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Director:
   
Staff:
 
Ann Buscherfeld
   
Faculty: Gad Barzilai
 
  Angelina Snodgrass Godoy
  Steven Herbert
  George Lovell
  Michael McCann
  Jamie Mayerfeld
  Joel Migdal
  Arzoo Osanloo
  Anita Ramasastry
  Luana Ross
  Stuart Scheingold
 

William Talbott

  Veronica Taylor
  Walter Walsh
  Susan Whiting
  Louis Wolcher
   
Graduate Students: Please see graduate page and the graduate biographies
   

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Faculty and Staff Biographies

 

  Director

Michael McCann
Professor
Box 353530
Gowen 47
Tel: 206-543-2377
FAX: 206-685-2146
e-mail: mwmccann@u.washington.edu

CV (.pdf document)

Michael McCann is Gordon Hirabayashi Professor for the Advancement of Citizenship at the University of Washington.   A former chair of the Political Science Department and Adjunct Professor in the Law School, he is the founding director of both the interdisciplinary Comparative Law and Society Studies (CLASS) Center and the undergraduate Law, Societies, and Justice program. McCann is the author of Taking Reform Seriously: Perspectives on Public Interest Liberalism (Cornell, 1986), Rights at Work: Pay Equity Reform and the Politics of Legal Mobilization (Chicago, 1994), and (with William Haltom) Distorting the Law: Politics, Media, and the Litigation Crisis (Chicago, 2004).   The last two books together have won six major book awards from professional academic associations.   McCann is also the principal co-editor of Judging the Constitution: Critical Essays on Judicial Lawmaking (Little, Brown, 1989 ) , in which he authored two chapters, editor and lead author for Law and Social Movements (Dartmouth/Ashgate, 2006);   and co-editor, with David Engel, of a forthcoming book (Stanford) tentatively titled Fault Lines: Tort Law as Cultural Practice .   He has published essays in Law & Society Review, Law and Social Inquiry, and other social science journals and law reviews as well as in edited books on numerous subjects, including: the politics of legal mobilization challenging racial, gender, and class discrimination; law and democratic social movements; how the U.S. Supreme Court matters; the politics of cause lawyering; "new property" rights and environmentalism; everyday disputing and legal resistance; studies of rights consciousness; the politics of tort reform; popular folklore and media coverage about civil litigation; and contested conceptions of citizenship rights in a globalized world     Among his present research projects is a study of the cultural backlash against egalitarian rights claiming and public interest litigation for progressive causes in the U.S., and its implications for contemporary politics at local, national, and international levels. McCann teaches a variety of undergraduate and graduate courses on law and society topics, for which he received a university-wide Distinguished Teaching Award in 1989.  



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  Staff

 

 

Mark Weitzenkamp
Academic Counselor
Box 353530
42 Gowen
Tel: 206-543-2396
FAX: 206-685-2146
lsjadv@u.washington.edu          
Office Hours: M-F 8:00-12:00 and 1:00-5:00



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  Faculty

Gad Barzilai
Professor
Box 353340
502B Thompson
Tel: 206-685-0578
FAX: 206-685-0668
e-mail: gbarzil@u.washington.edu

http://faculty.washington.edu/gbarzil/

CV (.pdf document)

Gad Barzilai is an expert on politics and law. He is a Professor of International Studies, Law, and Political Science in the Law, Societies, and Justice Program [LSJ], Comparative, Law, and Societies Program [CLASS], and in the Jackson School of International Studies. Prior to his permanent appointments at University of Washington, he was a Professor of Political Science and Law in the Department of Political Science, and co-director and co-founder of the Law, Politics & Society Program at Tel Aviv University where he was teaching in both the political science department and the law school. Barzilai was a Board Member of the Law and Society Association [class 2006], a Board Member of the American Journal of Political Science (1998-2003), a Board Member of the Association of Israel Studies [1993-1996], and currently a Board Member of the Journal of Comparative Studies [2006- ]. He is also active in international, Israeli and Israeli-Palestinian human rights organizations. Barzilai was the First Founding Director (2000-2002) of the newly established international Dan David Prize, which is among the three large Prize foundations in the world, bestowing international prizes and scholarships of academic and scientific international excellence. During Barzilai’s term, two out of three laureates of the DDP were awarded the Nobel Prize.

