Lawyer and Historian Paul Lombardo to Deliver Lecture on Buck v. Priddy Court Case The Nov. 18 lecture is open to the public and marks the centenary of the case argued in Amherst County, Virginia.
Paul Lombardo, Regents’ Professor and Bobby Lee Cook Professor of Law at Georgia State University College of Law, will deliver a lecture titled “Carrie Buck on Trial: A Centennial Retrospective” at Washington and Lee University on Monday, Nov. 18 at 5:30 p.m. in Hillel 101.
Lombardo’s lecture is free and open to the public. The event is sponsored by the Frances Lewis Law Center, the Roger Mudd Center for Ethics, the Leyburn Scholars in Anthropology Program, the Department of History, the Department of Philosophy, the Department of Sociology and Anthropology and the Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies Program.
Lombardo is a leading scholar in the legal history of the American eugenics movement and has published extensively on topics in health law, medico-legal history and bioethics. From 2011 to 2016, he served as a senior adviser to the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues, and his work has been cited and his interviews quoted across major news outlets, including NPR, CBS and CNN.
The lecture marks the centenary of the Buck v. Priddy court case argued in Amherst County, Virginia, in 1924 — a case that evolved into the Buck v. Bell case argued before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1927 and its ruling that compulsory sterilization is in the nation’s interest.
In his talk, Lombardo will discuss the Buck case, its impacts and its continuing legacies.
Enacted in 1924, Virginia’s eugenic sterilization law allowed state institutions to operate on individuals to prevent the conception of what were believed to be “genetically inferior” children. Charlottesville native Carrie Buck, who had been involuntarily committed to a state facility near Lynchburg, was the first person to be sterilized under the new law. Buck v. Bell ultimately affirmed the Virginia law and more than 8,000 Virginians were sterilized before parts of the law were repealed in 1974. In 2002, Lombardo sponsored the historical marker located in Charlottesville that commemorates the Buck v. Bell case and corrects the record of the court’s ruling.
Before joining the George State Law faculty in 2006, Lombardo taught at the University of Virginia’s School of Law and School of Medicine, where he also directed the Center for Mental Health Law at the Institute of Law, Psychiatry and Public Policy, and the Program in Law and Medicine at the Center for Biomedical Ethics. Lombardo is the author of “Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court and Buck v. Bell” (2008) and “A Century of Eugenics in America: From the Indiana Experiment to the Human Genome Era” (2011). He received his bachelor’s degree from Rockhurst College and his J.D. from the University of Virginia.
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