APALSA – Korematsu Lecture

Tuesday, April 1, 2014  |  7:00 PM – 9:00 PM
Vanderbilt Hall, Greenberg Lounge

The Korematsu Lecture series was started in 2000 by a group of NYU law students who wished to create a lecture series in honor of Japanese internment challenger Fred Korematsu. The lecture provides a forum to address Asian American perspectives on the law and to honor Asian Americans who have substantially contributed to the development of the law while challenging the status quo.

This year’s special guest will be Professor Kenji Yoshino, Chief Justice Earl Warren Professor of Constitutional Law at NYU Law School. He was educated at Harvard (B.A. 1991), Oxford (M.Sc. 1993 as a Rhodes Scholar), and Yale Law School (J.D. 1996).  He taught at Yale Law School from 1998 to 2008, where he served as Deputy Dean (2005-6) and became the inaugural Guido Calabresi Professor in 2006.  His fields are constitutional law, anti-discrimination law, and law and literature.

Yoshino’s first book, Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights, was published by Random House in 2006.  His second book, A Thousand Times More Fair: What Shakespeare’s Plays Teach Us About Justice, was published by Ecco / HarperCollins in 2011.

Yoshino has published in major academic journals, including The Columbia Law Review, The Harvard Law Review, The Stanford Law Review, and The Yale Law Journal.  He has also written for more popular forums, including The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, and The Washington Post.  He makes regular appearances on various radio and television programs, such as NPR, PBS and MSNBC. In 2011, he was elected to the Harvard Board of Overseers.

This year’s lecture is titled “Uncovering Talent: The Case of Asian Americans.” Drawing on his award-winning book COVERING (2006), Professor Yoshino recently partnered with the management consultancy Deloitte to test his hypothesis that individuals “cover,” or downplay, stigmatized attributes at work, often at great cost to their efficacy and sense of self. Yoshino will discuss the incidence, impact, and sources of the covering based on a study of over 3,000 respondents from ten different industries. He will then focus on Asian-American covering, discussing what such covering reveals about the status of Asian-Americans in today’s U.S. workplace.

This year’s Korematsu Lecture will be held on April 1, 2014 at 7:00 P.M. in Greenberg Lounge.

To register, please click here.