Professor Rachel F. Moran Gives 2002 Foulston & Siefkin Lecture
Professor Rachel F. Moran presented the 2002 Foulston & Siefkin Lecture on April 19, 2002. Titled "Law and the Construction of Fear," Professor Moran's lecture was a reply in part to Professor Cass Sunstein's paper "The Laws of Fear". Sunstein's paper puts forth the idea that fear should be discounted in the formulation of law and policy. Professor Moran's lecture will appear as the lead article in the first issue of volume 42 of the Washburn Law Journal in Fall 2002.
Professor Moran, speaking to a capacity audience in the Robinson Courtroom, discussed the role that fear and risk has played in developments of the law, specifically in the areas of tort and criminal law. Fear, Professor Moran observed, may be expressed in two ways. First, it may be assigned a certain value based on scientific research and statistics, such as the percentage of smokers who get lung cancer. Second, it may be manifested in the public’s perception of a particular danger, such as the fear of drinking polluted water. The latter is often influenced by the media, which sometimes find themselves in conflict between reporting the facts and selling the news. Another danger is that poor or biased statistical analysis will bolster public perceptions of risk, leading some to have a false sense of confidence in what is really an irrational fear.
Professor Moran suggested that both paradigms of measuring fear – the scientific and the emotional – have value in the rule-making process. The challenge, she said, is to balance the two. Too much reliance on science harms the public’s confidence in the government’s ability to respond to its concerns. Too much reliance on emotion, such as stereotypes about the link between certain minority groups and criminal behavior, harms the individual’s moral right not to be an "object of prediction." Science alone, however, should not be our only measure of fear and risk in our lives. "That does not mean I want a law without reason," Professor Moran said. "But I don’t want one without compassion, either."
Professor Rachel F. Moran, is the Robert D. and Leslie-Kay Raven Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley Law School. Professor Moran currently teaches torts, education law, and seminars on various topics related to civil rights and equality. She is a member of the American Law Institute and the American Bar Association's Standing Committee for the Division of Public Education, and she just completed a three-year term on the Executive Committee of the Association of American Law Schools.
Professor Moran earned an A.B. from Stanford University and her J.D. from Yale Law School. She clerked for Chief Judge Wilfred Feinberg of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, and worked for the San Francisco firm of Heller, Ehrman, White & McAuliffe, before joining the faculty at Boalt Hall in 1983. She served as visiting professor at UCLA (1988), Stanford (1989), NYU School of Law (1996), the University of Miami Law School (1997), the University of Texas (2000), and is currently visiting at UCLA this spring. Professor Moran served as chair of the Chicano/Latino Policy Project at UC Berkeley’s Institute for the Study of Social Change. In 1995, she received the UC Berkeley Distinguished Teaching Award.
Professor Moran has published: "Diversity and Its Discontents: The End of Affirmative Action at Boalt Hall," in the California Law Review, "Sorting and Reforming: High-Stakes Testing in the Public Schools," in the Akron Law Review, "Law and Emotion, Love and Hate," in The Journal of Contemporary Legal Issues, and "Bilingual Education, Immigration and the Culture of Disinvestment," in the Iowa Journal of Gender, Race and Justice. She is also the author of Interracial Intimacy: The Regulation of Race and Romance and co-author (with Mark Yudof, David Kirp, and Betsy Levin) of the fourth edition of Educational Policy and the Law.
Professor Moran with Professor Myrl Duncan (left) and Jodi Hoss (right), Editor-in-Chief of volume 41 of the Washburn Law Journal.
Each year since 1978 the Wichita law firm of Foulston & Siefkin has generously sponsored the Foulston & Siefkin Lecture Series. This lecture series brings a prominent legal scholar to Washburn School of Law to challenge and enhance the legal thinking of our students and faculty and the Washburn Law Journal readership. The visiting scholar delivers a lecture and also provides an article for the next volume of the Journal.
Professor Moran was also the keynote speaker at the Washburn Law Journal / Moot Court / Trial Advocacy Awards Banquet on Thursday, April 18, 2002.
Robert R. Short contributed the summary of Professor Moran's lecture to this article.