Gad Barzilai was trained in comparative politics, comparative law, and has also acquired professional knowledge in history, Judaism, international relations, public policy, statistics & quantitative tools of analysis from Tel Aviv University, Hebrew University, Jerusalem (Ph.d., 1987), Yale University (1987, 1988, 1993, 1994), and Michigan University, Ann Arbor (1988). He was invited to address lectures in various universities and public venues around the globe, including at University of California, Berkeley; Columbia University; Harvard University; Kings’ College, University of London; Lafayette College; Lehigh University; Oxford University; Yale University.

Gad Barzilai list of scientific publications includes more than one hundred and thirty publications- several books, several monographs and edited volumes, and more than one hundred articles, published in refereed leading scientific and legal journals in England, USA, and Israel. Some of his publications were translated to Arabic, French, German, Russian, Slovak, and Spanish. His recent award-winning book about legal cultures and non- ruling communities (minorities) under state domination and in the midst of globalization, has been published by University of Michigan Press (2003, 2005): Gad Barzilai, Communities and Law: Politics, and Cultures of Legal Identities. See: http://www.press.umich.edu/titleDetailDesc.do?id=17817


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Katherine Beckett
Associate Professor
Box 353340
44 Gowen
Tel: 206-543-4461
FAX: 206-543-2516
e-mail: kbeckett@u.washington.edu

CV (.pdf document)

I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and the Law, Societies & Justice Program at the University of Washington in Seattle. Katherine received her Ph.D. from UCLA's Department of Sociology in 1994. My interests include responses to crime and drug use, socio-legal studies, punishment, and social control. I have published numerous articles and book chapters on these topics, including several articles analyzing the political-economic causes and consequences of the expansion of the social control apparatus in industrialized democracies. I am also the author of two books: The Politics of Injustice: Crime and Punishment in America (with Theodore Sasson, Sage Publications) and Making Crime Pay: Law and Order in Contemporary American Politics (Oxford University Press) on these topics. I have also written about contests over the framing of and legal response to social issues such as child sexual abuse and midwifery.

My more recent work examines the racialized nature and implications of current drug law enforcement strategies employed in Seattle and elsewhere, and analyzes these strategies in the context of political struggles over urban space and development. I am currently researching and writing a book manuscript that will explore the origins, effects, and theoretical implications of the transformation of urban social control currently underway in Seattle and U.S. cities more generally.


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Rachel A. Cichowski
Assistant Professor
Box 353340
125 Gowen
Tel: 206-543-4949
Fax: 206-685-2146
email: rcichows@u.washington.edu
http://faculty.washington.edu /rcichows/

CV (.pdf document)

Rachel A. Cichowski (PhD, University of California, Irvine, 2002) Cichowski is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science with a joint appointment in the Law, Societies and Justice program at the University of Washington. She is a member of the European Studies Faculty in the Jackson School of International Studies and adjunct Faculty in the Women's Studies Department at UW. Her visiting research positions include Visiting Research Fellow at the European University Institute, Florence, Italy (1998-99) and Visiting Fellow at the Max Planck Institute, Bonn, Germany (2000).  

Her primary research interests include comparative law and politics, international law and organization, and transnational mobilization with an emphasis on the role of courts and social activists in the processes of constitutionalization, democratization and globalization around the world. She is author of a book entitled The European Court and Civil Society (2007, Cambridge University Press) that focuses on the interactions between the European Court of Justice, transnational activists and the expansion of EU governance in the areas of women's rights and environmental protection. Cichowski co-edited the book State of the European Union: Law, Politics and Society (Oxford University Press, 2003).  She also edited and contributed to a Special Issue of the journal Comparative Political Studies , entitled Courts, Democracy and Governance (February 2006).  Her research is published in edited volumes and in various journals, including Law & Society Review, Comparative Political Studies , Journal of European Public Policy , and Women & Politics . Cichowski teaches classes in comparative and international law and courts, international organization, sex discrimination law in the European Union and women's rights as human rights in international perspective.



