Month: May 2023

Georgia Law Professor Jason Cade presents on immigration at Wisconsin International Law Journal symposium

Professor Jason A. Code, an immigration law expert here at the University of Georgia School of Law, presented in April as part of the Wisconsin International Law Journal 2023 symposium, “Immigration and Access to Legal Resources for Migrants and Refugees,” held at the University of Wisconsin Law School in Madison.

Cade, who is Associate Dean for Clinical Programs and Experiential Learning, J. Alton Hosch Professor of Law, and Director of the Community HeLP Clinic at Georgia Law, gave a presentation entitled “Not Just a Pandemic Problem: Administrative Failures in the Humanitarian Immigration System” in a panel exploring the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic. Other panelists included Evelyn Marcelina Rangel-Media, Temple University Beasley School of Law, Wooksoo Kim, University at Buffalo School of Social Work, and Emily Ryo, University of Southern California Gould School of Law.

Georgia Law’s first international law professor, Sigmund A. Cohn, featured in Dean Rusk International Law Center exhibit

An ongoing exhibit here at the Dean Rusk International Law Center, University of Georgia School of Law, celebrates the distinguished life and career of Professor Sigmund A. Cohn, who taught the law school’s first international law class, in 1940.

Cohn’s courses, in international law and in comparative law, blazed a trail. Others would follow Cohn’s path; among them, past Georgia Law Professors Dean Rusk, Louis B. Sohn, and Gabriel Wilner.

The exhibit was researched and curated by two of the Center’s Student Ambassadors, 3L Isabel White and 2L Carolina Mares, along with Rachel Evans, Metadata Services & Special Collections Librarian at the law school’s Alexander Campbell King Law Library. It features a collection of archival items about Cohn’s life and work.

Cohn was born in 1898 in Breslau, Germany (now Wrocław, Poland) to a Jewish family. He became a lawyer and then a judge in Germany’s Weimar Republic. But in 1934, Nazi Germany’s antisemitic laws forced him out of his judicial position. Cohn immigrated to Italy for a few years, but then was forced to immigrate once again, to the United States.

He was hired by Georgia Law, and became its first professor of Jewish ancestry, at a time when state laws barred the paying of foreign citizens. His hiring thus was supported financially by Harold Hirsch – then general counsel at the Coca-Cola Co., and the lawyer for whom Georgia Law’s Hirsch Hall is named.

A portrait of Professor Cohn greets visitors to the Dean Rusk International Law Center.

Cohn’s legacy likewise continues in the form of Georgia Law’s highly ranked curriculum (here and here), in global practice preparation and international professional education, benefiting candidates for Juris Doctor, Master of Laws (LL.M.), and Master in the Study of Law (M.S.L.) degrees as well as Graduate Certificate in International Law students.