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What if a constitutional right meant to guarantee your security was actually a license to harm or even kill you?

Thats the premise for the James McCormick Mitchell Lecture, the School of Laws signature lecture series, to be held April 7. The address is titled Race, the Supreme Court, and Police Power.

The speaker, UCLA School of Law Professor Devon W. Carbado, is a renowned scholar of constitutional law, criminal procedure and critical race theory. His widely acclaimed book, Unreasonable: Black Lives, Police Power, and the Fourth Amendment, published last year, argues that the U.S. Supreme Courts decision to treat unreasonable police tactics as reasonable under the Fourth Amendment has shortened the distance between life and death for Black people.

Many forms of policing that people find troubling are perfectly legal under a particular body of constitutional law Fourth Amendment doctrine, Carbado writes. Over the past five decades, the Supreme Court has interpreted the Fourth Amendment to allocate enormous power to the police: to surveil, to racially profile, to stop-and-frisk, and to kill.

Carbado will develop those themes in his April 7 appearance in the Charles B. Sears Law Library in OBrian Hall, North Campus. The event, from noon to 2 p.m., includes a discussion with UB Law faculty members Alexandra Harrington, associate professor, and Athena Mutua, professor and Floyd H. & Hilda L. Hurst Faculty Scholar. A reception will follow.

Police victimization of people of color is an obvious moral scandal., says Michael Boucai, professor of law and chair of the schools Mitchell Lecture Steering Committee. Far less evident are the legal mechanisms enabling it. Thats what makes Professor Carbados recent work so necessary. His description of the problems constitutional architecture is unmatched in acumen and accessibility.

A 1994 graduate of Harvard Law School, Carbado holds the Hon. Harry Pregerson Professor of Law chair at UCLA School of Law; he joined the faculty in 1997.

The event is free and open to the public. Registration is available online.

The Mitchell Lecture series was endowed in 1950 by a gift from Lavinia A. Mitchell in memory of her husband, James McCormick Mitchell. An 1897 graduate of the Buffalo Law School, Mitchell later served as chairman of the Council of the University of Buffalo, which was then a private university.

Justice Robert H. Jackson delivered the first Mitchell Lecture in 1951, titled Wartime Security and Liberty Under Law. The lecture was published that year in the first issue of the Buffalo Law Review.

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Mitchell lecture to address race, the Supreme Court and police power - University at Buffalo