Robert A. Williams, Jr.

Robert A. Williams, Jr. is the E. Thomas Sullivan Professor of Law and American Indian Studies and Faculty Co-Chair of the Indigenous Peoples Law and Policy (IPLP) Program at the University of Arizona Rogers College of Law in Tucson. An enrolled member of the Lumbee Indian Tribe of North Carolina, Professor Williams received his B.A. from Loyola College (1977) and his J.D. from Harvard Law School (1980). He was named the first Oneida Indian Nation Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School (2003-2004), having previously served there as Bennet Boskey Distinguished Visiting Lecturer of Law. He is the author of The American Indian in Western Legal Thought: The Discourses of Conquest (1990), which received the Gustavus Meyers Human Rights Center Award as one of the outstanding books published in 1990 on the subject of prejudice in the United States. He has also written Linking Arms Together: American Indian Treaty Visions of Law and Peace, 1600-1800 (1997) and Like a Loaded Weapon: The Rehnquist Court, Indian Rights and the Legal History of Racism in America (2005). He is co-author of Federal Indian Law: Cases and Materials (6th ed., with David Getches and Charles Wilkinson, 2011). His latest book, Savage Anxieties: The Invention of Western Civilization will be published by Palgrave Macmillan (Fall 2102). The 2006 recipient of the University of Arizona Henry and Phyllis Koffler Prize for Outstanding Accomplishments in Public Service, Professor Williams is the founding Director of the IPLP Program at the Rogers College of Law. He has received major grants and awards from the Soros Senior Justice Fellowship Program of the Open Society Institute, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the U.S. Department of Education, the U.S. Department of Justice, and the National Institute of Justice. He has represented tribal groups before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, and the United Nations Working Group on Indigenous Peoples, and served as co-counsel for Floyd Hicks in the United States Supreme Court case, Nevada v. Hicks (2001 term). Professor Williams has served as Chief Justice for the Court of Appeals, Pascua Yaqui Indian Reservation, and as Justice for the Court of Appeals and trial judge pro tem for the Tohono O’odham Nation. Professor Williams was named one of 2011’s “Heroes on the Hill” by Indian Country Today for his work on behalf of the Hul’qumi’num Treaty Group before the OAS Inter-American Human Rights Commission.