(www.scstatehouse.gov)

The Louis D. Brandeis Center is proud to announce that Representative Alan D. Clemmons will be speaking at LDB’s upcoming Fifth Annual Law Student Leadership Conference, taking place in Washington, D.C. on February 25 – 26, 2018.

Alan D. Clemmons is a member of the South Carolina House of Representatives and a leader in the fight against anti-Semitism and the Boycotts, Divestment, and Sanctions movement against Israel. He was first elected to the chamber in 2002 and has served in various leadership roles. He presently serves on the Ways and Means Committee and the Rules Committee, which he chairs.

In 2015, Representative Clemmons introduced South Carolina’s anti-BDS bill, the first of its kind in the United States, which bans the state of South Carolina from contracting with companies that boycott Israel.   Through a multi-state network of pro-Israel legislators that he assembled, to date, nearly half of the U.S. states have followed his great example and passed their own versions of anti-BDS legislation. In 2016, Representative Clemmons introduced H.3643, South Carolina’s Anti-Semitism Awareness Act, which will ensure crucial legal protection of the rights of Jewish students. It defines anti-Semitism using the U.S. Department of State’s definition and will provide South Carolina public post-secondary institutions with the means to fight discrimination of Jewish students. It passed the House and is expected to be passed by the Senate soon.

Clemmons was also the author of the Israel Plank of the 2016 Republican Platform which set the stage for the relocation of the US Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. He was recently hailed in the Charleston Post and Courier as the “leading pro-Israel policy maker in the United States at any level.”

Clemmons earned his B.S. from Coastal Carolina University and his J.D. from Minnesota’s Hamline University School of Law. He works as a Real Estate Attorney in his Myrtle Beach, South Carolina Law Practice, Clemmons Law Firm, LLC

Representative Clemmons will join other speakers, such as keynote speaker Irwin Cotler, and contribute to discussing topics including civil rights law; international law and the Arab-Israeli Conflict; how to use legal tools to combat anti-Semitism, including alt-right racism, white supremacy, and neo-Nazism, as well as the Boycotts, Divestment, and Sanctions movement; combating anti-Semitism legislatively, and others. Students will be given the opportunity to engage with each other in a dialogue about the issues facing them as aspiring lawyers and proponents of civil rights for the Jewish people and all people through a series of lectures, panels, and roundtable discussions. The full list of speakers will be announced soon.