Derrick Bell Lecturer to Highlight Hidden Agenda of Affirmative Action Cases, Impact on Civil Rights

Professor Kimberly West-Faulcon

Not all lawsuits are as they seem. In the 2025 Derrick Bell Lecture, featured speaker Professor Kimberly West-Faulcon, James P. Bradley Chair in Constitutional Law, Loyola Marymount University, will address how some race-conscious affirmative action lawsuits hide a different goal. 

In this year’s lecture, “The Hidden Agenda of Legal Cases Against Affirmative Action--The SFFA v. Harvard Trojan Horse Admissions Lawsuit,” West-Faulcon will provide the audience insight into how lawsuits like this one conceal an effort to undermine the public’s view of what is right and wrong and are an attempt to destroy American civil rights laws protecting against discrimination in education and employment. 

In previewing her lecture, West-Faulcon said that while the primary goal of cases like this is not yet a victory in law, the doctrine of what the Constitution means can easily change in one Supreme Court opinion.

“The mere existence of a lawsuit, the way the lawsuit is perceived, the way it's talked about, the way it's understood, could have what I argue is, I think, the broader and bigger goal of SFFA v. Harvard,” West-Faulcon said. 

The Derrick Bell Lecture, a part of the UO African American Lecture Series sponsored by the Division of Equity and Inclusion and the Office of the President, started in 2013 and has been held annually since 2017.

Bell served as Oregon Law Dean from 1981-85. Before his time at the University of Oregon, he was the first African American tenured professor at Harvard University School of Law. While there, he published the first casebook for teaching race-related law courses, “Race, Racism, and American Law,” which is now a standard textbook in US law schools. Bell’s interest convergence theory—that inclusion only happens for Black people when it's in the interest of White people—is still relevant and a point of discussion for academics today.

“That says a lot about him as an academic, as a legal scholar, that (Bell) came up with a theory that—here, as we enter 2025—so many people are drawing on that theory to try to make sense of what's around them and to try to analyze the current issues of our day,” West-Faulcon said.

Watch the Derrick Bell Lecture at 5:30 p.m. on Tuesday, February 20 in room 175 at the Knight Law Center or by livestream.