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.
Schwarcz proposes a solution to insuring companies against pandemic-related risk: CAT bonds offered through the global capital markets
A new policy brief by Stanley A. Star Distinguished Professor of Law & Business Steven L. Schwarcz that proposes an innovative way to insure companies against pandemic-related risk.
Using Risk Securitization to Insure against Pandemic-Related Risk addresses a problem that has surfaced during the COVID-19 pandemic - how to insure businesses against the economic devastation of future pandemics. No such insurance product is currently available due to lack of capacity to absorb such potentially catastrophic losses.
Schwarcz examines how risk securitization could insure these losses by issuing catastrophe (CAT) bonds through the global capital markets, which have far greater capacity to absorb risk than the global insurance markets.
The policy brief, based on Schwarcz's forthcoming article, “Insuring the ‘Uninsurable’: Catastrophe Bonds, Pandemics, and Risk Securitization,” was recently published by the G20 as part of its “Think 20 (T20)” Annual Summit for 2021.
Copy This Book! Buell, Jenkins, and Boyle offer their new textbooks for free
Three Duke Law faculty members are offering their new coursebooks as free digital downloads under Creative Commons licenses that also allow readers to copy, share, modify, and build upon the material in any way they choose.
Both of the new texts, Corporate Crime: An Introduction to the Law and its Enforcement by Bernard M. Fishman Professor Samuel Buell and Intellectual Property: Law & the Information Society by Clinical Professor Jennifer Jenkins and William Neal Reynolds Professor James Boyle, are downloadable as a whole book or by individual chapter. They’ve also made bound paper copies available at low cost through a self-publishing platform.
Buell says Corporate Crime grew out of the course pack for his popular class by the same name. He says he developed his own course pack when he started teaching the class 11 years ago because he couldn’t find a suitable textbook for such a young and fast-evolving field.
“As you go along each year you keep adding and sometimes subtracting and re-organizing your materials and you’re just making your course pack better. Eventually I got to a point where I thought, ‘This is closer to a book now than it is to a course pack. How much work would be involved in just taking this to the next level?'”
Jenkins and Boyle say while they fully support creators profiting from their work and understand the labor involved in putting together a textbook, the cost of most law school casebooks is disproportionately high and little of the profit flows to authors. That cost is no longer justifiable with the advent of fast, inexpensive, and accurate print-on-demand services and mechanisms for worldwide, almost cost-free distribution, they say, and traditional casebooks are also inflexible, uncustomizable, and hard to preview and search on the web.
"We hope this will provide a pleasant, restorative, competitive pressure on the commercial publishers to lower their prices and improve their digital access norms,” Boyle says.