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 Foundation’s 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)