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Eric
K. Yamamoto, Member,
Board of Directors
Eric
Yamamoto is an award-winning law professor who is known for his
legal work and scholarship on civil rights and racial justice.
He served as a member of the legal team in 1984 successfully reopening
the infamous WWII Japanese American internment case, Korematsu
v. U.S., which led to reparations.
He
represented Manuel Fragante in his accent discrimination case
to the U.S. Supreme Court and Alice Aiwohi in her successful Hawaiian
Homelands breach of trust class action resulting in a state settlement
of $600 million. He has long served as counsel to an organization
working on indigenous Hawaiian water and reparation claims. He
also recently represented the Hawai`i Civil Rights Commission
in its appeal to the Hawai`i Supreme Court and has written many
amicus briefs to the U.S. Supreme Court, most recently in the
Grutter v. Michigan affirmative action case.
Professor
Yamamoto has published over 50 articles and chapters and two books.
His first book on Interracial Justice (conflict and reconciliation
among racial communities) received the Gustavus Meyers Award for
Outstanding Books on Social Justice for 2000. His second, and
co-authored book, Race, Rights and Reparation: Law and the Japanese
American Internment, is receiving national attention in light
of its relevance to the post-September 11th tension between national
security and civil liberties in America.
For
the year 2001 Professor Yamamoto was awarded the Haywood Burns
Chair in Civil Rights for New York, where he taught and lectured,
and in 2000 he received the Rockefellar Foundations coveted
Residency Fellowship for international justice scholars in Bellagio,
Italy. In 1999 he taught as a visiting professor at his alma mater,
Boalt Hall Law School, University of California at Berkeley.
Professor
Yamamoto works closely with and helps train law students interested
in social justice, and is a founding member of the nationwide
Equal Justice Society. He speaks regularly across the country
on issues of racial reconciliation, reparations, national security
and civil liberties.
(Updated
July 2003)
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