Kristin Henning to Deliver 2021 Katz Lecture
Annual Lecture scheduled for Oct. 18
Professor Kristin Henning from Georgetown Law will deliver the 7th Annual Katheryn D. Katz ’70 Memorial Lecture on Monday, October 18, 2021.
The lecture – titled, “Race, Adolescence, and Trauma: The Criminalization of Black Youth in America” – will start at 5 p.m. and be livestreamed via Zoom.
Henning is the Blume Professor of Law and Director of the Juvenile Justice Clinic and Initiative at Georgetown Law, where she and her law students represent youth accused of delinquency in Washington, DC. Henning was previously the Lead Attorney for the Juvenile Unit of the D.C. Public Defender Service and is currently the Director of the Mid-Atlantic Juvenile Defender Center. She has been representing children accused of crime for more than 25 years.
The Katheryn D. Katz ’70 Lecture Series was established in 2014 to focus on the family law topics that Professor Katz made central to her teaching, including domestic violence, gender and the law, children and the law, reproductive rights, and inequality. Previous Katz lectures were delivered by Professors Melissa Breger (2015), Donna Young (2016), Mary A. Lynch (2017), Stephen Clark (2018), Jessica Knouse ’04 of the University of Toledo College of Law (2019), and Rutgers Law School Co-Dean and Professor Kimberly Mutcherson (2020).
Henning trains state actors across the country on the impact of racial bias in the juvenile and criminal legal systems. Her workshops help stakeholders recognize their own biases and develop strategies to counter them. She also worked closely with the McArthur Foundation’s Juvenile Indigent Defense Action Network to develop a 41-volume Juvenile Training Immersion Program (JTIP), a national training curriculum for juvenile defenders. She now co-hosts, with the National Juvenile Defender Center (NJDC), an annual week-long JTIP summer academy for defenders. In 2019, Kris partnered with NJDC to launch a Racial Justice Toolkit for youth advocates, and again in 2020, to launch the Ambassadors for Racial Justice program, a year-long program for juvenile defenders committed to challenging racial injustice in the juvenile legal system through litigation and systemic reform.
Henning writes extensively about race, adolescence, and policing. Her new book, The Rage of Innocence: How America Criminalizes Black Youth, is forthcoming with Pantheon Books (Penguin Random House) on September 28, 2021. Her previous work appears in journals and books such as Policing the Black Man: Arrest, Prosecution and Imprisonment (2017, edited by Angela J. Davis) and Punishment in Popular Culture (2015, edited by Charles J. Ogletree, Jr. and Austin Sarat). Race features prominently in her articles such as The Reasonable Black Child: Race, Adolescence and the Fourth Amendment, 67 Am. U. L. Rev. 1513 (2018).
Henning is the recipient of many honors, including the 2021 Juvenile Leadership Prize.
She received a B.A. from Duke University, a J.D. from Yale Law School, and an LL.M. from Georgetown Law.
