Why Attend?
- Join us at the Virginia Holocaust Museum in Richmond for an extremely relevant hour of live-interactive CLE by a national expert focused on the law and practice of hate crimes
- Stay for dinner and a brief ceremony where John Grisham will receive the Rule of Law Award and David P. Bobzien will posthumously be awarded the Civility in Law Award
- Guests welcome
“History teaches us that intolerance, unchecked, leads to persecution and violence,” said a statement co-authored by members of the Association of Holocaust Organizations in response to a surge of hate crimes in 2016.
The FBI has defined a hate crime as “a criminal offense against a person or property motivated in whole or in part by an offender’s bias against a race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, ethnicity, gender, or gender identity.” Hate crime laws are essentially “penalty enhancement” tools for prosecutors, with statutes allowing state and federal prosecutors to charge a defendant with an added penalty and thereby seek harsher sentences.
Associate Provost and Professor Kami N. Chavis of Wake Forest University School of Law will discuss the language of Virginia hate crime laws and will compare how hate crimes are prosecuted in Virginia, other states, and federally. Professor Chavis, a former Assistant U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia who specializes in federal hate crime legislation and enforcement, will also explore whether hate crimes are on the rise, barriers to prosecution, and solutions to overcoming those limitations.
After the seminar, join us for a dinner (at no additional cost) sponsored by the Nuremberg Courtroom Committee of the Virginia Holocaust Museum and the Virginia Law Foundation, with generous support from VLF Fellow Jay Weinberg and his wife, Marilyn.
The evening will conclude with a Rule of Law Awards Program that honors individuals whose lives and work emulate the highest ideals enshrined in the principles of the Nuremberg Military Tribunal and later the International Court of Justice. This year, attorney and best-selling author John Grisham will receive the Rule of Law Award. The Civility in Law Award will be given posthumously to David P. Bobzien, past president of the Virginia State Bar and the Virginia Law Foundation.
Guests not seeking CLE credit are welcome free of charge,
but must pre-register by emailing Tanya Morris at tmorris@vacle.org.