Gordon Gamm Symposium March 21 to focus on the experience of Black women and voting

The historical efforts of Black women’s fight for access to the ballot box and the criminalization of those efforts is the topic of the Gordon J. Gamm Comparative Law and Justice Symposium at Tulane Law School on March 21.

Led by Gordon Gamm Faculty Scholar Professor Carla Laroche, the symposium seeks to dissect how systems have criminalized the work of Black women to secure access to voting and through that, to justice. Panels will explore approaches in the recent presidential election cycle, look at international approaches and more.

“We vote, campaign, organize, and educate to obtain the justice and democratic values the United States claims to hold dear and have not yet achieved," said Professor Laroche, who also is the Felder-Fayard Associate Professor of Law and an affiliated faculty with the Murphy Institute. 

“While praising Black women’s dedication and strides to ‘save the democracy,’ however, racism and sexism intersect to destroy, attack, and invalidate those same political principles. We aim to explore the parallels across countries that exclude Black women from the ballot box and what working to achieve real political power entail.”

The day-long symposium will include speakers from a variety of agencies, academic institutions, professional organizations and nonprofits including the American Bar Association Center for Human Rights, Daughters Beyond Incarceration, NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and Xavier University as well as Tulane, Loyola New Orleans, and Yale law schools, and Human Rights Watch.

See the schedule here.

Laroche is a distinguished faculty member at Tulane Law, renowned for her expertise in civil rights, the criminal legal system, and gender and racial equity in legal systems. With a deep commitment to social justice, she has dedicated her career to advocating for systemically excluded communities, particularly women of color affected by the criminal legal system. 

Before joining Tulane, Laroche held positions in academia, public interest law, and government, including serving as a clinical professor where she provided hands-on legal training to law students while directly serving people and communities. Her scholarship and public advocacy focus on systemic inequities in law enforcement, access to justice, and the intersection of race and gender in legal policies.

The Gordon Gamm Symposium supports research and public engagement of scholarly work that pertains to the relationship of justice to the comparison between civil law and common law, comparative law, human rights, jurisprudence, legal history, humanism, philosophy of law, law and society, or any combination of those topics. 

The annual forum, founded in 2014 by Tulane Law alumnus Gordon Gamm (L ’70) and his wife, Grace Gamm, supports the work of early-career professors. It brings together legal scholars, practitioners, and thought leaders to discuss pressing legal and societal issues. It also serves as a platform for exploring critical intersections between international and comparative law, ethics, and policy. Through engaging panels and keynote addresses, the event promotes thoughtful discussions on complex legal matters, often incorporating perspectives from philosophy, social justice, and political science.

In previous years, the Gamm Symposium has tackled a variety of thought-provoking topics that reflect contemporary legal and ethical dilemmas. Past themes have included discussions on freedom of speech and its limits, the role of artificial intelligence in the legal system, criminal legal system reform, and the future of democracy in an era of political polarization.