Biography
Bibliography | Courses
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Hiroshi Motomura
Susan Westerberg Prager Professor of Law
B.A. Yale, 1974
J.D. UC Berkeley, 1978
UCLA Law Faculty since 2007
motomura@law.ucla.edu |
Hiroshi Motomura is an influential scholar and teacher of immigration and citizenship law. He is a co-author of two immigration-related casebooks: Immigration and Citizenship: Process and Policy (Seventh Edition 2012), and Forced Migration: Law and Policy, published in 2007. His book, Americans in Waiting: The Lost Story of Immigration and Citizenship in the United States, published in 2006 by Oxford University Press, won the Professional and Scholarly Publishing Award from the Association of American Publishers as the year’s best book in Law and Legal Studies, and was chosen by the U.S. Department of State for its Suggested Reading List for Foreign Service Officers. One of his current projects is a companion volume, Immigration Outside the Law, under contract with Oxford University Press. In addition, Professor Motomura has published many significant articles and essays on immigration and citizenship. He has testified as an immigration expert in the U.S. Congress, has served as co-counsel or a volunteer consultant in several cases in the U.S. Supreme Court and the federal appeals courts, and has been a member of the American Bar Association’s Commission on Immigration. He is one of the co-founders and current Directors of the Rocky Mountain Immigrant Advocacy Network (RMIAN), and he also serves on the Board of Directors of the National Immigration Law Center. In the fall of 2008, he was an outside advisor to the Obama-Biden Transition Team's Working Group on Immigration Policy.
Before coming home to California and joining the permanent faculty of UCLA Law in 2008, Professor Motomura was Kenan Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and before that Nicholas Doman Professor of International Law at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He has been a visiting professor at Hokkaido University in Sapporo, Japan, the University of Michigan Law School, and UCLA. He was the first Lloyd Cutler Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, and has served on the Board of Governors of the University of North Carolina Press.
In 1997, Professor Motomura was named President's Teaching Scholar, which is the highest teaching distinction at the University of Colorado, and he has won several other teaching awards, most recently the Distinguished Teaching Award for Post-Baccalaureate Instruction at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, in 2008. He teaches immigration law, immigrants’ rights, and civil procedure.