UC Davis School of Law - Faculty & Administration - Joo

Welcome

Thomas W. Joo

Contact Information

twjoo@ucdavis.edu
530-754-6089
Rm. 1109 King Hall

Education

B.A. East Asian Studies, Harvard College 1989
J.D., Harvard Law School 1993

(SSRN) External Link

Professor of Law

"The study of law involves not only the development and application of a discourse to describe and analyze the system of rights and obligations in political society, but also the development and application of a discourse to describe and analyze that discourse itself. The lawyer learns to speak the language of the law, and in that language, he or she not only speaks the law, but also speaks about the law. Or, to put it another way, the difference between law and zoology is that zoologists do not train to become elephants. Nor do elephants bother studying zoology. But legal education requires learning both to think like a lawyer and to critically analyze that method of thinking--in other words, to become both elephant and zoologist."

Special Interests

Corporate Governance, Contracts, Race Relations

Selected Career Highlights

Law Clerk to Hon. Wilfred Feinberg, U.S. Court of Appeals, Second Circuit, 1993&94
Associate, Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton, New York City, 1994-96
Executive Committee Member, Section on Contracts, Association of American Law Schools, 1999-2000

More Career Highlights...

Board Member, Conference of Asian Pacific American Law Faculty, 2003

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Selected Publications

CORPORATE GOVERNANCE: LAW, THEORY, AND POLICY, (Carolina Academic Press, 2004).
CORPORATE GOVERNANCE: LAW, THEORY, AND POLICY, 2008 UNIV. ILL. L. REV. 101 (2008)
The Discourse of “Contract” and the Law of Marriage, RES. IN L. & ECON (John Kirkwood., ed., forthcoming, Elsevier)
Natural Is Not in It: Disaster, Race, and the Built Environment, 56 CLEV. ST. L. REV. 403 (2008)

More Publications...

Legislation and Legitimation: Congress and Insider Trading in the 1980s, 82 IND. L.J. 575 (2007) (to be reprinted in SHAREHOLDER VALUISM (Lawrence A. Mitchell, ed., forthcoming, Carolina Academic Press)
Corporate Governance and the "D-Word", 63 WASH. & LEE L. REV. 1579-92 (2006)
Corporate Hierarchy and Racial Justice, 79 ST. JOHN’S L. REV. 955 (2005)
Race, Corporate Law, and Shareholder Value, 54 J. Legal Educ. 351 (2004)
A Trip Through the Maze of "Corporate Democracy:" Shareholder Voice and Management Composition, 77 St. John's L.Rev. 735 (2003)
Presumed Disloyal: Executive Power, Judicial Deference, and the Construction of Race Before and After September 11, 34 COLUMBIA HUMAN RIGHTS L.J. 1(2002)
Corporate Governance and the Constitutionality of Campaign Finance Reform, 1 ELECTION L. J. 361 (2002)
Contract, Property and the Role of Metaphor in Corporations Law, (Daniel J. Dykstra Memorial Corporate Governance Symposium), 35 UC DAVIS L. REV. 779 (2002)
The Modern Corporation and Campaign Finance: Incorporating Corporate Governance Analysis into First Amendment Jurisprudence, 79 WASH. U. L. Q. 1 (2001)
Common Sense and Contract Law: Fear of a Normative Planet? Symposium on Common Sense and Contract Law, 17 TOURO L. REV. 1037 (2000)
Who Watches the Watchers? The Securities Investor Protection Act, Investor Confidence, and the Subsidization of Failure, 72 S. CAL. L. REV. 1071 (1999)
New “Conspiracy Theory” of the Fourteenth Amendment: Nineteenth Century Chinese Civil Rights Cases and the Development of Substantive Due Process, 29 U.S.F. L. REV. 353 (1995)
Hate is Not Speech: A Constitutional Defense of Penalty Enhancement for Hate Crimes, 106 HARV. L. REV. 1314 (1993)
Blame the Board of Directors, (comments on the book Pay Without Performance, by Lucian Bebchuk and Jesse Fried), Across the Board, May/June 2005 at 42-43
Dab of Democracy in Corporate Boardrooms, (opinion piece on the reform of corporate director elections), Sacramento Bee
What, If Not Race, Tagged Lee?, (opinion piece on the Wen Ho Lee investigation) Los Angeles Times

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