BU Law Salutes Retiring Faculty
Two beloved faculty members announce their retirement as of August 2015.
Clinical Associate Professor of Law Judith Diamond to Retire
as a member of the BU Law faculty for 32 years.
A member of the BU Law faculty for more than thirty years, Diamond will retire this summer.
After 32 years of distinguished service, Judith Diamond has announced her retirement at the end of August 2015.
Professor Diamond earned a BA in political science and government from the University of Michigan. She followed that passion to complete a master’s degree in the same subject with the University of Wisconsin.
A member of the Boston University School of Law community since attending the School from 1971 to 1974, Diamond practiced as an attorney and later a partner with the firm Harrington and Diamond in Boston. She practiced civil law, specializing in domestic relations and appeals, as well as some federal court criminal law.
Diamond joined the BU Law clinical faculty in 1982 as part of the Civil Litigation Clinical Program. She supervised second- and third-year law students in the representation of indigent clients in the Asylum and Human Rights Clinic until 2013, when it was split into the Immigrants’ Rights Clinic and the International Human Rights Clinic.
Today, Diamond teaches courses in pre-trial advocacy, trial advocacy, and professional ethics for the Immigrants’ Rights Clinic. She works with student attorneys on asylum cases before United States Citizenship and Immigration Services and the federal Immigration Court, Violence Against Women Act and U-visa cases involving domestic abuse, and Special Immigrant Juvenile status cases on behalf of undocumented immigrant children who cannot be reunited with one or both parents due to abuse, neglect or abandonment. Many of these cases involve practice before federal courts and agencies as well as Massachusetts Probate & Family and Juvenile Courts.
Please join us in congratulating Professor Diamond for her years of service.
Make a gift to BU Law in Professor Diamond’s honor.
Law Alumni Scholar and Professor of Law David Lyons to Retire
of the BU Law faculty for 20 years.
A member of the BU Law faculty for twenty years, Lyons will retire this summer.
An esteemed member of the Boston University School of Law faculty for twenty years, David Lyons has announced his retirement at the end of August 2015.
Professor Lyons studied engineering and worked for several years as a machinist and draftsman before obtaining his BA in philosophy and American studies from Brooklyn College. He went on to earn advanced degrees in philosophy from Harvard University, completing his PhD in 1963.
He joined the philosophy department at Cornell University in 1964, later joining the law faculty. In his tenure at Cornell, he was named a Susan Linn Sage Professor of Philosophy and served as chairman of the philosophy department. He helped develop the Program on Ethics and Public Life and received the Clark Distinguished Teaching Award.
Since joining Boston University School of Law in 1995, Lyons has held dual appointments as professor of law and professor of moral and political philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts & Science’s philosophy department.
As professor of law and Law Alumni Scholar, Lyons has taught upper-level courses focusing on the intersection of philosophy and the law, including Philosophy of Law, Legal Interpretation, Theory of Democracy and Political Resistance, and The Color Line: Race and Ethnicity in American Law.
His scholarship focuses on jurisprudence, moral and political theory, and race and the development of American law. He has published eight books, which include studies of utilitarianism and moral rights, the nature of law and legal interpretation, the work of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, and the problem of confronting grave injustices in American law and political theory.
Over the course of his career, Professor Lyons received major research fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). He has directed NEH summer seminars for lawyers, judges, and law professors, and has taught in California’s continuing judicial education program. In addition, he has served as vice president of the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy, and is a member of several other learned societies, including the American Philosophical Association, the American Political Science Association, and the Association of American Law Schools. He also serves on several journal editorial boards.
A political activist since the 1940s, Professor Lyons has helped to organize community-wide forums on behalf of the BU faculty for a Humane Foreign Policy and the Coalition for Social Justice.
Please join us in congratulating Professor Lyons for his years of service.
