1. Maureen Edobor Publishes Article in the UCLA Law Review

Maureen Edobor Publishes Article in the UCLA Law Review The article advocates for a constitutional "right to truth" in public education to confront censorship and protect democracy.

By Law Communications
January 27, 2026

Washington and Lee law professor Maureen Edobor has published an article in the UCLA Law Review. The article, titled "The Right to Truth," examines efforts to censor accurate historical narratives in public education and proposes a constitutional framework to protect democracy.

"This Article argues that today's anti-CRT statutes, book bans, and "divisive concepts" laws are not isolated culture-war skirmishes but the latest chapter in a long campaign-dating back to the Lost Cause and the United Daughters of the Confederacy-to legislate white innocence as national identity. By sanitizing slavery, suppressing discussions of systemic racism, and threatening educators with punitive ambiguity, these laws flatten historical truth and convert classrooms into zones of anticipatory obedience. The result is a state-engineered amnesia that undermines the core First and Fourteenth Amendment protections the Supreme Court has recognized for more than a century, from Meyer and Barnette to Tinker and Pico," writes Professor Edobor.

Professor Edobor goes on to advance a constitutional "right to truth" in public education, which she describes as a "substantive due process safeguard rooted in the nation's history, philosophical commitments to intellectual liberty, and long-standing First Amendment principles."

"Recognizing such a right is essential to preserving students' ability to access accurate historical narratives, engage in democratic reasoning, and resist state-mandated orthodoxy," writes Professor Edobor. "At a moment when public education is being weaponized to construct a sanitized national myth, the right to truth offers a necessary constitutional framework to confront these censorship regimes and protect the democratic project itself."

The full article is available online at the W&L Law Scholarly Commons.

Professor Edobor joined the faculty in 2023. She teaches and writes in constitutional law, election law, and democratic theory, and serves as a Theodore DeLaney Center Fellow focusing on Southern race relations, politics, and culture. Her scholarship examines how constitutional and election law doctrines influence access to democratic participation and shape collective understandings of civic identity.

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