Mari Matsuda

Mari Matsuda, professor at Georgetown Law Center and co-author of the book Words that Wound: Critical Race Theory, Assaultive Speech, and the First Amendment, will discuss the challenges imposed by not regulating such speech.

Matsuda, an expert in torts, constitutional law, legal history, feminist theory, critical race theory, and civil rights, holds the J.D. from the University of Hawaii, and the L.L.M. from Harvard.

Before joining the Law Center, she had been a professor of law at the University of California at Los Angeles School of Law and the University of Hawaii School of Law. She has also taught at Stanford Law School and the University of Hiroshima and served as a judicial training consultant in Micronesia and South Africa. She was an associate at the labor law firm of King & Nakamura in Honolulu and was law clerk to the Honorable Herbert Y.C. Choy of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

Matsuda has written well-known articles on constitutional law and jurisprudential issues, including hate speech, affirmative action, and feminist theory. Her books include Called From Within: Early Women Lawyers of Hawaii (University of Hawaii Press, 1992); and the co-authored Words that Wound (Westview Press, 1993); and We Won't Go Back, Making a Case for Affirmative Action (Houghton Mifflin, 1997).

She is serving on the court-appointed Texaco Task Force on Equality and Fairness as part of a record-setting anti-discrimination settlement. She serves on the national advisory boards of Ms. Magazine, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the National Asian Pacific Legal Consortium.


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