SJD Paper Workshop

The SJD Paper Workshop is a platform for presenting academic work in progress and an opportunity to build a supportive scholarly community through reading, commenting on, and discussing draft papers.

For this workshop, the SJD Students Association and the Student Government will host Andrew Stobo Sniderman, who will present a draft titled “Plessy, Brown and Canada’s Separate and Unequal Schools.”

This (early rough draft!) paper explores the relevance in Canada of Plessy v Ferguson and Brown v Board of Education. The dream of Brown helped justify the integration of Indigenous students into Canadian provincial public schools in the 1950s and 1960s. More recently, the specter of Plessy has been invoked to condemn conditions in separate schools for Indigenous children on Indian reserves:“[w]hat is happening to First Nations students today is similar to what African American students experienced under the Jim Crow laws…Except in Canada, First Nations students are separate and unequal.” These analogies prompted my inquiry, which juxtaposes the stories of Black students in the United States and Indigenous students in Canada.

Participants are expected to read the draft in advance. If you would like to attend, please email Wei-An Tsai (wtsai@sjd.law.harvard.edu) by March 20 (Friday) to receive the paper. Lunch will be provided.