Michael McCann served as Chair of the Political Science Department for five years in the late 1990s and again for a brief stint in 2010-11. He was the leading architect and advocate of the Law, Societies, and Justice program as well as the Comparative Law and Society Studies (CLASS) Center at UW starting in the late 1990s; he served as Director of both for a decade, until 2011. McCann also has been a teacher and leader in the UW LSJ Rome Program in Comparative Legal Studies for a number of years.
McCann’s research focuses on the politics of rights and rights-based struggles for social justice, with an emphasis on challenges to race, gender, and class hierarchies. He also was an important figure in the interpretive turn toward scholarly analysis of legal discourse as a constitutive form of power. McCann is author of over sixty article-length publications and author, co-author, editor, or co-editor of eight books, including authoring Rights at Work: Pay Equity Reform and the Politics of Legal Mobilization (Chicago, 1994) and (with William Haltom) Distorting the Law: Politics, Media, and the Litigation Crisis (Chicago, 2004); both books have won multiple professional awards. McCann has won a variety of awards for conference papers and published articles as well. His current research, with George Lovell, documents and analyzes the history of struggles for socioeconomic rights and social justice by Filipino immigrant workers in the western United States over the twentieth century, culminating in the devastating U.S. Supreme Court ruling in 1989 (Wards Cove Packing Co. v. Atonio) that largely killed collective worker challenges to structural race and/or sex discrimination. The book will be titled A Union by Law: Filipino Cannery Workers and the Transpacific Struggle for Social Justice.
Research/Teaching Areas:Â American Political Development, American Politics, Civil Rights, Comparative Politics, Law and Society, Minority and Race Politics, Political Theory, Public Law, Social Movements
