The fall 2006 symposium will celebrate the 40th anniversary of the landmark decision Loving v. Virginia in an all-day conference on November 17, 2006 at Boalt Hall. The Mario G. Olmos Memorial Lecture will inaugurate the symposium on November 16, 2006 at 4 p.m. in Booth Auditorium.
In Loving v. Virginia , the Supreme Court struck down anti-miscegenation statues in Virginia that prohibited and punished marriage between Whites and non-Whites. The Court held that “restricting the freedom to marry solely because of racial classifications violates the central meaning of the Equal Protection Clause” and also held that such classifications violate the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment because the “freedom to marry [is]…one of the most vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men.”
Loving is often hailed as a case essential to race relations. The decision is consistently highlighted as a symbol of the steady crumbling of racial barriers in intimate and personal relationship and as a result the Loving decision ended the policing of interracial intimacy. Legal scholars have used the case to promote widely divergent colorblindness, anti-subordination and gay rights agenda. However, Loving is often only studied in the context of Constitutional Law - Family Law textbooks often do not include the decision in their pages at all. Even fewer Criminal Law textbooks, if any, include the case of the Lovings, who were sentenced to one year in jail for violating Virigina's anti-miscegenation statutes. This sentence was suspended for a 25 – year period on the condition that the Lovings leave Virginia and not return together for 25 years. Legal scholars have generally failed to examine, at least enough, the effects of Loving in society, or rather, the promise of the decision itself and whether such promises have been fulfilled.
The fall 2006 symposium will explore a broad range of questions concerning Loving and its impact, including the role of interracial intimacy in criminal enforcement and prosecution, such as the strikingly high number of black men in interracial relationships in Tulia, Texas, who were targeted in the town's “war on drugs;” the policing of interracial and interethnic intimacies through immigration laws; the contradictions in the Loving itself and in the societal understanding of interracial relationships; and the intersection of interracial intimacy, the media, and the law. Contributors to the symposium will include renowned scholars such as Angela Harris, Kevin Johnson, Richard Banks, and Kim Forde-Mazrui, and renowned Boalt Hall faculty, Rachel Moran, will serve as one of the key commentators.
More information on speakers and the agenda will be posted in the next month.
