UM Law Professor Elizabeth M. Iglesias was appointed to serve on the Advisory Board of the new Jesuit Social Research Institute at Loyola University in New Orleans. The Board will oversee, advise, and appraise institute work, assist in fund development for the institute, and participate in the annual evaluation of the performance of the institute director. The Institute’s mission is to apply Catholic social teaching to analyze, educate, advocate, and ultimately make a tangible contribution to solving the problems of race, poverty and migration in South and Latin America.

Though the vision animating the Institute’s foundation predates the devastation Hurricanes Katrina and Rita inflicted on the people of New Orleans, the images of the mostly poor and black children, women, and elderly people, left behind to suffer the storm and its aftermath, awakened in the Jesuits of New Orleans Province a pressing need to take programmatic action. Increasingly, and most notably following the Hurricanes, there are significant numbers of migrants – both documented and undocumented – living in the Southern States. Persistent and pervasive poverty in the South leads to higher rates of illiteracy, sickness and incarceration among persons of color, who constitute a disproportionate percentage of persons living in poverty in the South. The Institute seeks to develop initiatives that will do more to respond to the “unjustly suffering world,” through research, education, advocacy and immersion experiences.

Professor Iglesias brings to this appointment a scholarly interest in developing a deeper dialogue between Liberation Theology and Critical Race Feminist, LatCrit and Critical Legal Theory, as well as extensive professional experience working with migrant communities in South Florida, both in the agricultural sectors of Homestead and Florida City as well as the informal economy of micro-businesses run by migrant entrepreneurs and the independent media movement in Latin America and the Caribbean. Professor Iglesias has collaborated on law reform projects dealing with criminal procedure, labor law and indigenous peoples rights in Guatemala, Colombia, Venezuela and Chile and is currently working on a book exploring issues of social and economic justice arising out of proposals to create a Free Trade Area of the Americas.

For scholarly works by Professor Iglesias dealing with issues of racial and economic justice within the United States, Latin America and South Africa, see

• Institutionalizing Economic Justice: A LatCrit Perspective on the Imperatives of Linking the Reconstruction of “Community” to the Transformation of Legal Structures that Institutionalize the Depoliticization and Fragmentation of Labor/Community Solidarity, 2 University Pennsylvania Journal of Labor and Employment Law 755-88 (2000)
  
• Global Markets, Racial Spaces and the Role of Critical Race Theory in the Struggle for Community Control of Investment: An Institutional Class Analysis , 45 Villanova L. Rev 1037-73 (2000)
  
• Foreword: International Law, Human Rights and LatCrit Theory , 28 University Miami Inter-American Law Review 177-213 (1996-97)
• International Economic Law and Human Rights Enforcement: Locating Latinas/os in the Linkage Debate, 28 U. Miami Inter-American Law Review 361-86 (1996-97)

For scholarly works by Professor Iglesias exploring the relevance of liberation theology to the articulation of critical legal theories, see

• Afterword: Religion, Gender, Sexuality, Race and Class in Coalitional Theory: A Critical and Self-Critical Analysis of LatCrit Social Justice Agendas, 19 U.C.L.A. Chicano-Latino L. Rev. 503-88 (1998)
• Structures of Subordination: Women of Color at the Intersection of Title VII and the NLRA. Not!, 28 Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review 395-503 (1993) reprinted in part in CRITICAL RACE FEMINISM: A LEGAL READER (ed. Adrien K. Wing, NYU Press 1996)

Related Links

• Professor Elizabeth M. Iglesias Biography

posted 24-September-2007