I want to mention just a few of the events at the law school just this week. I hope this sampling demonstrates the kind of exciting, wide-ranging work and dialogue that is a hallmark of Berkeley Law.
9/9 - Laksham Guruswarmy, one of the world’s recognized experts in International Environmental Law and the Nicholas Doman Professor of International Environmental Law at the University of Colorado gave a talk as part of the CCELP’s Fall 2008 Events and Speaker Series. His talk was entitled: “Energy Justice: Addressing Poverty and Climate Change Through Intermediate Technology” and addressed the energy problem experienced by the energy-oppressed poor numbering 2.5 billion, who rely on fire fueled by biomass as their sole source of energy for cooking, illumination, and heating. The indoor pollutants this inefficient for of combustion releases results in the premature death of over 1.5 million children and women from pneumonia, lung cancer and asthma, and other chronic obstructive pulmonary diseases.
9/11 - Eric K. Yamamoto, Professor of Law at the University of Hawai’i, delivers the Honorable Mario G. Olmos Law & Cultural Diversity Memorial Lecture, presented by the Thelton E. Henderson Center for Social Justice. Professor Yamamoto’s lecture is entitled “Rethinking Reconciliation: Social Healing Through Justice”.
Professor Yamamoto is known for his legal work and scholarship on civil rights and racial justice, with an emphasis on reparations for historic injustice. In 1984 he served as coram nobis co-counsel to Fred Korematsu in the successful reopening the infamous WWII Japanese American internment case, Korematsu v. U.S.. He worked on the legal team for Manuel Fragante in his accent discrimination case to the U.S. Supreme Court and for Alice Aiwohi in her successful Hawaiian Homelands breach of trust class action resulting in a state reparations settlement of $600 million. He has written amicus briefs to the U.S. Supreme Court, most recently as co-author in the Grutter v. Michigan affirmative action case and the Rasul v. Bush post-9/11 Guantanamo Bay mass detention case, as well as a recent amicus brief to the Ninth Circuit in Doe v. Kamemameha.
9/12 - The Thelton E. Henderson Center for Social Justice presents its Fall Convening - “Transformative Justice in Communities of Color“. This will be a day-long public event that will bring together practitioners and scholars in the field.
The panelists are listed below with abbreviated bios. For their full bios please go to: http://hcsj.wordpress.com/transformative-justice-convening/panelists-profiles/
Sujatha Baliga is the Soros Justice Advocacy Fellow at Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth (RJOY) where her work focuses on juvenile justice diversion programming in Alameda County. Baliga’s personal and research interests include victims’ voices in restorative justice practices, the forgiveness of seemingly unforgivable acts, and Tibetan notions of justice.
Alfred Brophy is the Reef C. Ivey II Professor of Law at the University of North Carolina, where he teaches in the areas of property, trusts and estates, and American legal history. He is the author of Reconstructing the Dreamland: The Tulsa Riot of 1921-Race, Reparations, Reconciliation (Oxford University Press, 2002) and Reparations Pro and Con (Oxford University Press, 2006), the lead co-author of Integrating Spaces: Cases and Materials on Race and Property (forthcoming Aspen, 2009) and co-editor of Transformations in American Legal History (forthcoming Harvard, 2009). He is completing a study of jurisprudence in the old South, tentatively titled University, Court, and Slave.
Mary Louise Frampton is the Faculty Director of the Thelton E. Henderson Center for Social Justice at the UC Berkeley School of Law where she teaches in the areas of restorative justice, law and social justice. Her most current publication is “Transformative Justice and the Dismantling of Slavery’s Legacy in Post-Modern America,” a chapter in After the War on Crime: Race, Democracy, and a New Reconstruction (NYU Press, 2008) which she co-edited with Jonathan Simon and Ian Haney Lopez. Frampton was a civil rights lawyer for thirty years and continues to represent death row inmates in federal habeas cases.
Angela Harris is a Professor of Law at UC Berkeley School of Law and Chair of the Thelton E. Henderson Center for Social Justice’s Faculty Executive Committee. She teaches in the areas of criminal law, restorative justice, and environmental justice, and has writing and research focus on feminist legal theory and critical race theory. Her recent publications include Gender and Law: Theory, Doctrine, Commentary (with Katherine Bartlett) and Race and Races: Cases and Resources for a Diverse America (with Juan Perea, Richard Delgado and Stephanie Wildman).
Charles P. Henry is Professor of African American Studies at the University of California at Berkeley. Former president of the National Council for Black Studies, Henry is the author/editor of seven books and more than 80 articles and reviews on Black politics, public policy, and human rights. Before joining the University of California at Berkeley in 1981, Henry taught at Denison University and Howard University. Henry was chair of the board of directors of Amnesty International U.S.A. from 1986 to 1988 and is a former NEH Post-doctoral Fellow and American Political Science Association Congressional Fellow.
Moana Jackson is a New Zealand Māori lawyer specializing in Treaty of Waitangi and constitutional issues and is presently Director of Nga Kaiwhakamarama I Nga Ture (the Māori Legal Service) which he co-founded in 1987. He also teaches in the Maori Law and Philosophy degree program at Te Wananga o Raukawa. A graduate in Law and Criminology from Victoria University of Wellington, Jackson practiced law and then took up the teaching of Maori language. Moana Jackson has also worked extensively overseas on international indigenous issues, particularly the drafting of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. He was a judge on the International Tribunal of Indigenous Rights in Hawaii in 1993 and again in Canada in 1995. Moana Jackson is of Ngāti Kahungunu and Ngāti Porou descent.
