About the Center

The above words were written in 2016, when Fordham's Center on Race, Law and Justice was first launched, but could have easily been written today. Indeed, given the ongoing protests over police violence, the racial inequities brought to the surface by Covid-19, and an administration that seems openly hostile to racial minorities, the work of the Center on Race, Law and Justice seems more urgent than ever. 

Since its launch in 2016, the Center on Race, Law and Justice has become a national voice in: 

• intervening in current debates about race, citizenship, and democracy
• promoting critical, interdisciplinary, and methodologically innovative scholarship and approaches to understanding race and discrimination
• generating insights and solutions necessary to achieve real and positive change on race issues
• collaborating with law firms and other legal institutions to address issues of diversity and access in the legal profession
• establishing the LEAP pipeline program (now call IDEAL) to increase diversity in education and the law by identifying talented underrepresented college students in the New York City area and exposing them to the legal profession

Our Mission

Going forward, and with its new Director, Professor Bennett Capers, the Center on Race, Law and Justice is committed to playing an even greater role for students at Fordham Law School, and for the community at large, both domestically and internationally. Law schools have always played an important role in the movement for equality. The Center looks forward to being at the vanguard of that movement. 

The Center works to generate innovative responses to racial inequality and discrimination. It prioritizes law, data, and social science-informed interventions capable of creating concrete change in communities, institutions, and public policy in a number of areas in the domestic and global contexts.  The Center maximizes real-world impact through cross-disciplinary collaborations, comparative analyses, and systemic interventions that push the boundaries of traditional approaches to race and inequality.  Founded in early 2016, the Center marks an effort to marshal the tremendous research capacity and expertise at Fordham University on race and urban issues directly relevant to the University’s social justice mission, location in New York City, and status as one of the premiere research institutions in the country.