Meet Our Faculty
Our faculty are internationally recognized experts across a wide range of fields and disciplines—from environmental law and Native Hawaiian law to international law and Pacific-Asian legal studies. They prepare Richardson Law School students for the complexities of law practice, while inspiring them to make lasting impacts in Hawaiʻi, throughout the United States, and internationally. Learn more about our Richardson ‘ohana below.
Faculty Research: Shaping Law and Policy
The faculty at Richardson Law School are leading scholars engaged in diverse and groundbreaking research. Their interdisciplinary scholarship shapes the development of law and policy in Hawaiʻi and beyond. In collaboration with law students, Richardson faculty produce books, scholarly articles, empirical studies, and essays that advance legal knowledge and grapple with important issues that impact lives and communities.
Featured Faculty Book
Invisible Atrocities: The Aesthetic Biases of International Criminal Justice
Invisible Atrocities assesses the role aesthetic factors play in shaping what forms of mass violence a reviewed as international crimes.
This book examines how associations between atrocity commission and the production of horrific spectacles shape the processes through which international crimes are identified and conceptualized, leading to the foregrounding of certain forms of mass violence and the backgrounding or complete invisibilization of others.
The publication recently received an honorable mention for the top book award from the Law and Society Association (LSA), the Herbert Jacob Prize.
Featured Faculty Book
Healing the Persisting Wounds of Historic Injustice: United States, South Korea and the Jeju 4.3 Tragedy
Healing the Persisting Wounds of Historic Injustice offers a pragmatic theoretical framework for shaping new reparative justice initiatives and for recalibrating stalled efforts (ranging from Black reparations to Korean “Comfort” Women).
And through its focus on potential U.S. participation in Jeju 4.3 social healing, it presents a vision for the United States as a democracy demonstrably committed to the rule of law and particularly to human rights as checks on excessive government security power.
Recent Faculty Scholarship
Aia i Waiʻoli ke Aloha ʻĀina: Re-centering ʻĀīna and Indigenous Knowledge for Restorative Environmental Justice
by A. Uʻilani Tanigawa Lum
In Aia i Waiʻoli ke Aloha ʻĀina, Professor Tanigawa Lum deploys a contextual inquiry framework to explore Kānaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) community efforts to re-center principles of Indigenous biocultural resource management practices in decision-making to more fully realize restorative environmental justice.
Cascading Consequences of Sinking States
by Melissa Stewart
Professor Stewart received the AALS Section on International Law inaugural New Scholars Award for her article, Cascading Consequences of Sinking States. In Cascading Consequences, Professor Stewart examines the phenomenon of sinking states—low-lying island states at risk of the submergence of the entirety of their territory due to sea level rise—and offers a novel perspective on what the existence of sinking states reveals about cracks in the foundation of international law.
Fran Ansley’s Tennessee Posse for Peace and Justice
by Charles R. Lawrence, III
In Fran Ansley’s Tennessee Posse for Peace and Justice, Emeritus Professor Lawrence honors the life and work of scholar, lawyer, and activist Fran Ansley, and considers how her work has been committed to the building of broad, democratic, inclusive, powerful, grassroots movements, led in important part by people who are themselves subordinated and oppressed.
Women’s Rights
by Carole J. Petersen
In Women’s Rights in THE OXFORD HANDBOOK OF CONSTITUTIONAL LAW IN ASIA, Professor Petersen compares the extent to which constitutional law and strategic litigation has been used to promote gender equality in four jurisdictions: Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.
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