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Frank Boas Harvard Visiting Professor Fund & Wallace S. Fujiyama Distinguished Visiting Professor Fund

March 13, 2015

By Beverly Creamer

The UH Law School brought a stellar group of legal scholars to Hawai‘i for its unique January-Term, this year covering topics ranging from terrorism, war and the Constitution to legal issues in the European Union, and to sovereignty and indigenous rights.

The annual specialized minicourses ran from Jan. 5-10, offering law students the opportunity without charge to learn from renowned scholars, attorneys, judges and policy experts.

The annual program is scheduled a week before regular spring semester classes begin and it is supported by two generous gifts. Funding from the late Frank Boas, who helped start the program in 2005, continues to bring a Visiting Harvard Law School professor as a key part of the program each year.

Additionally, the Wallace S. Fujiyama Distinguished Visiting Professor Fund supports the other J-Term professors.

The Lineup for 2015 Included:

  • Vicki Jackson, Thurgood Marshall Professor of Law, Harvard Law School, was the Frank Boas Harvard Visiting Professor. She taught “Selected Topics in Comparative Constitutional Law.”
  • Gerald Torres, Jane M.G. Foster Professor of Law, Cornell Law School, taught: “Indigeneity, Indianness: Themes in Sovereignty.”
  • Jules Lobel, Bessie McKee Walthour Endowed Chaired Professor of Law, University of Pittsburgh Law School, taught: “Terrorism, War, and the Constitution.”
  • Fraser Cameron, Director of the EUAsia Centre in Brussels, taught: “Intro to the EU & Foreign Policy.”

Brief Backgrounds

Vicki Jackson is a graduate of Yale Law School and previously taught constitutional law at Georgetown. She clerked at all three levels of the federal courts, including for Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. Before she began teaching, Jackson practiced law for many years, including serving as a Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Office of Legal Counsel, U.S. Justice Department, and was appointed by the Supreme Court to brief and argue jurisdictional questions in United States V. Windsor (2012-13).

Gerald Torres is a leading figure in critical race theory, dealing primarily with issues of environmental law and federal Indian law. He is a former president of the Association of American Law Schools (AALS) and previously held the Bryant Smith Chair at the University of Texas. He has served as Deputy Assistant Attorney General for the Environment and Natural Resources Division of the U.S. Department of Justice in Washington, D.C., and as counsel to then U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno.

Jules Lobel is president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, a national human and constitutional rights organization headquartered in New York City. Both an academic and a public litigator, he has challenged the ban on travel to Cuba and aspects of anti-terrorism laws as violations of free speech. He is currently lead counsel in a class action challenge to prolonged
solitary confinement of prisoners in California.

Fraser Cameron is a former European Commission advisor and well-known policy analyst and commentator on European Union and international affairs. He is visiting professor at the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin, and Senior Advisor to the European Policy Centre (EPC). He is an advisor to the BBC and to the United Kingdom’s Higher Education Panel on Europe. He received his Masters degree at the University of St Andrews in Scotland and his doctorate at Cambridge in England. From 1975-89 he was a member of the British Diplomatic Service, serving mainly in Germany, dealing with economic, political and press affairs. He joined the European Commission in 1990.

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If you would like to learn how you can support UH students and programs like this, please contact us at 808 376-7800 or send us a message.