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Professors David Friedman and Gwynne Skinner Receive Tenure
David Friedman, director of the Certificate in Law and Business program, and Gwynne Skinner, director of the International Human Rights Clinic, were awarded tenure earlier this year.
Friedman directs the law school’s Certificate Program in Law and Business. Students have voted him Outstanding Professor of the Year several times. Last year, Friedman received Willamette University’s Jerry F. Hudson Award for Excellence in Teaching.
Friedman’s scholarship focuses on how people make transactional decisions and what the regulatory response should be. He’s interested in free offers and the bait-and-switch tactics that companies use, as well as the efforts of politicians to regulate private behavior.
“People don’t behave like robots,” Friedman says. “What mistakes should we be correcting, and what mistakes should we say are impractical to correct?”
Friedman’s scholarship is especially timely as big-city mayors like Mike Bloomberg seek to regulate the soft drink habits of New Yorkers as part of an effort to curb obesity, and as former Portland commissioners sought earlier this year to include fluoride in the city’s drinking water.
The fluoride and soft drink debates, Friedman says, are about removing choice. “That’s when paternalism has its limits,” he explains. “This stuff affects everyone because we’re all consumers. When I present my work, there’s always a vibrant discussion because everyone can relate to the core problem.”
Professor Gwynne Skinner, director of Willamette’s International Human Rights Clinic, focuses her scholarly research on issues related to human rights litigation in U.S. courts and the role of international law in the U.S. domestic legal system. She has litigated high-profile cases: Hamad v. Gates, et al, and Ameur v. Gates, et al, which allege violations of international law on behalf of two former Guantanamo Bay detainees; and Corrie et al v. Caterpillar, which involved corporate liability for violations of human rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. Skinner recently was asked to serve on the International Corporate Accountability Roundtable (ICAR), which promotes corporate accountability for human rights abuses around the globe.
“The courts and Congress have treated international law with a lot of respect,” Skinner says. “Even though there may be temptations to have that changed, it shouldn’t happen.” In the post 9/11 era, Skinner says, human rights are being sacrificed in the fight against terrorism.
Willamette students have assisted Skinner on the Guantanamo Bay cases, as well as more routine cases of people seeking asylum from persecution they’ve suffered abroad. They’ve helped compile a report on human trafficking in Oregon.
“I want to give students a good, solid set of skills that they can build on, and I want to use the clinic to challenge them intellectually to deal with these cases that don’t fit neatly into a box,” Skinner says. “I push them and push them to think outside of their comfort zone. That’s what we should be doing as law professors.”