Luz Mena is Assistant Professor of Women and Gender Studies at the University of California at Davis. She teaches and writes in areas of cultural geography, Latin American history, ethnic studies, and colonial relations. As a professor on the UC Davis Geography Graduate Group, Mena focuses on gender and geography and works with academics in many different disciplines on the environment and the law. Mena is currently researching how black and mulatto women in 1830’s Havana stretched the limits of gendered spaces.
Sherene Razack is Professor of Sociology and Equity Studies in Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto. Her research and teaching interests lie in the area of race and gender issues in the law. Her most recent book Dark Threats and White Knights: The Somalia Affair, Peacekeeping and the New Imperialism (University of Toronto Press, 2004) is an examination of the violence of Canadian peacekeepers in Somalia and an exploration of the role of law in violence enacted on racialized bodies in the new world order. Previous books include an edited collection, Race, Space and the Law: Unmapping a White Settler Society (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2002), Looking White People in the Eye: Gender, Race, and Culture in Courtrooms and Classrooms (Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1998, 1999, 2000). Dr. Razack teaches at the graduate level on racism and the law, race and knowledge production, race, space and citizenship, and marginality and the politics of resistance.
Sunny Schwartz is the Program Administrator for the San Francisco Sheriff’s Department and the creator of a groundbreaking restorative justice program, Resolve to Stop the Violence (RSVP). RSVP recently received the “Oscars in Government” Innovations in Government Award sponsored by the Harvard University Kennedy School of Government. A nationally recognized expert in criminal justice reform, she has pioneered new policy initiatives for prisoner’s programs and their reentry as well as alternatives to incarceration. She has also directed the design and operation of prisoner programs in the San Francisco county jails and supervised over 200 teaching and treatment professionals, both sworn and civilian.
Olis Simmons is the Executive Director of Youth Uprising in East Oakland with nearly 20 years of public and private sector experience in the youth leadership development, child welfare, health care and economic development fields. Simmons moves seamlessly between traditionally disparate arenas and creates bridges and leverages resources which advance youth leadership development and community-building efforts. Most recently, she guided an intensive youth centered process to design and develop Youth UpRising, a state of the art 25,000 sq. ft. youth leadership development center offering comprehensive services in East Oakland.
Andrea Lee Smith is Professor of American Culture and Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. A Cherokee intellectual, feminist, and anti-violence activist, her work focuses on issues of violence against women of color and their communities, specifically Native American women. A co-founder of INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, the Boarding School Healing Project, and the Chicago chapter of Women of All Red Nations, Smith centers the experiences of women of color in both her activism and her scholarship. As a Bunche Fellow at Amnesty International she coordinated the research project on sexual violence and American Indian women and she represented the Indigenous Women’s Network and the American Indian Law Alliance at the United Nations World Conference Against Racism in 1991. In 2005, Smith was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. She is the author of Sacred Sites, Sacred Rites (1998), Native Americans and the Christian Rights: The Gendered Politics of Unlikely Alliances (2008) and Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide, which won the 2005 Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award.
D. Kapua Sproat is an Assistant Professor at the University of Hawai’i William S. Richardson School of Law’s Center for Excellence in Native Hawaiian Law. Before entering academia she was a staff attorney at Earthjustice litigating environmental cases. At Earthjustice she combined her legal training with cultural knowledge and grassroots organizing to implement an integrated advocacy approach to issues. Sproat has a special interest in empowering and supporting Native Hawaiian culture and people and works to preserve the resources necessary to perpetuate her culture. She was born and raised on Kauai‘s North Shore in Kalihiwai and is a member of the Akana and Sproat ‘Ohana of Kaua’i and Kohala, Hawai’i.
Rebecca Tsosie is Professor of Law, Willard H. Pedrick Distinguished Research Scholar, and Executive Director of the top-ranked Indian Legal Program at the Arizona State University Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law at Arizona State University. She has written and published widely on doctrinal and theoretical issues related to tribal sovereignty, environmental policy, and cultural rights. She is the author of many prominent articles dealing with cultural resources and cultural pluralism. She has used this work as a foundation for her newest research, which deals with Native rights to genetic resources. Tsosie, who is of Yaqui descent, has also worked extensively with tribal governments and organizations. She serves as a Supreme Court Justice for the Fort McDowell Yavapai Nation. She is a Faculty Fellow of the Center for the Study of Law, Science, & Technology and an Affiliate Professor for the American Indian Studies Program. She teaches in the areas of Indian law, property, bioethics, and critical race theory. She is the co-author with Robert Clinton and Carole Goldberg of a federal Indian law casebook entitled American Indian Law: Native Nations and the Federal System.
Leti Volpp is Professor of Law, UC Berkeley School of Law, and is a well-known scholar in law and the humanities. She writes about citizenship, migration, culture and identity. Her most recent publications include the edited volume Legal Borderlands: Law and the Construction of American Borders (with Mary Dudziak) (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006); “The Culture of Citizenship” in Theoretical Inquiries in Law (2007) and “Disappearing Acts: On Gendered Violence, Pathological Cultures and Civil Society” in PMLA (2006). She is also the author of “Divesting Citizenship: On Asian American History and the Loss of Citizenship Through Marriage” in the UCLA Law Review (2005), “The Citizen and the Terrorist” in the UCLA Law Review (2002), “Feminism versus Multiculturalism” in the Columbia Law Review (2001), and many other articles.