Join us at the bookstore for a conversation between Armand Derfner & John Simpkins on the Supreme Court & Voting Rights! This is a ticketed event! Find tickets here.
On Wednesday, October 12, Armand Derfner & John Simpkins will be joining us at the bookstore for a conversation on justice. They will be sharing their expertise on issues ranging from supreme court to voting rights.
With the election fast approaching, there is no better time to educate yourself on the issues that matter and engage with the people who are at the forefront of making change happen.
Doors for the event open at 5:00 pm. Discussion to begin at 5:30 pm.
Please come out, bring a friend or relative, and be ready to ask questions!
About Armand Derfner:
Armand Derfner has been practicing civil rights law for 40 years, as a staff lawyer for civil rights organizations in Mississippi and Washington, D.C., and in private practice in Charleston. He is a litigator specializing in class actions, especially in the areas of labor, employment, and consumer law.
He has helped shape the Voting Rights Act through his Supreme Court arguments in several of the earliest cases, including Allen v. State Board of Elections (1969) and Perkins v. Matthews (1971), as well as many other voting rights cases. He has testified before the Judiciary Committees of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives about extensions of the Voting Rights Act, as well as other pro bono legislation. With his late wife, Mary Frances Derfner, he assisted in passage of the Civil Rights Attorneys' Fees Awards Act of 1976, as well as the Equal Access to Justice Act of 1980. For more than 20 years, he has represented litigants in two long-running suits to desegregate and end racial inequality in the higher education systems of Alabama (Knight v. Alabama) and Mississippi (Ayers v. Fordice).
In addition to these cases, he has been involved in numerous other civil rights and public interest cases, including successfully representing civil rights demonstrators, death row inmates, victims of employment discrimination, targets of free speech restrictions, and community organizations seeking to advance the public interest.
About John Simpkins:
John L. S. Simpkins is President and CEO of MDC, an organization working on behalf of racial equity and economic mobility in the South. A Fellow of the Liberty Fellowship, he is also a Senior Lecturer at Duke Law School.
John received his AB in government from Harvard College and a JD and LLM in international and comparative law from Duke University School of Law. He served as VP Aspen Global Leadership Network at the Aspen Institute. He was an executive with Prisma Health, where he led collaborative, evidence-based efforts to promote health innovation, access, and equity. John was of counsel with Wyche, P.A., visiting assistant professor of law at the University of Victoria, and an assistant professor at Charleston School of Law. He was then appointed to the Senior Executive Service in the Obama Administration where he served as general counsel for the U.S. Agency for International Development and deputy general counsel for the White House Office of Management and Budget.
He continues to work as a consultant and researcher in comparative constitutional law and constitutional design.
About Justice Deferred:
The Supreme Court is usually seen as a protector of our liberties: it ended segregation, was a guarantor of fair trials, and safeguarded free speech and the vote. But this narrative derives mostly from a short period, from the 1930s to the early 1970s. Before then, the Court spent a century largely ignoring or suppressing basic rights, while the fifty years since 1970 have witnessed a mostly accelerating retreat from racial justice.