NEWS RELEASE
February 1, 2007
Richard H. Weisberg Joins Thomas Jefferson School of Law Faculty
Is Teaching Course on European Legal Systems During the Holocaust
SAN DIEGO- Internationally renowned author and law professor Richard H. Weisberg has joined the faculty at Thomas Jefferson School of Law as a visiting professor for the spring 2007 semester. Professor Weisberg is a distinguished member of the faculty at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law of Yeshiva University in New York, where he is the Walter Floersheimer Professor of Constitutional Law
At Thomas Jefferson, Professor Weisberg is teaching a course titled "European Legal Systems During the Holocaust,” to a of group students he says are actively engaged in figuring out the terrible tragedy that linked legal reasoning and law generally to the genocide in Europe during World War II.
Professor Weisberg is involved in theoretical and litigation-oriented approaches to the subject of his book Vichy Law and the Holocaust in France. Since 2001, Professor Weisberg has been the representative of former plaintiffs in Vichy-related litigation to an oversight committee, consisting of American State Department and French governmental officials, which has responsibility for the day-to-day restitution of stolen banking assets to victims or their heirs.
“How could civilized earlier legal traditions, such as those in Germany and France, devolve to participate in exclusion and murder?,” asks Professor Weisberg. “With my students I also will be speaking about recent attempts in American federal courts, in which I have participated for the plaintiffs, to bring a measure of justice and restitution to the material harms that law also inflicted on the Holocaust's victims.”
While in San Diego, Professor Weisberg will be the keynote speaker at Thomas Jefferson’s Challenges for Children’s Rights Symposium on March 2nd. His address is titled: Wronged by Law: Children During the Holocaust
For More information on the “Challenges for Children’s Rights Symposium” visit: www.tjsl.edu/ChildrensRights
Professor Weisberg earned a B.A. from Brandeis University; a Ph.D. from Cornell University; and his J.D. from Columbia University.
In addition to his work with holocaust issues, he pioneered the worldwide "Law and Literature" movement and is the author of The Failure of the Word; When Lawyers Write and Poethics: And Other Strategies of Law and Literature. An editor of the Columbia Law Review, he was associated with Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton.
Professor Weisberg was a fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Society for the Humanities of Cornell University, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Rockefeller Foundation.
In 1998, he was named a Guggenheim Fellow for his study of the privatization of public discourse. In fall 2002, Professor Weisberg was on the visiting faculty at the Johns Hopkins program in Nanjing, China.
From 1979 to 1986, he was president of the Law and Humanities Institute and has been its chair since 1987. In 1983, he became chair of the law and humanities section of the American Association of Law Schools. Professor Weisberg is founding editor of Law and Literature.
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