Legal minds from the United States, Japan, Scotland and Germany will share their expertise with Elon Law students this winter in “Constitutions and Cultures: The Idea of a Constitution,” a course taught by noted constitutional law expert A.E. Dick Howard.
Howard created the course based partly on the experiences he has had with men and women who helped create constitutions in other nations, such as the societies of Central and Eastern Europe after the fall of communism.
Professors taking part in the Winter Term course include the following:
Professor A.E. Dick Howard
University of Virginia School of Law
White Burkett Miller Professor of Law and Public Affairs
Earle K. Shawe Research Professor
Widely acknowledged as an expert in the fields of constitutional law, comparative constitutionalism, and the Supreme Court, A. E. Dick Howard was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University and served as executive director of the commission that wrote Virginia’s current constitution and directed the successful referendum campaign for its ratification.
He is the author of a number of books, articles, and monographs. These include The Road from Runnymede: Magna Carta and Constitutionalism in America and Commentaries on the Constitution of Virginia, which won a Phi Beta Kappa prize. More recent works include Democracy’s Dawn and Constitution-making in Eastern Europe.
Often consulted by constitutional draftsmen in other states and abroad, Professor Howard has compared notes with revisers at work on new constitutions in Brazil, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Romania, Russia, Albania, Malawi and South Africa.
Howard serves as the first Sandra Day O’Connor Professor at Elon.
Mr. Naoyuki Agawa
Attorney
Former Minister for Public Affairs at the Embassy of Japan in Washington, D.C.
Naoyuki Agawa was appointed Minister for Public Affairs at the Embassy of Japan in Washington, D.C. in August 2002 and served there until April 2005. He has taught constitutional law and history at the University of Virginia School of Law, Georgetown University Law Center, Doshisha University, and most recently Tokyo University.
Agawa’s publications include, among others, The Birth of an American Lawyer, To America with de Tocqueville, The Friendship on the Sea: the United States Navy and the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force, Have You Found America?, American History through the United States Constitution and 2520 Massachusetts Avenue.
Dr. Azizah al-Hibri
Professor of Law
University of Richmond School of Law
Azizah al-Hibri is a leading expert in the United States on Islam, particularly the role of women in the religion. In 1993 she founded an organization called “Karamah: Muslim Women Lawyers for Human Rights,” with the goal of producing scholarship and activity that would help Muslim women around the world achieve the rights they are afforded but often denied. She edited the 1982 book, Women and Islam, which includes a major article she authored.
She came to the University of Richmond in 1998 after working as an associate for law firms in New York. She holds a J.D. from the University of Pennsylvania Law School, a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, a master’s degree from Wayne State University, and a bachelor’s degree from the American University of Beirut. Azizah al-Hibri teaches courses on corporate law and Islamic jurisprudence.
Professor Winfried Brugger
Professor of Public Law, Philosophy of Law and Theory of State
Heidelberg University
Winfried Brugger studied law, philosophy and sociology at the Universities in Munich and Tübingen, and received an LL.M. from the University of California, Berkeley. He has held visiting professorships at Georgetown University Law Center, the University of Houston Law Center, the University of San Francisco and the University of San Diego. He is president of the German Section of the International Association for Social and Legal Philosophy and is author and editor of 18 books and 250 articles and book reviews, including on German and American constitutional law and theory and the philosophy of law.
Brugger also works on human rights in general and free speech issues in particular, judicial review, theories of interpretation, liberalism and communitarianism, constitutional law in times of emergency, and theories of good decision-making. In Germany, he regularly reviews new U.S. Supreme Court decisions and is co-editor of the Newsletter of the German-American Lawyers Association.
Mr. Herbert A. Kerrigan
Barrister, Queen’s Counsel, Scotland
Herbert A. Kerrigan is a Queen’s Counsel practising in Scotland where he is a member of the Faculty of Advocates and in England where he is a member of the Honourable Society of the Middle Temple (one of the four Inns of Court). He is a member of the prestigious Chambers of Lord Carlyle QC in Bell Yard in London beside the Royal Courts of Justice. His practice encompasses serious crime and medical and other forms of medical negligence. He prosecutes and defends in the supreme courts.
Kerrigan has lectured and tutored at the University of Edinburgh in constitutional law, criminal law and criminology and Scots Law and at various Universities in the United States of America on aspects of comparative law. He is also one of the few members of the Bar in the United Kingdom who has appeared in a capital murder trial having successfully defended a British mercenary in Angola who faced such charges. He has addressed the Knesset Law Committee in Israel on behalf of all of the Christian Churches on a constitutional law proposal on freedom of religion, which threatened the historic status of these churches in the Holy Land.