Rodney J. Uphoff is first Elwood L. Thomas Missouri Endowed Professor of Law at the University of Missouri – Columbia School of Law. From 2002-2005, he served as the Associate Dean of Academic Affairs at the University of Missouri – Columbia. In 2005, Uphoff was selected by UM President Elson Floyd to be the Director of the University of Missouri South African Education Program, a program in which all four Missouri campuses participate in a partnership with the University of the Western Cape. Prior to joining the Missouri faculty in 2001, Uphoff taught at the University of Oklahoma College of Law, where he served as a Professor and Director of Clinical Legal Education. At Oklahoma, Professor Uphoff ran a criminal defense clinic for 10 years. From 1984-1988 Uphoff directed a criminal clinic at the University of Wisconsin Law School. Before he began teaching law, Professor Uphoff was a public defender including serving as the Chief Staff Attorney of the Milwaukee Office of the Wisconsin State Public Defender. He also worked for Gimbel, Reilly, Guerin & Brown in Milwaukee, concentrating in personal injury and products liability litigation. He graduated from the University of Wisconsin School of Law with honors in 1976 and has a Masters Degree from the London School of Economics.

Professor Uphoff has written numerous articles on criminal defense practice, the delivery of indigent defense services, and ethical issues facing those involved in the criminal justice system. In 1995, he edited a book for the ABA entitled Ethical Problems Facing the Criminal Defense Lawyer. He was appointed by Governor Frank Keating in 1995 to the Oklahoma Indigent System Board which oversees the operation of Oklahoma’s public defender program in all counties except for Tulsa and Oklahoma County. He frequently speaks at conferences across the country on criminal defense ethics and trial advocacy and has participated four times as a faculty member at Harvard University’s Trial Advocacy Workshop.

Professor Uphoff was one of the attorneys appointed to represent Terry Nichols in Oklahoma state court. Nichols was convicted of 160 murders based on his involvement in the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City in April 1995, but did not receive the death penalty. He teaches Trial Practice, Professional Responsibility, Criminal Procedure and Criminal Litigation Skills.

2008 will mark the fourth year Professor Uphoff has served as the on-site director of the South Africa Study Abroad Program. He is a frequent traveler to Cape Town having been there nine times since in the past seven years.

Pierre F. de Vos has been on the law faculty at the University of the Western Cape since 1993 where he has taught Criminal Law, Constitutional and Administrative Law, Advanced Public Law, South African Constitutional Law and International Human Rights Law. In the Fall of 2002, Professor de Vos served as a visiting Research Scholar at Columbia University School of Law. He also has served as a visiting scholar at the University of Utrecht School of Law in Holland and the University of Aix-en-Provence School of Law in France. Professor de Vos’s scholarship focuses on human rights issues and the South African constitution.. He has published nearly forty articles, book reviews, and book chapters in South African, European and American law reviews and journals. In 2002 , his article "South Africa’s Constitutional Court: Starry-Eyed in the Face of History" appeared in the Vermont Law Review, vol. 26.

Professor Levin joined the Law School in 1995 as Associate Director of the Center for the Study of Dispute Resolution after serving six years as the executive director of the Dispute Resolution Center in St. Paul, Minnesota.

After receiving his J.D. in 1986 from Northeastern University, he clerked for the Hon. Robert G. Renner, U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota, and worked in a private law practice.

Professor Levin is an experienced practitioner and trainer in dispute resolution and was a founding member of the National Association for Community Mediation. He serves on the Missouri Supreme Court Commission on ADR Services in Domestic Relations Cases and he is the Chair of the University's Campus Mediation Service Advisory Committee.

He also serves as a co-director of the law school's summer study abroad program in Cape Town, South Africa. Professor Levin has published in the field of mediation. He teaches Mediation and directs the Mediation Clinic. In 2007, Professor Levin served as the on-site director of the South Africa summer study abroad program. The 2008 program will mark Professor Levin's 4th trip to South Africa, and third as a professor in this program.

