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Fred Knubel, Director of Public Information
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Randall Kennedy to Speak at Trilling Seminar

Professor Randall Kennedy of Harvard Law School will speak on "Racial Pride, Racial Kinship, and Other Problems" at a Lionel Trilling Seminar at Columbia University on Wednesday, April 17.

In his talk, he will address the questions: What role should race play in determining the feelings of blacks toward others? Does blackness give rise to racial obligation? Should black people have a closer relationship with their fellow blacks than with others in America's multicultural society?

The seminar, the final of three given each year in memory of the distinguished Columbia professor of English, author and critic, will begin at 8 P.M. in the Rotunda of Low Memorial Library on Columbia's Morningside Heights campus at Broadway and 116th Street. Admission is free and the public is invited.

Following the tradition of the Trilling Seminars, Professor Kennedy's lecture will be followed by commentary from two discussants: George P. Fletcher, Cardozo Professor at Columbia Law School, and Manning Marable, professor of history and director of the Institute for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia.

Professor Kennedy has taught at Harvard Law School since 1984 and has been Professor of Law since 1989. He is a graduate of Princeton University and Yale Law School. He was a Rhodes Scholar at Balliol College, Oxford University. After graduating from law school he clerked for Judge J. Skelly Wright of the United States Court of Appeals, District of Columbia Circuit (1982-83) and then was law clerk for Justice Thurgood Marshall of the Supreme Court of the United States (1983-84). Earlier he was a summer intern at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and special assistant to Assistant Attorney General Drew S. Days III of the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice.

He is a member of the American Law Institute, the Massachusetts Board of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws and the Bar of the District of Columbia. He is a trustee of Princeton University and an editorial board member of The Nation and The American Prospect. He is faculty adviser to the Harvard College Charles Hamilton Houston Black Pre-Law Society. He is editor of Reconstruction and writes frequently on racial matters in law journals and general publications, including The New Republic, Time, The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal and other publications.

Professor Fletcher, a specialist in criminal law, comparative law and legal philosophy, is the author of eight books, includingWith Justice for Some: Victims' Rights in Criminal Trials (1995) and A Crime of Self-Defense: Bernhard Goetz and the Law on Trial (1988). He holds degrees from the University of California at Berkeley (B.A.) and the University of Chicago (J.D., M.C.L.). He has taught at Columbia since 1983.

Professor Marable, one of the most widely read black intellectuals in the United States, is the author of nine books, the most recent,Beyond Black and White: Transforming African-American Politics (1995). He was appointed to his present posts at Columbia in 1993 and previously taught at the University of Colorado at Boulder; Ohio State University, where he chaired the Department of Black Studies, and Colgate University, as founding director of the Africana and Hispanic Studies Program. His commentary series, Along the Color Line, appears in more than 280 newspapers and journals. He received the B.A. from Earlham College, the M.A. from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and the Ph.D. from the University of Maryland.

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