Taja-Nia Y. Henderson (Rutgers) has published a new article in the Iowa Law Review:
Lutie Lytle
‘I Shall Talk to My Own People’: The Intersectional Life and Times of Lutie A. Lytle, 102 Iowa L. Rev. 1983 (2017). For those not familiar with Lytle, she was the daughter of slaves who became a law professor. Here is an abstract of the article:
In the fall of 1898, the Chicago Tribune hailed Lutie A. Lytle of Topeka as the “only female law instructor in the world.” Notwithstanding this purported shattering of the legal academy’s glass ceiling, Lytle’s accomplishments — her path to the professoriate, and her career in the years following her appointment to the faculty of a Nashville law school — have been largely lost to historians of legal education. She is not among
those honored or commemorated by our profession, and her name is largely unknown beyond a small circle of interest. The biographical sketch that follows fills this scholarly gap through an examination of Lytle as a historical figure, using contemporary newspaper accounts and other primary source material to provide context for her achievements and linking her life to previously understudied legal, political and social movements.
The full article is available here.
Taja-Nia Y. Henderson
Some colleagues may not know that Professor Lytle’s legacy lives on in the Lutie Lytle Black Women Law Faculty Writing Workshop, an annual workshop for current and aspiring black women law faculty. More info about the Lytle Workshop is available here.
