Vitae
Amos N. Jones, Associate Professor of Law [PDF]
Campbell University Law School, Raleigh, North Carolina
amosjones@post.harvard.edu
Abbreviated Curriculum Vitae, May 13, 2017
Education
Juris Doctor, Harvard University, 2006
Research Assistant to Professors Lani Guinier, Charles J. Ogletree, Jr., and Kenneth Mack; Executive Editor of Harvard Human Rights Journal; Executive Editor of Harvard BlackLetter Law Journal; Parliamentarian, Harvard Black Law Students Association; Extern, Krokidas & Bluestein LLP employment-law boutique; Member, Class Committee.
Master of Science, Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, 2003
Elaine Exton Award for Excellence in Business Reporting; Resident Trustee, International House New York.
Bachelor of Arts, cum laude (Political Science), Emory University, 2000
Truman Scholar; Member, USA Today’s 2000 All-USA College Academic First Team (rated among country’s top twenty undergraduates); Robert W. Woodruff Scholar; National Merit Scholar; Recipient, Emory College’s 2000 Schear Book Award “for the student most likely to make a uniquely positive impact on her or his universe.”
Academic Appointments
CAMPBELL UNIVERSITY LAW SCHOOL, Raleigh, N.C. July 1, 2011, to present
Associate Professor of Law
Teach Contracts I, Contracts II, and Professional Responsibility. Teach legal-history/civil rights seminar titled “The Black American Lawyer,” which by Spring 2014 had grown into school’s most popular elective, drawing 78 students, 70 of them Caucasian. Serve on Faculty Recruitment Committee (Vice Chair in 2012-13) and Admissions Committee. Formerly chaired Committee on Community, Diversity, and Student Life and Law Review Evaluation Committee.
UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD, Oxford, United Kingdom Fall 2015
Academic Visitor to the Faculty of Law
Researched ecclesiastical jurisprudence at Bodleian Law and Dr. Williams’s libraries.
NORTH CAROLINA CENTRAL UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF LAW, Durham, N.C. August 1, 2010, to June 30, 2011
Visiting Assistant Professor of Constitutional Law
UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE, Australia September 1, 2006, to May 15, 2007
Fulbright Scholar and Visitor to the Faculty of Law
Recommended by the late Professor John H. Mansfield of Harvard Law School, studied proposed bills of rights and presented in the Centre for Comparative Constitutional Studies.
Courses Taught
Contracts (six years), Professional Responsibility (three years), Constitutional Law I and II (one year), Comparative Constitutional Law (one year), The Black American Lawyer (seven years), and Legal Problems of the Poor (one summer)
Summarized Agenda
Research, publications, briefing, and commentary focus on public and private clashes at the intersections of the First Amendment (religious and associational freedoms), the Fourteenth Amendment (equal protection), Title VII (civil rights), and/or U.S. counterespionage laws (e.g., the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938). Quoted in leading investigative reports by The New York Times, National Review, The Times of Israel, HuffPost Live, and Gawker.
Select Publications
- The ‘Old’ Black Corporate Bar: Durham’s Wall Street, 1898-1971, 92 C. L. Rev. 1831 (2014).
- The Corrective Use of Lawsuit Data in Policing: Reconstructing the Vocabulary of Racial Profiling, 5 Widener J. L., Econ. & Race 1 (2013) [lead article].
- Defending Profiling while Combating Racism: A Companion to Ogletree’s ‘Presumption of Guilt,’
33 C. Cent. L. Rev. 187 (2011). - America’s sizzling summer of espionage enforcement has roots in obscure registration laws that govern foreign intercourse, IBA North American Regional Forum, 1, No. 1, December 2010, at 16.
- Egypt’s Competitive Liberalization in Services: Bilateral, Regional, and Multilateral, 16-SUM Currents: Int’l Trade L.J. 41 (2007) (with Professor Mohamed Hassanien).
- Setting Aside the Will of the Plaintiffs: How and Why the 1950s School-Desegregation Strategy Marginalized Experiences of Black Self-Determination in Unequal Schools and Examples of Black Self-Sufficiency in Equalization Plans, 23 St. U. L. Rev. 287 (2006).
- Black Like Obama: What the Junior Illinois Senator’s Appearance Reveals about Race in America, and Where We Should Go from Here, 31 Marshall L. Rev. 79 (2005).
- The Ghost of Ward’s Cove: The Supreme Court, the Bush Administration, and the Ideology Undermining Title VII, 21 Harv. BlackLetterJ. 163 (2005) (with D. Alexander Ewing).
- Beyond Ecclesiastical Abstention: ‘Ministerial Exception’ as a Positional Privilege (in progress).
- Arbitrationalizing Pre-existing Civil Rights Litigation, Precedent by Dicta, and Other Equitable Hazards Confronting Third Circuit Employees (in progress).
- Maynard Jackson, Lawyer (in progress).
Select Addresses, Presentations, and Other Appearances
“Don’t Put the Cart before the Horses,” presentation from panel on “Impact of Big Data-Centered and Algorithmic-Centered Power” at annual symposium of Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice, Washington and Lee University School of Law, March 30, 2017, Lexington, Virginia.
“Civil Rights in Context: The Rhetoric of Contemporary Constitutional Competition,” lecture in Arts Center Lecture Series at Lake Superior State University, Nov. 11, 2016, Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan. Podcast at https://lakerblogs.lssu.edu/lakercast/podcast/civil-rights-in-context-amos-jones/.
“Cultures and the Common Law: Explaining the United States, Constitutionally and Politically,” invited lecture with response by Dr. Andrew Hammel, Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf (University of Düsseldorf Law School), June 11, 2014, Düsseldorf, Germany.
