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Matthew Adler

Richard A. Horvitz Distinguished Professor of Law and Professor of Economics, Philosophy and Public Policy

adler@law.duke.edu or 919-613-7172

Matthew D. Adler is the Richard A. Horvitz Professor of Law and Professor of Economics, Philosophy and Public Policy at Duke University, and is the founding director of the Duke Center for Law, Economics and Public Policy. His scholarship is interdisciplinary, drawing from welfare economics, normative ethics, and legal theory.  Adler’s current research agenda focuses on “prioritarianism”—a refinement to utilitarianism that gives extra weight (“priority”) to the worse off. He writes about the theoretical foundations of prioritarianism; its implementation as a policy analysis methodology, in the form of a “social welfare function” or cost-benefit analysis with distributional weights; and its application to a variety of policy domains, including climate change, risk regulation, and health policy.   

Adler is the author of numerous articles and several monographs, including New Foundations of Cost-Benefit Analysis (Harvard, 2006; co-authored with Eric Posner); Well-Being and Fair Distribution: Beyond Cost-Benefit Analysis, which systematically discusses how to integrate considerations of fair distribution into policy analysis (Oxford, 2012); and Measuring Social Welfare: An Introduction (Oxford, 2019), an overview of the social-welfare function approach. With Marc Fleurbaey, he edited the Oxford Handbook of Well-Being and Public Policy (2016). Along with Ole Norheim, he is the co-founder of the Prioritarianism in Practice Research Network, whose work will appear in an edited volume, Prioritarianism in Practice (under contract, Cambridge University Press). He is an editor of Economics and Philosophy.

Prior to joining the Duke Law faculty in 2012, Adler was the Leon Meltzer Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania School of Law. He has been a visiting professor at Bar-Ilan University, Columbia University, Duke, the University of Chicago, and the University of Virginia. In addition to his Duke appointment, Adler currently holds a 3-year position as the Ludwig M. Lachmann Professorial Research Fellow at the London School of Economics.

Adler has a B.A. and J.D. from Yale University, where he was a member of the Yale Law Journal. He also received an M. Litt. in modern history from St. Antony’s College at Oxford University, where he was a Marshall Scholar. He clerked for Judge Harry Edwards of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in 1991-1992 and for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor during the 1992-1993 term. Adler practiced litigation at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison in New York prior to joining the University of Pennsylvania law faculty in 1995.

Stuart M. Benjamin

William Van Alstyne Distinguished Professor of Law
Co-Director, The Center for Innovation Policy

benjamin@law.duke.edu or 919-613-7275

Stuart Benjamin is the Douglas B. Maggs Professor of Law and co-director of the Center for Innovation Policy at Duke Law School.  He specializes in telecommunications law, the First Amendment, and administrative law. From 2009 to 2011, he was the first Distinguished Scholar at the Federal Communications Commission.

Benjamin is a coauthor of Internet and Telecommunication Regulation (2019) and Telecommunications Law and Policy (multiple editions), and has written numerous law review articles. He has testified before House and Senate committees as a legal expert on a range of topics.

From 2001 to 2003 he was the Rex G. & Edna Baker Professor in Constitutional Law at the University of Texas School of Law, and from 1997 to 2001 he was an associate professor of law at the University of San Diego School of Law.

Before he began teaching law, Benjamin clerked for Judge William C. Canby of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and for Supreme Court Justice David H. Souter; worked as an attorney-advisor in the Office of Legal Counsel in the U.S. Department of Justice; worked as an associate with Professor Laurence Tribe; and served as staff attorney for the Legal Resources Centre in Port Elizabeth, South Africa. He received his B.A. and J.D. from Yale University.

Jonathan B. Wiener

William R. and Thomas L. Perkins Distinguished Professor of Law
Professor of Environmental Policy
Professor of Public Policy

Wiener@law.duke.edu or 919-613-7054

Jonathan B. Wiener is the William R. Perkins Distinguished Professor of Law at Duke Law School, Professor of Environmental Policy at the Nicholas School of the Environment, and Professor of Public Policy at the Sanford School of Public Policy, at Duke University.  He is the Co-Director of the Duke Center on Risk in the Science & Society Initiative.

