Professor Etienne Toussaint, Fellow, had his 2024 MLK Lecture at Villanova Law School, Abolition, Dignity, and Amazing Grace, published in the Villanova Law Review. His essay The Sound of the Beast was published in UCLA Law Review Discourse, which engages with Devon Carbado’s latest book, Unreasonable: Black Lives, Police Power, and the Fourth Amendment.
The lecture published in the Villanova Law Review features Professor Toussaint’s exploration of Dr. King’s legacy in pursuit of racial justice and multiracial democracy in America through the lens of his grandmother’s urban gardening practice – using gardening as a metaphor for social transformation. In The Sound of the Beast, Professor Toussaint bridges Carbado’s analysis of racialized policing with Toni Morrison’s portrayal of Black life in her novel The Bluest Eye, as well as his own formative experiences in a Black urban neighborhood in the South Bronx during the 1980s and 1990s.
Professor Toussaint is currently an associate professor at the University of South Carolina Joseph F. Rice School of Law, where he teaches Contracts, Business Associations, Law and Political Economy, and Critical Legal History. Toussaint has served as a Board Member of the Washington Council of Lawyers, a National Advisory Board Member of the National Black Law Students Association, and a member of the American Bar Association Commission on Homelessness and Poverty, and is currently on the Advisory Board of the Georgetown Journal on Poverty Law & Policy.
Read the Villanova Law Review Lecture here and The Sound of the Beast here.