For more information call:
212-678-3291
11/12/2007 ~ 11/13/2007 at Cowin Center, Teachers College
President and Director-Counsel
NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund
Theodore M. Shaw is the Director-Counsel and President of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF) and an adjunct professor of law at Columbia Law School. Since joining LDF in 1982, Shaw has directed LDF''s education docket and litigated school desegregation, capital punishment, and other civil rights cases throughout the country. He was lead counsel in a coalition that represented African-American and Latino student-interveners in the University of Michigan undergraduate affirmative action admissions case. In 2003, the U.S. Supreme Court heard the case, along with the lawsuit challenging the University of Michigan Law School''s admissions policies, and upheld the right of universities to consider race in admissions procedures in order to achieve a diverse student body. The ruling has been deemed the court''s most important affirmative action decision since the court''s 1976 ruling in University of California v. Bakke. Prior to joining LDF, Shaw worked as a trial attorney in the Civil Rights Division of the United States Department of Justice from 1979 until 1982 in Washington, D.C. He has taught at the University of Michigan Law School and at Temple Law School, where he was the second appointee to the Phyllis Beck Chair. Shaw was also the second recipient of the Haywood Burns Chair in Civil Rights at CUNY School of Law, which he held for the 1997-1998 academic year.