Congresswoman Barbara Jordan Speaker Series: Daniel Kiel

In his last opinion as a Supreme Court justice, Thurgood Marshall lamented that changes in the Court’s personnel seemed to be driving the institution away from its role as protector of the powerless. Over the past 70 years, few changes in the Court’s personnel have been as impactful as the one that shortly followed, from Marshall to his successor, Clarence Thomas. Drawing from his recent book, The Transition: Interpreting Justice from Thurgood Marshall to Clarence Thomas, Daniel Kiel will examine how these justices came to their contrasting visions for using law to produce equal Black citizenship and how those visions have influenced and defined the decades-long remaking of the Supreme Court.