USD Law Advocate, Spring 2026

doing social justice work—that is the main benefit I see in my existence as a legal academic. These are people who have gone out and done things to make this a better world.” Shannon Finley ’13 (JD) is one of them. In addi tion to taking Brooks’s 1L Civil Procedure and 2L Jurisprudence courses, she also served as his research assistant and credits him with encouraging her to apply for a federal clerkship. “I remember getting the news that I had been accepted, and jumping up and down in his office,” Finley remembered. “Professor Brooks is so special to me. I was not a confident law student. I did not know any attorneys growing up, but he nudged and encouraged me. He influenced my life in a profound way that only a teacher can.” That is a sentiment shared by many. “Being a professor is not just his profession; it is truly his calling,” commented Vickie Turner ’82 (JD), a partner emeritus at Wilson Turner Kosmo LLP and a 2009 USD Law Distinguished Alumni Award and 2018 Author E. Hughes Career Achievement Award recipient. “What makes Professor Brooks extraordinary is the com bination of his intellectual brilliance and his character, which is defined by kindness, humility and unshakable optimism,” said former student James de Haan ’18 (JD), an associate at Paul Hastings. “His goal was always teaching and proving that reasonable people, even with different motivations or worldviews, should be able to arrive at reasoned conclusions because the process matters as much as the outcome. I cannot overstate the impact Professor Brooks has had on my legal education and professional identity.” Charlotte Hasse ’05 (JD) is another student who has felt Brooks’s influence deeply. She remembers something he said on the first day of Civil Procedure: a concept he called the “right wrong answer.” The idea is that, as a student, you may not understand a complex legal concept right away. But in the process of learning, you may be wrong but still heading in the right direction. “It is a way of showing progress,” Hasse elaborated. “It is fundamental to how he views the world: He looks at all of us as having the ability to do more.”

USD Leadership: President James T. Harris III, Professor Roy L. Brooks, Provost Gail F. Baker (ret.) and Dean Robert A. Schapiro at USD’s 3rd Annual Roy L. Brooks Distinguished Lecture Series.

focus and began writing extensively on social justice fram ings, reparations and post-conflict justice, critical race theory, critical theory, and legal theory. His books include Integration of Separation? A Strategy for Racial Equality (Harvard University Press, 1996); When Sorry Isn’t Enough: The Controversy Over Apologies and Reparations for Human Injustice (NYU Press, 1999); Atonement and Forgiveness (UC Press, 2004); Racial Justice in the Age of Obama (Princeton University Press, 2009, dedicated to his deceased wife); The Racial Glass Ceiling: Subordination in American Law and Culture (Yale University Press, 2017); Diversity Judgments: Democratizing Judicial Legitimacy (Cambridge University Press, 2022); Structures of Judicial Decision Making from Legal Formalism to Critical Theory (Carolina Academic Press, 2005, a textbook); and The Law of Discrimination: Cases and Perspectives (Lexis/Nexis, 2011, one of four casebooks). Brooks worked on a reparations complaint for victims of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre along with Charles Ogletree and Johnnie Cochran, and he argued before an international tribunal in South Korea on behalf of comfort women seeking reparations from Japan. A LEGACY OF LEARNING As he prepares for the next chapter of his life, Brooks can look out and see the influence he has had not just on the fields of social justice and legal theory, but also on gen erations of law students who have passed through his classroom. “My students mean more to me than my scholar ship,” he reflected. “To have students who are practicing,

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