The book "Immigration Outside the Law" (Oxford University Press, 2014), by Hiroshi Motomura, the Susan Westerberg Prager Professor of Law at the UCLA School of Law, has won the Association of American Publishers 2015 Professional and Scholarly Excellence (PROSE) Award in the Law and Legal Studies category. The PROSE Awards annually recognize achievements in professional and scholarly publishing. Motomura also won a PROSE Award in 2006, for "Americans In Waiting: The Lost Story of Immigration and Citizenship in the United States" (Oxford University Press, 2007), to which "Immigration Outside the Law" is a companion volume.
Motomura is an influential scholar and teacher of immigration and citizenship law. In addition to his books, he has published numerous significant articles and essays on immigration and citizenship and co-authored two immigration-related casebooks.
He joined the UCLA Law faculty in 2007, and received UCLA’s Distinguished Teaching Award in 2014. He was one of 26 law professors in the United States profiled in the book, "What the Best Law Teachers Do" (Harvard University Press, 2013).
Professor Motomura has testified as an immigration expert in the U.S. Congress, has served as co-counsel or a volunteer consultant in several cases in the U.S. Supreme Court and the federal appeals courts, and has been a member of the American Bar Association’s Commission on Immigration. He is one of the co-founders and current directors of the Rocky Mountain Immigrant Advocacy Network, and he serves on the board of directors of the National Immigration Law Center. He is also is a member of the Editorial Board of the International Migration Review. In the fall of 2008, he was an outside advisor to the Obama-Biden Transition Team's Working Group on Immigration Policy.
Previously, Motomura was the Kenan Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where he won the Distinguished Teaching Award for Post-Baccalaureate Instruction. Prior to that, he was the Nicholas Doman Professor of International Law at the University of Colorado, Boulder, where he was named President’s Teaching Scholar in 1997. He also won the Chris K. Iijima Teacher and Mentor Award from the Conference of Asian Pacific American Law Faculty.