Please join fellow alumni, parents, and friends of WashU for a day at the Skirball Cultural Center featuring a law faculty presentation by Professor Susan Appleton, Lemma Barkeloo and Phoebe Couzins Professor of Law. After a brunch reception, Professor Appleton will highlight the transformational contributions of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg before we all explore the special exhibition Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Schedule of events:
11:00 am - Registration checkin and brunch reception
11:45 am - Presentation by Professor Appleton with Q & A
12:30 pm - Docent overview/introduction to Notorious RBG exhibition
Starting at 1:00 pm - Self-guided timed tickets into Notorious RBG exhibition
Our museum admittance also allows us to explore other current exhibitions, including the Skirballs's Jewish Life from Antiquity to America.
More about Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg:
With so much at stake on the Supreme Court, come explore the American judicial system through one of its sharpest legal minds. Coinciding with the twenty-fifth anniversary of her appointment to the high court, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg is the first-ever retrospective about the famed associate justice and American cultural icon.
Based upon the New York Times bestselling book of the same name, it was created in partnership with the book’s co-authors: journalist Irin Carmon, a senior correspondent at New York magazine, and attorney Shana Knizhnik, who founded the popular Tumblr that earned Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg internet fame (and amused the Justice herself). Like the book, the exhibition offers a visually rich, entertaining, yet rigorous look at RBG’s life and work. Through archival photographs and documents, contemporary art, media stations, and playful interactives, the exhibition tells the parallel stories of RBG’s remarkable career and the efforts she joined to expand “We the People” to include those long left out of the Constitution’s promises. By bringing to life RBG’s compelling biography and her commitment to our nation’s highest ideals, the exhibition invites visitors to participate in civic life and consider how the future of the Supreme Court impacts us all.
Woven throughout the exhibition are briefs and other writings by RBG, including some of her most famously searing dissents. In keeping with the spirit of Carmon and Knizhnik’s book, the exhibition riffs off the playful connection between the Notorious RBG and Notorious B.I.G. (as she likes to point out, they were both born and bred in Brooklyn, New York): for example, the name of each gallery section alludes to a song or lyric from the late hip-hop artist.
Find out more about the Skirball and the Notorious RBG exhibition here.
More about Professor Appleton:
Susan Frelich Appleton, the Lemma Barkeloo & Phoebe Couzins Professor of Law, is a nationally known expert in family law. Her research, scholarship, and writings address such legal issues as adoption, reproductive rights, parentage, gender, and sexualities.
She has co-authored a family law casebook, now in its sixth edition, as well as a casebook on adoption and assisted reproduction, and she has published extensively on family law matters in law reviews. A member of the American Law Institute (ALI), she serves as an adviser on two projects, Model Penal Code: Sexual Assault and Related Offenses and Restatement of the Law: Children & the Law. Previously, Professor Appleton held the office of Secretary of ALI (2004-13), sat on the ALI Council (beginning in 1993 and continuing now as a member emerita), and served as an adviser to the ALI’s Principles of the Law of Family Dissolution. She also served on the Board of Directors of the American Bar Foundation (2004-14) and worked as consultant to the New Jersey Bioethics Commission, assisting that agency in its recommendations for laws addressing surrogacy arrangements. Professor Appleton is a recipient of the law school’s Triennial Alumni Distinguished Teaching Award and Washington University’s Distinguished Faculty Award.
She was the John S. Lehmann Research Professor in 2009–10 and held the Israel Treiman Faculty Fellowship during 2012-13. She is a prolific speaker and panelist on family law and related topics at workshops, conferences, and other venues, including UC Davis Law School, where she delivered the Brigitte Bodenheimer Lecture on Family Law in March 2013; Fudan University in Shangai, where she spoke about feminism and family law at a conference on feminist jurisprudence in the US and Asia in May 2015; and the Radzyner Law School at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, Israel, in December 2015, when she taught a course on the Modern Law of Parentage as a Visiting Professor and presented a paper at a symposium on “Families-in-Law: Setting New Agendas.” At the law school, she served as vice dean (2013-14) and associate dean of faculty (1998-2003). In 2010-12, she served as Washington University’s first Ombuds, facilitating the informal resolution or management of faculty-related conflicts or concerns on the Danforth Campus. Before becoming a law professor, she clerked for law school alumnus, the Hon. William H. Webster, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit.