Kip M. Hustace

Biography

Kip Hustace teaches and writes in torts, civil procedure, civil rights, legal theory, Indigenous peoples law, and the law of democracy. His scholarship theorizes and appraises how law can facilitate democratic accountability, exploring neorepublican theories of freedom as nondomination and of legal constraints over public and private power. To that end, Kip has theorized negligence law as an institution for achieving nondomination, appraised the value of neorepublican theory in Indigenous peoples law, and theorized education rights as grounded in constitutional commitments to nondomination. He has also documented the intellectual history of legal republicanism and examined the proliferation of causes of action and its effects on legal system complexity. His current projects address federal and state governments' tort liability, Indigenous tort law, Indigenous legal futurisms, the intersection of tort and civil rights liability, kanaka ‘ōiwi (Native Hawaiian) legal history, and aesthetics in law. Kip's scholarship is interdisciplinary, integrating law, literature, history, philosophy, Indigenous studies, (dis)ability studies, and other humanities.

Prior to joining the faculty at Seattle University School of Law, Kip was a visiting assistant professor at Arizona State University's Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law, where he taught education law and professional responsibility. Before entering academia, he worked as a staff attorney at the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund in Los Angeles, where he litigated education and voting rights cases. He earned his BA and JD at Stanford University and his LLM at the University of Washington.