Commemorating 1808: Fighting for the Right to Dream,
October 24-25, 2008, Toledo, Ohio
Speakers Biographies
Keynote Speaker
The Honorable Donald M. Payne
Donald M. Payne, a native of Newark, New Jersey, was elected to represent the 10th
Congressional District of New Jersey in 1988 as New Jersey’s first African American Congressman by an overwhelming majority and has been returned by a wide margin of
the vote in each subsequent election. In 2006, he won election to his tenth term to threpresent his constituents in the historic 110 Congress.
He is a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, where he serves as Chairman
of the Subcommittee on Africa and Global Health and as a member of the Subcommittee
on the Western Hemisphere and the Subcommittee on International Organizations,
Human Rights, and Oversight. Congressman Payne has been at the forefront of efforts to
restore democracy and human rights in nations throughout the globe. He was one of five
members of Congress chosen to accompany President Clinton and Hillary Rodham
Clinton on their historic six-nation tour of Africa. He also headed a Presidential mission
to war-torn Rwanda to help find solutions to that country's political and humanitarian
crises. In addition, he was recognized as having the most supportive record in Congress
on issues involving the Northern Ireland peace process.
In 2003, President Bush appointed Payne as one of two members of Congress to serve as
a Congressional delegate to the United Nations and reappointed him in 2005 to an
unprecedented second term. In this role, he has met with the U.N. Secretary General, the
U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. and regularly attended sessions of the U.N. General thAssembly and other high level meetings. In the 110 Congress, Speaker Nancy Pelosi
appointed Congressman Payne to serve on the House Democracy Assistance Commission,
which provides procedural, technical, and material assistance to legislatures and their
members in developing democracies around the world.
Congressman Payne joined with his colleagues on the Foreign Affairs Committee in
introducing a measure which was subsequently approved by Congress to strengthen the
Microenterprise Act, providing small business loans to people in developing nations. The
law contains language that directs at least half of the loans towards the poorest people –
those who subsist on less than $1 a day. He was successful in winning passage of a
resolution declaring genocide in Darfur, Sudan. The measure was the culmination of
more than two years' work by many churches, religious organizations, anti-slavery groups,
and resettled Sudanese through broad grass-roots support. His involvement in Africa led
him to meet with Darfur refugees at the camps in Chad, where he heard many of their
stories first-hand. Congressman Payne also gained national recognition when he was
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selected to manage the debate on the floor of the House of Representatives in opposition to the use of force in Iraq before fully exploring a diplomatic solution.
A former national President of the YMCA, he served as Chairman of the World Refugee and Rehabilitation Committee. He has served on the board of directors of the National Endowment for Democracy, TransAfrica and the Discovery Channel Global Education Fund He has received numerous awards and honors from national, international and community-based organizations, including the Visionaries Award bestowed by the Africa Society and the prestigious Democracy Service Medal, which was previously awarded to Lech Walesa, the former Polish President and founder of the Solidarity movement, by the National Endowment for Democracy.
A graduate of Seton Hall University, he pursued graduate studies at Springfield College in Massachusetts. He holds honorary doctorates from Chicago State University, Drew University, Essex County College and William Paterson University. Congressman Payne, a widower, is the father of 3 and grandfather of 4.
Distinguished Speakers
Margaret Martin Barry is an Associate Professor of Law at the Columbus School of
Law, the Catholic University of America. She teaches in the Families and the Law Clinic (the school’s clinical programs are among the top ranked clinical programs in the country). Professor Barry currently serves as Co-President of the Society of American Law Teachers (SALT), Vice-Chair of the ABA Standards Review Committee and Chair of the District of Columbia Bar’s Family Law Representation Committee, an award-
winning committee that has aggressively pursued providing access to the court for low-income families. She also serves on the Board of the Clinical Law Review. In the past, Professor Barry served as Chair of the Association of American Law Schools (AALS) Section on Clinical Legal Education, as President of the Clinical Legal Education Association (CLEA) and as a member of the boards or committees of the organizations listed. Professor Barry was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship in 2007 to teach and learn in Montenegro. As a Fulbright Senior Specialist, she co-taught a clinical course at NALSAR Law University in Hyderabad, India in the summer of 2005. She also teaches from time to time in Catholic’s American Law Institute in Krakow, Poland. She has published in the areas of clinical teaching and family law, and has served on a number of professional panels in the U.S. and abroad discussing clinical teaching, family and domestic violence law, and legal representation. Professor Barry is a graduate of the University of Minnesota School of Law and Luther College.