He served as President of the Society for Risk Analysis (SRA) in 2008, and he co-chaired the SRA's World Congress on Risk in Sydney Australia in 2012. In 2003 he received SRA’s Chauncey Starr Young Risk Analyst Award, and in 2014 he received SRA’s Richard J. Burk Outstanding Service Award. From 2015-19 he co-directed the Rethinking Regulation program at Duke, and from 2007-15 he directed the JD-LLM Program in International and Comparative Law at Duke Law School. From 2000-05 he was the founding Faculty Director of the Duke Center for Environmental Solutions, which was then expanded into the Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions, for which he served as chair of the faculty advisory committee from 2007-10.

He is a University Fellow of Resources for the Future (RFF); a Public Member of the Administrative Conference of the United States (ACUS); a board member of the Society for Benefit-Cost Analysis (SBCA); and an affiliated faculty member of the environment program at Duke Kunshan University (DKU) and of the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis (HCRA). He is a member of advisory committees at the NYU Institute for Policy Integrity, the International Risk Governance Council (IRGC), the Chaire Economie du Climat (CEC), and the Cambridge Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER).  He has been a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 5th Assessment Report (Working Group III) (2014), and the study team on “Environmental Risk Management” for the China Council for International Cooperation on Environment and Development (CCICED) (2015). 

His publications include the books Policy Shock: Recalibrating Risk and Regulation after Oil Spills, Nuclear Accidents, and Financial Crises (Cambridge University Press, 2017 [paperback 2020], with Ed Balleisen, Lori Bennear, and Kim Krawiec); The Reality of Precaution: Comparing Risk Regulation in the United States and Europe (RFF/Routledge, 2011, with Michael Rogers, Jim Hammitt, and Peter Sand), Reconstructing Climate Policy (AEI Press 2003, with Richard Stewart) and Risk vs. Risk (Harvard University Press 1995, with John Graham [Chinese translation, 2018]), and more than 100 articles in journals in law, policy, economics, risk and science. He has been a visiting professor at Harvard Law School, the University of Chicago Law School, Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense, Université Paris-Dauphine, Sciences Po, and EHESS and CIRED in Paris.

Before coming to Duke, he served at the White House Council of Economic Advisers (CEA), at the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), and at the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ/ENRD). He helped negotiate the Framework Convention on Climate Change, attended the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, and helped draft Executive Order 12866 (1993). He also helped organize the Americorps National Service program in 1993. He clerked for Judge (now U.S. Supreme Court Justice) Stephen G. Breyer on the U.S. Court of Appeals in Boston in 1988-89, and for Chief Judge Jack B. Weinstein on the U.S. District Court in New York in 1987-88. He received his A.B. in economics (1984) and J.D. (1987) from Harvard University.

Nita A. Farahany

Robinson O. Everett Distinguished Professor of Law
Professor of Philosophy

farahany@duke.edu or 919-613-8514
@NitaFarahany

Nita A. Farahany is a leading scholar on the ethical, legal, and social implications of emerging technologies. She is the Robinson O. Everett Distinguished Professor of Law & Philosophy at Duke Law School, the Founding Director of Duke Science & Society, the Faculty Chair of the Duke MA in Bioethics & Science Policy, and principal investigator of SLAP Lab. 

Farahany is a frequent commentator for national media and radio shows and a regular keynote speaker. She presents her work to diverse academic, legal, corporate, and public audiences including at TED, the World Economic Forum, Aspen Ideas Festival, and Judicial Conferences for US Court of Appeals, and at scientific venues including the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Society for Neuroscience, the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine, and the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy. She has also testified before Congress as an expert witness.

Farahany's current scholarship focuses on the implications of emerging neuroscience, genomics, and artificial intelligence for law and society; legal and bioethical issues arising from the COVID-19 pandemic; FDA law and policy; and the use of science and technology in criminal law. In addition to publishing in legal and scientific journals, as well as edited book volumes, Farahany is the author of The Battle for Your Brain: Defending Your Right to Think Freely in the Age of Neurotechnology (St. Martin’s Press 2023).

