Professor E. Joan Blum, during her nearly four decades at Boston College Law School, has made her mark not only on thousands of students in her legal research and writing classes, but she has also had an outsized impact since 2019 on both faculty and students far from the Newton campus—in the Republic of Uzbekistan. That is where she will return during the 2022-23 academic year on a Fulbright Teaching/Research grant.
The Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board project will fund Blum’s instruction in academic legal writing and a case study of publication practices at Tashkent State University of Law (TSUL), with which BC Law established a partnership in the late 2000s. The university, like Uzbekistan, was formerly under Soviet rule. The collaboration began with the hope of stabilizing and strengthening the legal system in Uzbekistan as the nation shifts away from totalitarianism to a system of democracy.
As international legal education consultant, Blum has played a vital role in that shift, having visited Uzbekistan periodically to instill the concepts of law and the significance of a well-structured legal system. This time, with the Fulbright, she will help doctoral students and faculty develop legal scholarship for publication in internationally recognized journals.
Read more of Phil Gloudemans’ article about Blum in Boston College Chronicle.