The Wisconsin Law Review Symposium "Intimacy, Marriage, Race, and the Meaning of Equality: Perspectives on the Fortieth Anniversary of Loving v. Virginia" will bring nationally recognized experts in the field of race theory to Madison on Friday and Saturday, November 10-11, 2006.
Friday’s events will be at Monona Terrace Convention Center from 8:45 a.m. to 4 p.m.; on Saturday, the symposium will move to the Law School’s Room 2260 (Godfrey & Kahn Hall) from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. The event is open to all faculty, staff, and students.
Loving v. Virginia is one of the most noteworthy Supreme Court decisions of the 20th century. Mildred Jeter, a black woman, and Richard Loving, a white man, were married in Washington, D.C. because their home state of Virginia prohibited interracial marriages. Upon their return to Virginia, the couple was arrested and charged with violating the state's anti-miscegenation statute, which banned interracial marriages. The Lovings were found guilty and sentenced to a year in jail, with the sentence suspended for 25 years on condition that the couple leave the state of Virginia. The Lovings began a series of lawsuits seeking to overcome their conviction on Fourteenth Amendment grounds. In 1967, the Supreme Court overturned the conviction and struck down the anti-miscegenation laws still in effect in 15 states.
Loving continues to be important both as a race case and as a freedom to marry or intimate association case. The Court concluded that "restricting the freedom to marry solely because of racial classifications violates the central meaning of the Equal Protection Clause" and also that anti-miscegenation statutes violate the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment because the "freedom to marry [is] . . . one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men." As a race case, Loving was perhaps the last great decision of the civil rights era.
The goal of the symposium is to explore a broad range of questions concerning Loving and its impact, such as the policing of interracial and inter-ethnic intimacies through immigration laws; the contradictions in the Loving decision itself and in societal understanding of interracial relationships; the parallels of interracial relationships to gay marriage; and the intersection of interracial intimacy, media, and law.
For more information, contact Symposium Editors Claudia Quiroz, quiroz@wisc.edu, or Amy Arndt, aearndt@wisc.edu.
Submitted by on November 13, 2006
This article appears in the categories: Articles
