New-faculty Profile: Jason Gillmer

New Hemmingson Chair has Scholarly Side

Jason A. Gillmer is the newly appointed John J. Hemmingson Chair in Civil Liberties at Gonzaga Law. Originally from Minnesota, he is a recent transplant to Spokane from Fort Worth, Texas, where he taught at Texas Wesleyan for seven years.

In addition to his working experience as a tort lawyer as well as his teaching, Gillmer has a deeply scholarly side.

"Broadly speaking, I'm a legal historian," he says. "My research interests have always had to do with the 19th-century, early 20th-century American South.

"When you think of someone who does legal history, you often think of the big cases like Dred Scott [v. Sandford] or Plessy v. Ferguson. And while obviously those are important cases, what has really been interesting to me are the cases you probably haven't heard of, because these often can tell us a lot more about what mattered to people in this era than the more famous cases."

Case study

One case that caught his attention was Honey v. Clark (1872). His award-winning account of it was published in the Alabama Law Review in 2008.

The case involved a slave, Sobrina, and her master, John Clark. Clark happened to be "an incredibly wealthy slaveholder in Texas - and by incredibly wealthy, I mean he was one of the wealthiest men in the state," Gillmer explains.

"But he was a bit of a recluse and he didn't have any family. Instead, over the course of thirty years, he developed a relationship with one of his female slaves, and by all accounts they lived together as husband and wife for much of the time that they were together."

When Clark passed away, the children of his relationship with Sobrina tried to establish their claim on the estate.

"The question was, are they his natural heirs?" asks Gillmer. "Put differently, the question was, were John Clark and this woman, Sobrina, husband and wife?

"And that was a very troubling question for most Southerners, because this was a time and an era when interracial relationships would have been banned in most every Southern state. But the testimony in the case, which was in large part the testimony of the former slaves who had lived on Clark’s plantation, was that the two had lived together, slept together, and treated each other in such a way that they actually were common law husband and wife.

"It's really shocking," he continues. "It upends what our common assumptions would be about that era. The idea that a white man and black woman could be husband and wife — it just doesn't make a whole lot of sense. But that's what the jury found, and the Texas Supreme Court upheld it."

A perfect fit

Gillmer will continue to do this kind of "hands-on archival research" at Gonzaga Law. He selected the school - and vice versa, he notes - because it would allow him to do so.

"I was looking to come to a school that could help me in my scholarship pursuits while at the same time being a school that I felt very comfortable in. And Gonzaga fits the bill. It's a school that has a national reputation for excellence.

"It's also a school that I believe in. It's got this long and rich history of social justice."

That mindset is something that fits very neatly with his chosen area of research.

"To the extent that we understand racial issues back then, it sheds light onto how we understand racial issues today," he says. "Even the question of bans on interracial relationships, those had their origins in the 1600s. But those bans were part of our legal culture until 1967.

"As the Chair in Civil Liberties, and tying in with what my research is all about, I'll be teaching Civil Rights and Constitutional Law. I also teach Torts, which is what I practiced when I was a lawyer. So it's a fun class for me. I really enjoy it."

That, too, is a subject that adheres to the idea of social justice.

"I think (Torts) very much fits with the ideas and goals of this institution: to stand up for the little guy, to take on big tobacco, to make sure that the automobiles that we buy have a minimum level of safety. Those are good things in our society, and that's what tort lawyers do."

His style of teaching is one that aims to engage students.

"I think that [students] can expect a lot of discussion of not just what the law is, but why we have it and what it should be. My class is not about memorizing doctrines. It's about understanding the social context in which the decisions were made, the public policy decisions that go into the decisions, and whether we agree with those decisions."

Gillmer's research, teaching, and professional experience are united by his succinct philosophy: "Law to me is very much a part of, and a reflection of, the society in which we live."

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