Professor of Law and Dean's Distinguished Scholar Charlton Copeland was awarded a Mellon CREATES grant through the collaboration with the UM libraries and the Lowe Art Museum. His project titled “Confronting Jim Crow Miami” will focus on the papers of Reverend Canon Theodore Gibson who was the President of the Miami NAACP, and whose fight with the Florida legislature over revealing the group’s membership list went to the U.S. Supreme Court in Gibson v Florida Legislative Investigative Committee (1963).
Copeland was also honored recently as the 2021 recipient of the Clyde Ferguson Award, the highest award bestowed by the Association of American Law Schools Section on Minority Groups. He teaches Civil Procedure I and II, Federal Courts, Administrative Law, and the Regulatory State. In addition, he has served as the Faculty Coordinator of the Florida Supreme Court Internship Program, and the Washington, DC Externship Program, where he teaches Federal Policy Making: Legislation, Regulation and Litigation. He is a 2015 recipient of the Richard Hausler Golden Apple Award for the faculty member contributing the most to the student body both academically and through his or her extracurricular activities.
His scholarship has focused primarily on the ways in which federalism as a constitutional and political structure is mediated in: the relationship between federal and state courts, the jurisprudence of remedies for state violations of federal law, and the relationship between state and federal implementation of federal policy. In addition, he has written about the intersection between law and theology as they relate to religion’s role in American democracy and the framing of liberationist critiques of same sex marriage.
