Leaders from across the generations of the UCLA School of Law community gathered for a three-day summit to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Critical Race Studies program, reflect on its massive impact in the law and education, and look ahead.

The symposium – titled “Think. Teach. Transform. 25 Years of Critical Race Studies” – took place at the law school from Oct. 23 to 25 and featured a who’s who of scholars and advocates in the space of Critical Race Theory and civil rights law.

“I want to note what a point of pride our CRS program is for UCLA Law and UCLA,” said Michael Waterstone, UCLA Law’s dean, in his welcoming remarks. “We pay our respect today and celebrate the founding faculty members, most of whom I think are here today. From an institutional perspective, these are some our incredibly valuable institutional citizens that, apart from building the CRS program, built UCLA Law into what it is.”

The CRS program was founded at UCLA Law in 2000. That was an important moment in the history of the field and higher education because it marked the first – and, still, only – time that a law school opened its doors to serve as the institutional home of the leading professors, students, and other leaders in Critical Race Theory. In the decades since, the program has grown significantly. Each year, roughly 200 J.D. students, plus other LL.M. and S.J.D. students, specialize in Critical Race Studies. Graduates of the program have gone on to serve as leaders across the country, including as lawyers in the public interest and law professors who train succeeding generations of advocates. And former core faculty members have expanded the program’s reach through their continued work at other top law schools.

Many of those people returned for the symposium, which served as both a homecoming and, for current UCLA Law students, an introduction to many of the greats in the field.

Four of CRS’s founding faculty members – Kimberlé Crenshaw, Laura E. Gómez, Cheryl Harris, and Jerry Kang – anchored panels that highlighted the festivities. Their discussions included the retrospective “From Theory to Program: The Establishment of Critical Race Studies,” the dynamic “Think Bold, New Ideas,” and the forward-focused “Teach Future Leaders and Scholars.” (Read the symposium’s program for a full view of the schedule and distinguished participants.)

“What [our founding faculty members, students, and alumni] created has endured. CRS has trained hundreds of lawyers, many of whom are here, who now fight in courtrooms, classrooms, legislatures, and social movements, and it has produced pathbreaking scholarship that has shaped debates around the world,” said Jasleen Kohli, the CRS program’s executive director. “And it has nurtured a community – this beautiful community that’s here – one that insists on thinking critically, teaching boldly, and transforming relentlessly.”

The event was organized and presented by a faculty committee that included Kohli; LaToya Baldwin Clark, who serves as the CRS program’s faculty director; Harris; Kang; Sunita Patel, who is the faculty director of the David J. Epstein Program in Public Interest Law and Policy and faculty director of the Veterans Legal Clinic; and Lauren van Schilfgaarde ’12, herself a UCLA Law alumna, who is the assistant director of the law school’s Native Nations Law and Policy Center.

“I’m humbled not only by the community but by just the raw sparks here, just the firepower that you see,” Kang said during one of the panel conversations. “Holding other people to account, holding power to account, is best done when we also hold ourselves accountable. … That practice, leveraging everything we know from every discipline, is the only thing that we can actually possibly do in this moment: to hold all of us to account, to a vision of a more basic, just society that we hope to leave the next generation with.”

Read more about the incredible legacy of the CRS program in the UCLA Law magazine, and dive into the pathbreaking perspectives that several faculty members shared on the 20th anniversary of the program, which happened in 2020, amid the pandemic and national racial reckoning.