Fund honors human rights professor Virginia Leary

New generations of would-be human rights advocates are benefiting from the goodwill that a beloved professor grew during nearly two decades of teaching at SUNY Buffalo Law School.

The Virginia A. Leary Memorial Fund for Human Rights honors its namesake, who taught in Buffalo from 1975 until she retired as a SUNY Distinguished Service Professor in 1995. She died in 2009 in Geneva, Switzerland, where she had lived since her retirement.

The fund, established with donations from individuals whose lives were touched by Leary and her work, enables monetary awards to recognize high-achieving students interested in human rights law, who may use them to, for example, help pay the travel costs to attend a human rights conference overseas.

As the fund continues to grow, the next goal is to reach the $100,000 level, which would make it possible to grant scholarships in Leary’s name. Those scholarships will be earmarked for students participating in a human rights program, preferably involving international agencies.

Already the fund has provided benefits to current students, having provided summer fellowship money for students wanting to do human rights work domestically or abroad, and having funded fellowships to help students with the costs of participating in a bridge-term course in human rights lobbying that took place in Washington, D.C.

Professor David Engel, a close friend and colleague of Leary, called her “an extremely kind and generous person. She was a strong individual in many ways as a human rights advocate, but she always struck you as very humble and sweet-natured, and with a wonderful sense of humor. She was someone who everybody loved.”

Engel says Leary, who earned the J.D. from the University of Chicago Law School and had a doctoral degree in international studies from the University of Geneva, perhaps got a little of her spunk from her mother, an advocate of women’s suffrage who at one point chained herself to the gates of the White House during a protest. Leary’s father was the longtime dean of the University of Utah Law School.

“Nowadays the field of human rights is quite well recognized and every school has at least one person in that field, but it wasn’t always so,” Engel says. “In the United States, human rights was understood mostly as civil and political rights. The so-called second- and third- generation rights, such as Virginia’s particular interest, the right to health, were promoted more by non-North American scholars. So her interest in the right to health was really ahead of its time in North America.”

Also notable, Engel says, was her courage in taking on sometimes-dangerous overseas missions in support of human rights. For example, he says, Leary went to Sri Lanka at the height of that nation’s civil war – and the Sri Lankan human rights activist who hosted her was killed by a suicide bomber not long after she left the country. “It was easy for her friends and colleagues to forget how courageous she was and what a strong person she was,” Engel says. “She was really a peacemaker. She brought people together and was able to promote dialogue and understanding.”