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Professor Deo Awarded 2014 Neil Gotanda Speakership

February 6, 2014

Professor Meera Deo Awarded 2014 Neil Gotanda Speakership

Professor Meera Deo has been invited to be the Asian American Law Journal’s 2014 Neil Gotanda Speaker. Her remarks will be featured during a symposium co-sponsored with the Berkeley Journal of African-American Law and & Policy. The symposium is titled, “25 Years From Now: The Case for Diversity and Future Affirmative Action in the Wake of Fisher and Schuette,” and will be held on March 3, 2014 at Berkeley Law.

This year’s symposium will discuss the constitutional and practical implications of the recent United States Supreme Court’s decision in Fisher v. University of Texas and its upcoming decision in Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action.

The Neil Gotanda speakership awarded to Professor Deo is named after Professor Neil Gotanda, a constitutional law expert.  Professor Gotanda is widely considered to be one of the founders of Asian American Jurisprudence. At the symposium, Professor Deo will present her forthcoming publication on alternatives to educational diversity that may support affirmative action. She also will share preliminary findings regarding challenges facing Asian American law faculty from her ongoing empirical study, Diversity in Legal Academia.

“I am honored to be the 2014 Neil Gotanda Speaker for the Asian American Law Journal, in part because the award is named for one of the great American legal scholars. It is wonderful to see that my research will reach a wide audience at the symposium. I look forward to returning to Berkeley to participate in what will surely be a successful event.”

Professor Deo is a nationally-recognized interdisciplinary scholar on institutional diversity and affirmative action. Her scholarship has been cited in numerous amicus briefs filed in the U.S. Supreme Court and published in leading law journals around the country.

Professor Deo is currently a Visiting Professor at UCLA School of Law. Last semester she was a Visiting Scholar at Berkeley Law’s Center for the Study of Law & Society. She earned her J.D. from the University of Michigan Law School and her Ph.D in Sociology from UCLA. Before coming to Thomas Jefferson, Professor Deo worked for the ACLU’s National Legal Department in New York City and as Staff Attorney for Women’s Health and Director of the Breast Cancer Legal Project at the California Women’s Law Center in Los Angeles. She currently serves on the Association of American Law School’s Executive Committee on the Law and the Social Sciences Section and is an appointee to the California Commission on Access to Justice.