“The Dismantling of De Jure Segregation in Kentucky: How Slave Religion, Strategic Voting, and Creative Lawyering Broke Barriers in a Socially Advanced Border State,” afternoon faculty workshop and evening keynote lecture, University of Kentucky College of Law, Feb. 1, 2013, Lexington. Covered at http://law.campbell.edu/news_article.cfm?id=42444.
“Putting Your Engineering Foundation to Work: Professional Options Ten Years Out,” panel presentation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, July 14, 2012, Cambridge.
“The U.S. Presidential Election in Context: The Constitution, Racial Politics, and the Future of Civil Rights Lawyering,” invited lecture, University of the Andes Law School, Nov. 22, 2012, Bogotá, Colombia. Covered at http://law.campbell.edu/news_article.cfm?id=42432.
“Reforming the D.C. Office of Human Rights,” expert testimony at Council of the District of Columbia Budget Oversight Hearing for jurisdiction’s Office and Commission on Human Rights, April 20, 2012, Washington. Covered at http://law.campbell.edu/news_article.cfm?id=42384&t=professor-jones-delivers-expert-testimony-at-dc-hearing.
“Divining Exceptions: How the Supreme Court’s Hosanna-Tabor Decision Invites Offenses to the First Amendment’s Non-Establishment Clause,” faculty workshop, Georgetown University Law Center, Feb. 23, 2012, Washington, District of Columbia, relating to case featured at http://law.campbell.edu/news_article.cfm?id=42594.
“International Law and Foreign Affairs: Adding our Voices to the Global Dialogue,” panel presentation, Harvard Law School, Sept. 17, 2011, Cambridge, Massachusetts, available at http://hls.harvard.edu/dept/alumni/celebration-of-black-alumni-videos/ starting at 1:03:55.
“The Presumption of Guilt: A Guided Discussion on the Arrest of Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Racial Profiling in Law Enforcement, and Public Policy,” address and discussion centered on then in-progress article titled The Corrective Use of Lawsuit Data in Policing: Reconstructing the Vocabulary of Racial Profiling, University of Chicago Law School, April 18, 2011, Chicago, Illinois.
“The Black Law Firm in Business: From Bottom of the Barrel to Viable Enterprise,” panel presentation at 95th Annual Meeting of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, Oct. 1, 2010, Raleigh, North Carolina.
“Obama’s America One Year On,” public lecture, Whitley College, Feb. 24, 2010, Melbourne, Australia.
“Cultural Wars and Constitutional Law: Australia and the United States Compared,” University of Melbourne faculty seminar, May 9, 2007, Melbourne, Australia.
Professional Experience
AMOS JONES LAW FIRM, Washington, D.C. August 10, 2010, to present
Represent and/or serve as cooperating counsel in self-funding national pro bono consultancy. For noteworthy appellate victories and other outcomes in civil rights and constitutional law, was named a 2016 Top 40 Under 40 Lawyer by The National Black Lawyers attorney rating organization. Recognized as 2017 Super Lawyers Rising Star, rating among top 2.7% of all Washington, D.C., lawyers under the age of 40.
BRYAN CAVE LLP, Washington, District of Columbia August 13, 2007, to July 30, 2010
Associate, International Trade and Commercial Litigation
Summer Associate in New York, 2005
DENTONS LLP, Washington, District of Columbia Summer 2004 and Summer 2005
Summer Associate
THE MCCLATCHY COMPANY, San Jose, California May 2000 to August 2003
News Copy Editor, The Charlotte Observer and Lexington Herald-Leader
CHARLOTTE PHILHARMONIC ORCHESTRA, Charlotte, North Carolina 2000-01 Season
Staff Violist
Bar and Court Admissions
Supreme Court of the United States (2012)
U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (2014)
U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit (2015)
U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit (2016)
U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland (2009)
U.S. District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania (2014)
District of Columbia (2007)
Research Agenda
Summarized on Page One of this Abbreviated Curriculum Vitae, my research is centered on civil rights, and has been since I undertook a Fall 2003 Research Assistantship with Professor Lani Guinier for her 2004 article in The Journal of American History titled “From Racial Liberalism to Racial Literacy.” My work addresses competing liberties that clash amidst personal and public confrontations, and how American political culture and courts moderate and resolve such conflicts. I grapple with emerging trends such as the battle between religious liberty and civil rights. To that end, I, from my North Carolina setting in recent years, have examined and commented on North Carolina’s constitutional marriage amendment of 2012 and “the bathroom bill” of 2016, its origins, and its repeal, as well as the voting-rights controversies affecting access to the ballot box.
When particularly moved and uniquely equipped to solve problems, I will advocate. As a native of Kentucky widely published in the areas of civil rights history and religious culture, I, in April 2014, won the unanimous, 7-0 First Amendment case of first impression at the Kentucky Supreme Court in Jimmy Kirby v. Lexington Theological Seminary, 426 S.W.3d 597 (2014). After three years of briefing, we had obtained a grant of discretionary review in this racial discrimination/ministerial exception case highlighting tensions between enforcement of the civil rights statutes and the First Amendment’s religious-freedom clauses following the firing of a black, tenured Lexington professor in 2009 – addressing the kinds of controversies framing my research agenda since I entered the academy in 2010. In overturning this injustice on behalf of a tenured professor who had been dismissed from his faculty without cause, I became recognized as the advocate who restored tenure rights at law on behalf of every seminary professor in my home state. For the work in Kirby, I was awarded Campbell Law School’s 2014 Award for Outstanding Faculty Achievement in Pro Bono and Public Service. That was the first court case for my K Street civil-rights boutique, and comparable battles have been waged since then.
References
Available upon request