveland Branch of the NAACP as the criminal justice and legal redress chair. Griffin holds a Juris Doctorate and a Master of Public Administration from Cleveland State University and a bachelor’s degree from Kent State University.

 

Jonathan Entin is the David L. Brennan Professor Emeritus of Law at Case Western Reserve University School of Law. Professor Entin taught for nearly four decades and served for nearly eight years as the law school’s associate dean for academic affairs. Long engaged across campus, he held an appointment in the Department of Political Science for many years and served as the university’s faculty mediator. Entin was the longtime faculty advisor to the Case Western Reserve Law Review. He also co-edited the Journal of Legal Education for nearly seven years and was a visiting fellow at the Federal Judicial Center. He has published more than 150 articles, book chapters, essays, and reviews. His work has appeared in journals at such law schools as Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Northwestern, and Texas, as well as in the Administrative Law Review, Constitutional Commentary, Jurimetrics Journal, The Urban Lawyer and a number of social science publications. His 1993 article “Innumeracy and Jurisprudence” received the American Bar Association’s Loevinger Prize for the best work in science and technology law. He also was a consultant on census issues to the National Research Council and on ethics matters to the Population Association of America. 

 

Elizabeth Bonham is a civil rights trial attorney at FG+G. Prior to joining the firm, she was a staff attorney with the ACLU of Ohio. There, she litigated complex civil rights cases to advance voting rights, LGBTQ equality, race and gender equality, abortion access, First Amendment rights, disability justice, and criminal justice reform, including in police misconduct and immigrant detention. Between her time at the ACLU and FG+G, Elizabeth served as a judicial law clerk in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Ohio. In her spare time, Elizabeth teaches Gender, Sexuality, & Law at her alma mater, Cleveland State University College of Law, and she manages a small urban farm on west side of Cleveland.

 

Michael Gentithes joined the Akron faculty in 2019 as an assistant professor of law. He was promoted to associate professor in 2021. In that time Gentithes has excelled both as a scholar and a teacher. Students have excelled in his courses on criminal procedure, constitutional law, and legal writing. He has also published more than 20 articles in law reviews across the country, including the Iowa Law Review, Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review, William & Mary Law Review, University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law, and Georgia Law Review. He also makes frequent presentations to bar associations on topics in constitutional law, criminal law, and appellate practice and is frequently quoted in the media on issued related these same topics.

 

Atiba Ellis is the Laura B. Chisolm Distinguished Research Scholar and Professor of Law at Case Western Reserve University School of Law. A nationally noted voting rights scholar, his primary research focuses on how racial and class-based oppression interact continues to abridge and deny the right to vote to communities on the margins of American democracy. His work has analyzed voter identification laws for their socioeconomic effects, situated felon disenfranchisement laws as enforcing a political underclass, analyzed the theoretical scope of the Citizens United decision and described the ideological drivers of vote suppression. His work is interdisciplinary in nature, spanning doctrinal legal analysis, critical political theory, race and the law, legal history, and innovative legal pedagogy. Professor Ellis’s current research focuses on how ideologically driven conceptions of “wrongful voters” diminish the right to vote. He has also written on critical legal theory and legal history. Moreover, he is currently working with his co-authors to publish a new edition of the late Derrick Bell’s foundational textbook, RACE RACISM AND AMERICAN LAW. Professor Ellis received his Bachelor of Arts, Master of Arts, and Juris Doctorate from Duke University. 

 

Brian Glassman: Professor Emeritus Brian Glassman was a member of the full-time faculty for 27 years at the Cleveland State University College of Law. He teaches Election Law, as well as a range of other topics. Prof. Glassman conceived of, organized, and moderated a conference, “Election Integrity in a Time of Political Polarization: Gerrymandering, Redistricting Commissions, and the 2020 Census Citizenship Question,” hosted by CSU College of Law in October 2019. In the run-up to the November 2020 general election, he worked on voting rights issues for organizations committed to free and fair elections. From June 2021 – March 2023, Prof. Glassman was a co-presenter at six voting legislation/litigation CLEs hosted by the Cleveland Metropolitan Bar Association. He also testified twice before the Ohio Redistricting Commission, in August and September 2021. As a member of the Fair Districts Mapping Competition Advisory Committee in 2021, he helped select winners from among the maps that had been submitted, proposing how Ohio’s voting districts should be redrawn. Finally, in July 2022, he presented on “Redistricting: Red vs. Blue” for the Cleveland Leadership Center. 

 

Steven H. Steinglass is the former Dean of Cleveland State College of Law and a nationally known expert on Section 1983 Civil Rights Litigation and a frequent lecturer at continuing legal and judicial education programs throughout the country. He is the author of a leading treatise on civil rights (SECTION 1983 LITIGATION IN STATE AND FEDERAL COURTS) (revised ed.) (updated annually) and numerous law review articles and book chapters. He is also the author of THE OHIO CONSTITUTION: A REFERENCE GUIDE (with Gino J. Scarselli), which was published in 2004 by Greenwood Publishing (and is now published by Oxford University Press as part of its Constitutions of the United States series). The second edition will become available in October 2022. Professor Steinglass has argued two cases before the United States Supreme Court, Board of Regents v. Roth (1972) and Felder v. Casey (1988). 

