Expert On Eugenics To Give Talk At W&L

Expert On Eugenics To Give Talk At W&L

Professor Paul Lombardo, an historian and lawyer currently on the faculty at Georgia Southern University, will give the talk “Carrie Buck on Trial: A Centennial Retrospective” Nov. 18 at Washington and Lee University’s Hillel House, room 101, at 5:30 p.m. Lombardo will discuss the Buck case, its impacts and its continuing legacies. The talk is free and open to the public.

This year marks the centenary of Buck v. Priddy’s being argued in Amherst County on Nov. 18, 1924. The Amherst Buck v. Priddy case evolved into the Supreme Court Buck v. Bell case (1927) and its ruling that compulsory sterilization is in the nation’s interest. As Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote, “It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.”

According to the Georgia Southern University website, Lombardo has published extensively on topics in health law, medico-legal history, and bioethics and is best known for his work on the legal history of the American eugenics movement. His books include “Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court and Buck v. Bell” (2008) and “A Century of Eugenics in America: From the Indiana Experiment to the Human Genome Era (2011).”

The talk is sponsored by the Frances Lewis Law Center, the History Department, the Leyburn Scholars in Anthropology Program, the Philosophy Department, the Roger Mudd Center for Ethics, the Sociology and Anthropology Department, and the Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies Program. It is being organized by Alison Bell, professor of anthropology.