Seminary of the Southwest announced recently that the speaker for the 2025 Commencement Exercises will be noted lawyer, author, and founder and Executive Director of the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI ), Bryan Stevenson. Mr. Stevenson will also be awarded an honorary doctorate from the seminary at the service.
The 74th Commencement Exercises of Seminary of the Southwest will be a service of morning prayer held at 10 a.m. on Wednesday, May 21, 2025 at the Episcopal Church of the Good Shepherd.
“Bryan Stevenson’s work with the Equal Justice Initiative has been transformative for challenging racial and economic injustice,” said Dr. Scott Bader-Saye, dean and president. “Last summer I visited the Legacy Sites of EJI in Montgomery with our students on the Civil Rights Pilgrimage. The sites—combining art, history, and powerful storytelling—gave us a profound window onto Black experience in this country. We are fortunate to have someone of such vision, grace, and courage delivering our commencement sermon.”
Under Stevenson’s leadership, EJI has won major legal challenges eliminating excessive and unfair sentencing, exonerating innocent death row prisoners, confronting abuse of the incarcerated and the mentally ill, and aiding children prosecuted as adults.
Mr. Stevenson has argued and won multiple cases at the United States Supreme Court, including a 2019 ruling protecting condemned prisoners who suffer from dementia and a landmark 2012 ruling that banned mandatory life-imprisonment-without-parole sentences for all children 17 or younger. Mr. Stevenson and his staff have won reversals, relief, or release from prison for over 140 wrongly condemned prisoners on death row and won relief for hundreds of others wrongly convicted or unfairly sentenced.
He is the author of the critically acclaimed New York Times bestseller, Just Mercy, which was named by Time Magazine as one of the 10 Best Books of Nonfiction for 2014.
In 2016, he was the featured speaker at Seminary of the Southwest’s Blandy Lecture and Alumni Convocation. To accommodate demand, the lecture that year was held at the LBJ Library at the University of Texas
Mr. Stevenson’s work has won him numerous awards including the prestigious MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Prize; the ABA Medal, the American Bar Association’s highest honor; the National Medal of Liberty from the American Civil Liberties Union after he was nominated by United States Supreme Court Justice John Stevens; the Public Interest Lawyer of the Year by the National Association of Public Interest Lawyers; and the Olaf Palme Prize in Stockholm, Sweden for international human rights.
