Exactly 92 years after the infamous Buck v. Bell decision, the Center presents a partial screening of “A Dangerous Idea: Eugenics, Genetics and the American Dream”—an award-winning documentary exploring the legal history of the eugenics movement in the United States. Following the screening, join the film’s co-writer and executive producer Andrew Kimbrell, acclaimed author and journalist Daniel Okrent, and law and bioethics scholars Paul Lombardo and Dorothy Roberts for a conversation exploring the dark history of eugenics and the Constitution. Jeffrey Rosen, president and CEO of the National Constitution Center, moderates.
Participants
- Andrew Kimbrell is an internationally recognized public interest attorney, public speaker, and author. He is the founder and Executive Director of Center for Food Safety. He also is Director of the Center for Technology Assessment, co-founder of Foundation Earth, and President of the Board of Humane Farm Animal Care. Kimbrell is co-writer and executive producer of A Dangerous Idea: Eugenics, Genetics, and the American Dream.
- Paul Lombardo is the Regents’ Professor and Bobby Lee Cook Professor of Law at Georgia State University College of Law. He is also a lawyer/historian who served from 2011-2016 as a senior advisor to the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues. His books include: Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court and Buck v. Bell and A Century of Eugenics in America: From the Indiana Experiment to the Human Genome Era.
- Daniel Okrent was the first public editor of The New York Times, editor-at-large of Time, Inc., and managing editor of Life magazine. He worked in book publishing as an editor at Knopf and Viking, and was editor-in-chief of general books at Harcourt Brace. He was a featured commentator on two Ken Burns series, and his newest book is The Guarded Gate: Bigotry, Eugenics and the Law That Kept Two Generations of Jews, Italians, and Other European Immigrants Out of America.
- Dorothy Roberts joined the University of Pennsylvania as its 14th Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor with joint appointments in the Departments of Africana Studies and Sociology and the Law School where she holds the inaugural Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander chair. She is also founding director of the Penn Program on Race, Science & Society in the Center for Africana Studies.
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Jeffrey Rosen is the president and CEO of the National Constitution Center, a nonpartisan nonprofit organization devoted to educating the public about the U.S. Constitution. Rosen is also professor of law at The George Washington University Law School and a contributing editor of The Atlantic.
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