Faculty and Staff

Winter Intersession Program on Modern Day Slavery and Human Trafficking

December 20, 2010 - January 3, 2011  |  Optional Mainland Safari - January 4 - January 9, 2011

Professor Bernard K. Freamon is the on-site Director of the Zanzibar Winter Program. His office is located at Seton Hall University School of Law, Room 520, One Newark Center, Newark, NJ 07102-5210. He can be reached at 973-642-8827 or via e-mail at zanzibar@shu.edu.

A brief summary of his resume, together with a listing of the names and biographies of the other program faculty follows.

Bernard K. Freamon, Professor of Law, Seton Hall University School of Law
B.A., Wesleyan University
J.D., Rutgers University School of Law (Newark)
LL.M., Columbia University School of Law
J.S.D., Columbia University School of Law

Professor Freamon has been a member of the Seton Hall faculty since 1979. He is the founding director of the law school’s Center for Social Justice and he has also spent two years on the law faculty of the University of Nairobi in Kenya and a sabbatical semester as a special student at Al Azhar University in Cairo, Egypt. He is the director of the Law School’s Program for the Study of Law in the Middle East which operates the Cairo Summer Program, the first and only ABA approved study abroad program in the Arab world, and the Jordan Summer Program. He has lectured, consulted, and published in the areas of Islamic Jurisprudence, Comparative Law, International Law and Professional Ethics. His J.S.D. dissertation, soon to be published, is concerned with conceptions of equality in Islamic Law and their relation to the problem of slavery. Continuing that quest, he is currently pursuing a major research and writing project on the abolition of slavery in the Islamic world and his forthcoming book, "Islam, Slavery and Empire in the Indian Ocean World," will be the first installment on that effort. In 2007, Professor Freamon was a fellow at Yale University's Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition. In November 2008, he was an organizer and co-convener of an important Gilder Lehrman international conference at Yale entitled "Slavery and the Slave Trades in the Indian Ocean and Arab Worlds: Global Connections and Disconnections." The conference attracted a number of significant scholars from around the world and the conference papers will appear in a Yale University Press publication, edited by Professor Freamon and Professors Robert Harms and David W. Blight, in 2012. In March 2010, Professor Freamon was elected to membership in the American Law Institute, the leading independent organization in the United States producing scholarly work aimed at clarifying, modernizing and improving the law. He recently completed a year as Chairperson of the Section on Islamic Law of the Association of American Law Schools and he was one of the conveners of a ground-breaking conference on "The Teaching of Islamic Law at American Law Schools," sponsored by the Islamic Legal Studies Program at Harvard Law School. Professor Freamon was recently appointed co-rapporteur to the Committee on Islamic Law of the American Branch of the International Law Association. In addition to his numerous articles and book chapters on Islamic law and slavery, he is the author of two entries in the recently published Encyclopedia on Antislavery and Abolition (Greenwood Press, 2007), one entitled "The Qur'an and Antislavery," and the other entitled "The Ideological Origins of Antislavery Thought." His entry "Slaves," will appear in the forthcoming Encyclopedia of Islamic Political Thought (Princeton University Press, 2011). Professor Freamon's book chapter, "Islamic Law and the Right to Freedom from Slavery, Servitude and Forced Labor," will appear in the "Research Handbook on Islamic Law and Human Rights," to be published by Edward Elgar Publishers in 2012.

Simone Monasebian, Esq., Chief, NY Office of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime ("UNODC")
J.D., Syracuse University School of Law

Professor Monasebian is the Chief of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) New York Office. UNODC is the principal UN organ responsible for coordination of UN efforts directed at eliminating human trafficking. Professor Monasebian led the UN Secretariat's negotiations of the 2010 (General Assembly) adopted UN Global Plan of Action Against Trafficking in Persons, and the launch of the UN Voluntary Trust Fund for Victims of Trafficking in Persons. She has trained diplomats, judges, lawyers and investigators on various aspects of international criminal law, including human trafficking. Prior to her appointment with the UNODC, Professor Monasebian served as Principal Defender of the Special Court for Sierra Leone, and before that was a Trial Attorney with the UN International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, Office of the Prosecutor. In that capacity she lived in Arusha, Tanzania for over four years and was one of the prosecutors responsible for the 2003 landmark convictions of three media executives who fanned the flames of genocide in their newspaper and radio station. That case raised important principles concerning the role of the media, which had not been addressed at the level of international criminal justice since Nuremberg. Her work on the Media Case is prominently featured in the book "Justice On The Grass: Three Rwandan Journalists, Their Trial for War Crimes and a Nation's Quest for Redemption" by Dina Temple-Raston. Professor Monasebian has also served as Court TV's legal analyst for the Saddam Hussein and other international criminal trials, and is a frequent commentator on international justice for various media outlets. Prior to joining the UN, she practiced in a New York law firm handling complex litigation matters. Professor Monasebian began her professional career in the 1980s as one of the very first journalists covering rap music and hip hop culture.

