RALEIGH, N.C. – Campbell Law Assistant Professor of Law Amos Jones will speak at a 50-year commemorative scholars roundtable on civil rights at Norfolk State University on Thursday, April 17 at 7 p.m. The event, “Constructing Citizenship from 1619 to the 1964 Civil Rights Act,” features a panel of prominent legal experts and scholars discussing the history of civil rights in America, beginning in 1619 and culminating in the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
“The complex of enforcement flowing from the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is far-reaching,” Jones said. “My goal is to inform the audience toward a sense of its positive impact on individuals’ everyday lives but also on the complacency I perceive today with regard to the key Title VII prohibitions of employment discrimination.”
In addition to Jones, featured participants include moderator Barbara Hamm Lee (television journalist), Eric Claville (Hampton University), John Pierre (Southern University Law Center) and The Honorable John Charles Thomas (retired Justice of the Supreme Court of Virginia).
The panel will examine the 1964 Civil Rights Act as it has been broadened to include the recent debates regarding civil liberties.
“The same-sex marriage developments have occasioned a discursive and policy clash involving civil rights, civil liberties and religious freedom,” Jones said. “Our panel enters this thicket on TV.”
Jones teaches and writes in the areas of civil rights, religious freedom, legal ethics and contracts, focusing on contemporary conflicts resulting from competing liberties enshrined in the U.S. Constitution.
A vigorous public advocate, Jones argued a First Amendment case of first impression before the Supreme Court of Kentucky last April and has advised Republic of Georgia scholar-practitioners on liberty provisions of the constitution framed after that country’s Rose Revolution of 2003. In April 2012, he delivered expert testimony at an oversight hearing in Washington, D.C., on the most effective ways to improve enforcement of D.C.’s Human Rights Act of 1978, and in November 2012 he appeared as an invited guest of the law faculty at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogota, Colombia, critiquing that country’s experimentation with affirmative action remedies for blacks there. Last February he delivered a faculty workshop and a public lecture at the University of Kentucky to kick off the institution’s observance of Black History Month.
A Trustee of The First Baptist Church Foundation in Washington, D.C., and a former Resident Trustee of International House New York, Jones serves on Campbell Law’s Community, Diversity and Student Life Committee and is serving his second-consecutive year as Vice Chair of Campbell Law’s Faculty Recruitment Committee.
Before coming to Campbell Law, Jones practiced in the international trade and commercial litigation groups of Bryan Cave LLP in Washington, D.C. Prior to entering the legal profession, he was a journalist for Pulitzer Prize-winning newspapers in Georgia, Kentucky, New York, and North Carolina.
Jones graduated with honors in political science from Emory University, where he was a Harry S. Truman Scholar, earned his Master of Science from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, and earned his J.D. from Harvard Law School, where he served as an executive editor of both the Harvard BlackLetter Law Journal and the Harvard Human Rights Journal and was President of Direct Action. While at Harvard, he was awarded a Fulbright Postgraduate Scholarship, on which he spent his first year out of law school as a visiting scholar in the Centre for Comparative Constitutional Studies at Australia’s University of Melbourne.
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