Education, Children and Human Rights:
De Facto Segregation in US Education

Myron Orfield and David Weissbrodt

Thursday, May 25, 2006

12:00 - 1:00 P.M.

Faegre & Benson LLP

The Century Room

2200 Wells Fargo Center ■ 90 South Seventh Street ■ Minneapolis, MN 55402

More than fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education, de facto segregation in education is still a major problem in the United States. Myron Orfield will discuss the current status of racial integration in schools in the United States. David Weissbrodt will discuss the international human rights implications of the situation.

Please RSVP to Amy Beier at Minnesota Advocates by noon on Tuesday, May 23

(612) 341-3302 ext. 118 or abeier@mnadvocates.org.

Lunch will be provided for those who RSVP. Application will be made for one CLE credit.

Biographic Information                                                                                                                           

Myron Orfield is the Director of the Institute on Race and Poverty and Associate Professor of Law at the University of Minnesota. He is an authority on civil rights, state and local government, state and local finance, land use, questions of regional governance, and the legislative process. He received his B.A. from the University of Minnesota and has a J.D. from the University of Chicago. He has served five terms as a member of the Minnesota House of Representatives, and one term in the Minnesota Senate. For the past ten years, Orfield has been president of a nationally respected regional research organization undertaking studies involving the legal, demographic and land use profiles of various American metropolitan areas. His second book, American Metropolitics: The New Suburban Reality (Brookings 2002) is a compilation of his work involving the nation's twenty-five largest regions.

David Weissbrodt is the Regents Professor of Law and the Fredrikson & Byron Professor of Law at the University of Minnesota Law School. Since its beginning Professor Weissbrodt has been Legal Counsel of Minnesota Advocates for Human Rights. In 1996 and 2000 Weissbrodt was elected to serve as a member of the U.N. Sub-Commission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights. In 2001-02, Professor Weissbrodt became the first United States citizen since Eleanor Roosevelt to head a United Nations human rights body when he served as chairperson for the U.N. Sub-Commission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights. During the period 2001-03 he also served as the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Non-Citizens and as a member of the Sub-Commission’s five-person Working Group on the Working Methods and Activities of Transnational Corporations which drafted the United Nations’ Norms on the Responsibilities of Transnational Corporations. In 2005, Professor Weissbrodt became a Member of the Board of Trustees of the United Nations Voluntary Trust Fund on Contemporary Forms of Slavery.

The bi-monthly Children's Human Rights Speaker Series will be held throughout 2006 and 2007.

Lectures are free and open to the public (registration required).

For more information, please contact Minnesota Advocates for Human Rights at (612) 341-3302 or see our website at www.mnadvocates.org. You may find directions to Faegre & Benson LLP. at: www.faegre.com.