Faculty & Research
The faculty of Duke Law School is made up of innovative and influential scholars who are also passionate, creative, and caring teachers.
Duke Law professors are leaders in a broad range of fields and highly regarded for their research, writing, and public service. A community of scholars, they are collegial, collaborative, and interdisciplinary, and many hold joint appointments or collaborate with colleagues in other Duke schools and departments.
They also care deeply about helping students learn, both in the classroom and beyond, devote substantial time to students' academic and professional development, and continue to celebrate successes and provide counsel through difficult times once students become practicing lawyers.
The deep and ongoing engagement of our faculty with the subjects that they study and teach and the students they mentor creates an intellectual excitement that is palpable in our classrooms and hallways and is the foundation for an atmosphere of collaboration and respect that defines our school culture.
Richman says nation's hospital system, caught off guard by Covid, must reform to prepare for the next pandemic
In a new article for Harvard Business Review, "Preparing Hospitals for the Next Pandemic," Katharine T. Bartlett Professor of Law and Professor of Business Administration Barak D. Richman and coauthor Regina E. Herzlinger of Harvard Business School describe how the Covid-19 pandemic exposed shortcomings in hospital financing and discuss how to create a hospital sector that can respond to demand surges and the population’s health needs during a time of crisis.
The authors place primary blame on a fee-for-service financial model for hospitals and insurance companies that is geared towards providing lucrative, highly reimbursed services rather than meeting all demands for care, including pandemics. And they offer a set of recommendations for shifting toward a system-based model that will allow for greater flexibility and agility when the next public health crisis strikes.
"Health care policymakers must remain farsighted to create a transition to the better system of tomorrow, even as they navigate the current emergency," they say. "Their attention should focus on creating population-wide capacity and reforming a hospital financing model that produced shortages during a time of great need."
Grunwald's "Wandering Officers" paper gains national attention in the conversation about police accountability
A paper co-authored by Associate Professor Ben Grunwald has earned wide notice in the national conversation over policing reform and accountability. "The Wandering Officer," published in the Yale Law Journal by Grunwald and University of Chicago law professor John Rappaport, was hailed in The New Yorker as "the first wide-scale analysis of officers ... who have lost employment at one law-enforcement agency and then found a new job at another."
The authors analyzed a data set of 98,000 full-time law-enforcement officers employed by nearly 500 different Florida agencies over 30 years. They found that officers fired by one department, sometimes for serious misconduct, who then find work at another agency were more likely than their peers “to be fired from their next job or to receive a complaint for a ‘moral character violation.’”
Grunwald has been interviewed by the BBC, Bloomberg Law, WRAL, and other outlets. In February, he and Rappaport wrote an op-ed on the viability of policing reform legislation for The Washington Post. Importantly, their findings form the basis for a bill introduced this term in the New York State Senate called the "Wandering Officers Act" that would prohibit hiring a police officer who was fired, left while under investigation or disciplinary action that could result in termination, or resigned while criminal charges were pending stemming from actions committed on duty from any other jurisdiction in the country.