On March 2, the Academy Awards held their 97th ceremony, awarding 23 categories for achievement in film. Some categories have changed over the years, while others have been scrapped or swapped to meet modern standards. But one category has remained the same—the awards for acting.
Professor Lawrence R. Jones
Performance awards also hold another distinction. Since the Oscar’s inception, it has been and remains the only category segregated by gender.
That stood out to Lawrence R. Jones.
“It always struck me as odd that those rules were set up 100 years ago, when women did not have equal rights. Why do these rules still exist now, without any social questioning?” asks Jones.
Jones is a former New Jersey Superior Court judge who retired from the bench in 2017. He taught constitutional law for a time at Montclair State University and then Monmouth University, where he gained a reputation for assigning unique projects.
“While studying through textbooks and PowerPoints can have value, if that is all that students are asked to do, they can be missing out on a valuable opportunity to stretch their minds, and strengthen critical thinking skills by addressing new and complex current-day issues,” says Jones.
In August 2023, he brought his creative thinking to the University of New Mexico, where he charged his first group of constitutional law students to take a critical look at the Academy Awards.
