Participant Biographies

Tae-Ung Baik

Professor, William S. Richardson School of Law, University of Hawaii

Tae-Ung Baik was born in South Korea. He graduated from Seoul National University College of Law, and he continued his legal studies at Notre Dame Law School earning his master (LL.M.) and doctoral (JSD) degrees on international human rights law. He was Assistant Professor and Director of the Korean Legal Studies Program at the Faculty of Law, University of British Columbia (UBC). He taught courses on international human rights, transnational law, Korean law and comparative law. He was admitted to the Bar in the State of New York. He worked for Human Rights Watch in New York and served as a legal adviser for the South Korean Delegation in the 56th United Nations Sub-Commission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights. His book, “Emerging Regional Human Rights Systems in Asia,” is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press.

John Ciorciari

Professor, Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, University of Michigan

John Ciorciari's interests include international law, politics, and international finance. His current research projects focus primarily on the Asia-Pacific region, and examine foreign policy strategies, human rights, and the reform of international economic institutions.

He has served as a National Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, and as a Shorenstein Fellow at the university's Asia-Pacific Research Center. From 2004-07, he served as a policy official in the U.S. Treasury Department's Office of International Affairs. Since 1999, he has been a legal advisor to the Documentation Center of Cambodia, which promotes historical memory and justice for the atrocities of the Pol Pot regime.

His book, "The Limits of Alignment: Southeast Asia and the Great Powers since 1975," investigates the power alignments of small and middle states in Southeast Asia.

Dong-Choon Kim

Professor, Songkonghoe University (Korea) and Former Standing Commissioner, TRCK

Dong-Choon Kim is a professor in the Sociology Department at Sungkonghoe University. He served as a standing commissioner of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Republic of Korea from December 2005 to December 2010. He is the author of many works in Korean as well as English, including The Unending Korean War: A Social History, which has been translated into English, German and Japanese.

Hun Joon Kim

Professor, Griffith University (Australia)

Hun Joon Kim received his PhD in 2008 with a dissertation Expansion of Transitional Justice Measures: A Comparative Analysis of Its Causes. His dissertation was selected as the winner of 2009 American Political Science Association (APSA) Best Dissertation Award (Human Rights Section). He had publications in International Studies Quarterly, Global Governance, International Journal of Transitional Justice, and Journal of Human Rights and forthcoming publications in the Journal of Peace Research and Human Rights Quarterly. His research interests include: international norms and institutions, democratization and consolidation, East Asian politics, transitional justice, and international human rights.

Lisa Laplante

Professor, Praxis Institute for Social Injustice & University of Connecticut Law School

Upon graduating from law school, Laplante went on to win a Furman Fellowship at Human Rights First (formerly Lawyers Committee for Human Rights). Soon after, she spent almost six years participating in Peru’s transitional justice experience in various capacities, including as a researcher with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission as a grantee of the Notre Dame University Transitional Justice Program.  Her experience as a human rights practitioner includes serving as a legal advisor to victims groups, assisting with litigation before the Inter-American Human Rights System. Additionally, she co-founded the Praxis Institute for Social Justice, where she has served as deputy director.

As a researcher, Laplante has directed studies funded by the Ford Foundation and United States Institute of Peace on themes connected to transitional justice, including reparations, mental health, criminal justice and civic transformation. These projects have resulted in invitations to present at conferences in the United States, Europe, Africa and Asia. Additionally, her work can be found in numerous book chapters as well as articles being published in law journals as well as inter-disciplinary peer reviewed publications. Her article “The Law of

Remedies and the Clean Hands Doctrine: Exclusionary Reparation Policies in Peru’s Political Transition” published in the American University International Law Review won the Academy on Human Rights and Humanitarian Law at American University Washington College of Law’s Human Rights Prize in 2007. That same year, her article “On the Indivisibility of Rights: Truth Commissions, Reparations and the Right to Development” published in the Yale Human Rights and Development Law Journal won the José María Arguedas Article prize awarded by the Latin American Studies Association (LASA). Due to her work, she was invited to be a member of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton (IAS) for the academic year 2007-8. In 2008-2009 she directed a trial monitoring project of the human rights trial of former Peruvian president Alberto Fujimori (www.fujimoriontrial.org), funded by the Open Society Institute and she continues to write on themes related to that important trial. Most recently, she was a visiting assistant professor at Marquette Law School.