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Angelina Snodgrass Godoy
Assistant Professor
Law, Societies, and Justice
Jackson School of International Studies
Box 353650
48 Gowen
Phone: (206) 616-3585

e-mail:
agodoy@u.washington.edu

CV (.pdf document)

Angelina Snodgrass Godoy received her PhD in Sociology from UC Berkeley in 2001, and joined the UW faculty in 2002. Her recent research has examined issues of violence and social control and their implications for human rights and democracy, particularly in Latin America. Her book, Popular Injustice: Violence, Community, and Law in Latin America (Stanford University Press, 2006) , focuses on the spread of highly punitive forms of social control (known locally as mano dura) in post-authoritarian Latin America, and on the use of lynchings, extrajudicial executions, and other forms of vigilante "justice." At present, she is conducting research on free trade agreements and their effects on health and human rights, particularly intellectual property law and access to medications. Prof. Godoy teaches courses in human rights, social theory, and special topics relating to violence, democracy, and the law.


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Steven Herbert
Professor
Box 353550
Smith 113B
Tel: 206-685-2621
FAX: 206-543-3313

CV (.pdf document)

Trained as an urban political geographer (Ph.D., UCLA 1995), Steve Herbert is Professor of Geography and Law, Societies, and Justice. He is interested in the relationship between space and power, particularly the power expressed through law and policing. He has done extensive fieldwork with the police, including work that resulted in two books, Policing Space: Territoriality and the Los Angeles Police Department (University of Minnesota Press, 1997), and Citizens, Cops, and Power: Recognizing the Limits of Community (University of Chicago Press, 2006). He has also authored works that focus on the culture and organization of policing, and on ethnography as a methodology.  At present, he is working on a co-authored manuscript (with Katherine Beckett) focused on new practices of urban social control.  The manuscript, whose working title is Banished , outlines how zones of exclusion are being created in Seattle to increase the power of the police to make ‘undesirable' people feel unwanted in public spaces.

His courses -- which include LSJ 375, Crime Politics and Justice; LSJ 378/GEOG 378, Policing the City; and LSJ 474/GEOG 474, Geography and the Law --draw upon his interests and expertise.


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George Lovell
Assistant Professor
Box 353530
114 Gowen
Tel: 206-543-8144
e-mail: glovell@u.washington.edu

CV (.pdf document)

George Lovell (Ph.D., Michigan) is an Associate Professor in the
Department of Political Science. He specializes in American public law,
legal mobilization, American political development, and constitutional
theory. Specifically, his research examines interaction among branches of
government and the effect of courts and other political institutions on
social movements. Lovell is currently working on a book that examines how ordinary citizens made rights claims on government officials during a period when there was no civil rights law. The project focuses on the Justice Department's civil rights activities in the 1940's. His first book, Legislative
Deferrals, (Cambridge U. Press) looks at the development of the American
labor movement and shows how legislators use ambiguity to give judges the
opportunity to resolve important policy controversies. The book challenges
conventional understandings of both American labor history and the
relationship between judicial power and democracy. He has published articles on the deployment of legal claims in everyday political encounters, 19th century state labor legislation, the Supreme Court's progressive era decisions on federal labor legislation, and legislative delegation to the executive branch. He teaches LSJ and Political Science courses on civil liberties, American constitutional law, and the role of courts in American politics.



