Oklahoma City University School of Law is pleased to welcome Professor Maggie Blackhawk as the 2024 Quinlan Lecture Series lecturer. Professor Blackhawk will give her lecture on “The Constitution of American Colonialism” Monday, April 1 at 5 p.m. in the Crowe and Dunlevy rooms at OCU Law. A light reception will follow.
Maggie Blackhawk (Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe) is professor of law at NYU and an award-winning interdisciplinary scholar and teacher of constitutional law, federal Indian law, and legislation. She was awarded the American Society for Legal History’s William Nelson Cromwell Article Prize, and her research has been published or is forthcoming in the Harvard Law Review, Stanford Law Review, Yale Law Journal, Columbia Law Review, Supreme Court Review, and Cambridge University Press. Her recent projects examine the ways that American democracy can and should empower minorities, especially outside of traditional rights and courts-based frameworks.
“The Supreme Court’s decision in McGirt v. Oklahoma (2020) made clear, if it wasn’t clear already, that our state will play a lead part in the development of Indian law,” said OCU Law professor Jeremy Telman. “Similarly, post-McGirt, it has become clear, if it wasn’t clear already, that Professor Maggie Blackhawk will play a lead part in the development of legal scholarship on federal Indian law. Last year, the Harvard Law Review recognized her prominence in the field, and her indispensable role in championing the treatment of federal Indian law as a part of U.S. constitutional law, by inviting her to author its annual Supreme Court Foreword. Rarely can an institution boast so proudly that it has brought the right person at the right time to the right place in the way we are able to do in this year’s Quinlan Lecture. Professor Blackhawk is the person to speak on this topic in this place at this critical time.”
Professor Blackhawk also studies how the political agency of marginalized communities has shaped American democracy historically and how those communities have leveraged the law to redistribute power. She is particularly interested in how law can structure institutions in ways that empower minorities to govern and engage in lawmaking—petitioning, lobbying, federalism, etc.—and how empowering minorities could be harnessed to better mitigate constitutional failures, like colonialism and slavery.
This event is free and open to the public. Registration is available online at okcu.link/quinlan2024
The Quinlan Lecture is named for long-time Oklahoma City University law professor Wayne Quinlan. Professor Quinlan taught at Oklahoma City University from 1952 until his death in 1981 and served as a Special Justice of the Oklahoma Supreme Court in 1966 and 1967. His love of constitutional law and American history inspired the faculty to name this annual lecture in his honor.