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.
Jenkins talks to media about creative works from 1925 freed up on Public Domain Day 2021
Jennifer Jenkins, clinical professor of law and director of the Center for the Study of the Public Domain, spoke widely with media about Public Domain Day 2021 and the value of bringing creative work into public domain.
Jenkins told outlets including NPR's Morning Edition that a bumper crop of books, film, and music from 1925 became free for public use on Jan. 1, 2021, after their copyrights expired. They include F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, silent films featuring Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton, and music including the jazz standard Sweet Georgia Brown and songs by blues legend Gertrude “Ma” Rainey. Public Domain Day annually gives Jenkins a chance to explain U.S. copyright law and note that public domain status can revive forgotten works and give them new life in popular culture.
"To borrow a line from 'The Great Gatsby,' we now will all have a green light to use one more year of our rich cultural past without permission or fee," Jenkins said. "And all of these works - they teach us about ourselves. We gain insights into places we've never been, people we'll never be, times we've never seen. And that in itself feeds creativity."
Baxter, Fletcher, and Raskin join committee planning for a climate-resilient economic recovery
Professors Lawrence Baxter, Gina-Gail Fletcher, and Sarah Bloom Raskin are serving on a panel of top economic thinkers who are drafting policy recommendations that will facilitate a resilient and sustainable post-COVID economic recovery.
The Regenerative Crisis Response Committee is a non-partisan group of economists, scholars, and policy experts who are studying ways to reduce the U.S. economy’s climate-related financial risks. Their goal is to create a set of fiscal and monetary policies, programs, guardrails, and regulations to channel resources toward mitigating climate-related risk and supporting the resilience of the economy at large. The initiative is supported by a coalition of funders, including lead sponsor the William & Flora Hewlett Foundation, which has long supported research into “decarbonizing” the financial sector through fiscal and monetary policy.