Renowned legal scholar, civil rights advocate, and former judge Margaret A. Burnham will deliver a talk on her acclaimed book By Hands Now Known: Jim Crow’s Legal Executioners on April 8 at 7 p.m. in Gasson 100. By Hands Now Known is a “paradigm-shifting investigation of Jim Crow-era violence, the legal apparatus that sustained it, and its enduring legacy.” A University Distinguished Professor of Law at Northeastern University, Burnham is the founder of Northeastern University School of Law’s Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project (CRRJ). Through CRRJ, Burnham has led teams of law students in investigating acts of racial violence in the Jim Crow era, including hundreds of unsolved murders of Black people among other historical failures of the criminal justice system.  In 1977, she became the first African American woman to serve in the Massachusetts judiciary, when she joined the Boston Municipal Court bench as an associate justice. She was among four scholars appointed to serve on the Civil Rights Cold Case Records Review Board, a national initiative charged with reviewing the records of murders and other acts of racially motivated violence that occurred between 1940 and 1979. Her appearance is presented by the Lowell Humanities Series and cosponsored by the PULSE Program for Service Learning and Winston Center for Leadership and Ethics. The lecture is fee and open to the public, but registration is required.