2008 OLMOS LECTURER
Eric K. Yamamoto
Eric Yamamoto is an internationally-recognized law professor at the University of Hawai’i William S. Richardson School of Law. He 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.
Professor Yamamoto has published two books and over fifty book chapters and law review articles. His first book on Interracial Justice (conflict and reconciliation among racial communities) received the Gustavus Meyers Award for Outstanding Books on Social Justice for 2000. His second book, Race, Rights and Reparation: Law and the Japanese American Internment, co-authored with Chon, Izumi, Kang and Wu, is receiving national attention in light of its relevance to the post-September 11th tension between national security and civil liberties in America. His recent articles include: “White(House) Lies: Why the Public Must Compel the Courts to Hold the President Accountable for National Security Abuses,” which provides a strategic roadmap for activists and scholars, and “Contextual Strict Scrutiny,” which coalesces a new methodology for Equal Protection judicial review. His earlier article, “Critical Race Praxis: Race Theory and Political Lawyering,” in the Michigan Law Review, was the centerpiece of a later law review symposium on strategies for connecting racial justice scholarship with frontline advocacy.
For the year 2001 Professor Yamamoto was awarded the Haywood Burns Chair in Civil Rights for New York, where he taught and lectured, and in 2000 he received the Rockefeller Foundation’s coveted Residency Fellowship for international justice scholars in Bellagio, Italy. In 1999 he taught as a visiting professor at his alma mater, Boalt Hall Law School, University of California at Berkeley. In fall 2006 he was a featured speaker at an international conference on “Racial Reparations: A Transatlantic Dialogue” in Tour outside of Paris, France. For spring 2007 he will be the Scholar-in-Residence at the Boalt Hall Law School’s Thelton Henderson Center for Social Justice, and for the fall he will be the Scholar-in-Residence at Hokkaido University Law School’s new Center for the Study of Ainu and Indigenous Law in Japan.
Professor Yamamoto has received eight outstanding law teaching awards, including the University of Hawai`i’s highest award, the 2005 Regents Medal for Teaching Excellence, and the Society of American Law Teachers’ nation-wide award as Outstanding Law Teacher for 2005. He has also received awards for his work on civil rights and social justice – most recently the Japanese American Citizens League – Honolulu Chapter’s 2006 Distinguished Public Service Award (with Chris Iijima) and the Patsy T. Mink Award for Social Justice in 2004. In his work outside the classroom, he trains law students and new lawyers interested in social justice as part of the “Scholar-Advocate” program he helped create. He is a founding member of the Equal Justice Society and has been a member of the Steering Committee of the Campaign to Restore Civil Rights. He speaks regularly across the country and internationally on issues of racial reconciliation, reparations, national security and civil liberties.
CONVENING PANELISTS
Sujatha Baliga
As the Soros Justice Advocacy Fellow at Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth (RJOY), Sujatha Baliga’s work focuses on juvenile justice diversion programming in Alameda County. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania School of Law, she has taught restorative justice at New College School of Law and at the California Institute for Integral Studies. Prior to joining RJOY, Sujatha was an Assistant Public Defender at the New Mexico Public Defender Department, most recently working on capital appeals. She has also been an advocate for people who suffer family, intimate partner and other interpersonal violence and sexual abuse. Sujatha’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
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. Prior to joining the academy he was in private practice in New York.
Mary Louise Frampton
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. In 2005 Frampton initiated the Communities in Justice partnership with the UC Berkeley School of Journalism and the Oakland Tribune to foster the discussion of restorative justice concepts in the mass media. 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. Recently she presented on restorative justice and race at the National Conference on Restorative Justice and the Annual Law and Society Conference. Frampton was a civil rights lawyer for thirty years and continues to represent death row inmates in federal habeas cases.
Angela Harris
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). In 2003 Harris received the Rutter Award for Teaching Distinction, an annual award that honors a Boalt Hall professor who has demonstrated an outstanding commitment to teaching. She also received the 2003 Mathew O. Tobriner Public Service Award, an annual prize that recognizes Bay Area law school professors for their commitment to academic diversity and for mentoring the next generation of lawyers. Before joining the Boalt faculty in 1988, Angela Harris served as a law clerk to Judge Joel M. Flaum of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit, and as an attorney in the San Francisco office of Morrison & Foerster.
Charles Henry
Charles P. Henry is Professor of African American Studies at the University of California at Berkeley. In 1994, President Clinton appointed him to the National Council on the Humanities for a six-year term. 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. Chancellor Birgeneau presented Henry with the Chancellor’s Award for Advancing Institutional Excellence in April 2008. He holds a doctorate in Political Science from the University of Chicago.
Moana Jackson
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. He undertook further study in the United States before returning to New Zealand to conduct research for the then Justice Department report, The Maori and the criminal justice system: A New Perspective, He Whaipaanga Hou. His report was published in 1988. 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. He was also counsel for the Bougainville Interim Government during the Bougainville peace process. Moana Jackson is of Ngāti Kahungunu and Ngāti Porou descent.
Luz Mena
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. Geography Graduate Group, which will become a founding group in the Graduate School of the Environment, views gender as a key variable in influencing spatial patterns. Mena is currently researching how black and mulatto women in 1830’s Havana stretched the limits of gendered spaces.
Sherene Razack
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. Before obtaining her Ph.D. in education she worked in the area of human rights, and taught on a variety of social justice issues.
Sunny Schwartz
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. While practicing both criminal and civil law, Schwartz received numerous awards from the San Francisco Bar Association including “Outstanding Pro Bono Attorney of the Year” and “Attorney Excellence in Public Interest Pro Bono Service”.
Olis Simmons
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. In her previous position, Director of Children & Youth Services for the Alameda County Health Care Service Agency, she led numerous projects of national significance, including School Based Health Centers and Court Appointed Special Advocates (CASA).
Andrea Smith
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. She is a graduate of Harvard University, the Union Theological Seminary, and UC Santa Cruz.
D. Kapua Sproat
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 is a graduate of Mills College and the University of Hawai’i William S. Richardson School of Law. 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
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
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. Volpp’s numerous honors include two Rockefeller Foundation Humanities Fellowships, a MacArthur Foundation Individual Research and Writing Grant, and the Association of American Law Schools Minority Section Derrick A. Bell, Jr., Award.