Constitution Day Lecture: Who Belongs? The Limits of American Citizenship

Speaker Frank H. Wu is currently a Distinguished Professor, the highest rank accorded a faculty member, at University of California Hastings College of Law.

He previously served as Chancellor & Dean at the school, receiving a unanimous vote for renewal to a second term after having been voted the most “influential” dean in legal education in a poll by National Jurist magazine.

Before joining UC Hastings, he was a member of the faculty at Howard University, the nation’s leading historically black college/university, for a decade. He served as Dean of Wayne State University Law School in his hometown of Detroit, and he has been a visiting professor at University of Michigan; an adjunct professor at Columbia University; and a Thomas C. Grey Teaching Fellow at Stanford University. He taught at the Peking University School of Transnational Law in its inaugural year.

He is dedicated to civic engagement and volunteer service. In April 2016, he was elected by the members of Committee of 100 as their Chair. The Committee of 100 is a non-profit membership organization. Founded by individuals such as cellist Yo-Yo Ma, architect IM Pei, businesswoman Shirley Tang, financier Henry Tang, and philanthropist Cyrus Tang, it invites Chinese Americans who have achieved the highest levels of success to join, working on twin missions of promoting good relations between the US and China and the civic engagement of Chinese Americans.

He was appointed by the federal Department of Education to its National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity (NACIQI), which advises the administration on higher education accreditation, and by the Defense Department to the Military Leadership Diversity Commission, which submitted to Congress the report From Representation to Inclusion. He currently is a Trustee of Deep Springs College, a highly-selective full-scholarship all-male school enrolling twenty-six on a student-run cattle ranch near Death Valley, where he previously taught for several short periods. (The Trustees voted in 2011 in favor of transitioning to co-ed.) He was a Trustee of Gallaudet University, the only university in the world dedicated to deaf and hard of hearing persons from 2000 to 2010, and Vice-Chair of the Board for the final four years of his tenure; he participated in the presidential selection process. He served on the Board of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights Education Fund from 2004 to 2010.

He is the author of Yellow: Race in America Beyond Black and White, which was immediately reprinted in its hardcover edition, and co-author of Race, Rights and Reparation: Law and the Japanese American Internment, which received the single greatest grant from the Civil Liberties Public Education Fund. He blogs regularly for Huffington Post, and his work has appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post, and LA Times. He is writing a book on the Vincent Chin case, and his op-ed discussing the significance of the subject appeared in The New York Times on the thirtieth anniversary of the crime. Other op-eds have appeared in the Washington Post, LA Times, and Chicago Tribune. He blogs regularly for Huffington Post.

Over the years, Professor Wu has maintained an extensive schedule of media appearances and public speaking. His professional credits include commentary for National Public Radio and Now with Bill Moyers. He has appeared as a guest on the Oprah Winfrey show, O’Reilly Factor, and C-SPAN Booknotes with Brian Lamb, and as part of a roundtable hosted by George Takei (the original “Mr. Sulu” on Star Trek) discussing the restored Charlie Chan movies broadcast by Fox Movie Channel.

Prior to his academic career, he held a clerkship with the late U.S. District Judge Frank J. Battisti in Cleveland and practiced law with the firm of Morrison & Foerster in San Francisco – while there, he devoted a quarter of his time to pro bono work on behalf of indigent clients. He received a B.A. from the Johns Hopkins University and a J.D. from the University of Michigan. He completed the Management Development Program of the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Professor Wu was born in the United States in 1967, to immigrants from Taiwan. He is married to Carol L. Izumi. They live in San Francisco.

Cosponsored by the Program in Law and Public Affairs and the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions.