DISTINGUISHED FACULTY LECTURE SERIES

I am pleased to invite you to the 31st Hofstra University Distinguished Faculty Lecture, which will be presented by Hofstra Law School Associate Professor I. Bennett Capers. Professor Capers' lecture, titled "On Justitia: Race, Gender, and Blindness," will be delivered during Common Hour (11:15 a.m.-12:45 p.m.) on Wednesday, October 25, 2006, at the Leo A. Guthart Cultural Center Theater, first floor of the Joan and Donald E. Axinn Library. (Justitia was the Roman goddess of justice and was often portrayed as wearing a blindfold and carrying evenly balanced scales and a sword.)

Professor Capers joined the Hofstra Law School faculty in 2005. He is a graduate of Columbia Law School, where he was a Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar, and holds a Bachelor of Arts in literature from Princeton University. Following law school, he served as a law clerk to Judge John S. Martin, Jr., in the Southern District of New York before joining the Department of Justice as an assistant U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York. During his nine years as an assistant U.S. attorney, he prosecuted hundreds of federal cases, and tried approximately 20, ranging from RICO murders to insider trading, and argued numerous appeals before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. His scholarship explores the dialogic relationship between culture and criminal law, and has appeared or is forthcoming in California Law Review, NYU Review of Law and Social Change, Howard Law Journal, and Michigan Journal of Race and the Law.

Professor Capers' lecture will examine Justitia, with her sword brandished, carrying scales and wearing a blindfold, and question how the image functions. Drawing upon law, literature, art history and cultural studies, Professor Capers will explore what it means, connotatively and denotatively, for Justitia to be blind in a racialized society where color is so determinative, and what it means to many in the criminal justice system to look at an image of justice that has been represented as a white female. Professor Capers contends that answering these questions is imperative for those of us who care about making our criminal justice system fairer, both in the way justice is meted out and in our perception of justice.