CWSL Professors William Aceves and James Cooper Return to Comic Con
SAN DIEGO (July 24, 2024) – This Saturday, California Western School of Law (CWSL) Professors William J. Aceves and James Cooper will participate in Comic Con’s Comic Arts Conference Poster Session, presenting their collaborative project, “Comic Arts in Public Service: Tales from National and International Law.”
Professors Aceves and Cooper, who participated at Comic Con in 2008 and 2009, will be speaking one-on-one with conference attendees about their work, which surveys the use of comics in public policy and legal education and calls for more collaboration among the academy, public institutions, the artist community, and the entertainment industry. They believe the law can be made more accessible by utilizing elements of popular culture, including the comic arts. As they explain in their presentation, “the law should meet people where they are. Access to justice first requires access to knowledge, and law should be for everyone.”
Professors Aceves and Cooper have previously collaborated on two articles that used graphic arts to convey complex concepts in international law and legal scholarship: The Orthodoxy of Format: Some Sketches on Legal Scholarship and The Life Cycle of Immigration: A Tale of Two Migrants.
The latter article was informed by Professor Cooper’s work in Latin America through Proyecto ACCESO—which he co-founded and directed—and which worked to “empower non-governmental organizations, Indigenous groups, newly minted state institutions, university professors and students, and other members of civil society with the tools to increase access to justice.”
Professor William Aceves is the Chief Justice Roger Traynor Professor of Law at CWSL, where he teaches Civil Procedure, Constitutional Law, Critical Race Theory, Human Rights Law, and International Law. He frequently works with Amnesty International, the Center for Justice & Accountability, the Center for Constitutional Rights, and the American Civil Liberties Union. He is the author of numerous publications.
Professor James Cooper teaches Comparative Law, International Business Transactions, International Law, and Torts at CWSL. For more than two decades, he directed Proyecto ACCESO, and he has consulted for the U.S. Department of Justice, U.S. Department of State, the Organization of American States, U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, the Bolivian President’s Office for the Constituent Assembly negotiations, Mexico’s Executive Branch (Los Pinos), Paraguay’s Senate, and a number of other governments, international agencies, regional aid organizations, and technical cooperation agencies. He currently serves as a Research Fellow at the Singapore University of Social Sciences and a Visiting Professor at the University of Heidelberg in its Master of Law program in Santiago de Chile where, he has been a member of the academic staff of the Heidelberg Center for Latin America since 2004. Professor Cooper’s work has recently focused on the legal regulation of emerging technologies, including blockchain, artificial intelligence, financial technology, and the metaverse.
Learn more about Professor Aceves and Professor Cooper’s poster session here and how to attend their Comic Con session here.