Content area
Full Text
When this Symposium was first conceived in the Summer of 2021, the nation was just emerging from the first phases of the COVID-19 pandemic. This was the beginning of trying to go back to life as normal. Given this reawakening, the Symposium's planning committee felt the urgency of a need to regroup, rethink, and reassess the state of employment antidiscrimination law. We were not sure where others would be on this possible project, given the newness of the hopeful end to lockdowns and social isolation and return to "normal" concerns. But we quickly found that those who joined the Symposium planning group, and then those who responded to our calls to contribute to the Symposium, were more than ready to join in a reassessment and relinking of the many unresolved issues confronting employment anti-discrimination law. We saw such reassessment as all the more pressing in light of the multiple pressures of the COVID-19 pandemic, the #MeToo Movement, and the racial reckoning that followed the statesponsored murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and 184 other persons of color in the spring of 2020,1 on top of the countless state-sponsored murders of persons of color stretching far back into the past and the rise of Sinophobic violence.
With these goals in mind, a planning committee extraordinaire coalesced. Its members included, most importantly, the Journal of Gender, Social Policy & Law ("JGSPL") leaders Adriana E. Morquecho, Editor-in-Chief, and Inka Sklodowska Boehm, Symposium Editor, without whose indefatigable work this project would never have been possible; National Employment Lawyers Association ("NELA") President, Rebecca Salawdeh; the National Institute for Workers' Rights ("Institute") Executive Director, Jeffrey Mittman; NELA member, Bruce A. Frederickson; Washington College of Law Assistant Dean for Diversity, Inclusion and Affinity Relations Lisa Taylor; and me.
From the first, the idea was to span gaps-between race, sex, and disability discrimination; between employment and career, on the one side, and preparation for employment through education, on the other; between Title VII and Title IX; and, very importantly in our eyes, between academia and practitioners of law in the anti-discrimination arena. The planning committee was hugely excited to be carrying forward a collaboration between NELA, the Institute, and the American University Washington College of Law ("WCL") and JGSPL. The Symposium idea came...