A Conversation with Eric Holder: Voting Rights and Inequality in the U.S.

The third annual Payton Distinguished Lectureship will feature remarks from The Honorable Eric Holder followed by an in-depth conversation on voting rights and inequality in the U.S. moderated by Associate Professor of Politics Amanda Hollis-Brusky.

Holder served as Attorney General of the United States from February 2009 to April 2015. As the third-longest serving Attorney General in U.S. history and the first African American to hold that office, Holder is an internationally recognized leader across a broad range of regulatory enforcement, criminal justice, and national security issues. In 2014, Time magazine named him to its list of 100 Most Influential People, noting that he had “worked tirelessly to ensure equal justice.” Including his tenure as Attorney General, Holder has served in government for more than thirty years, having been appointed to various positions requiring U.S. Senate confirmation by Presidents Obama, Clinton and Reagan.

Holder now chairs the National Democratic Redistricting Committee (NDRC), the first-ever strategic hub for a comprehensive redistricting strategy. Using a four-part strategy focused on advancing legal action, mobilizing grassroots energy, supporting reforms and winning targeted elections, NDRC's mission is to ensure the next round of redistricting is fair and that district maps reflect the will of the voters.

Professor Hollis-Brusky teaches courses on American politics, constitutional law, and legal institutions in the Politics Department at Pomona College. A go-to expert on Supreme Court politics, she has written and spoken about the Supreme Court and the conservative legal movement in various media outlets, including NPR’s All Things Considered, BBC World News, the New Yorker, the Los Angeles Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Washington Post, New York Magazine, Newsweek, AirTalk with Larry Mantel, KCRW’s Press Play and California Edition. Hollis-Brusky is also a co-founder of the Southern California Law and Social Science Forum.

The Pomona College Board of Trustees endowed the John A. Payton ’73 Distinguished Lectureship in memory of John Payton's life and influential career as a renowned civil rights attorney, president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and a member of the Pomona College Board of Trustees, and in honor of David W. Oxtoby, ninth president of Pomona College. This is the third Payton Lecture.