Professor Bernard K. Freamon is the on-site Director of the Cairo Summer Program. His office is located in Room 520 in the Law School. He can be reached at 973-642-8827 or via e-mail at CAIRO@SHU.EDU.
Bernard K. Freamon, Professor of Law, Director
Professor Bernard Freamon received his B.A. from Wesleyan University and his J.D. from Rutgers University (Newark.) He also has LL.M. and J.S.D. degrees from Columbia University School of Law. His J.S.D. dissertation, soon to be published, is concerned with conceptions of equality in Islamic Law and their relations to the problem of slavery. He was the founding director of the Seton Hall University School of Law’s Center for Social Justice and spent two years on the law faculty of the University of Nairobi in Kenya and a sabbatical semester at Al Azhar University in Cairo, Egypt. He has lectured, consulted, and published in the areas of Islamic Jurisprudence, Comparative Law, and Professional Ethics. Professor Freamon is the author of a recent article on martyrdom in Islam entitled “Martyrdom, Suicide, and The Islamic Law of War: A Short Legal History,” 27 Fordham Int’l L.J. 299 (2003), and he is currently pursuing a major research project on the abolition of slavery in the Islamic world. He recently completed a fellowship at Yale University's Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition.
Michèle Alexandre, Associate Professor of Law
Professor Michèle Alexandre is a graduate of Colgate University and Harvard Law School. She is currently an Associate Professor of Law at the University of Mississippi. her teaching areas include property, trusts and estate, critical race theory, constitutional law, civil rights, human rights and feminist legal theory. Professor Alexandre's prior professional experience includes serving as a civil rights attorney with Chestnut Sanders Sanders Pettaway Campbell & Albright L.L.C. in Selma, AL; as an Associate in the Corporate Real Estate Department of the Debevoise & Plimpton law firm; and as a Law Clerk for the Hon. John P. Fullam, U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. Professor Alexandre has received Fulbright and Watson Fellowships to pursue her research projects. Her publications include: “Big Love: Is Feminist Polygamy an Oxymoron or a True Possibility?”(18 HSTWLJ 3); “Human Rights Still Matter?” Oxford Round Table’s Forum on Public Policy, (Volume 2, Number 2, 2006); Lessons from Islamic Law: A Case for Expanding the American Conception of Surviving Spouse So As to Include De facto Polygamous Spouses (forthcoming in the Washington and Lee Law Review); Navigating the Topography of Inequality: A Proposal for Remedying Past Geographic Segregation During Post-Disaster Rebuilding (forthcoming in LAW, PROPERTY, AND SOCIETY Ashgate Publishing); Black Venus Hottentot Revisited: Gratuitous Use of Black Women’s Bodies and the Role of Race and Gender in Campus and Academic Reactions, (forthcoming in RACE TO INJUSTICE: LESSONS LEARNED FROM THE DUKE UNIVERSITY LACROSSE PLAYERS’ RAPE CASE, Carolina Academic Press).
Sherman A. Jackson, Professor of Middle Eastern Studies and Islamic Law
Professor Sherman A. Jackson is a Professor of Islamic Studies, Department of Near Eastern Studies at the University of Michigan. His areas of specialization are Islamic law and theology. He earned his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania between 1982 to 1990. Professor Jackson has broad teaching experience, having taught at Wayne State University, Indiana University, University of Texas at Austin, American University in Cairo, Egypt, and Middlebury College. He has also received numerous fellowships and awards and has served as interim president of the Shari'ah Scholars Association of North America and as a member of the Board of Trustees for the North American Islamic Trust. Jackson is the author of Islamic Law and the State: The Constitutional Jurisprudence of Shihab al-Din al-Qarafi, as well as numerous articles on Islam. He speaks classical Arabic as well as the Egyptian, Levantine, Saudi Arabian and Sudanese dialects, and has a reading knowledge of French, German, and Persian.
William Hughes, Professor of Law
Professor William Hughes is a graduate of the citadel with a law degree from Harvard Law School. He has extensive practical and academic experience in the commercial, banking, oil and gas, and natural resources fields. After graduating from Harvard in 1968, he was commissioned as a First Lieutenant and then Captain in the United States Army, where he served as an instructor in the Airborne Department, Infantry School, Fort Benning, Georgia, and then as advisor to the 1st Vietnamese Infantry Battalion in Vietnam. For his service in Vietnam, he was awarded the Combat Infantry Badge and the Bronze Star. He returned to the U.S. and practiced law with Herrick, Smith, Donald, Farley and Ketchum in Boston, Massachusetts for three years, working on commercial litigation and related matters. He then worked as an Assistant United States Attorney in Boston for five years handling a wide variety of civil and white collar criminal matters. In 1978 he joined the law firm of Doerner, Stuart, Saunders, Daniel and Anderson in Tulsa, Oklahoma where he engaged in a trial, appellate, and administrative law practice involving banking and finance, commercial, energy, and public utilities matters and disputes. He became a partner in the firm in 1982. In 1988 he opened his own law firm in Tulsa and he continued to specialize in general commercial, energy, financial, and criminal defense matters. He was a Fulbright Scholar and Visiting Professor of American Law in the University of Tunis, Faculty of Law and Faculty of Letters in Tunisia during the 2000-2001 academic year. Since then he has concentrated on academic and teaching pursuits in the energy and natural resources law fields. He has taught International Oil and Gas Law for OGCI Petroskills in Trinidad, London, Dubai, and Rio de Janeiro. He currently teaches International Oil and Gas Law at the University of Tulsa College of Law.