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Williams Project's Cheryl Harris Honored With the ACLU’s Distinguished Professor Award

June 1, 2005

On 21, 2005, Williams Project Faculty Advisory Committee Member and UCLA School of Law Professor Cheryl Harris will be honored at the ACLU’s 11th Annual Law Luncheon with the ACLU’s Distinguished Professor Award. Harris has been a member of the UCLA School of Law faculty since 1998 and is a founding member of the Williams Project Faculty Advisory Committee.

Harris worked on the ACLU of Southern California's landmark case Williams v. California, filed on behalf of California public school children deprived of educational opportunities because they attend schools that lacked basic and necessary learning tools, such as books, trained teachers, and seats for students. Most of the students in schools that fall below prevailing standards are children of color. The Williams case was successfully settled last year.

Professor Harris is the author of leading works in Critical Race Theory including the highly influential Whiteness as Property (Harv. L. Rev.). Her work has also taken up the relationship among race, gender and property and most recently has focused on race, equality and the Constitution through the re-examination of Plessy v. Ferguson and Grutter v. Bollinger.

As the National Co-Chair for the National Conference of Black Lawyers, she developed expertise in international human rights, particularly concerning South Africa. Harris was a key organizer of several international conferences that helped establish a dialogue between U.S. legal scholars and South African lawyers during the development of South Africa's first democratic constitution in 1994.

In 2002 Professor Harris received a fellowship from the Mellon Foundation to co-host a semester long interdisciplinary working group on "Redress in Social Thought, Law and Literature," at the University of California Humanities Research Institute. She is a member of the Advisory Board of the Bunche Center for African-American Studies and is part of the Executive Council of the American Studies Association.