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Jamie Mayerfeld
Associate Professor
Box 353530
Gowen 46
Tel: 206-543-4717
FAX: 206-685-2146
e-mail: jasonm@u.washington.edu

CV (.pdf document)

Jamie Mayerfeld (PhD, Princeton ) Associate Professor of Political Science, Adjunct Associate Professor of Law, Societies & Justice, and Seattle Campus Advisor for the Human Rights Minor, teaches a range of courses in normative political theory, legal philosophy, and human rights. His publications include the book Suffering and Moral Responsibility ( Oxford 1999) and several articles on the duty to relieve suffering, nationalism, and human rights. His papers on the International Criminal Court have appeared recently in Human Rights Quarterly, the Fletcher Forum of World Affairs, and the Finnish Yearbook of International Law.  He is currently engaged in two writing projects, one on the meaning and realization of human rights, and another on the ambiguous relationship between justice and peace. In conjunction with the CLASS Center, he has taught courses on the international human rights movement and the philosophy of punishment.  Mayerfeld has received fellowships from Columbia Law School and the University of Washington Simpson Center for the Humanities.  In 2006-07 he will be a Laurance S. Rockefeller Visiting Fellow at the Princeton University Center for Human Values, where he will be working on a book entitled The Architecture of Human Rights.  The book argues that democracy is incomplete unless domestic institutions for the protection of human rights are bolted into a system of international guarantees.  You can learn more about Mayerfeld's work at faculty.washington.edu/jasonm/



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Michael McCann
see Director


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Joel S. Migdal
Professor
Box 353650
407 Thomson
Tel: 206-543-6406
FAX: 206-685-0668
e-mail: migdal@u.washington.edu

CV (.pdf document)

Joel S. Migdal is the Robert F. Philip Professor of International Studies in the University of Washington’s Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies.  He was the founding chair of the University of Washington’s International Studies Program.  Dr. Migdal was formerly associate professor of Government at Harvard University and senior lecturer at Tel-Aviv University.  Among his books are Peasants, Politics, and Revolution; Palestinian Society and Politics; Strong Societies and Weak States; State in Society; Through the Lens of Israel; The Palestinian People: A History (with Baruch Kimmerling); and, most recently, Boundaries and Belonging.  In 1993, he received the University of Washington’s Distinguished Teaching Award, and, in 1994, the Governor’s Writers Award.  He is immediate past president of the Association for Israel Studies.



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Arzoo Osanloo
Assistant Professor
Box 353100
M-41 Denny
Tel: 206-543-1102
aosanloo@u.washington.edu

CV (.pdf document)

Professor Osanloo (Ph.D., Stanford University 2002; J.D., American University 1993) holds a joint appointment in Anthropology and the Law, Societies and Justice Program. Her research interests reflect anthropological inquiries into law, governance and the state. She is currently working on a book project that focuses on women's everyday discourses of rights in Iran's Islamic Republic, a unique, if not contradictory, combination of religious state and a republic. This research examines the social, political, and legal conditions that mediate urban middle-class women's conceptions rights. Her article, “Islamico-civil ‘rights talk’: Women, subjectivity, and law in Iranian family court,” American Ethnologist 33(2) 2006, explores some of these ideas. Prof. Osanloo is broadly interested in human rights as a discourse of social accountability in the current geopolitical era and is beginning research on a new project that examines the relationship between human rights, mercy and state power. Before venturing into Anthropology, Prof. Osanloo was a lawyer and practiced asylum and immigration law in Washington, D.C. and San Francisco. Her work in human rights law sparked an interest in the interplay between international and national legal systems and their effects on people at local levels. She teaches courses on human rights, women's rights in Muslim societies, and refugees.


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Anita Ramasastry
Associate Professor
Box 354600
417 William H Gates Hall
Tel: 206-616-8441
e-mail: arama@u.washington.edu

CV (.pdf document)

Professor Ramasastry joined the faculty in 1996. Her research interests include commercial law, banking and payments systems, law and development and comparative law. Her research focuses on two main areas - one if the relationship between economic actors and corporations in conflict economies and the second is payment systems including the role of informal payment systems such as "hawala" in market economies.

