Maria L. Marcus
Professor

Professor Maria L. Marcus, a graduate of Yale Law School, is the author of Learning Together: Justice Marshall’s Desegregation Opinions, and served as an Assistant Attorney General of New York State and Chief of its Litigation bureau, arguing cases in federal courts, including several before the United States Supreme Court. She was Associate Counsel at the NAACP’s national office and participated in Supreme Court cases that dismantled segregation statutes throughout the South.

Sheila Foster
Professor

Sheila Foster is the Albert A. Walsh Professor of Law at Fordham University and Co-Director of the Stein Center for Law and Ethics. From 1994 to 2001, she was a Professor of Law at the Rutgers University in Camden, New Jersey. She received her B.A. in English, with honors, from the University of Michigan–Ann Arbor and her J.D. in from Boalt Hall School of Law at the University of California–Berkeley.

Professor Foster is the author of numerous publications on civil rights/constitutional law, race and legal theory, and environmental law. Her primary scholarship, however, is dedicated to exploring the intersection of civil rights and environmental law, in a field called “environmental justice.” The movement for environmental justice has called attention to the widespread inequitable distribution of a variety of environmental hazards (hazardous wastes, air pollution, lead, etc.) on low-income and minority communities. Professor Foster’s scholarship carefully delineates the legal, political, economic and social forces in producing this inequitable distribution and suggests legal reforms to alleviate it.

She has published in top law reviews, including the California Law Review and the Harvard Environmental Law Review. Professor Foster is a coauthor (with Luke Cole of the Center for Race, Poverty and the Environment) of the book From the Ground Up: Environmental Racism and the Rise of the Environmental Justice Movement, published by N.Y.U Press (2001; second edition forthcoming in 2010). She is also co-editor (with Michael Gerrard) of The Law of Environmental Justice: Theories and Procedures to Address Disproportionate Risks (ABA, 2008).

Craig Renaud
Director

To mark the 50th anniversary of the forced integration of Central High School, Little Rock natives Brent and Craig Renaud provide a candid look at the lives of contemporary Central High students. The HBO documentary explores the legacy of desegregation and the challenges facing American education today.

In 2005, their HBO documentary Dope Sick Love (co-directed with Felice Conte) followed two drug-addicted couples on the streets of New York City for 18 months, and was nominated for an Emmy Award for Best Documentary. Today, Dope Sick Love is used extensively by social workers and drug rehabilitation centers around the country as an educational tool. The Renaud brothers also directed and produced the award-winning series Off to War, which marked the first time in the history of television that a single unit of soldiers was followed throughout an entire deployment at war. The Renaud brothers were nominated as best directors by the Directors Guild of America for the series.