China, America, and Chinese Americans: From the Transcontinental Railroad to Self-Driving Cars

Frank H. Wu is currently a Distinguished Professor at University of California Hastings College of Law. He previously served as Chancellor & Dean at the school.

Before joining UC Hastings, he was a member of the faculty at Howard University, the nation’s leading historically black college/university, for a decade. He served as Dean of Wayne State University Law School in his hometown of Detroit, and he has been a visiting professor at University of Michigan; an adjunct professor at Columbia University; and a Thomas C. Grey Teaching Fellow at Stanford University. He taught at the Peking University School of Transnational Law in its inaugural year.

He is dedicated to civic engagement and volunteer service. In April 2016, he was elected by the members of Committee of 100 as their Chair. The Committee of 100 is a non-profit membership organization, inviting Chinese Americans who have achieved the highest levels of success to join, working on twin missions of promoting good relations between the US and China and the civic engagement of Chinese Americans.

He was appointed by the federal Department of Education to its National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity (NACIQI), which advises the administration on higher education accreditation, and by the Defense Department to the Military Leadership Diversity Commission, which submitted to Congress the report From Representation to Inclusion. He currently is a Trustee of Deep Springs College, a highly-selective full-scholarship all-male school enrolling twenty-six on a student-run cattle ranch near Death Valley, where he previously taught for several short periods. (The Trustees voted in 2011 in favor of transitioning to co-ed.) He was a Trustee of Gallaudet University, the only university in the world dedicated to deaf and hard of hearing persons from 2000 to 2010, and Vice-Chair of the Board for the final four years of his tenure; he participated in the presidential selection process.

He is the author of Yellow: Race in America Beyond Black and White, which was immediately reprinted in its hardcover edition, and co-author of Race, Rights and Reparation: Law and the Japanese American Internment, which received the single greatest grant from the Civil Liberties Public Education Fund.

Prior to his academic career, he held a clerkship with the late U.S. District Judge Frank J. Battisti in Cleveland and practiced law with the firm of Morrison & Foerster in San Francisco – while there, he devoted a quarter of his time to pro bono work on behalf of indigent clients. He received a B.A. from the Johns Hopkins University and a J.D. from the University of Michigan.