Biographical Information, UH Distinguished Lecture Series 1998-99

Lani Guinier, professor of law at Harvard Law School, specializes in voting rights law. Her teaching interests range from voting rights, professional responsibility, criminal process and public interest lawyering to issues of race and gender. She has written widely on topics related to voting rights, democratic theory, affirmative action and legal education. She co-authored a major study of women and law school (Becoming Gentlemen: Women, Law School and Institutional Change, written with Michelle Fine and Jane Balin, 1997). Guinier became the first woman to join Harvard Law School's tenured faculty when she was appointed with tenure last January. She is the author most recently of Lift Every Voice: Turning a Civil Rights Setback into a New Vision of Social Justice. The new book is Guinier's account of the controversy that surrounded her 1993 nomination by President Bill Clinton to be U.S. assistant attorney general for civil rights-a nomination that was eventually withdrawn. Guinier analyzes the political forces at work at the time, considers the damage done to the civil rights movement and how it might be renewed, and calls for a commitment to civil rights in the United States. In the two Honolulu events, Lani Guinier will discuss with colleagues from the University of Texas and the University of Hawai'i her most recent thinking on issues of race and social justice.

Gerald Torres, associate dean for academic affairs and H.O. Head Centennial Professor in Real Property Law at the University of Texas School of Law, is a leading figure in critical race theory as well as an expert in agricultural and environmental law. His many articles include "Taking and Giving: Police Power, Public Value, and Private Right" (Environmental Law, 1996) and "Translating Yonnondia by Precedent and Example: The Mashpee Indian Case" (Duke Law Journal, 1990). Torres was recently elected to the Board of the Environmental Law Institute, and appointed to the EPA's National Environmental Justice Advisory Council. He has been a Visiting Professor at Harvard Law School, and is a member of the American Law Institute.

Eric Yamamoto came to the University of Hawai'i's William S. Richardson School of Law after seven years of private practice in Honolulu. He has served as counsel to the Hawai'i Judiciary's Civil Rules Committee and has published articles on procedural reform, national security, minority rights and civil liberties. He has been active as a member of the Board of Directors of the Native Hawaiian Legal Corporation and as an officer of the Legal Aid Society and has performed significant pro bono legal work, including the reopening of the Korematsu Japanese internment case and class-action litigation on behalf of Native Hawaiian Homelands Trust beneficiaries. In 1994 he received the Korematsu Civil Rights Award.

J. William Schopf is the discoverer of the oldest fossil organisms known and has carried out geological studies in Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, and North and South America. Schopf is a member of the UCLA Department of Earth and Space Sciences, the Molecular Biology Institute, and the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics (IGPP) at the University of California at Los Angeles. He is a professor and director of the IGPP Center for the Study of Evolution and the Origin of Life. Schopf was an undergraduate geology major at Oberlin College, Ohio. In 1968 he received his Ph.D. in biology from Harvard University. He is a recipient of medals from the U.S. National Science Board, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, and the International Society for the Study of the Origin of Life. He received national book prizes for two volumes he edited, an Alexander von Humboldt Research Award, and two Guggenheim Fellowships.

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