Renowned legal scholar, civil rights advocate, and former judge, Margaret A. Burnham is the founder of Northeastern University School of Law’s Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project (CRRJ) and author of By Hands Now Known: Jim Crow’s Legal Executioners. Through CRRJ, Burnham has led teams of law students in investigating acts of racial violence in the Jim Crow era, including hundreds of unsolved murders of Black people among other historical failures of the criminal justice system.
She joins Boston College to discuss her recent case in which the Dallas County Commissioners Court delivered a posthumous exoneration of Texas man, Tommy Lee Walker, 70 years after his wrongful conviction and execution.
Professor Burnham began her career at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund litigating school desegregation cases. She has served as a Boston municipal court judge and a partner in a Boston civil rights firm with an international human rights practice. Her areas of interest are civil and human rights, comparative constitutional rights, and international criminal law. Professor Burnham directs the Northeastern University Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project , which engages students in legal matters relating to the 1960s US civil rights movement.
Meghan T. Sweeney is Professor of the Practice in the Theology Department at Boston College. She joined the BC faculty in 2006 to teach in the PULSE Program for Service Learning, the university’s social justice education program based in the Philosophy and Theology Departments, and in 2014 became the program’s Cooney Family Director.