Donald H. Beskind

Professor of the Practice of Law

beskind@law.duke.edu or 919-613-7085

Donald H. Beskind directs and teaches in Duke Law School's Trial Practice program and teaches Torts and Evidence. He has been a trial lawyer representing plaintiffs in civil cases and defendants in criminal cases throughout his career. 

After beginning his career in practice in Denver, Beskind was a John S. Bradway Fellow at Duke Law from 1975 to 1977, at the conclusion of which he received his LLM. He then joined the governing faculty, first as an assistant professor and then as associate professor and director of the Clinical Legal Studies Program. 

In 1981, Beskind returned to private practice, co-founding Beskind & Rudolf (later Beskind, Rudolf & Maher) where he practiced until 1993. In 1993, he joined what became Twiggs, Beskind, Strickland & Rabenau, and practiced with that firm until 2010. While in private practice, as a Senior Lecturer in Law, he directed and taught in Duke Law School’s Trial Practice program and periodically taught Evidence. Beskind serves as co-counsel in cases with various national and local firms and as a mediator and arbitrator in complex cases.

Beskind is a fellow of the International Society of Barristers, its Administrative Secretary and the Editor of its Quarterly journal. He is also a fellow of the American College of Trial Lawyers. He has served on the Board of Governors of both national and North Carolina trial lawyer organizations and has chaired the committees on continuing legal education for both. He was a founding board member of North Carolina Prisoner’s Legal Services and served as its president. He is Vice President of the Board of the Center for Death Penalty Litigation. Beskind lectures on evidentiary and trial skills topics across the United States and has run trial training programs at major U.S. law firms and has trained solicitors and barristers in the United Kingdom.

Beskind received his AB in sociology from The George Washington University, his JD, with honors, from the University of Connecticut, and his LLM from Duke Law School.

Thomas B. Metzloff

Professor of Law

Metzloff@law.duke.edu or 919-613-7055

Professor Metzloff is a native of Buffalo, N.Y. He earned his BA from Yale College in 1976 and his JD from Harvard Law School in 1979. He began his professional career with a judicial clerkship on the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans, followed by a clerkship with the Supreme Court of the United States. He then practiced with a private firm in Atlanta doing civil litigation matters before accepting a position at Duke Law School in 1985. He teaches civil procedure, ethics, and dispute resolution, as well as a specialized course on the American legal system for international LLM students. He has taught that course regularly at Duke's Geneva and Hong Kong summer institutes as well as at Tsinghua University in Beijing. He served as the Law School's senior associate dean for academic affairs from 1998-2001, and currently serves as a member of the executive committee of Duke University's Academic Council.

Metzloff is also director of the Voices of American Law project. The goal of the project is interview the parties, attorneys, experts, and judges who were involved in the development of important Supreme Court cases dealing with key constitutional values (such as the First Amendment, privacy rights, property rights). The interviews are then used to create detailed documentaries that are being widely used in law schools and other educational settings to study constitutional rights and values.

Metzloff also has conducted extensive research on the litigation system as it relates to medical malpractice disputes. He conducted a major empirical study of court-ordered mediation in medical malpractice cases funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Metzloff is active in a number of professional activities. He has served as an advisory member to the North Carolina State Bar Ethics Committee, and also served on the North Carolina Supreme Court's Dispute Resolution Committee.

Jonathan B. Wiener

William R. and Thomas L. Perkins Distinguished Professor of Law
Professor of Environmental Policy
Professor of Public Policy

Wiener@law.duke.edu or 919-613-7054

Jonathan B. Wiener is the William R. and Thomas L. Perkins Professor of Law at Duke Law School, Professor of Environmental Policy at the Nicholas School of the Environment, and Professor of Public Policy at the Sanford School of Public Policy, at Duke University.  He is the Co-Director of the Duke Center on Risk in the Science & Society Initiative. 

