Howard Gillman was appointed by the University of California Board of Regents as the sixth chancellor of the University of California, Irvine on September 18, 2014. He is an award-winning scholar and teacher with an expertise in the American Constitution and the Supreme Court. He holds faculty appointments in the School of Law, the Department of Political Science (within the School of Social Sciences), the Department of History (within the School of Humanities), and the Department of Criminology, Law and Society (within the School of Social Ecology) and every year teaches an undergraduate seminar. He also provides administrative oversight to, and serves as co-chair of the advisory board of, the University of California’s National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement.
BUDDY CASSIDY
Buddy Cassidy is a 4th year English PhD student at UC Irvine. He specializes in Medieval and Early Modern English literature, and his dissertation will examine the nexus of English kingship, service, and virtue from Chaucer to Shakespeare. In the past, Buddy has taught Composition 39B: American Gothic and 39C: Free Speech on Campus. Though Buddy’s work in law and literature is typically confined to 15th and 16th C. England, he is nonetheless passionate about U.S. constitutional law, with a particular emphasis on the Bill of Rights. He would like to thank his teaching mentor Brad Queen for the opportunity to work alongside him in teaching Society, Law, and Literature: The First Amendment Today.
Kathy Chiang is the Assistant Director of the esports department at the University of California, Irvine. She manages the UCI Esports Arena, oversees program staff, and leads key initiatives including training programs, outreach, summer camps, and operations for the UCI Esports Conference. She graduated from UCI with a B.S. in Computer Game Science after co-founding one of the largest clubs on campus, The Association of Gamers. Recognized for her work with the campus gaming community and collegiate esports space since 2011, she was brought on as a key advisor for shaping the new esports program in 2016.
Mark led the effort to create the award-winning esports program at UCI. Working closely with student leaders, administrators, faculty, and industry partners, Mark built a business plan that was both cost-neutral to the university and that broadly approaches the world of esports through the five pillars of Competition, Research, Community, Entertainment, and Careers. Mark was selected to serve as the inaugural commissioner for the North America Scholastic Esports Federation, helping connect learning to student interests.
In June 2018, UCI’s League of Legends team won the College League of Legends Championship. In October 2018, UCI’s esports program was awarded “Most Outstanding Collegiate Program” by the esports industry at the Tempest Awards. While at UCI, Mark has coordinated many campus traditions including helping break Guinness Book World records. Mark has a B.S. in psychobiology from UCLA and an MBA from Cal State Fullerton’s College of Business and Economics.
Michelle N. Deutchman is the inaugural Executive Director of the UC National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement. Formed by the UC Office of the President, the Center explores how the fundamental democratic and academic principles of free speech and civic engagement should enrich the discovery and transmission of knowledge in America’s colleges and universities. In this role, Deutchman oversees a multidisciplinary national fellowship program and works across all 10 UC campuses to study and shape national discourse about free speech.
Before joining the Center, Deutchman served as Western States Civil Rights Counsel and National Campus Counsel for the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a non-profit organization that has been a leader in combating bigotry, prejudice and anti-Semitism for over a century. As National Campus Counsel, Ms. Deutchman focused on emerging trends and challenges pertaining to free expression at colleges and universities. She trained campus stakeholders – including administrators and law enforcement – on how to safeguard free speech at universities while simultaneously maintaining a safe and inclusive campus climate.
From 2014-2018, Deutchman taught a course on contemporary free exercise issues at UCLA School of Law. She earned her Juris Doctor from University of Southern California Law Center, where she graduated Order of the Coif. She is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of University of California at Berkeley and holds a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science.
David Kaye is a Clinical Professor of Law at the University of California, Irvine, and the former United Nations Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression (2014-2020). He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a former member of the Executive Council of the American Society of International Law. His 2019 book, Speech Police: The Global Struggle to Govern the Internet (Columbia Global Reports), explores the ways in which companies, governments and activists struggle to define the rules for online expression.
Appointed by the UN Human Rights Council in June 2014, David served through July 2020 as the global body’s principal monitor for freedom of expression issues worldwide. He reported to the UN on COVID-19 and freedom of expression and, in 2019, to the UN General Assembly on online hate speech. His earlier reporting addressed, among other topics, the ways in which Artificial Intelligence technologies implicate human rights issues, the global private surveillance industry and its impact on freedom of expression, growing repression of freedom of expression globally, encryption and anonymity as promoters of freedom of expression, the protection of whistleblowers and journalistic sources, the roles and responsibilities of private Internet companies, and the regulation of online content by social media and search companies.
