Demand the Impossible
BU Law hosts an event to celebrate the publication of Professor Robert Tsai’s latest book.
Demand the Impossible
BU Law hosts an event to celebrate the publication of Professor Robert Tsai’s latest book.
From 1982 to 2016, Stephen B. Bright served as director, and later president and senior council, of the Southern Center for Human Rights, a nonprofit public interest law firm that worked to enforce the civil and human rights of people in the criminal justice system, particularly those facing the death penalty and challenging cruel and unusual incarceration conditions. While at the Southern Center for Human Rights, Bright argued and won four capital cases before the Supreme Court: Amadeo v. Zant (1987), Snyder v. Louisiana (2007), Foster v. Chatman (2015), and McWilliams v. Dunn (2016).
These four cases are the basis for BU Law Professor Robert Tsai’s newest book Demand the Impossible: One Lawyer’s Pursuit of Equal Justice for All, which traces Bright’s career and impact as a cause lawyer relentlessly pursuing an end to racial and economic discrimination within the criminal justice system.
On March 28, 2024, BU Law hosted a conversation between Bright and Tsai on Tsai’s book and Bright’s book, The Fear of Too Much Justice: Race, Poverty, and the Persistence of Inequality in the Criminal Courts, an account of the “structural failures that undermine justice in our criminal courts.” BU Law Professor Jed Shugerman, a former student of Bright’s capital punishment course at Yale Law School, moderated the event.
Listen to an abridged version of the discussion: