W. Lewis Burke

Professor of Law
Department of Clinical Legal Studies

Contact Information Room 131-1 USC School of Law 701 Main Street Columbia, South Carolina 29208 v 803-777-2278 f 803-777-3401 Email

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Profile

Lewis Burke is Director of Clinical Education and Chair of the Department of Clinical Legal Studies. He teaches Alternative Dispute Resolution, Consumer Bankruptcy, Interviewing, Counseling, & Negotiation, and Trial Advocacy. The new courses this year will be the Veterans Rights Placement Clinic and Issues in Civil Rights Legal History. Lewis is also affiliate faculty in the University's African-American Studies Program. Before joining the faculty in 1978, he was a VISTA Volunteer and a legal services attorney.

Burke's chief research interest is in legal history with an emphasis on African Americans and civil rights. He is writing a book for the University of Georgia Press on the history of black lawyers in South Carolina. Two additional major projects are an article on black civil rights lawyers in the Jim Crow South and a book on Pink Franklin: the NAACP's first legal client. Burke has authored or co-edited four other books: At Freedom's Door: African American Founding Fathers and Lawyers in Reconstruction South Carolina (2000); Matthew J. Perry: The Man, His Times and His Legacy (2004), The Dawn of Religious Freedom in South Carolina (2006); and Truth in Lending and Credit Disclosures (1986). He is a frequent contributor to " ... And Miles to Go Before I Sleep," edited by Fred Sheheen (2004). His articles have appeared in the American Journal of Legal History, S.C. Law Review, The Nineteenth American History Journal, and the Journal of Contemporary Law. His most recent article was "Killing, Cheating, Legislating and Lying: A History of Voting Rights in South Carolina after the Civil War," 57 S.C. Law. Rev. 859 (2006). He presented papers at the American Society for Legal History, the Southern Historical Association, and at USC's Symposium on the 40th Anniversary of the Voting Rights Act, and at the Southeastern Association of Law Schools annual meeting in the summer of 2005.

Illustrative of Burke's extensive research are his articles on the post-Reconstruction corruption trial of Francis Lewis Cardozo. These articles were based on the use of one of the prosecutor's handwritten notes from the trial, newspaper accounts and others records. The article reveals the racial and political motivations behind the prosecution and clearly demonstrates the injustice of Cardozo's conviction. Joel Williamson of the University of North Carolina described the research as creative and the article as "superb." Williamson is the author of such well known and award winning works as After Slavery and The Crucible of Race. Eric Foner of Columbia University said the article is "fascinating and important." Foner the preeminent historian on Reconstruction further said "no one that I know of has done the indepth job of research to unravel a case like Cardozo's ...... and the implications of Burke's findings go well beyond this one case."