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.
Fletcher and co-authors propose six recommendations to help the federal government transition to long-term low-carbon procurement practices
In a recent white paper, Professor Gina-Gail Fletcher et al. examine how low carbon purchasing at the federal level can promote the widespread development and adoption of environmentally friendly goods, in addition to strengthening provider and consumer action towards solving the climate crisis by helping the U.S. reach its goal of net-zero emissions by 2050.
The largest purchaser of goods and services in the world, the U.S. government annually spends at least $586 billion on procurement through federal agencies. This immense purchasing power gives the federal government a unique ability to influence markets. However, the U.S. also is the world’s second largest emitter of greenhouse gas emissions after China.
The paper, The Case for Climate Conscious, Low Carbon Federal Procurement, sets forth six recommendations for "greener" procurement, including revising the contracting and reporting process and enshrining long-term, low-carbon procurement policy in law.
It was written by Fletcher and other members of the Regenerative Crisis Response Committee (RCRC), a nonpartisan group of senior leaders from the banking, financial services, regulatory, and policy arenas convened in late 2020 to work on fiscal, monetary, and financial regulatory policy solutions for a more durable, equitable, and sustainable post-pandemic economic recovery.
Fletcher, a scholar of complex financial instruments and market regulation who joined the Duke Law faculty in July 2020, recently was named to the Securities and Exchange Commission’s Investor Advisory Committee. Established under the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, it advises the Commission on regulatory priorities and various initiatives to help protect investors and promote the integrity of the U.S. securities markets.
Empirical study by Helfer and co-author finds evidence that the European Court of Human Rights is moving in a regressive direction on human rights protections
On June 17, Harry R. Chadwick, Sr. Professor of Law Laurence R. Helfer was elected to serve for the 2023-2026 term on the United Nations Human Rights Committee, an 18-member body charged with monitoring compliance with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR). The ICCPR is a human rights treaty ratified by 173 states parties that protects civil and political liberties and fundamental freedoms around the globe.
Nominated and supported by the U.S. Department of State, Helfer is one of the world’s foremost scholars of international law and human rights whose recent scholarship includes Walking Back Human Rights in Europe? EJIL Vol. 31 No. 3 (2020), in which he and Erik Voeten conduct an empirical analysis of minority opinions of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) between 1998 and 2018 to understand the court’s trajectory on human rights protections.
Focusing on opinions asserting that the Grand Chamber has tacitly overturned prior rulings or settled doctrine in a way that favors the respondent state, labeled as ‘walking back dissents,’ they found that such dissents have become significantly more common in the last decade, revealing that some members of the ECtHR themselves believe that the Grand Chamber is increasingly overturning prior judgments in a regressive direction.
Helfer discussed implications of his findings in the Spring 2022 issue of Judicature International:
"If circumstances are changing but the protections of rights are contracting, can the European Court really say that there is only a trajectory of increasing rights protections while rights in national law are staying the same or decreasing? My own personal view is that you can’t let that separation [between the Court’s decisions and a society’s practices] become too wide or the Court will lose its authority and legitimacy."