Profile of Michael E. Tigar

Michael E. Tigar is Research Professor of Law at Washington College of Law, American University, Washington, D.C., Visiting Professor of Law at Duke Law School, and Professeur Invité at the Faculté de droit et des sciences politiques in Aix-en-Provence. He has also held full-time academic positions at UCLA and The University of Texas. He has been a lecturer at dozens of law schools and bar associations in the United States, Europe, Africa, and Latin America , including the faculty of law at Aix-en-Provence. He is a 1966 graduate of Boalt Hall, University of California, Berkeley, where he was first in his class, Editor-in-Chief of the law review and Order of the Coif.

Tigar has authored or co-authored ten books, three plays, and scores of articles and essays. He has argued seven cases in the United States Supreme Court, about one hundred federal appeals, and has tried cases in all parts of the country in state and federal courts. His latest book is Fighting Injustice, a memoir. He has been active on several continents in promoting and protecting human rights.

Tigar´s clients have included: Angela Davis, H. Rap Brown, John Connally, Kay Bailey Hutchison, the Washington Post, Fantasy Films, Terry Nichols, Allen Ginsberg, Leonard Peltier, Fernando Chavez and Lynne Stewart. He has been Chair of the 60.000 member Section of Litigation of the American Bar Association, and Chair of the Board of Directors of the Texas Resource Center for Capital Litigation.

Since 2000, Tigar has taught a clinical seminar at Washington College of Law in which students are counsel in significant human rights litigation. He has made several trips to South Africa, working with organizations of African lawyers engaged in the struggle to end apartheid, and after the release of Nelson Mandela from prison, to lecture on human rights issues and to advise the African National Congress on issues in drafting a new constitution. He has been actively involved in efforts to bring to justice members of the Chilean junta, including former President Pinochet. Of Tigar´s career, Justice William J. Brennan has written that "his tireless striving for justice stretches his arms towards perfection".

In 1999, the California Attorneys for Criminal Justice held a ballot for "Lawyer of the Century" Tigar was third in the balloting, behind Clarence Darrow and Thurgood Marshall. In 2003, the Texas Civil Rights Project named its new building in Austin, Texas, (purchased with a gift from attorney Wayne Reaud) the Michael Tigar Human Rights Center.

• Weblinks
• Washington College of Law
• Interview, Find Law
• Article, "Lynne Stewart Trial: Michael Tigar's Closing", Talk Left
• Article, "Lawyers, Jails, and the Law?s Fake Bargains"