Judge Garrett Brown Jr., Chief Judge, United States District Court for the District of New Jersey
J.D., Duke University School of Law

Judge Brown has been the Chief Judge of the District of New Jersey since 1996. His career in public service has included work as a clerk for the Honorable Vincent S. Haneman, Supreme Court of New Jersey from 1968-1969, Assistant U.S. Attorney from 1969-1971, Deputy Chief, Criminal Division 1971-1972 (Received Attorney General's Meritorious Service Award); Executive Asst. U.S. Attorney, all with District of NJ, 1972-73; General Counsel, U.S. government Printing Office, 1981-1983; and Acting Maritime Administrator, U.S. Maritime Administration, 1985. He was in private practice as a senior associate, 1973-1975 and partner, Stryker, Tams and Dill, Newark, NJ, 1976-1981. In these positions he specialized in commercial and maritime litigation. Judge Brown was appointed by President Ronald Reagan to the U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey in January 1986. Judge Brown is currently a member of the Judicial Conference of the U.S. and the Third Circuit Judicial Council. He was also a member of the Committee on Financial Disclosure, 1997-2004; and the Federal Judicial Center, District Judge Education Advisory Committee, 1999-2004. He is also a long-time Adjunct Professor at Seton Hall University School of Law where he has taught Civil Trial Practice, Professional Responsibility, Advanced Negotiation Skills, Federal Courts and International Admiralty & Maritime Law.

Guest Lecturers for 2011-2012 Program

Kevin Bales, President and Co-Founder of Free the Slaves
B.A., University of Oklahoma
M.A., University of Mississippi
M.Sc., London School of Economics
Ph.D., London School of Economics

Dr. Bales is the President and Co-Founder of Free the Slaves, the US sister organization of Anti-Slavery International (the world's oldest human rights organization), and he is Emeritus Professor at Roehampton University, London. His book, "Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and has been published in eleven languages. Desmond Tutu called it "a well researched, scholarly and deeply disturbing expose of modern slavery." Dr. Bales served as a consultant to the UN Global Program on Human Trafficking and has advised the US, British, Irish, Norwegian, and Nepali governments, as well as the ECOWAS Community, on slavery and human trafficking policy. The film based on his book, which he co-wrote, won a Peabody Award and two Emmy Awards. Dr. Bales has written several other books on Slavery and Human Trafficking and has been the recipient of several human rights awards. Dr. Bales was most recently honored with the 2011 University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award for "Ideas Improving World Order." He is currently writing a book on the relationship of slavery and environmental destruction and, with Jody Sarich, a book exploring forced marriage worldwide.

Ruchira Gupta, President and Founder of Apne Aap Women Worldwide

Ms. Gupta was inspired to found Apne Aap after working closely with 22 courageous young women in prostitution in the brothels of Mumbai to make her Emmy Award-winning documentary, The Selling of Innocents. She has campaigned tirelessly to promote the leadership of survivors in the global fight to end trafficking - bringing groups of survivors to speak before the United Nations General Assembly in 2008 and 2009, elevating their voices to the highest levels of global policy. She has been honored with the Clinton Global Citizen Award in 2009, the UK House of Lords' Abolitionist Award in 2007, an Emmy in 1995 and was recently featured in Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn's bestseller Half the Sky. Her most significant contribution to civil society, governments, and multi-lateral bodies like the United Nations has been to highlight the link between trafficking and prostitution and to lobby with policy makers on shifting the blame from the victim to the perpetrator. Ms. Gupta has worked in the United Nations in various capacities for over ten years in Nepal, Thailand, Philippines, Kosovo, USA, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Myanmar, Indonesia and Iran. In some of these countries she has helped to develop National Action Plans on women's empowerment and laws against human trafficking.

SETON HALL UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF LAW | One Newark Center | Newark, New Jersey | 07102 | 973-642-8500