Craig obtained the BA and LLB degrees from the University of Stellenbosch and an LLM in labour law from the University of Cape Town. He taught in the Law Faculty at the University of Cape Town between 1997 and 2002 before joining the Faculty of Law at the University of the Western Cape as a senior lecturer. Labour law is Craig’s primary area of research interest. He has written a number of articles and given various conference papers on issues arising in that area. Most recently he has focused on problems relating to employment status and transfers of undertakings and is a co-author of Business Transfers and Employment Rights in South Africa. Craig is also a part-time commissioner at the Commission for Conciliation, Mediation and Arbitration where he works as a mediator and arbitrator in resolving employment disputes.

Professor Lovell Fernandez , Deputy Dean in the Faculty of Law, University of the Western Cape (UWC), ahs taught criminal law, criminal procedure and law in transitional societies for the past ten years at UWC. He has been involved a great deal in research into the criminal justice system, and was seconded by the university for three years as a full-time legal advisor to the Minister of Justice. During his sojourn in the Department of Justice, Professor Fernandez helped to co-author the Justice Vision 2000 document, which is a blueprint for the transformation of the justice system of South Africa over the next twenty years. A number of the projects proposed in the document have already been implemented.

Professor Fernandez also headed the group of senior advocates appointed by the National Director of Public Prosecutions to draft the National Prosecution Policy, the Prosecutorial Directives, and the Code of Ethics for the prosecution service of the country. In 1998, he was commissioned by the United States AID to conduct a comprehensive audit of the entire criminal justice system in South Africa, and to identify areas in need of critical expert intervention.

He has also been invited to teach at several universities and has addressed numerous conferences in South Africa and abroad on criminal justice issues pertaining to South Africa, including the question of reparations for the victims of gross human rights offences. He has published articles and chapters in books in these areas. He has also acted as a consultant for both Danish and Swedish Aid Agencies in other parts of Africa.

Professor Fernandez also serves on the South African Law Reform Commission’s expert group on the Law of Evidence. He also acts as an expert assessor in criminal trials.

Recently promoted to senior professor at the University of the Western Cape, prof Sloth-Nielsen started at the university as the senior researcher and programme manager for the children’s rights project at the Community Law centre in 1994 (stepping into the shoes of Brigitte Mabandla, now Minister for Justice and Constitutional Development!). Throughout the 190’s she worked extensive in children’s rights related issues, with a special focus on juvenile justice. She served as a member of the South African Law Reform Commission’s project committee on juvenile justice, which drafted legislation establishing a dedicated juvenile justice system for South Africa. She also served as member of the project committee on the Review of the Child Care Act. This Committee drafted a comprehensive children’s statute which was adopted by the House of Assembly on 22 June 2005. having produced a situation analysis for UNICEF on children in prison in South Africa in 1997, she was appointed to serve four terms on the national Council on Correctional services, a statutory body which advises the Minister for Correctional Services on matters related to correctional policy.

In 2002, she founded the Civil Society Prison Reform Initiative, and NGO aimed at encouraging informed debate about prison reform. She wrote the initial paper examining penal and correctional policy since 1994 with which the work of CSPRI was launched, and recently updated this work for publication in the faculty journal “Law, democracy and development.” She was also invited to co-write a paper on mandatory sentencing and sentencing reform generally by the Institute for Security Students, and has addressed the judiciary on a number of occasions on the need for sentencing reform. Most recently she was commissioned by the Department of Justice to train the magistracy nationally on restorative justice in the child law sphere.

She has also worked fairly extensively in Africa generally, including in Mozambique, Lesotho, Sudan, and Zambia. In 2004, she coauthored a book on “Child justice in Africa: A guide to good practice”, and she is currently working on a paper on “Children in prison in Africa, due for publication in 2006.

Prof Sloth-Nielsen co-taught the advanced criminal justice module with prof Rod Uphoff for the first time in 2005, and will remain involved in 2006. Her other teaching interests include children’s rights law (LLM), juvenile justice law (LLB) and social welfare and family law.