 

Mark Wagoner is a former Ohio State Senator and a Chairman of the Antitrust Section of the Ohio State Bar Association and specializes in antitrust issues, including both criminal and civil matters. In addition to handling litigation matters, he counsels clients on premerger notification compliance under the Hart-Scott-Rodino Act, and he prepares filings for submission to the Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice. Mark also has substantive experience with shareholder control disputes, and complex business litigation, including class actions. Mark has secured eight figure recoveries for his clients, as well as defeated bet-the-company claims against them. As detailed in his Representative Matters, Mark has successfully litigated major cases in federal and state courts and arbitrations throughout the Midwest and has been retained by several high level federal and state officials to represent them in investigations in a variety of contexts. Mark has also been designated as Special Counsel for the Ohio Attorney General to handle complex litigation on behalf of the State of Ohio.   

 

Justice Melody Stewart was elected in November 2018 to a full term as the 161st Justice to serve on the Supreme Court of Ohio. Prior to joining the Supreme Court, Justice Stewart served on the Eighth District Court of Appeals — elected to an unexpired term in 2006 and twice reelected to full terms. She served as the court’s Administrative Judge in 2013. 

 

Justice Michael P. Donnelly is the 160th justice of the Supreme Court of Ohio. He took office in January 2019, following his statewide election in November 2018 to a full term on the Court. Prior to joining the state Court, Justice Donnelly served as a judge on the Cuyahoga County Court of Common Pleas, General Division for 14 years. He was elected to the seat in November 2004 and re-elected in 2010 and 2016. In addition, from 2010 to 2017, he was one of five judges on Cuyahoga County’s Mental Health and Developmental Disabilities Court, which oversees criminal cases involving defendants who suffer from severe mental illness or developmental disabilities.

 

Brent Larkin: When he retired as editorial page editor of The Plain Dealer in 2009, Cleveland Magazine wrote Brent Larkin “will go down in history as Cleveland’s last big power-broker journalist, the last guy who single-handedly pens the town’s conventional wisdom.” Larkin joined the Cleveland Press as a reporter in 1970. A year later he began covering Cleveland city government and in 1976 was named the newspaper’s politics editor. Larkin moved to the Plain Dealer in 1981, covering politics and later writing a column for the paper’s Metro section. In 1991, Larkin was named to head the Plain Dealer’s opinion pages. In 2002, he was inducted into the Cleveland Press Club Hall of Fame. Since retiring, Larking has wrote a regular Sunday column for the Plain Dealer.

 

Jen Miller is the Executive Director of League of Women Voters of Ohio. Miller has over twenty years' experience working with diverse communities to promote social justice and civic action through positions with Columbus Recreation and Parks, the Martin Luther Jr. King Arts Complex, Sierra Club, the Ohio State University, and Global Gallery. Miller earned her Master's in Arts Policy, Education and Administration, a program of the John Glenn School of Public Affairs at Ohio State. She holds two bachelor's degrees in Vocal Music and History and Ethnic Studies from Capital University. Miller is a graduate of the US Department of Energy NREL Leadership Academy. She is a board member for the Ohio Debate Commission, the Ohio History Connection, Kids Voting Ohio, and the Ohio Women's Suffrage Monument Commission. Inspiring others to participate in civic engagement is her deepest passion. She is a jazz singer and proud mother of one daughter.

 

Quinn Yeargain is an Assistant Professor of Law at Widener University Commonwealth Law School. Professor Yeargain is an expert in state constitutional law and studies the relationship between the organization of state government institutions and the development of policy outcomes in different areas of law. They have published in the areas of criminal law, environmental law, and state government more generally, and their current project focuses on the role of democracy in policy formation. 

 

Bree Easterling is a dedicated community organizer, with a focus on social justice, particularly in the realm of behavioral health justice and the criminal legal system. Their role as a Social Justice Outreach and Organizing Specialist at Policy Matters Ohio underscores their commitment to advocating for equitable policies. Additionally, Bree currently serves as a facilitator of the Trans+ Wellness program at the LGBT Center of Greater Cleveland, highlighting their work within the LGBT+ community. Bree’s background in social justice advocacy, community engagement, and supportive research, positions them as a champion in the fight for equity and liberation. Their emphasis on abolitionist-based grassroots activism, particularly in the context of Black queer liberation, reflects their unwavering passion and dedication to creating a more just and inclusive society.

 

Registration:  $60 (CLE Credit), $25 (No CLE Credit)   REGISTER

CSU Faculty, Staff & Students: Free  REGISTER

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