Karen E. Bravo is an Associate Professor of Law and John S. Grimes Fellow and
Dean’s Fellow at the Indiana University School of Law – Indianapolis. Professor Bravo
teaches business organizations and public and private international law courses, including Illicit International Markets (concerning the traffic in people, money and drugs). She practiced corporate law with international law firms in New York and Massachusetts before joining the American Bar Association Central European and Eurasian Law Initiative (ABA/CEELI) in the Republic of Armenia. After leaving Armenia, Professor
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Bravo completed her LLM in International Trade Regulation before joining the faculty of the school of law in Indianapolis . Professor Bravo’s research interests include regional integration, democratization and the rule of law, labor liberalization and human trafficking. She is a graduate of the University of the West Indies, Columbia University School of Law and New York University School of Law.
Pamela D. Bridgewater is a law professor and teaches Property, Wills, and Trusts, and
Reproduction and the Law. Her book, Breeding a Nation: Slavery, Reproduction and the Pursuit of Freedom, will be published this year by South End Press. As a lawyer and reproductive rights advocate/activist, she consults and provides legal defense for reproductive health care clinics, service providers and activists. She has testified to federal and state law and policy makers on issues ranging from HPV vaccinations, contraceptive and sterilization abuse, and the FDA's reauthorization of silicon breast implants. Her pro bono work includes estate planning for people living with AIDS. Bridgewater writes about reproduction and the law, legal history, feminism and race in the law, and queer legal theory. She has served on the boards of the Boston Women's Health Book Collective and the Law School Admissions Subcommittee on Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender issues. She is currently working on a oral history project of the transsexual rights movement.
Benjamin G. Davis B.A., Harvard College; JD-MBA, Harvard Law School and Harvard
Business School. Associate Professor, the University of Toledo College of Law, teaching in the areas of contracts, alternative dispute resolution, arbitration, public international law, and international business transactions. Previously was a Director, Conference Programmes and Manager of the International Chamber of Commerce, and American Legal Counsel for the Secretariat of the International Court of Arbitration, all in Paris, France. He is the creator of fast-track international commercial arbitration, and the creator of the International Competitions for Online Dispute Resolution (ICODR). He led the effort to adopt the American Society of International Law Centennial Resolution on the Laws of War and Detainee Treatment in 2006. He is recent past co-chair of the American Society of International Law Teaching International Law Interest Group. He is widely published and has made numerous presentations and speeches around the world. He is Co-chair of the Peace Post 9/11 and Human Rights Committee of the Society of American Law Teachers. His most recent works are Refluat Stercus: A Citizen's View of
Criminal Prosecution in U.S. domestic courts of high-level U.S. civilian authority and military generals for torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment 23.2 St. John's Journal of Legal Commentary _____ (Forthcoming 2008), A Citizen Observer's View of the U.S. Approach to the "War on Terrorism", 17 Transnat’l L. and Contemp. Probs. 465
(2008), and No Third Class Processes for Foreigners, 103 Nw. U. L. Rev. Colloquy 88 (2008)
Dorothy Davis is the founder and president of The Diasporan Touch, a New York City-
based international public affairs, conferences, special events and celebrity advocacy consulting company. Its mission is to promote economic development and
entrepreneurship through strategic outreach to the global African diaspora while highlighting South-South cooperation. The firm creates unique partnerships by building
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bridges between people, cultures and interests in support of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals. Clients of The Diasporan Touch include the Special Unit for South-South Cooperation at UNDP, UNIFEM, UN-OHRLLS, IFAD, WHO,
UNECA, the Ellen Johnson Sirleaf Market Women’s Fund, the African Women’s Development Fund, Femmes Africa Solidarite, the Ford Foundation, Lincoln University, and the Sports Foundation.
Roy E. Finkenbine is Professor of History and Director of the Black Abolitionist
Archives at the University of Detroit Mercy, where he has been on the faculty since 1996. He has also taught at Florida State University, Murray State University, and Hampton University. From 1981 to 1991, he worked on the editorial staff of the Black Abolitionist Papers Project at Florida State University where he coedited the five-volume Black Abolitionist Papers, 1830-1865 (University of North Carolina Press, 1985-1992) and Witness for Freedom: African American Voices on Race, Slavery, and Emancipation (University of North Carolina Press, 1993).
He is also the editor of Sources of the African-American Past (Longman, 1st ed., 1997; Pearson Education, 2nd ed., 2004), a market-leading documentary sourcebook in African American history. Among his other publications are dozens of book chapters, articles, and encyclopedia entries on various subjects in African American history.
Professor Jason Gillmer is a member of the faculty at Texas Wesleyan School of
Law. Professor Gillmer’s scholarship focuses on issues of race and law in the 19th-
century American South, including issues of interracial intimacy, racial identity, and racial and class ideology. Drawing on a number of legal and historical sources, Professor Gillmer is particularly interested in how the law functioned in everyday life, and his current work emphasizes the importance of local records and trial-level data in understanding history and its contours. Professor Gillmer holds a LL.M. from Harvard Law School and a J.D., summa cum laude, from American University Washington College of Law. He teaches in the areas of Torts, Criminal Law, Civil Rights, and Race and the Law.
