Hennepin County Law Library Continuing Legal Education Series

Hennepin County’s Law Library offers a Continuing Legal Education (CLE) series that provides continuing education credits to attorneys. The classes are free of charge and open to anyone. Registration is not required. Attendees may receive one credit per session.

Course information

Slavery’s Legal Legacy and its Meaning for Modern Lawyers 

Justin Simard, J.D., Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Law, Michigan State University College of Law
Justin Simard is the author of Citing Slavery, 72 Stanford Law Review 79 (2020) and founder of the Citing Slavery Project. Mr. Simard’s presentation will help lawyers identify the harms that exist in the unacknowledged citation of cases involving enslaved African Americans by modern judges and lawyers. It will show how seemingly neutral legal reasoning can help hide the biases that such cases have imported into the legal system and suggest ways for the profession to address this bias through changes in research, citation, and educational practices.

Attend the class

February 17, 2023, 12:15 – 1:15 p.m. via Zoom
Launch Meeting - Zoom (zoomgov.com)
Approved for one elimination of bias CLE credit, CLE code 479481

Exhibits on display

Citing Slavery Display

The Citing Slavery display is a visual extension of the Citing Slavery project and CLE presentation. While the project and initial research sheds light on the historical impact of judicial decisions buried in case law, the display seeks to take another approach by presenting a series of photographs, text, and illustrations that allow those who experience it to engage and access the research physically and emotionally.

The display will run the month of February in the main atrium display cases on street level at Minneapolis Central Library.

Wanted: Runaways Art Display

Wanted: Runaways is a series of portraits inspired by archive runaway slave advertisements. Using the descriptors provided by the enslavers, artist Lillian Young has created her own interpretation of the runaway enslaved. Artist Young describes herself as a painter who moonlights as a printmaker, and her works depict forgotten or muted moments in Black history and the Black experience. Young’s works are based on historical documents and photos from various archives. More information can be found here.  

These works of art will be on display at Hennepin County’s Law Library (C-2451 Government Center) and as part of the Minneapolis Central Library display in February and will move to Brookdale Library for the month of March.

The displays are funded with money from Minnesota's Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund.