José Argueta Funes | The King's Wharf, Custom, and Common Law in Hawai'i

Please join us for the secondProperty, Territory, and Sovereignty on Indigenous Land workshop meeting of 2024–25. José Argueta Funes will share a paper titled “The King's Wharf, Custom, and Common Law in Hawai'i.” 

About the Speaker

José Argueta Funes is an Assistant Professor at Berkeley Law. He is a historian studying the development of American law in imperial contexts. His current research uses litigation around the inheritance rights of adopted children in Hawai’i to explore the relationship between law and property reform, the history of legislation and the common law as modes of lawmaking, and the place of Indigenous legalities in settler polities. His work has been supported by the Newberry Consortium in American Indian Studies, the American Society for Legal History, the Hurst Institute at the University of Wisconsin Law School, and the William Nelson Cromwell Foundation. 

Argueta Funes was born and raised in San Salvador, El Salvador. He attended the University of Virginia as a Jefferson Scholar, graduating with a BA, highest distinction, in history and philosophy. He holds an MA in history from Princeton University, where he is currently a doctoral candidate. After earning his J. from Yale Law School, he served as a law clerk for Judge Guido Calabresi on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Prior to joining Berkeley Law, he was an Academic Fellow at Columbia Law School.