The 2025 Honorable Clifford Scott Green Lecture The Evolution of Immigrants’ Rights: New Challenges and New Ideas

Professor Motomura has testified in the U.S. Congress, has served as co-counsel or a volunteer consultant in many litigated cases and policy matters, and has been a member of the American Bar Association’s Commission on Immigration. In the fall of 2008, he was an outside advisor to the Obama-Biden Transition Team’s Working Group on Immigration Policy. He served on the Board of Directors of the National Immigration Law Center from 2011 through 2020, and he is one of the co-founders and current directors of the Rocky Mountain Immigrant Advocacy Network (RMIAN). 

Before joining the permanent faculty of UCLA Law in 2008, Professor Motomura was Kenan Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and before that Nicholas Doman Professor of International Law at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He has been a visiting professor at Hokkaido University in Sapporo, Japan, the University of Michigan Law School, and UCLA, and a guest researcher at the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin. He was the first Lloyd Cutler Berlin Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, and has served on the Board of Governors of the University of North Carolina Press. Professor Motomura is currently a member of the Editorial Board of the International Migration Review. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship for 2018, and in May 2024 he participated in the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center Residency program in Bellagio, Italy. 

In 1997, Professor Motomura was named President’s Teaching Scholar, which is the highest teaching distinction at the University of Colorado, and he has won several other teaching awards, including the 2008 Distinguished Teaching Award for Post-Baccalaureate Instruction at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and the 2013 Chris Kando Iijima Teacher and Mentor Award from the Conference of Asian Pacific American Law Faculty (CAPALF). He was one of just 26 law professors nationwide profiled in What the Best Law Teachers Do (Harvard 2013), and he received the UCLA Distinguished Teaching Award in 2014 and the law school’s Rutter Award for Teaching Excellence in 2021. He teaches Immigration Law, Immigrants’ Rights, and the Immigrants’ Rights Policy Clinic, and he is the Faculty Co-Director of the Center for Immigration Law and Policy (CILP) at the UCLA School of Law. 

Professor Motomura’s latest book is Borders and Belonging, published by Oxford University Press in January 2025. For his collaboration on an overview of U.S. immigration law in a completely different medium, see The Try Guys Try Immigrating to America. 

Dean Ramji-Nogales also writes on global migration law, a new field of study that she is developing along with colleagues in law and other disciplines.  Her work in the area focuses on forced migration as well as the intersection of immigration and international human rights law. Her most recent works explore the role of international migration law in constructing migration emergencies and critique human rights law as insufficiently attentive to the interests of undocumented migrants. Dean Ramji-Nogales has also written on the situation of forced migrants under international criminal law and international humanitarian law.

Along with her Georgetown University co-authors, Dean Ramji-Nogales has published several quantitative and qualitative studies of the U.S. asylum system. Their first book, Refugee Roulette: Disparities in Asylum Adjudication and Proposals for Reform, was the first empirical study of decision-making at all four levels of the American asylum process.  Their second book, Lives in the Balance: Asylum Adjudication by the Department of Homeland Security, provides an in-depth examination of the first level of that process, enriching its quantitative findings with interviews and surveys of asylum adjudicators.  Both works offer suggestions for systemic reform.

In her earlier work, Dean Ramji-Nogales explored questions of process and systemic design in the transitional justice context. Her work in that field suggests that existing efforts are under-theorized and inadequately tailored to local contexts and offers a pluralist theory to guide future transitional justice projects. As a Senior Legal Advisor to the Documentation Center of Cambodia for over twenty years, Dean Ramji-Nogales has authored several pieces on transitional justice in Cambodia, the lessons of which inform all of her work in the field. She is also the co-editor of Bringing the Khmer Rouge to Justice: Prosecuting Mass Violence Before the Cambodian Courts.

Prior to joining academia, Dean Ramji-Nogales practiced law as a Staff Attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union in New York and as an Associate at the international law firm Debevoise & Plimpton. She was previously awarded a Robert L. Bernstein Fellowship in International Human Rights to create a refugee law clinic at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. Dean Ramji-Nogales received a B.A. with highest honors from the University of California at Berkeley; a J.D., in 1999, from the Yale Law School; and an LL.M. with distinction from the Georgetown University Law Center.

Dean Ramji-Nogales is a Senior Research Associate of the Refugee Law Initiative of the School for Advanced Studies at the University of London. She is a Counselor of the American Society of International Law, where she has also served on the Executive Council, was a founding co-chair of the Migration Law Interest Group, and helped to create the Interest Group Committee. Dean Ramji-Nogales is an Immigration Editor at JOTWELL, and served as a founding editor of the IntLawGrrls blog from 2007 to 2018.