Samuel V. Jones

Education

Jones earned the Legum Magister advanced law degree, with recognition, from Columbia University Law School, where he was admitted into Columbia’s Legal Theory Workshop. He holds a Juris Doctor, cum laude, from Texas Southern University, where he served as teaching assistant to the dean of law school and president of the university. He completed his undergraduate degree at Chaminade University of Honolulu, where he majored in philosophy.

Career

Prior to joining the tenured faculty at Chicago’s John Marshall Law School, Jones practiced law at K&L Gates (formerly, Hughes & Luce, LLP), one of the nation's largest law firms. Thereafter, he served as senior counsel at AT&T, and later as corporate counsel for Blockbuster, Inc., then the nation's largest home entertainment company.

Jones is the first African American male at John Marshall Law School to receive the rank of full professor of law. For the academic year 2014-2015, Jones ranked within the top 5 of the most cited law professors at the John Marshall Law School. His work has been cited in textbooks and journals at law schools including Harvard, Yale, Cornell, Georgetown, and Berkeley. Jones has served on the visiting residential faculty at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law and the University of Florida Levin College of Law, and has presented his work at universities including Harvard and Oxford.

Other legal honors include:

Publications

In Darfur, the Authority of Law, and Unilateral Humanitarian Intervention, Jones crafted a theory of humanitarian intervention that authorized countries to balance the United Nations restrictions on intervention against human rights imperatives in a manner that recognized the general utility of law and dangers of moral arbitrariness. In a published analysis of Jones’s theory, one scholar noted that the portrayal of military intervention depicted in the hit TV show, The West Wing, “most clearly flows on some level from the ‘unilateralist’ arguments that Jones advocates.”

In Judges, Friends and Facebook: The Ethics of Prohibition, Jones took the first step in enunciating the ethical risks judges encounter through Facebook “friendships.” Because of the potential for Facebook friendships to evolve into intimate relationships, and the reality of social impulses that are inimical to the exercise of proper judicial duties, Jones opined that judges are required to embrace ethics that restrict their capacity to engage in online relationships that could weaken the public’s confidence in the judiciary. Jones's "restrictionist" exhortation had a chilling effect on judicial conduct in Illinois according to at least one Supreme Court Justice.

A defender of Kantian conceptions of human dignity and the idea that respect for human dignity should remain unencumbered by another’s impulses, social rank or individual talent, Jones cautions against the distribution of rights between groups based on notions of fairness rather than human dignity, on grounds that “fairness” is unduly susceptible to bias and political exploitation. In a response to Charles Blow that was published in The New York Times, Jones asserts that to preserve “moral authority,” people have a responsibility to condemn all violence and that “rebuke should not turn on whether the victim is heterosexual or homosexual, male or female, or a member of a group to which we belong, but whether there was an offense made against a person’s human dignity.”

Concerned about the spate of police killings of unarmed minorities, and the source of growing discord between law enforcement and minority communities, Jones authored FBI Warning of White Supremacists Infiltration of Law Enforcement Nearly Forgotten. After exposing the threat posed to law enforcement and minorities alike, Jones concluded that “the white supremacist threat should inform all Americans that today’s civil discord is not borne out of a robust animosity towards law enforcement, most of whom are professional. Rather, it’s more representative of a centuries-old ideological clash, which has ignited in citizens of good will a desire to affirm notions of racial equality so that the moral ethos of American culture is a reality for all.”

Jones also authored An Oppressive Cook County Courtroom. “Our nation's perennial allegiance to the idea that courts are public so that justice may be discussed and criticized in public has such strong appeal to the personal ethos of American culture that even the nation's highest court is open to the public and permits note-taking. So should Cook County officials have discretion to ban citizens from taking notes during public court proceedings?” Jones asked. In response, Chief Judge of the Circuit Court of Cook County issued General Administrative Order No 2014-06, which flatly rebuked the practice and prohibited judges from instituting general bans on courtroom note-taking for the first time in the Cook County history. The Chicago Tribune would subsequently publish, Judge Sullivan, Take Notes: A Law Professor Schools a Cook County Judge in the First Amendment, identifying Jones’s work as the catalyst for the new regulation and robust improvements in Cook County courtroom procedures.

In Ending 'Bacha Bazi: Boy Sex Slavery and the Responsibility to Protect Doctrine, the first law review publication dedicated to exposing the culture of pedophilia in Afghanistan, Jones opined that boy sex slavery is a “constitutive and central feature” of Afghanistan, and that Afghan provincial governors, military and police officials, are openly engaged in the “sexual exploitation of Afghan’s boy population.” He concluded that, “the Afghan government's failure to safeguard its populace from sexual violence has significantly undermined U.S. counterinsurgency objectives, raising serious questions about prospects for peace and security in the region.” Within months after the publication of Jones’s analysis, the U.S. Department of Defense Inspector General launched a full investigation into the Afghan government’s complicity in the systematic sexual exploitation of Afghan boys.

Other notable publications include:

Jones has appeared as an expert on national and local news radio and television, including ABC News, CBS Chicago, and quoted in leading newspapers, including The Dallas Morning News, The Times-Picayune, Chicago Daily Law Bulletin and The Chicago Tribune.

Military service

In the military, Jones reached the rank of Major. He is a former U.S. Army judge advocate, U.S. Army military police captain, and U.S. Marine infantryman.

Other military honors include:

Jones earned diplomas from military schools including the U.S. Army Judge Advocate General’s Legal Center and School, the U.S. Army Military Police Officer School, U.S. Marines Officer Candidates School Platoon Leaders Course (Quantico), the U.S. Army Officer Candidates School, and the U.S. Marines Noncommissioned Officers Leadership Course.

Community leadership

Jones serves as a special adviser to various judicial offices and organizations. He sits on the Legal and Budget Committee for the Juvenile Temporary Detention Center of Cook County and the board of directors for the Chicago Innocence Center.