He served as President of the Society for Risk Analysis (SRA) in 2008, and he co-chaired the SRA's World Congress on Risk in Sydney Australia in 2012. In 2003 he received SRA’s Chauncey Starr Young Risk Analyst Award, and in 2014 he received SRA’s Richard J. Burk Outstanding Service Award.  From 2015-19 he co-directed the Rethinking Regulation program at Duke, and from 2007-15 he directed the JD-LLM Program in International and Comparative Law at Duke Law School. From 2000-05 he was the founding Faculty Director of the Duke Center for Environmental Solutions, which was then expanded into the Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions, for which he served as chair of the faculty advisory committee from 2007-10.

He is a University Fellow of Resources for the Future (RFF); a Public Member of the Administrative Conference of the United States (ACUS); a board member of the Society for Benefit-Cost Analysis (SBCA); and an affiliated faculty member of the environment program at Duke Kunshan University (DKU) and of the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis (HCRA). He is a member of advisory committees at the NYU Institute for Policy Integrity, the International Risk Governance Council (IRGC), the Chaire Economie du Climat (CEC), and the Cambridge Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER). He has been a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 5th Assessment Report (Working Group III) (2014), and the study team on “Environmental Risk Management” for the China Council for International Cooperation on Environment and Development (CCICED) (2015). 

His publications include the books Policy Shock: Recalibrating Risk and Regulation after Oil Spills, Nuclear Accidents, and Financial Crises (Cambridge University Press, 2017 [paperback 2020], with Ed Balleisen, Lori Bennear, and Kim Krawiec); The Reality of Precaution: Comparing Risk Regulation in the United States and Europe (RFF/Routledge, 2011, with Michael Rogers, Jim Hammitt, and Peter Sand), Reconstructing Climate Policy (AEI Press 2003, with Richard Stewart) and Risk vs. Risk (Harvard University Press 1995, with John Graham [Chinese translation, 2018]), and more than 100 articles in journals in law, policy, economics, risk and science. He has been a visiting professor at Harvard Law School, the University of Chicago Law School, Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense, Université Paris-Dauphine, Sciences Po, and EHESS and CIRED in Paris.

Before coming to Duke, he served at the White House Council of Economic Advisers (CEA), at the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), and at the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ/ENRD). He helped negotiate the Framework Convention on Climate Change, attended the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, and helped draft Executive Order 12866 (1993).  He also helped organize the Americorps National Service program in 1993. He clerked for Judge (now U.S. Supreme Court Justice) Stephen G. Breyer on the U.S. Court of Appeals in Boston in 1988-89, and for Chief Judge Jack B. Weinstein on the U.S. District Court in New York in 1987-88. He received his A.B. in economics (1984) and J.D. (1987) from Harvard University.

Ryke Longest

John H. Adams Clinical Professor of Law
Director of Clinical Programs

Clinical Professor of Environmental Sciences and Policy
Co-Director, Environmental Law and Policy Clinic

longest@law.duke.edu or 919-613-7207
@rykelongest

Ryke Longest currently serves as the Director of Clinical Programs, the Director of the Environmental Law and Policy Clinic, and as the John H. Adams Clinical Professor of Law at the Duke University School of Law. He supervises students practicing in the clinic and teaches the seminar portion of the clinic.

Longest received his B.A. in English from the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill in 1987 and graduated from the University of North Carolina School of Law in 1991. Prior to coming to Duke he ran a solo law practice and worked for 14 years at the North Carolina Department of Justice. At NCDOJ, he litigated cases before administrative agencies, state courts, federal courts and appellate courts at all levels. He also drafted legislation and advised agencies on rulemaking. Longest also negotiated and led the state’s implementation of two multimillion dollar settlement agreements aimed at reducing the adverse impacts from swine farming in North Carolina.

Since coming to Duke, Longest has served as the founding Director of the Environmental Law and Policy Clinic, a joint project of Duke Law School and the Nicholas School of the Environment. The Environmental Law and Policy Clinic operates as a live client clinic out of offices in the Duke Law School building in Durham, N.C. Students work under direct supervision of Longest and Co-Director Michelle Nowlin.