Errol Meidinger

Professor of Law; Director, Baldy Center for Law & Social Policy

Errol Meidinger is Professor of Law, Director of the Baldy Center for Law & Social Policy, and Vice Dean for Research and Faculty Development in the Law School at the State University of New York in Buffalo. He is also an Honorary Professor at the University of Freiburg, Germany. His current research focuses on innovative transnational governance arrangements for promoting environmental conservation, social justice, and public safety. These include regulatory initiatives such as forest certification, fair labor standards, and food safety programs. He is particularly interested in how these programs compete and coordinate with each other and with state-based programs, and how the larger governance ensembles that are being formed may reshape law globally.

Tara J. Melish

Associate Professor of Law, University at Buffalo

Tara J. Melish serves as Director of the Buffalo Human Rights Center. She is a specialist in the area of international law and human rights, with a particular focus on comparative national and international approaches to the protection of economic, social and cultural rights. Active in litigation and reporting initiatives before United Nations and Inter-American human rights bodies, Professor Melish has worked as associate social affairs officer in the U.N. Department of Economic and Social Affairs, as staff attorney at the Center for Justice and International Law, as United Nations representative of Disability Rights International in the drafting negotiations of the U.N. Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, and as researcher at the Center for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation in South Africa.

A graduate of Brown University and the Yale Law School, she served as Editor-in-Chief of the Yale Human Rights and Development Law Journal, as law clerk on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and Land Claims Court of South Africa, and has taught as a visitor or lecturer on the law faculties of numerous universities, including Oxford, Notre Dame, Virginia, George Washington, Georgia, and Åbo Akademi (Finland). With extensive work and training experience in Latin America and parts of Africa, she has been the recipient of professional fellowships from the MacArthur Foundation, the Fulbright Foundation, and the Yale Law School.

Ereshnee Naidu

International Coalition of Museums of Conscience, Former Project Manager of Memory Work, Center for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation (South Africa)

Ereshnee Naidu is the Program Director for Africa, Asia, Middle East and North Africa at the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience based in New York and a PhD candidate in the Sociology Department at the City University of New York. Originally from South Africa, Ereshnee worked as a project manager and researcher at the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation, heading up their memorialization and symbolic reparations projects. Ereshnee has over ten years of experience in the field of memorialization and symbolic reparations working extensively with both survivor groups and policy-makers in countries including South Africa, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Kenya, Timor-Leste, Bangladesh and Morocco around questions related to memorialization and symbolic reparations. She has conducted extensive research on the subject of memorialization and symbolic reparations and has numerous published and unpublished works.

Mark Nathan

Assistant Professor, History and Asian Studies, University at Buffalo

Mark A. Nathan is a professor of Korean Religion and Society in the Asian Studies Program and Department of History at U.B. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles in the Department of Asian Languages & Cultures in 2010 with a focus on Buddhist Studies and Korean History. His dissertation examines the role that religious propagation as a strategic reform played in reshaping the Korean Buddhist tradition as a “modern” religion over the last century. He received his Masters degree in History of Religions from the University of Chicago and a B.A. in History from Rutgers University.

As part of his research, Professor Nathan developed an abiding interest in law and religion. He recently published an article in the Journal of Law and Religion, and he is the co-editor of the forthcoming companion volume in the Religion and Law series published by Cambridge University Press on Buddhism, Buddhism and Law: An Introduction. His other interests include critical geographies, civil society, organizational theories, religious pluralism and media.

Jaya Ramji-Nogales

Associate Professor of Law, Temple University

Associate Professor Jaya Ramji-Nogales' research areas include empirical assessment of the U.S. asylum system, procedural due process at the intersection of immigration and international human rights law, and transitional justice. She is the co-author of Refugee Roulette: Disparities in Asylum Adjudication and Proposals for Reform (NYU Press 2009) and the co-editor of Bringing the Khmer Rouge to Justice: Prosecuting Mass Violence Before the Cambodian Courts (Mellen Press 2005).

Prof. Ramji-Nogales received a BA with highest honors from the University of California at Berkeley and a JD, in 1999, from Yale Law School.  She also holds an LLM with distinction from the Georgetown University Law Center.

Following law school, she was awarded the Robert L. Bernstein Fellowship in International Human Rights to create a refugee law clinic at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. In 2001, Prof. Ramji-Nogales joined the international law firm of Debevoise & Plimpton, where she focused on international arbitration, and pursued pro bono projects in the areas of international and domestic refugee law and international human rights law. In 2002, she joined the American Civil Liberties Union in New York as a staff attorney.  From 2004 to 2006, Prof. Ramji-Nogales taught at Georgetown as a clinical fellow in the Center for Applied Legal Studies, where she supervised law students representing asylum seekers.  

Prof. Ramji-Nogales blogs regularly at IntLawGrrls and Concurring Opinions.