She has served as a staff attorney at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, an associate attorney at the international law firm of White & Case in Budapest, Hungary, and assistant professor of law at the Central European University in Budapest, founded by financier George Soros. She was the symposium editor for the Harvard International Law Journal and has clerked for Justice Alan B. Handler of the New Jersey Supreme Court.

In 1998-99, she served as a special attorney and advisor to a special claims resolution tribunal in Zurich, Switzerland, established to resolve claims to World War II-era bank accounts. She has been a visiting professor and Atlantic Fellow in Public Policy at the Centre for Commercial Law Studies, Queen Mary Westfield College, University of London. Professor Ramasastry served as a visiting scholar at the British Financial Services Authority. During the fall of 2001, she was a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School

 


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Luana Ross
Associate Professor

Box 354345
B11OR Padelford
Tel: 206-616-9375
FAX: 206-685-9555
e-mail: luana@u.washington.edu

Professor Ross is a member of the Salish tribe. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Oregon in 1992. She is Associate Professor of Women Studies and her interest are in criminology/deviance; race/ethnic relations and gender; and documentary film. She is the author of Inventing the Savage: The Social Construction of Native American Criminality, University of Texas Press, 1998.

 


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Stuart Scheingold
Professor Emeritus
email: stugold@u.washington.edu

CV (.pdf document)

Stuart Scheingold, Professor Emeritus of Political Science, has written widely on rights, the politics of crime and punishment, cause lawyering and, early in his career, on law and politics in the European Union. Given this range of interests, the CLASS program with its comparative focus and interdisciplinary resources provides an unique setting for intellectual engagement. He is co-director (with Austin Sarat, Amherst College) of the International Cause Lawyering Project whose most recent volume, Cause Lawyering and the State in the Global Era, was published by Oxford University Press in 2001. In addition to his chapters in that volume, Scheingold (jointly with William Lyons) also contributed a chapter, "The Politics of Crime and Punishment" to the National Insitute of Justice volume, The Nature of Crime: Continuity and Change, Volume 1 of the Criminal Justice 2000 series. Among his books are the Politics of Rights, The Politics of Law and Order, The Politics of Street Crime, and Europe's Would-Be Polity (with Leon Lindberg).In 2001 he was awarded the Harry J. Kalven, Jr. Prize by the Law and Society Association for "empirical scholarship that has contributed most effectively to the advancement of research in law and society." He was Walter S. Owen Visiting Chair in Law, University of British Columbia, 1998 and in 1999 was appointed an Associate at the Centre for Urban and Community Research at Goldsmiths College, University of London.



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William Talbott
Professor
Box 353350
252 Savery
Tel: 206-543-5095
FAX: 206-685-8740
e-mail: wtalbott@u.washington.edu

William Talbott is a Professor of Philosophy.   He received his bachelor's degree from Princeton and his Ph.D. from Harvard.   He is the author of Which Rights Should Be Universal? (Oxford University Press; 2005).   He is currently working on the companion volume, Human Rights and Human Well-Being , also to be published by Oxford University Press.   He teaches moral and political philosophy, including the philosophy of human rights, and epistemology.  

Web site: http://faculty.washington.edu/wtalbott/



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Veronica Taylor
Director, Asian Law Center, School of Law
Box 353020
William Gates Hall
TEL: 206-543-5643
FAX: 206-543-2164
e-mail: vtaylor@u.washington.edu

CV (.pdf document)

Veronica Taylor is Professor of Law and Director of the Asian Law Center at the University of Washington. Prior to moving to the UW, Professor Taylor had a key role in establishing Asian Law in Australia, setting up research and teaching programs at the Australian National University and the University of Melbourne. Professor Taylor is a specialist in law and society in Asia (particularly Japan); contracts and regulation. She also has a strong interest in law and development. Together with criminologist Kathy Laster, she produced the first empirical study of legal interpreting issues in Australia: Interpreters and the Legal System (Federation Press, Sydney, 1994) and a first year law text, Law as Culture (Sydney: Federation Press, 1997). Her work on Asian Law includes founding Asian Law, a key journal for scholars and practitioners in the field, and a number of edited volumes including: Asian Laws Through Australian Eyes (Sydney: LBC, 1997) and the Japan Business Law Guide (Singapore: CCH). Taylor's current projects address: reforms to insolvency and corporate governance in Japan; the issue of corruption and assumptions in current law and development thinking; and a review of deregulation and competition law in Japan and its implications for transition economies. Professor Taylor has near-native fluency in Japanese and basic Korean. She has worked in Japan, Korea, Indonesia, Australia, New Zealand and the US. She is excited by the prospect of working with the Comparative Law and Society Studies Center at the UW.


