Join Criminal Law Society, Stanford Criminal Justice Center, Stanford Racial Justice Center, Stanford Critical Legal Studies for a timely and thought-provoking conversation with Professor Ekow N. Yankah from the University of Michigan, as he discusses his recent Stanford Law Review article examining the relationship between criminal law and private racist violence.

In his work, Professor Yankah explores how criminal law not only responds to acts of private violence but can also legitimize and reinforce systems of racial power. By interrogating the ways in which legal doctrines sanction or fail to challenge racially motivated harm, his analysis raises urgent questions about the role of the state, the boundaries of policing, and the moral foundations of punishment.

Ekow N. Yankah is the Thomas M. Cooley Professor of Law, a professor of philosophy at the University of Michigan and the associate dean for faculty and research. His work focuses on questions of political and criminal theory and, particularly, questions of political obligation and justifications of punishment.  Yankah’s work has appeared in law review articles, peer reviewed legal theory journals, books, and medical journals, including NOMOS, Ratio Juris, Law and Philosophy, Criminal Law and Philosophy, Stanford Law Review, Texas Law Review, and the Harvard Law & Policy Review, among others.

We invite the law school community to engage in this critical conversation on law, race, and power.