A Discussion on Judicial Selection - Sept. 4th

Civil rights advocate William L. Taylor will speak on the increasingly important topic of judicial selection at the University of Missouri School of Law. Taylor’s talk, which will take place on Sept. 4 at 6 PM in the Hulston Hall courtroom, is hosted by the MU Chapter of the American Constitution Society for Law and Policy.

Taylor is Director of the Washington, D.C.-based Citizens’ Commission on Civil Rights, a bipartisan organization that monitors the civil rights practices of the federal government. A long-time advocate for civil rights, he was selected as the first recipient of the D.C. Bar’s Thurgood Marshall Award and is considered a “Legend in the Law” by the same organization. Taylor is also an adjunct professor of law at Georgetown University Law Center, where he has been teaching since 1986.

A Yale Law School graduate, Taylor’s career began in 1954, when he served as a staff member of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. During the 1960s, he became general counsel and then staff director of the United States Commission on Civil Rights.

Among his many accomplishments, Taylor helped to pass the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Civil Rights Restoration Act of 1988, the Civil Rights Act of 1991 and the Improving America’s Schools Act of 1994. Additionally, as a private attorney, he has helped minority and economically disadvantaged children to obtain an equal education by taking on the issue of school segregation. In his work on educational rights, Taylor represented minority children of St. Louis, and obtained for them the largest voluntary school desegregation plan in the nation.

Taylor has authored many articles on public policy and legal issues, as well as the 1971 book, Hanging Together: Equality in an Urban Nation. His memoirs, The Passion of My Times: An Advocate’s Fifty-Year Journey in the Civil Rights Movement, were published in 2004.

The American Constitution Society for Law and Policy is one of the nation’s leading progressive legal organization, comprised of lawyers, judges, students and policy makers committed to promoting the vitality of the Constitution and the fundamental values it expresses.  The views of the speaker are his own and should not be attributed to ACS.