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.
Read more about this topic: Peter H. Irons
Famous quotes containing the word career:
“They want to play at being mothers. So let them. Expressing tenderness in their own way will not prevent girls from enjoying a successful career in the future; indeed, the ability to nurture is as valuable a skill in the workplace as the ability to lead.”
—Anne Roiphe (20th century)
“Whether lawyer, politician or executive, the American who knows what’s good for his career seeks an institutional rather than an individual identity. He becomes the man from NBC or IBM. The institutional imprint furnishes him with pension, meaning, proofs of existence. A man without a company name is a man without a country.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)
“Work-family conflicts—the trade-offs of your money or your life, your job or your child—would not be forced upon women with such sanguine disregard if men experienced the same career stalls caused by the-buck-stops-here responsibility for children.”
—Letty Cottin Pogrebin (20th century)