Michael McCann

MICHAEL MCCANN is Gordon Hirabayashi Professor for the Advancement of Citizenship at the University of Washington. A former chair of the Political Science department, he is the founding director of the Comparative Law and Society Studies (CLASS) Center and director of the newly reconstructed undergraduate Law, Societies, and Justice program. McCann is the author of Taking Reform Seriously: Perspectives on Public Interest Liberalism (Cornell, 1986) and Rights at Work: Pay Equity Reform and the Politics of Legal Mobilization (Chicago, 1994); the latter was both awarded the Pritchett Prize for best book by the Law and Courts section of APSA and named co-winner of the Law and Society Association biennial best book prize. He is also the principal co-editor of Judging the Constitution: Critical Essays on Judicial Lawmaking (Little, Brown, 1989), in which he authored two chapters. McCann has published essays in Law & Society Review, Law and Social Inquiry, and other social science journals as well as in edited books on numerous subjects, including: the politics of legal mobilization challenging racial, gender, and class discrimination; law and social movements; how the U.S. Supreme Court matters; the politics of cause lawyering; "new property" rights and environmentalism; everyday disputing and legal resistance; studies of rights consciousness; and contested conceptions of rights in a globalized world. He is nearing completion of a co-authored book titled Law's Lore: Tort Reform, Mass Media, and the Social Production of Legal Knowledge. Also in progress is an essay about the ambiguous advances of civil rights during the Cold War and a long developing book project regarding issues of identity, strategy, and violence in the legal struggles of Asian-American cannery workers in the Pacific Northwest (titled A Union By Law). McCann teaches a variety of undergraduate and graduate courses on law and society topics, for which he received a university-wide Distinguished Teaching Award in 1989.