UConn Advance - November 6, 2006

Law School to hold symposium on Sheff v. O’Neill, 10 years later

by Michael Kirk

A symposium marking the 10-year anniversary of the state Supreme Court's decision in Sheff v. O'Neill will take place at the School of Law on Thursday, Nov. 9.

The decision held that the racial, ethnic, and economic isolation of children in the Hartford public schools violates the state constitution's guarantee of substantially equal educational opportunity for all children.

It led to a 2003 settlement agreement requiring that at least 30 percent of Hartford students receive an educational experience with reduced isolation through the use of inter-district magnet schools, the Open Choice program, and inter-district cooperative programs.

Several key players in the case will be among the speakers discussing how the Sheff case came about; what the decision has and has not accomplished; and what the future may hold for the issues involved.

The event will feature retired Chief Justice Ellen Ash Peters, a long-time visiting professor at the School of Law, who authored the decision; Elizabeth Horton Sheff, the plaintiff's mother and a Hartford City Councilwoman; George Coleman, current interim state education commissioner; John Brittain, an emeritus UConn professor of law and one of the original attorneys in the case; and others.

The symposium, which is hosted by the Law School's Black Law Students Association, will take place at the Law School campus on Elizabeth Street in Hartford, from 1 to 5 p.m. in Starr Hall.

The full list of the panels and participants is online.

Environmental impacts of globalization to be discussed Nov. 9

Environmental Impacts of Economic Globalization is the topic of a presentation by Jerry Mander, a leading critic of economic globalization and the influence of mass media, at Konover Auditorium on Thursday, Nov. 9.

The talk, part of the Edwin Way Teale Lecture Series on Nature & the Environment, begins at 4 p.m.

Mander, co-director and founder of the International Forum on Globalization, argues that a primary goal of economic globalization is to give global corporations control over worldwide markets and resources.

He says these corporations use media technology to create homogenized consumers, all with the same efficient-to-deliver material desires, no matter where on the planet they live.

His presentation will explore how globalized economic systems can only survive with inexpensive resources, new markets, and cheap labor, ultimately depleting the Earth's finite natural resources and manipulating the social, political, and economic character of distinctive communities throughout the world.

In addition to his role with the International Forum on Globalization, Mander is program director for the Foundation for Deep Ecology, and a senior fellow at Public Media Center, a non-profit strategic marketing, communications, and advocacy agency working on behalf of social justice, public interest, and environmental causes.

During the 1960s, Mander was president of a major San Francisco advertising company.

He later joined environmental campaigns that kept dams out of the Grand Canyon; established Redwood National Park; and stopped production of the Supersonic Transport.

His books include Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (1977); In the Absence of the Sacred (1991); The Case Against the Global Economy and For a Turn Toward the Local, co-edited with Edward Goldsmith (1996); and Alternatives to Economic Globalization: A Better World is Possible (2002).

The lecture is open to the public. For more information call 860-486-4500 or go here.

Coming to Campus

- November 6, 2006

Law School to hold symposium on Sheff v. O’Neill, 10 years later

by Michael Kirk

Environmental impacts of globalization to be discussed Nov. 9