http://law.vanderbilt.edu/events/event-detail/index.aspx?eid=391
Michael A. Olivas delivers the 2011 Victor S. Johnson Lecture
Michael A. Olivas holds the William B. Bates Distinguished Chair in Law at the University of Houston Law
Center and directs the Institute for Higher Education Law and Governance at the University of Houston.
In the 2011 Victor S. Johnson lecture, he will address the impact of the Supreme Court's decision in
Hernandez v. Texas, the first case to be tried by Mexican-American lawyers before the U.S. Supreme
Court, which held that Mexican Americans were a discrete group for purposes of applying equal
protection.
Although Hernandez v. Texas was about discriminatory state jury selection and trial practices, the case
has been cited for many other civil rights precedents in the intervening 50 years. Professor Olivas
published an edited collection of essays, "Colored Men" and "Hombres Aqui: Hernandez V. Texas and
the Emergence of Mexican-American Lawyering (Arte Publico Press, 2006) following a 2004 conference
addressing the decision's impact on its 50th anniversary. The Hernandez v. Texas decision was published
just before Brown v. Board of Education in the 1954 Supreme Court reporter.
Professor Olivas is the author of No Undocumented Children Left Behind (NYU Press, 2011), Suing Alma
Mater (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011) and has authored or co-authored 12 other books . He has
served on the editorial boards of more than 20 scholarly journals, including The Review of Higher
Education, The Journal of College and University Law, and The Journal of Higher Education. In 2010, he
was selected to be the Outstanding Immigration Professor of the Year by the national Immigration Blog
Group. He is currently serving as president of the Association of American Law Schools (AALS).
In addition to serving on the University of Houston's law faculty, he also chaired the University of
Houston's graduate program in higher education from 1983-87. He has served as the Houston Law
Center's associate dean from 1990-95 and from 2001-04. He was a visiting professor of law at the
University of Wisconsin in 1989-90 and special counsel to then-Chancellor Donna Shalala. In 1997, he
held the Mason Ladd Distinguished Visiting Chair at the University of Iowa College of Law.
He holds a B.A. from the Pontifical College Josephinum, an M.A. and Ph.D. from the Ohio State
University, and a J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center.