Professor Freamon received his B.A. from Wesleyan University and his J.D. from Rutgers University (Newark). He also possesses LL.M. and J.S.D. degrees from Columbia University School of Law. Professor Freamon's primary teaching focus is in evidence and legal philosophy, with a particular concentration in Islamic Jurisprudence and Islamic Legal History. He also has strong interests in ethics, international law, comparative law, and Anglo-American legal history. 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 in Islamic legal history. In recognition of his research and writing, Professor Freamon was recently awarded a postdoctoral fellowship in the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University. He spent the fall semester of 2007 in residence at Yale. He is currently on sabbatical and working on completing the manuscript of his book, tentatively entitled “Islam, Slavery, and Empire in the Indian Ocean World.” He will resume full-time teaching duties at Seton Hall in the fall of 2008.

Professor Freamon has wide experience, and has lectured, consulted, and published in the areas of Islamic Jurisprudence, Islamic Legal History, American Legal History, Comparative Law, Evidence, Prisoners' Rights, Slavery and the Law, and Professional Ethics. Most recently, he was asked by Governor Corzine, the New Jersey Departments of State and Education, and Princeton University to give the keynote address at the celebration of the 60th anniversary of the adoption of the 1948 New Jersey Constitution, which ended de jure racial segregation in the New Jersey public schools. The lecture, entitled “The Origins of the Anti-Segregation Clause in the New Jersey Constitution,” was attended by the Governor, the Secretary of State, the Commissioner of Education, and 500 high school children and their teachers from around the state. In a similar vein, on October 19, 2008 he will give the John Rock Memorial Lecture on African American History to the Salem County Historical Society, at the Mt. Pisgah Church, Salem, New Jersey. John Rock, a New Jersey native, was the first African American to be admitted to the Bar of the United States Supreme Court.

Professor Freamon’s work on topics in Islamic law and Islamic legal history is getting similar attention. 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. His article, entitled “Some Reflection on Post-Enlightenment Quranic Hermeneutics,” has just been published as part of a symposium on the future of Islamic law scholarship in the Michigan State Law Review. The article focuses on the problem of slavery in Quranic interpretation. His most recent piece on Islamic law, "The Emergence of a New Qur'anic Hermeneutic: The Role and Impact of Universities in West and East," has just appeared as part of a collection entitled "The Law Applied: Contextualizing the Islamic Shari'a" (I.B. Tauris). The collection is a festschrift of invited submissions from scholars in Islamic law honoring Professor Frank Vogel, who is retiring as Director of the Islamic Legal Studies Program at Harvard. Professor Freamon is also 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." In addition to his work on slavery and equality, Professor Freamon also has an interest in the Islamic law of war and the intersection of Islamic law, Islamic legal history, and international criminal law. He recently delivered a lecture on jihad at a University of Virginia Law School symposium organized by the U.S. Army War College and he is the author of a widely cited 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).

Professor Freamon was the founding director of Seton Hall Law School's Center for Social Justice and served for five years as Chairman of the Board of Essex- Newark Legal Services. He is a member of the Board of Editors of the New Jersey Law Journal and he is an elected member of the Board of Trustees of the New Jersey ACLU. In the 1999-2000 academic year, Professor Freamon was a Samuel I. Golieb Fellow in Legal History at NYU Law School. He has been a visiting professor at Washington & Lee School of Law in Lexington, VA and at Rutgers Law School in Newark, NJ. Professor Freamon's international experience includes two years on the law faculty of the University of Nairobi in Nairobi, Kenya and a sabbatical semester in 1993 as a special student at Al Azhar University in Cairo, Egypt, the premier educational institution in the Sunni Islamic world.

Professor Freamon is the Director of the Law School's Summer Program for the Study of Law in the Middle East, based in Cairo. The Cairo Summer Program is the first and only ABA-approved study abroad program in the Arabic speaking Middle East. In a recent initiative, he has organized a winter intersession study abroad program in Zanzibar, Tanzania, focusing on the twin problems of modern day slavery and human trafficking. The program is scheduled to begin operation in the winter of 2007-8. Consistent with these initiatives and his research interests, Professor Freamon is currently pursuing a major research and writing project on the abolition of slavery in the Islamic world. His forthcoming book, “Islam, Slavery, and Empire in the Indian Ocean World,” is the first installment in that effort. He came to Seton Hall in 1979.