PUBLISHED:May 30, 2007

Zephyr Teachout '99 and Shawn Bayern to join Duke Law Faculty as Visiting Assistant Professors

Zephyr Teachout ’99 and Shawn Bayern will join the Duke Law faculty for two academic years, beginning in July 2007, under the Law School’s new Visiting Assistant Professors (VAP) Program. Each will teach one course per year while working on scholarship with a view to entering the law school teaching market in the 2008 season. The Law School received more than 50 applications from exceptionally strong candidates for these two openings.

Teachout, a summa cum laude graduate of the Law School and former editor-in-chief of the Duke Law Journal, has spent the past several years working in public law. She has served as the co-founding executive director of the Fair Trial Initiative; a Durham non-profit dedicated to recruiting and training young lawyers to become capital trial attorneys, and is the national director of the Sunlight Foundation, an anti-corruption foundation that lobbies for more transparent governmental processes. Among Teachouts teaching and research interests are the laws and technologies that mediate access to democratic institutions. While a research fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, she began a project examining the FEC and the Internet, which she plans to revise into an article on extraterritorial electioneering. Teachout is a graduate of Yale College and earned a master’s degree in political science at Duke.

Bayern will come to Duke Law School after completing a clerkship with Judge Harris L. Hartz of the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit. A top graduate of the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, Bayern previously clerked in the Office of the Solicitor General in the United States Department of Justice. His scholarship has focused on contract law theory – the subject of a seminar he taught with Professor Melvin A. Eisenberg while in law school. He is the author of numerous articles on law and on computer programming as well as one book, JSTL in Action (2003). Bayern is a graduate of Yale University and a former editor-in-chief of the California Law Review.