Stephen Kimber, the author of a novel and seven books of nonfiction, including
"Loyalists and Layabouts: The Rapid Rise and Faster Fall of Shelburne, Nova Scotia 1783-1792," is the Rogers Communications Chair in Journalism at the University of King's College in Halifax, Canada. (By video)
Angela Mae Kupenda is a professor of law at Mississippi College School of Law.
Kupenda graduated summa cum laude with her B.S. from Jackson State University; received her M.A. from the University of Pennsylvania, The Wharton School of Business, and her J.D., graduating first in her class, from Mississippi College School of Law. Kupenda served as law clerk for the former chief judges of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and the Eleventh Circuit. She practiced law in Washington, D.C. and in Jackson, Mississippi.
Professor Kupenda joined the faculty of Mississippi College in 1995. She has also served as visiting associate professor at Boston College Law School, the Scholar-in-Residence at
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Pine Manor Women’s College in Massachusetts, the Distinguished Visiting Professor of
Teaching Excellence, at Franklin Pierce Law Center in New Hampshire and visiting
professor at Notre Dame Law School.
Kupenda lectures and presents, extensively nationally and some internationally, on her
research in the area of race, gender, class, and the law. She teaches Constitutional Law,
First Amendment, Civil Rights, Race and the Law, and Constitutional Law Seminars.
Peter Linzer studied English at Cornell and received his J.D. from Columbia, where he was an editor of the Columbia Law Review. He practiced law in Manhattan, first with a
major Wall Street firm and then in the reform city administration of Mayor John V.
Lindsay. He has taught at Cincinnati, Detroit-Mercy, and at the University of
Houston, where he has focused on contracts, constitutional law and transactional clinical
and simulation courses, involving both transnational and domestic matters. He is revising
the volume of Corbin On Contracts dealing with the parol evidence rule and implied
terms and default rules.
He has been working for a long time on a book entitled "The Color of the Constitution:
Race and Law in America, Past, Present and Future," which he will complete, he hopes,
when he finishes the Corbin revision. His discussion topic at the Conference, Billy Budd,
Joseph Story, and Racial Liberals Frying Fish: A Polemical Essay, started out as a sidebar
discussion that is part of the book.
Guadalupe T. Luna, gluna@niu.edu
Guadalupe T. Luna (B.A. and J.D., University of Minnesota) is Interim Associate Dean
and Professor of Law at Northern Illinois University, College of Law. Her primary areas
of teaching include Property Law, Agricultural Law, Remedies and Jurisprudence.
Before joining Northern Illinois University, she practiced civil rights law in San Antonio,
Texas, and served as a law clerk for the Honorable Theodore McMillian, United States
Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit. While in law school, she was editor-in-chief on
the Law and Inequality Journal. Professor Luna is the author of numerous articles on the
property disputes interpreting the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that terminated the
United States war against Mexico. Her additional scholarship encompasses agricultural
law and immigration related issues.
Dr. Sakui W. G. Malakpa earned a bachelors degree cum laude and a masters from
Florida State University, a doctorate and second masters degree from Harvard, and a
post-doc J.D. from the University of Toledo College of Law. He is a professor in the
College of Education, University of Toledo. Professor Malakpa has published in various
professional journals and presented papers at numerous conferences around the world.
This year, at the invitation of the President and government of Liberia, he gave the stnational oration for Liberia’s 161 independence anniversary.
James DeWolf Perry. James is the fifth-great grandson of James DeWolf of Bristol, R.I., who was a U.S. senator and the patriarch of the nation’s leading slave-trading family.
James appears in the PBS documentary about the DeWolf family and their legacy, Traces
of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North, for which he also served as the principal
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historical consultant, and in the companion book, Inheriting the Trade: A Northern Family Confronts Its Legacy as the Largest Slave-Trading Dynasty in U.S. History. James has presented the film, and has lead discussions about the nation’s legacy of
slavery and race, at high schools and universities and with educational, religious and community groups across the country. In addition, he works with the film’s outreach program, especially in connection with history and legislative affairs. James is a Ph.D. student in political science at Harvard University, and attended law school at Columbia University.
Douglas E. Ray. Douglas E. Ray is Dean and Professor of Law. Dean Ray previously
served as Dean of the Widener University School of Law and Vice President of Widener University from January 1999 until June 2005. He was responsible for law school campuses in Wilmington, Delaware and Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. From 1981-1998 he taught at The University of Toledo College of Law where he served as Charles W. Fornoff Professor of Law and Values and also as an associate dean.
A graduate of the University of Minnesota and the Harvard Law School, Dean Ray has been an economist with the U.S. Department of Labor, a labor attorney with Dorsey & Whitney in Minneapolis and a professor at the University of Richmond Law School. He served in the United States Army from 1966 to 1970.
