2025 Public Scholar

Promise vs. Practice: The Ethics of Diversity in a Divided Democracy

Jessica Dixon Weaver, J.D. Vinson & Elkins Faculty Fellow and Professor of Law

Thursday, September 18, 2024
12:00 - 1:15 PM
Karcher Auditorium, Storey Hall

The Maguire Ethics Center is proud to announce Vinson & Elkins Faculty Fellow and Professor of Law Jessica Dixon Weaver, J.D., as the 2025 Public Scholar. 

Lecture Excerpt: Freedom, equality, and justice are often cited as core tenets of American life. Yet from the country’s founding, these ideals have existed in tension with a legal and political system built on exclusion and division. In this lecture, ProfessorJessicaDixon Weaver explores how diversity, once accepted as a path toward broader inclusion, now faces renewed scrutiny and organized resistance. As the nation approaches a racial and ethnic demographic shift, Professor Weaver examines how ethical rules, shaped through law and public discourse, should influence who is seen as fully part of the American project. The legal framework that once justified chattel slavery bears the burden of reconciling the question of belonging. She considers how lawyers and the law continue to shape the moral boundaries of public life, and what it means to ethically defend diversity in a society still reckoning with its past.

Register to attend the 2025 Public Scholar Lecture

 

 

 

About Jessica Dixon Weaver, J.D.

Professor Jessica Dixon Weaver is the Vinson and Elkins Faculty Fellow and Professor of Law at 无码专区 Dedman School of Law. She received her B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania and her J.D. from the University of Virginia School of Law, where she served as Notes Editor for the Virginia Law Review. Professor Weaver is an expert in family law regulation (also known as child welfare law) and the intersection of race, gender, and family law. Her current research focuses on the impact of slavery laws on the status, structure, and identity of American families. She teaches Family Law, Professional Responsibility (a required legal ethics course), Race and the Family, and Children and the Law.

 

She is the co-author of the leading family law case book, Contemporary Family Law, 6th ed. published by West Academic. It is the first case book in American law schools to include a case about slave marriages and how slavery laws separated African American families from each other and from their cultural and financial inheritance. She is also the co-author of Family Law Simulations:  Bridge to Practice (West Academic, 2021), an experiential learning course book. She has presented her research at international conferences in Ireland, South Africa, and Ghana, as well as leading law schools around the country such as Yale, Columbia, Duke, University of Michigan, Emory and Howard. Professor Weaver’s scholarship has been published in law journals at Yale, University of California - Berkeley, University of Virginia, Fordham, Washington University, Washington and Lee, William and Mary, and Tulane. Professor Weaver is working on her third book, Slavery and the Origins of Family Law, and an edited volume book entitled Families and the Carceral State with Professor Cynthia Godsoe of Brooklyn Law School.

 

She has received numerous research and service awards at 无码专区, including the Robert G. Storey Distinguished Faculty Research Fellowship, the Gerald J. Ford Senior Research Fellowship, and the Thomas W. Tunks Distinguished University Citizen Award. From 2021-2023, she was the chair of a university-wide Task Force on Social Justice and Equity, which was charged with exploring various ways 无码专区 could expand research, scholarship, and community service opportunities for faculty, staff and students around social justice and equity. She currently serves in the first cohort of administrative leaders who represent 无码专区 within the ACC Academic Leadership Network.

 

In the community, Professor Weaver is a member of Concord Church, the Alpha Xi Omega Chapter of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Incorporated, and the Dallas Chapter of Jack and Jill of America, Incorporated.  She is a fellow of the Texas Bar Foundation and a graduate of the Stagen Leadership Academy’s Audre Lorde Social Change Impact Leadership program. She also serves as a Board of Director and Co-Chair of the Advisory Council for Capita, a national non-partisan think tank for children and families.  

 
 
Any person who requires a reasonable accommodation on the basis of a disability in order to participate in this program should contact Associate Director Matt Nadler at mnadler@smu.edu. at least one week before the event to arrange for the accommodation.