For Immediate Release
January 10, 2005
Contact:
Elissa Free, (202) 662-9500

Photo by Rhoda Baer

WASHINGTON, D.C. - Georgetown Law Center Professor Emma Coleman Jordan has won the 13th annual Clyde Ferguson award from the Minority Law Section of the Association of American Law Schools (AALS). The honor, named for one of the first African-American tenured professors at Harvard Law School, is "granted to an outstanding law teacher who in the course of his or her career has achieved excellence in the areas of public service, teaching and scholarship," according to the AALS.

Jordan received the award on January 8 at the AALS annual meeting in San Francisco. The honor recognizes Jordan for her dedication to scholarship, teaching and public service. The AALS Minority Section noted that "Professor Jordan has been engaged in cutting edge scholarship that has literally changed the way people think about the world…. One example of this work is the book that Professor Jordan is currently writing on the topic of lynching." The AALS said her forthcoming book and her work on economic justice "promise to open up new avenues of thinking in the critical race area and to encourage students and scholars to think about law in different and improved ways."

Jordan joined Georgetown Law in 1987, where she teaches in the fields of financial services and civil rights. In 1991 she
founded the Georgetown University Law Center Future Law Professors Program. Before coming to Georgetown, she taught
for 12 years at the University of California, Davis and served as a teaching fellow at Stanford Law School. She is the first
Georgetown faculty member and the first African American to serve as president of the AALS. She is also a past president
of the Society of American Law Teachers and has been a White House Fellow and Assistant to the Attorney General of the
United States. Jordan also served as counsel to Professor Anita Hill during the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings. She
has written several books, and another forthcoming work, Economic Justice: When Markets Fail, will be published this
June.

About Georgetown Law

Georgetown University Law Center is one of the world's leading law schools. It has the largest full-time faculty in the nation and is pre-eminent in several areas, including constitutional, international, tax and clinical law. Drawing on its Jesuit heritage, it has a strong tradition of public service and is dedicated to the principle that law is but a means, justice is the end. With this principle in mind, the Georgetown Law has built an environment that cultivates an exchange of ideas and the pursuit of academic excellence. It brings together an extraordinarily varied group of teachers, scholars and practitioners, as well as an outstanding student body.