For years, Ahmed White had been impressed with University of Wisconsin Law School from afar. This fall, he joins the faculty as the James E. Jones Jr. Chair. The endowed faculty chair honors the late Professor James E. Jones Jr. ’56, who was a trailblazing labor lawyer, civil rights activist, prolific scholar and committed professor.
“I had a broad sense of the high quality of the faculty, students and institution overall,” said White. “It has a very good reputation. My visits to the school over the course of the last year or so confirmed that.”
White’s considerable interactions convinced him that UW Law would be an ideal place to continue his career.
“In nearly every conversation I had, and in most every exploration of the institution, I found more reasons to join this community,” he said. “My wife, Teresa Bruce, who will be joining me at the school, was similarly impressed. And we both find Madison and the surrounding region enormously appealing.”
White is a graduate of Southern University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and Yale Law School, where he was a classmate of Dean Dan Tokaji. After graduating in 1994, White spent a couple more years in New Haven, Connecticut, on a research fellowship before working for nearly two years with the Louisiana State Senate. He started his teaching career as a visiting assistant professor at Northwestern Law School but has been on the faculty at the University of Colorado Law School in Boulder since 2000.
White’s research is primarily situated in labor and employment relations, with an emphasis in history, particularly labor unions, labor law and labor repression in the first half of the 20th century.
In the last eight years, White has published two books on these topics: One delves into a very violent and politically important steel strike in the New Deal period. The other focuses on the repression of a radical labor organization, the Industrial Workers of the World, during the 1910s and 1920s.
“I think this kind of work is actually essential for understanding how the institutions, traditions and values that define the world of labor today came about, and likewise for helping us to think intelligently about where the world of labor is likely heading in the years ahead,” he explained. “I also like to think that the work I do is important for the broader and more basic reason that it brings to light dramatic events and preserves the memory of people whose often tragic but extraordinarily meaningful lives would otherwise have been forgotten.”
Coming to UW Law, White said he finds the Wisconsin Idea “enormously appealing.”
“I don’t think I could find a law school and a university better situated than UW to support the work I’ve been doing and plan to continue to do…” — Ahmed White
“It realizes a notion that should be at the center of institutional education everywhere, but, for me, there’s also the more personal reason that it validates something that I have long made central to my work,” he explained. “My books are scholarly texts, meaning that I wrote them with every expectation that they would be cited, judged and generally consumed by academics. And they have. But I also wrote these books with the hope that they would be of interest to people who are not academics, people who read not because it is a direct mandate of their work lives, but because they are for whatever reason curious about things like the New Deal; or maybe because, though not professional scholars, their callings in life are such that they would benefit from knowing, for instance, how the Espionage Act was used against the Industrial Workers of the World. I have found few things more rewarding than engaging with these individuals — hearing, for example, how reading something I wrote helped a woman better understand what her grandfather, a steel worker, endured.”
White said he looks forward to working with his new colleagues, the students and staff. Besides that, “there is something else that excites me,” he said.
“I don’t think I could find a law school and a university better situated than UW to support the work I’ve been doing and plan to continue to do,” he explained. “In both teaching and service, I’ll have the opportunity to focus my efforts as never before on issues concerning labor and employment. I’ll not only be surrounded by an extraordinary community of scholars, many of them working in allied fields; I’ll also be working with some of the country’s best librarians and archivists at a law school that is just yards away from one of the country’s finest archives. And I’ll also be in a city that is fairly surrounded by a great number of other archives whose collections are likely to occupy me for many years to come. I’m quite eager to get to work.”