In addition to his work on human rights and freedom of expression, his academic research and writing have focused on accountability for serious human rights abuses, international humanitarian law, and the international law governing use of force.
Recent Works
Ronald Ly is the head coach for UCI Esports’ scholarship Overwatch team. He graduated from University of Toronto where he earned his Honors B.A. specializing in philosophy and captained their Overwatch team from 2017-2018. His past competitive experiences in Overwatch include working as the head coach for Uprising Academy and Mayhem Academy. Ronald bleeds maple syrup and showcased it by coaching Canada to 3rd place in the 2018 Overwatch World Cup. Aside from his competitive experience and accomplishments, Ronald is an avid voice of the gaming community and an advocate for positive change in areas of diversity, inclusion, and sustainability who has appeared on various podcasts and talk shows.
Margaret O’Hara is a Criminology, Law, and Society and Literary Journalism double major in UC Irvine’s Class of 2021. During her time at UCI, Margaret participated in the Campuswide Honors Collegium, conducted her School of Social Ecology field study at the ACLU of Southern California, and studied abroad on UCEAP’s Human Rights and Cultural Memory program to Argentina and Chile. In fact, it was Margaret’s participation in this study abroad program that inspired this research project. She is delighted to share her examination of how this classic work of fiction illuminates historical events.
Jessamyn Rosiak currently serves as General Manager for GameChanger Charity, a nonprofit dedicated to improving the lives of children facing life-threatening illnesses using gaming and technology. She also holds the role of Opportunities Associate at Twitch, under the Partnerships Go-To-Market team. Jess has previously served as NASEF’s Head of League Operations, where she built all NASEF competitive programming and other key programs. She graduated from UCI in 2018 with a B.A. in Political Science, where she helped develop key parts of the UCI Esports program as an undergraduate student.
Recent Works
“Title IX, Esports, and #EToo”.
(Forthcoming in The George Washington Law Review 2021)
Jane Stoever is a Clinical Professor of Law at UC Irvine School of Law, where she directs the Domestic Violence Clinic and the UCI Initiative to End Family Violence and teaches Family Law and Legal Ethics. She also co-chairs the Orange County Domestic Violence Death Review Team. She received her J.D. from Harvard Law School and her LL.M. from Georgetown University Law Center.
In Professor Stoever’s clinical teaching, she supervises law students representing clients in family law, immigration, and other legal and non-legal interventions into domestic violence.
Professor Stoever’s scholarly research concerns the multiple oppressions domestic violence survivors face and the legal and societal responses to such. Additionally, her work explores ways that the law can better respond to complex experiences of intimate partner abuse. In addressing the interdisciplinary problem of domestic violence, her scholarship frequently brings together the worlds of law, public health, psychology, and survivors’ lived experiences.
Brook Thomas is Chancellor’s Professor Emeritus of English and the Center for Law, Society, and Culture at UC Irvine. His specialty is 19th-century law and literature in the US. He has published six single-authored books and a case book on PLESSY v. FERGUSON. THE LITERATURE OF RECONSTRUCTION: NOT IN PLAIN BLACK AND WHITE (2017) won the Hugh Holman Prize. He has held von Humboldt, DAAD, Woodrow Wilson Center, ACLS, and NEH Fellowships.
Professor Thomas is fascinated with how, by creating imaginary worlds, literary works make political arguments, not by arguing a thesis, but by formally placing the various forces at play in a period in different proportions and relations. “Cross-examining” the law and literature of a period allows me to explore how difficult it is to find remedies for wrongs, even those universally condemned today.
Recent Works
“The First Amendment v. reproductive rights: Crisis pregnancy centers, commercial speech, and marketplaces of misinformation.” First Amendment Studies. 54.1 (April 2020): 71-92.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/21689725.2020.1742763
Brad Queen is an Associate Professor of Teaching in UCI’s English department, where he serves as Co-Director of the Composition Program, a large unit for undergraduates that offers well over five hundred classes yearly. He supervises and instructs graduate students new to writing & literacy pedagogy, and in his undergraduate instruction offers classes on First Amendment jurisprudence itself and its engagement with literature. His research in writing studies engages theories of equity and fairness in the assessment of student work, empirical designs for studying mainstream multilingual students, and metacognition. In the area of First Amendment law, his scholarship engages the dynamic tension between equality and liberty, the free exercise and free speech clauses, and the ways online environments are changing how we think about free speech and expression.