ONEIDA NATION HOMELANDS, N.Y. – The recently created Oneida Nation Professorship of Law at Harvard Law School has named its initial visiting professor. Robert Williams, professor of law and American Indian studies at the University Of Arizona College of Law, will assume the chair for the winter semester of 2004.
“When I was asked by the dean to accept the position, it was the most significant honor I’ve ever received,” said Williams, an alumnus of Harvard Law School’s class of 1980. “I’m proud to have been asked. I’m proud of Harvard, and I’m proud of the Oneida Indian Nation for having the vision to endow the chair.”
Williams has been E. Thomas Sullivan Professor of Law and American Indian Studies at the University of Arizona since 1998. He has served as the judge, pro tem, for the Tohono O’odham Indian nation in Arizona since 1988. He has also received awards from several organizations including, the International Advisory Board of the Review of Constitutional Studies, Editorial Board for the International Journal of Indigenous Philosophy and the National Institute of Justice, U.S. Department of Justice Grant.
“I’m delighted to have been named first Oneida Indian Nation visiting professor,” said Williams, a member of the Lumbee Indian Tribe of North Carolina. “I’ve devoted my life to Indian Law and to have been given this chair by the Oneida Indian Nation puts Indian law on the map. The field of Indian law has arrived and deservedly so.”
The Harvard chair is the only professorship of its kind east of the Mississippi. The Nation presented the school with a $3 million gift that will fund the Oneida Indian Nation Visiting Professors of Law – a number of scholars, including Williams, to teach at the law school – until the position can be filled.
