Ogletree to present King commemorative address

Internationally renowned legal theorist Charles J. Ogletree Jr. will present UB’s 40th Annual Martin Luther King Jr. Commemoration keynote speech on Feb. 11.

The talk, part of UB’s Distinguished Speakers Series, will take place at 8 p.m. in Alumni Arena, North Campus.

Tickets can be purchased online or at the Alumni Arena ticket office. Contributing series sponsors United University Professions and TIAA CREF offer discounts for UB faculty and staff.

Ogletree is the Harvard Law School Jesse Climenko Professor of Law and founding and current executive director of the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice, which focuses on a variety of issues relating to race and justice.

He has earned an international reputation by taking a hard look at complex issues of law and by working to secure the rights guaranteed by the Constitution for everyone equally under the law. He has examined these issues not only in the classroom, on the Internet, and in the pages of prestigious law journals, but also in the everyday world of the public defender in the courtroom and in public television forums where these issues can be dramatically revealed. He furthers dialogue by insisting that the justice system protect rights guaranteed to those citizens by law.

Ogletree is the author of numerous books, among them “Punishment in Popular Culture,” a collection of essays co-edited with Amherst College faculty member Austin Sarat; “The Presumption of Guilt: The Arrest of Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Race, Class and Crime in America,” which draws on the 2009 mistaken arrest of Gates to explore issues of race and what must be done to create a more just legal system; “From Lynch Mobs to the Killing State: Race and the Death Penalty in America,” which he co-edited with Sarat; “Brown at 50: The Unfinished Legacy,” which he co-authored with Deborah Rhode of Stanford University to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education; and “All Deliberate Speed: Reflections on the First Half-Century of Brown v. Board of Education,” his historical memoir of the court case.