Ruth Colker, one of the leading scholars in the areas of constitutional law and disability discrimination, will discuss “Politics Trump Science: The Collision Between No Child Left Behind and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act,” at 4 p.m. Thursday, April 10, in the Levitt Auditorium of the Boyd Law Building.

Colker is the Distinguished University Professor and Heck-Faust Memorial Chair in Constitutional Law at Moritz College of Law at The Ohio State University. She is giving the 2014 Inaugural Richards Lecture in the UI College of Law, which is free and open to the public.

Colker will discuss the alignment between No Child Left Behind and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.

She is the author of 12 books, two of which have won book prizes. She has also published more than 50 articles in law journals such as the Harvard Law Review, Yale Law Journal, Columbia Law Journal, Pennsylvania Law Review, University of Virginia Law Review, and University of Michigan Law Journal.

She has been a frequent guest on National Public Radio to comment on disability and constitutional law topics. In addition to her heavy scholarly output, Colker is an innovator in the classroom. The students in her disability discrimination class produce accessibility studies that have been helpful to The Ohio State University in trying to attain better accessibility.

Before joining the faculty at Moritz College of Law, Colker taught at Tulane University, the University of Toronto, the University of Pittsburgh, and in the women’s studies graduate program at George Washington University. She also spent four years working as a trial attorney in the Civil Rights Division of the United States Department of Justice, where she received two awards for outstanding performance.

The Richards lecture is made possible by an endowed fund held at the Iowa Law School Foundation known as the Stanley and Gail Richards Endowed Fund for Disability Law. This fund was created by a major gift from Stanley and Gail Richards. Stanley Richards earned two degrees from the UI; a Bachelor of Science in Commerce in 1955 and a Juris Doctor in 1958. Today’s inaugural Richards Lecture supports the purpose of the fund by educating our Iowa Law community and beyond about an area of disability law.

Individuals with disabilities are encouraged to attend all UI-sponsored events. If you are a person with a disability who requires a reasonable accommodation in order to attend this lecture, contact Jill DeYoung in advance at 319-335-9028 or jill-deyoung@uiowa.edu.