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Faculty and Staff
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Faculty and Staff Biographies
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Michael
McCann
Professor
Box 353530
Gowen 47
Tel: 206-543-2377
FAX: 206-685-2146
e-mail: mwmccann@u.washington.edu
CV (.pdf document)
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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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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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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
Among his articles, Gad Barzilai, “The Ambivalent Voice of Lawyers as Political Actors: Between Liberal Politics, Liberal Economics, and Dissent.” In Malcolm Feeley, Terry Halliday, and Lucien Karpik (eds.) Political Lawyering, Judiciaries, and Political Liberalism. (Hart Publications, 2006); “Legal Categorizations and Religion: On Politics of Modernity, Practices, Faith, and Power.” In Austin Sarat (ed.) A Companion to Law and Society (Blackwell, 2004) pp. 392-409; “Law is Politics.” UCLA Journal of International Law and Foreign Affairs 6 (1) (spring, summer 2001): 207-213; “Fantasies of Liberalism and Liberal Jurisprudence: State Law, Politics, and the Israeli-Arab-Palestinian Community.” Israel Law Review (2002) 34 (3) 425- 451; “Between the Rule of Law and the Laws of the Ruler ” International Social Science Journal 152 (June 1997): 193-208; “Supreme Courts and Public Opinion: General Paradigms and the Israeli Case,” Law and Courts, Vol. 4, 3 (1994): 3-6; “Culture of Patriarchy in Law:Violence from Anitquity to Modernity” Law & Society Review Vol. 38 (4) (2004) 864-887.
During his academic career, Barzilai has been awarded with international scientific grants and prizes. |

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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)
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| 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
CV (.pdf document)
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(PhD, University of California , Irvine , 2002) is Assistant Professor of comparative law and politics in the Department of Political Science with a joint appointment in the Law, Societies and Justice program at the University of Washington . She is also 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, empirical democratic theory and European integration with an emphasis on the role of courts, rights politics and public participation in the processes of constitutionalization and democratization around the world. She is author of a book entitled The European Court, Civil Society and European Integration (forthcoming Cambridge University Press) that focuses on the interactions between the European Court of Justice, transnational activists and the expansion of European Union governance in the areas of women's rights and environmental protection. Cichowski also co-edited the book State of the EU: Law, Politics and Society (Oxford University Press, 2003). She is currently directing a project entitled Courts, Democracy and Governance examining the impact of international courts on democratic politics within domestic and international governance. Her research has been published in edited volumes and in various journals, including Comparative Political Studies , Law & Society Review , Journal of European Public Policy , and Women & Politics .
Cichowski teaches classes in comparative law and politics, European legal institutions, law and democracy, sex discrimination law in the European Union and the politics of women's rights in comparative perspective. |

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| 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)
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Steve Herbert is trained as an urban political geographer (Ph.D., UCLA 1995) and is presently an Associate Professor with a joint appointment in the Geography Department 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 the book, Policing Space: Territoriality and the Los Angeles Police Department (University of Minnesota Press, 1997). He has also authored works that focus on the culture and organization of policing, and on ethnography as a methodology. He is currently completing a book manuscript with the working title, The Unbearable Lightness of Community: Police, Urban Residents and the State-Society Relation. This work examines the possibilities for, and constraints upon, productive relations between the police and the citizenry during an era of "community policing." It draws upon fieldwork completed in Seattle.
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)
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George Lovell (Ph.D., Michigan) is an Associate Professor in the Department of
Political Science. He studies public law, political institutions, American
political development, and constitutional theory. His research examines
interaction among branches of government and the effect of courts and legal
discourse on both political institutions and ordinary people. His first book,
Legislative Deferrals: Statutory Ambiguity, Judicial Power, and American
Democracy (2003, Cambridge U. Press) offers a bold reinterpretation of the
sources of judicial policy-making power in the United States. Using the
development of the American labor movement as a case study, the book shows how
legislators use ambiguity to empower judges to resolve important policy
controversies. The book challenges conventional understandings of American labor
history and the relationship between judicial power and democracy. Lovell is now
working on a new book project on political institutions and legal consciousness
that focuses on the Justice Department's civil rights activities in the 1940's.
He has published articles on 19th century state labor legislation, the Supreme
Court's progressive era decisions on federal labor legislation, legislative
delegation to the executive branch, and the use of legal language in everyday
political encounters between citizens and bureaucrats. He teaches CLASS-related
courses on civil liberties, American constitutional law, legal mobilization, 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)
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| 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
http://faculty.washington.edu/jasonm/ |

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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)
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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
Assistant Professor
Box 354600
424 Condon Hall
Tel: 206-616-8441
FAX: 206-616-3427
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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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
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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 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 and will
co-host a major Law and Society conference with CLASS in 2002.
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Walter
Walsh
Assistant Professor
Box 354600
430 Condon Hall
Tel: 206-616-7101
FAX: 206-616-3427
e-mail: wawa@u.washington.edu
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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
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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 People1s Republic
of China.
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Louis
Wolcher
Professor
Box 354600
428 Condon
Tel: 206-543-0600
FAX: 206-616-3427
e-mail: wolcher@u.washington.edu
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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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This page last updated
3/13/09
Website created by:
W. Washington
Photos: Deborah Hughes
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