Dean Ray has been active in a number of professional and civic organizations including state and local bar associations and the Association of American Law Schools. He has served as chair of the Labor and Employment Law Section of the Association of American Law Schools and is a member of the National Academy of Arbitrators. Dean Ray has also been a frequent speaker on national programs concerning labor and employment law. For example, he has spoken at the FMCS Annual Labor-Management Conference, and programs sponsored by the Labor and Employment Section and Teaching Methods Section of the Association of American Law Schools. He has also appeared on C-SPAN's Washington Journal. In 2004, he gave the Keynote Address at the Federal Administrative Law Judges Conference.
Since 1999, he has chaired the annual four-day Course in Labor Law and Labor Arbitration sponsored by the Center for American and International Law (formerly the Southwestern Legal Foundation) and held in Dallas, Texas. Dean Ray has taught and published in the fields of labor law, employment discrimination law, torts and labor arbitration.
Naomi R. Twining. For over thirty years, Toledoan Naomi R. Twining represented the
American Civil Liberties Union of Northwest Ohio, at the ACLU of Ohio Affiliate, and served two terms as Vice President of the Affiliate.
She was honored by the United Jewish Council of Greater Toledo for her devotion in researching the unspoken heroes of the Holocaust. Naomi represented the Jewish Council and traveled to Israel to the dedication of Rev. Waitstill and Martha Sharp to the
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Righteous Honor Wall of the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority, at Yad Vashem. She had been the first to suggest the Sharps be so honored. Rev. Sharp was the second American man, and Martha the first American women to be so honored.
As a local research historian, Naomi was responsible for Ohio Bicentennial markers for the 1934 Auto-Lite Strike, 1934 Onion Workers’ Strike, and the Ohio-Michigan War.
She has been successful in having the Ohio Historical Society recognize the Pioneer Inn/Howard House at Grand Rapids, Ohio, Wood County as an Ohio Landmark site.
As a result of her research, the King Farm, Delta, Ohio, has been verified as an Underground Railroad Station by the National Park service, Network to Freedom; Fulton County Historical Society, a Louisiana Historical Society; the Buxton National Historic site (Canada); Friends of Freedom;, and has received commendations from the governor of Ohio, senators and state representatives --- from York township and the commissioners of Fulton and Wood Counties.
She is the author of They Fought for Civil Liberties (1997) about how the ACLU was formed in Toledo.
Deleso Alford Washington earned a B.S., magna cum laude at Southern University A &
M College, a J.D. at Southern University Law Center, and an LL.M. at Georgetown University Law Center , Washington , DC. She is a past Fulbright Scholar- Senegal/Cote d’Ivoire and Delegate to the World Conference Against Racism in Durban , South Africa (2001). Professor Washington is an Associate Professor of Law at Florida A & M University teaching Torts and Race and the Law. Currently, she is exploring the history of gynecology in the United States from a critical race feminist perspective and its practical application to cultural competency in medical schools. Her publications include the Georgetown Journal of Gender and The Law, American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy and the Law, and the Nova Law Review. Professor Washington’s Encyclopedia Entry entitled, “Surgery, Medical Experimentation,” is forthcoming in Daina Ramey Berry , ed., The Female Slave: An Encyclopedia of Daily Life During Slavery in the United States.
Dr. Carter A. Wilson is a professor of political science and public administration at The
University of Toledo. He specializes in public policy and civil rights policy. He earned his Ph.D. at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. He is the author of many papers, articles and three books. He is the co-author of Sustaining Hand, a study of urban economic development in Detroit. His book, Racism from Slavery to Advanced Capitalism is the recipient of the Gustava Myers Award, an award sponsored by the NAACP, NOW and other organizations or books promoting human rights in North America. His latest book published last month is a public policy textbook. It covers social welfare, education, health care, labor, abortion, civil rights and many other policy areas. It is entitled Public Policy: Continuity and Change.
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Professor Evelyn L. Wilson joined the Southern University Law Center faculty in 1986,
after practicing law with the business firm, Losavio and Weinstein, in Baton Rouge. As a
visiting professor at Washington and Lee University Law School in Lexington, Virginia,
from 1988 to 1989, she taught environmental law, federal civil procedure, close business
arrangements and introduction to the lawyer's role. In 2004, she taught Civil Law
Property as a visiting professor at the Vytautas Magnus University School of Law in
Kaunas, Lithuania.
Professor Wilson's legal writings have focused on federal jurisdiction and procedure,
civil and human rights, especially the rights of women and children, and legal history.
She has written a mini biography on former law school dean Louis Berry and written a
book about Charles J. Hatfield, whose lawsuit caused the state of Louisiana to establish
the law school at Southern University.
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