Harvard Prof. Annette Gordon-Reed delivers Central Valley Foundation Lecture

Photos by Jose Alfonso Perez

It was another intellectually enriching day at UC Davis School of Law. Earlier this week, we once again presented the Central Valley Foundation/James B. McClatchy Lecture on the First Amendment. The Central Valley Foundation was established by the late James B. McClatchy, longtime publisher of McClatchy newspapers. A dedicated supporter of the School of Law, the foundation supports organizations and education programs dedicated to the protection and promotion of First Amendment rights and education in the Central Valley.

We had a full Kalmanovitz Appellate Courtoom, and an overflow room, for the event.

At the outset, Steve Boutin, UC Davis Class of 1972,  and a dear friend to and dedicated supporter of the school, said a few words. As board president of the Central Valley Foundation, he played a pivotal role in establishing this lecture. 

The lecturer this year was Professor Annette Gordon-Reed, the Charles Warren Professor of American Legal History at Harvard Law School, Professor of History in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University, and one of the foremost scholars on Thomas Jefferson. Professor Gordon-Reed’s scholarship has literally changed the way that the entire nation thinks about Thomas Jefferson as well as the trajectory of scholarship about him.

Professor Gordon-Reed won the Pulitzer Prize for history and the National Book Award for nonfiction for her 2008 book The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family. She had written about this subject previously in her 1997 book Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy. These works forever transformed perceptions of, and scholarship about, Jefferson and Hemings. Professor Gordon-Reed also is the author of Andrew Johnson, a 2010 biography of the only American president – to this point – besides Bill Clinton to be impeached. She wrote about Thomas Jefferson again in 2016 with “ Most Blessed of the Patriarchs”: Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination.

Jefferson founded the University of Virginia in 1819 in Charlottesville. In 2017, Charlottesville became the flashpoint of ongoing protests over the removal of Confederate statues from public spaces. Shortly after the events of Charlottesville, Professor Gordon-Reed wrote incisively about the tragedy, and Jefferson’s legacy, in the The New York Review of Books. In the Central Valley Foundation Lecture, she addressed the broader issues implicated in a talk titled “Monuments, Shields, and Statues: What, and Who, Belongs in the Public Sphere?” The engaging lecture covered considerable terrain, with analysis of the controversy at Harvard Law School over the Royall Shield, commemorating the slaveholder founder of the law school. Professor Gordon-Reed served on a committee that recommended elimination of the Royall Shield, over her dissent.  Read more about the discussion of the controversy. Professor Gordon-Reed looked at similar controversies at Yale over dorms named after John Calhoun, who offered the popular justification for slavery, and Confederate generals. She offered insightful analysis of these controversies on a case-by-case basis.

Following the lecture, Professor Gordon-Reed responded to questions and comments from the full house. It was great fun as all of us pondered a complex free speech and racial justice matrix.