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This year’s honorees will be DC Court of
Appeals Chief Judge Annice Wagner and Jonathan
Smith, Executive Director of the D.C. Legal
Aid Society and a member of the Antioch
School of Law Class of 1984.
Mr. Shaw is the Director-Counsel and
President of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational
Fund, Inc. (LDF), the nation's premier
civil rights law firm. On May 1, 2004, Shaw became
the fifth person to lead the organization in
its 64-year history.
Shaw joined LDF in 1982. He directed
LDF's education docket and litigated school desegregation,
capital punishment, and other civil
rights cases throughout the country. In 1987, he
established LDF's Western Regional Office in
Los Angeles, and served as its Western Regional
Counsel. In 1990, he left LDF to join the faculty
of the University of Michigan Law School, where
he taught constitutional law, civil procedure, and
civil rights. In 1993, on a leave of absence from
Michigan, he rejoined LDF as Associate Director-
Counsel.
Shaw was lead counsel in a coalition that
represented African-American and Latino student-
intervenors in the University of Michigan
undergraduate affirmative action admissions
case. In 2003, the U.S. Supreme Court heard that
case, along with one challenging the use of affirmative
action at the University of Michigan
Law School. The Court ruled in favor of diversity
as a compelling state interest.
Shaw graduated from Wesleyan University
with honors and from the Columbia University
School of Law, where he was a Charles Evans
Hughes Fellow. Upon graduation, Shaw worked
as a trial attorney in the Civil Rights Division of
the U.S. Department of Justice from 1979 until
1982. He litigated civil rights cases throughout
the country at the trial and appellate levels and in
the U.S. Supreme Court. Shaw resigned from the
Justice Department in protest of the Reagan Administration's
civil rights policies.
Shaw has testified before Congress and before
state legislatures on numerous occasions. He
has been a frequent guest on television and radio
programs, and has published numerous newspaper,
magazine and law review articles. He also
has traveled and lectured extensively on civil
rights and human rights in Europe, South Africa,
South America, and Japan. He currently serves
on the Legal Advisory Network of the European Roma Rights Council, based in Budapest, Hungary.
The National Bar Association’s Young
Lawyers Division recently presented Shaw with
the A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr., Memorial
Award. He also received the Lawrence A. Wein
Prize for Social Justice from Columbia University.
Further, he was awarded the Baldwin
Medal, the highest honor given by the Wesleyan
University alumni body, for extraordinary service
to the University and the public interest. He
served on the Wesleyan Board of Trustees for
15 years, and was Senior Vice Chair of the
Board when he retired from the board in June
2003.
Shaw is a member of the bar in New York
and California, and is admitted to practice before
the U.S. District Courts for the Central and
Northern Districts of California, the U.S. Courts
of Appeals for the Fifth, Sixth, Eighth, Ninth,
Tenth and Eleventh Circuits, and the United
States Supreme Court. He is an adjunct professor
of law at Columbia Law School, and the second
appointee to the Phyllis Beck Chair at Temple
Law School, which he held during the 2003
spring semester. He was the second recipient of
the Haywood Burns Chair in Civil Rights at
CUNY School of Law, which he held for the
1997-1998 academic year.
Thomas Todd is an activist attorney
widely known as "TNT" for his oratorical skills.
He served as a lawyer in the U.S. Army from
1964 to 1967 and joined the staff of the U.S. Attorney's
Office in Chicago in 1967. In this capacity,
Todd made history when he developed
the first criminal case against a Chicago policeman
for deprivation of an individual's civil
rights in 1968.
Todd organized and established the first
Civil Rights Office in a local U.S. Attorney's
Office in 1969. United States v. Gorman, the
first federal criminal case against a Chicago police
officer ended in a hung jury in 1971. Todd
was the first full-time black law professor at
Northwestern University, where he taught from
1970 to 1974.
Todd has been admitted to practice law before
many courts, including the Louisiana Supreme
Court, the U.S. Court of Military Appeals,
The Illinois Supreme Court and the U.S.
Supreme Court. A powerful spokesman for civil
rights, Todd was president of the Chicago Chapter
of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference
in 1971 and president of Operation PUSH
from 1983 to 1984.
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