Constitutional Roundtable – Susan Williams

Constitutional Roundtable

presents

Susan Williams

Walter W. Foskett Professor of Law and Director, Center for Constitutional Democracy Maurer School of Law Indiana University
12:30 – 2:00 p.m.

Wednesday, February 24, 2016

Solarium, Falconer Hall

Topic

Legal Pluralism, Gender Equality and Parity of Participation: Constitutional Issues Concerning Customary Law in Liberia

Susan Williams is the author of Truth, Autonomy, and Speech: Feminist Theory and the First Amendment (NYU Press 2004). Her current book project, Constituting Equality: Comparative Constitutional Law and Gender Equality, is a collection of essays growing out of a spring 2007 conference she organized. She has also written numerous articles on constitutional law and feminist legal theory. She is actively involved in constitutional advising for the Burmese democracy movement. She is a constitutional advisor to the Women’s League of Burma, the Federal Constitution Drafting Coordinating Committee, and the state constitution drafting committees of all of the states of Burma. In this capacity, she teaches workshops, produces educational materials, and works on drafting and revising constitutional language. At Indiana Law, Williams teaches Property, First Amendment Law, Feminist Jurisprudence, and a seminar on Comparative Constitutional Law on Gender Equality. She believes that the best lawyers do not conduct legal analysis in a vacuum. “We must train our students to think and argue clearly and critically,” she says. “But at the same time, we must encourage them to bring their own values and experiences to bear on the legal issues they are studying. Law is a mirror in which we can read our character as a society, both as it presently exists and as we would ideally like it to be.”(Bio drawn from Susan Williams’ profile at Maurer School of Law)