Virginia Eubanks to Give Reinhardt-Ripston Lecture at UCI Law

04-02-19

Virginia Eubanks
Award-winning author and Associate Professor of Political Science Virginia Eubanks. Photo by Sadaf Rassoul Cameron.

Virginia Eubanks, author of “Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police and Punish the Poor” will give the 2019 Judge Stephen Reinhardt and Ramona Ripston Lecture on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties on Friday, April 5, at UCI Law's Admitted Students Weekend. The award-winning book was chosen as a joint-reading assignment for incoming 1Ls of UCI Law’s Class of 2021, and also was the selection for the UCI Law faculty/staff book club.

Her talk is titled: Algorithms, Affect and the 'Progress of the Law.'

The UCI Law Reinhardt-Ripston Lecture is a series that invites lauded legal scholars and professionals to present on civil liberty and justice issues in today’s legal system. The lecture pays tribute to and celebrates the contributions of two fierce defenders of justice who are sincerely missed: Judge Stephen Reinhardt, U.S. Court of Appeals, 9th Circuit, and Ramona Ripston, retired executive director of the ACLU.

Eubanks is an associate professor of political science at the University of Albany, SUNY, where her academic research focuses on community technology and economic justice movements. Eubanks also is the author of “Digital Dead End: Fighting for Social Justice in the Information Age;” the co-editor of “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around: Forty Years of Movement Building with Barbara Smith,” and has written on technology and social justice for Scientific American, The Nation, Harper’s and Wired.

Additionally, she is a founding member of the Our Data Bodies Project, which examines how digital information is collected, stored and shared by government and corporate organizations. Eubanks was a 2016-17 Fellow at New America.