Sunny Hostin, CNN legal analyst and news anchor for ABC news, will speak at the 4th annual Ortique Lecture at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 19, in Georges Auditorium.
And next semester, as part of President Walter Kimbrough’s “Brain Food” lecture series, Dr. Sampson Davis, the African-American doctor and best-selling author, is among those scheduled to speak.
The Ortigue Lecture on Law and Society was named after Justice Revius O. Ortique Jr., a civil rights activist and the first African American elected to the Louisiana Supreme Court in 1992. He also is a Dillard graduate who was on the Board of Trustees for more than 40 years. The Mock Trial Center in the Professional Studies Building is named after him.
This year’s Ortigue lecturer, Hostin, has covered many of the major legal and political stories over the years, including the Casey Anthony and Conrad Murray trials, George Zimmerman, Bernie Madoff, Elliot Spitzer and the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints polygamy case.
Meanwhile, Davis is the first of three or four lecturers to be selected by the president for “Brain Food” in the spring. No date or time has been announced yet, and Kimbrough said he is still working on completing the spring list of guests.
Davis, raised in a large family in a poor New Jersey neighborhood, made a pact with two high school friends Rameck Hunt and George Jenkins to become doctors. They did and founded The Three Doctors Foundation, offering free public programs focused on health, education, leadership and mentoring. He wrote the New York Times best-seller “The Pact” about his experiences and followed up this year with “Living and Dying in Brick City: An ER Doctor Returns Home.”
Kimbrough said he decided to expand DU-sponsored lectures to bring more interesting people for the good of the university and the community: “Dillard has a long history of being a cultural hub.”
Kimbrough had a lecture series similar to “Brain Food” at Philander Smith called “Bless the Mic,” which he said became the model for HUBCU lecture series all across the country. The president is aiming to have three to four speakers a semester, with a portion of expenses covered by sponsors Harrah’s and Sodexho.
The series this fall has included the Rev. Jim Wallis, author and founder of the Sojourners community, and Dr. Clarence Jones, the former speechwriter for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Previous Ortique lecturers have included U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder Jr., 2010; Judge Carl E. Stewart, chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeal for the Fifth Circuit, 2011; and civil rights lawyer and legal scholar Michelle Alexander, 2012.
The Mock Trial Center offers a collection of archival papers, a series of pre-law scholarships and the annual lecture on Law and Society.
(Danielle Miller and Julian Render contributed to this report.)
