Brown v. Board of Education Revisited: Brown Oral Arguments w/ Prof Goldman

For the first time in more than 70 years, the oral arguments made to the U.S. Supreme Court in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education school desegregation case will be heard in a federal courtroom in America. After releasing his re-creation of the never-recorded oral arguments this past spring to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the Brown decision, Northwestern University Professor Emeritus Jerry Goldman of the Oyez Project will speak at the Ceremonial Courtroom of the Everett McKinley Dirksen U.S. Courthouse for their historic airing.

Oyez made the recreated arguments with artificial intelligence, recordings of the lawyers and justices, and oral argument transcripts, all incorporated into “Brown Revisited,” an educational project with historical photographs and narrative content. Professor Goldman will give the backstory of this educational project and offer his legal analysis and commentary on the arguments and their significance for constitutional interpretation today.

The October 8th educational event is presented by the Committee for Access, Opportunity & Community Engagement of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, in partnership with the Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Committee of the Federal Bar Association, Chicago Chapter. Light reception to follow.

Professor Jerry Goldman is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Northwestern University, renowned for his work in American politics. Notably, Professor Goldman developed the OYEZ Project, a multimedia relational database devoted to the United States Supreme Court. With major grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation and Google, Goldman worked with collaborators in linguistics, psychology, computer science and political science to create a complete archive of the Court’s public sessions stretching back to October 1955. This amounts to a public searchable database of more than 10,000 hours of audio, 100+ million words, with all speakers identified. The Project is now located at Cornell Law School. The OYEZ website gets more than 12 million visits a year.

Host or Publisher Federal Bar Association, Chicago Chapter