Mari Matsuda

Mari J. Matsuda (born 1956) is an American lawyer, activist, and law professor at the William S. Richardson School of Law at the University of Hawaii. Matsuda returned to Richardson in the fall of 2008. Prior to her return to Hawaii, Matsuda was a professor at the UCLA School of Law and Georgetown University Law Center, specializing in the fields of torts, constitutional law, legal history, feminist theory, critical race theory, and civil rights law.

Matsuda obtained her High School Diploma from Roosevelt High School in Hawaii, B.A. from Arizona State University, her J.D. from the University of Hawaii, and her LL.M., Harvard. She was an associate at the labor law firm of King & Nakamura in Honolulu and was law clerk to Judge Herbert Young Cho Choy of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. She is of Okinawan ancestry.

She became the first tenured female Asian American law professor in the United States, at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) School of Law in 1998. Before joining the faculty at UCLA, she was professor of law for eight years at the University of Hawaii School of Law, teaching American Legal History, Torts, Constitutional Law, Civil Rights, and Sex Discrimination. Professor Matsuda 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 is a self-described as an "activist scholar." Her intellectual influence extends beyond law reviews (she authored three entries on a Yale Law School librarian's list of the ten most-cited law review articles) to include articles in academic and popular journals such as Amerasia Journal and Ms. Magazine. She is one of the leading voices in critical race theory since its inception. Her publications on reparations and affirmative action are frequently cited.

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