Peter H. Irons - Career

Career

Irons completed a doctorate at Boston University in 1973. Afterwards, Zinn helped arrange for him to work at a law firm defending Daniel Ellsberg, who was under federal prosecution at the time for stealing the Pentagon Papers. His work at the law firm would later serve as motivation for him to pursue a law degree from Harvard Law School, which he received in 1978.

Upon graduating, he taught at Boston College Law School and the University of Massachusetts before moving to the University of California at San Diego. There in 1982 he established the Earl Warren Bill of Rights Project, of which he is the director. He was chosen in 1988 as the first Raoul Wallenberg Distinguished Visiting Professor of Human Rights at Rutgers University. He has lectured on constitutional law and civil liberties at the law schools of Harvard, Yale, Berkeley, Stanford, and more than 20 other schools.

He was also elected to two terms on the national board of the American Civil Liberties Union.

In addition to teaching and authoring several books, he has also helped reopen the wartime internment cases of Fred Korematsu, Minoru Yasui, and Gordon Hirabayashi.

He is an Emeritus Professor of Political Science at the University of California, San Diegoand an author on legal history. He retired from the University in 2004 and now devotes some of his time to causes that interest him. He has undertaken some legal work in issues of the separation of church and state and written some articles for the Montana Law Review.