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Walter Walsh
Associate Professor
Box 353020
William H Gates Hall
Tel: 206-616-7101
FAX: 206-616-3427
e-mail: wawa@u.washington.edu

Walter Walsh is Assistant Professor of Law. He took his B.C.L. (1979) from University College, Dublin, an LL.M. (1989) at Yale Law School, and an S.J.D. (1997) from Harvard Law School. Professor Walsh was born and raised in Dublin, Ireland. He began teaching on the UW law faculty in 1996, following appointments as Samuel I. Golieb Fellow in Legal History at New York University School of Law; Visiting Professor at Central European University, Budapest; Associate Professor, Seton Hall University School of Law; and Harry A. Bigelow Teaching Fellow and Lecturer in Law at University of Chicago Law School. His research and teaching interests are in the areas of legal history, torts, European Union Law, and law and religion. Professor Walsh was admitted to practice in Ireland in 1983, California in 1984, New York in 1986, and the U.S. Supreme Court and other federal courts. He served as a judicial clerk to Judge Julia Cooper Mack, District of Columbia Court of Appeals, 1985-87, and practiced law in New York City with Debevoise & Plimpton. He is the founder and director of the European Law Institute at UW.



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Susan Whiting
Associate Professor
Box 353530
45 Gowen
Tel: 206-543-9163
FAX: 206-543-2146
e-mail swhiting@u.washington.edu

Susan Whiting (Ph.D., University of Michigan), associate professor of Political Science, specializes in Chinese and comparative politics, with particular emphasis on political economy and development. Her current project takes her into the area of law, development, and transitions from socialism. The project focuses on the nature of dispute resolution in China and the changing role of the courts in the Chinese political economy. In conjunction with this project and with the support of the CLASS Program, the East Asia Center, and the International Studies Program, Whiting is coordinating a comparative speaker series on law and transition for the academic year 2001-02 and is developing a related course for the academic year 2002-03. Her current project grows out of the research for her first book, Power and Wealth in Rural China: The Political Economy of Institutional Change, which was published by Cambridge University Press in 2001. Her research also appears in several edited volumes, including Property Rights and Economic Reform in China (Stanford 1999), Trust and Governance (Russell Sage 1998), and Reforming Asian Socialism: The Growth of Market Institutions (Michigan 1996). She is also co-author of a study on fiscal reform in China conducted under the auspices of the Asian Development Bank and author of "The Politics of NGO Development in China," the research for which was conducted under the auspices of the Ford Foundation. Professor Whiting travels to China frequently. During Summer 2001, she conducted archival research in Hong Kong for a study of labor dispute resolution in the People's Republic of China.



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Louis Wolcher
Professor
Box 353020
335 William H Gates Hall
Tel: 206-543-0600
FAX: 206-616-3427
e-mail: wolcher@u.washington.edu

Louis Wolcher is Professor of Law, and has been with the University of Washington School of Law since 1986. A graduate of Stanford University (BA in History, 1969) and Harvard Law School (JD, 1973), his primary field of research is theory and philosophy of law. A former Fulbright scholar, he maintains close ties with scholars in Central Europe, and has lectured in Slovenia, Germany, France, England, and the former Soviet Union. In March of 1999, he gave a lecture on remedies to the European Court of Human Rights. Author of numerous articles and essays on legal and social theory, he maintains a close interest in expanding the international scope and mission of the University's programs



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