Steven L. Schwarcz

Stanley A. Star Distinguished Professor of Law & Business

schwarcz@law.duke.edu or 919-613-7060

Steven L. Schwarcz is the Stanley A. Star Distinguished Professor of Law & Business at  Duke University and Founding Director of Duke’s interdisciplinary Global Capital Markets Center (now renamed the Global Financial Markets Center). His areas of research and scholarship include insolvency and bankruptcy law, international finance, capital markets, systemic risk, corporate governance, and commercial law. He holds a bachelor’s degree in aerospace engineering (summa cum laude) and a Juris Doctor from Columbia Law School.

Prior to joining the Duke faculty, he was a partner at two of the world’s leading law firms and Visiting Lecturer at Yale Law School. He also helped to pioneer the field of asset securitization, and his book, Structured Finance: A Guide to the Principles of Asset Securitization (3d edition), is one of the most widely used texts in the field.

Schwarcz has testified before the U.S. Congress on topics including systemic risk, securitization, credit rating agencies, and financial regulation and has advised several U.S. and foreign governmental agencies on the financial crisis and shadow banking. His writings include Systemic Risk, 97 Georgetown Law Journal 193, the second most cited law review article of 2008; he also has been recognized as the world’s second most cited scholar, 2010-2014 and again 2013-2017, in commercial, contract, and bankruptcy law. He is also a Fellow of the American College of Bankruptcy, a Founding Member of the International Insolvency Institute, a Fellow of the American College of Commercial Finance Lawyers, Business Law Advisor to the American Bar Association Section on Business Law, a member of P.R.I.M.E. Finance’s Panel of Recognized International Market Experts in Finance, and Senior Fellow of The Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI).

Joseph Blocher

Lanty L. Smith ’67 Distinguished Professor of Law
Co-Director, Duke Center for Firearms Law
blocher@law.duke.edu or 919-613-7018

Joseph Blocher's principal academic interests include federal and state constitutional law, the First and Second Amendments, legal history, and property. His current scholarship addresses issues of gun rights and regulation, free speech, the law of the territories, and the relationship between law and violence.

He has published articles on those and other topics in the Harvard Law Review, Yale Law Journal, Stanford Law Review, Duke Law Journal, Yale Journal of International Law, and other leading journals. He is co-author of Free Speech Beyond Words (NYU Press, 2017) and The Positive Second Amendment: Rights, Regulation, and the Future of Heller (Cambridge University Press, 2018). He serves as Co-Founder and Faculty Director of the Center for Firearms Law, has testified before House and Senate committees, and has written for the New York Times, Washington Post, Slate, Vox, and other public outlets.

He returned to his hometown of Durham to join the Duke Law faculty in 2009, and received the law school's Distinguished Teaching Award in 2012. Before coming to Duke, he clerked for Guido Calabresi of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and Rosemary Barkett of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit. He also practiced law at O'Melveny & Myers LLP, where he assisted the merits briefing for the District of Columbia in District of Columbia v. Heller.

Blocher received his B.A., magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, from Rice University, and studied law and economic development as a Fulbright Scholar in Ghana and as a Gates Scholar at Cambridge University, where he received an M.Phil in Land Economy. He received his J.D. from Yale Law School, where he served as comments editor of the Yale Law Journal, symposium editor of the Yale Law & Policy Review, notes editor of the Yale Human Rights & Development Law Journal, participated in or directed several clinics, and was co-chair of the Legal Services Organization.

Ernest A. Young

Alston & Bird Distinguished Professor of Law
young@law.duke.edu or 919-613-8506

Professor Young teaches constitutional law, federal courts, and foreign relations law. He is one of the nation's leading authorities on the constitutional law of federalism, having written extensively on the Rehnquist Court's "Federalist Revival" and the difficulties confronting courts as they seek to draw lines between national and state authority. He also is an active commentator on foreign relations law, where he focuses on the interaction between domestic and supranational courts and the application of international law by domestic courts. Professor Young also writes on constitutional interpretation and constitutional theory. He has been known to dabble in maritime law and comparative constitutional law.

A native of Abilene, Texas, Professor Young joined the Duke Law faculty in 2008, after serving as the Charles Alan Wright Chair in Federal Courts at the University of Texas at Austin School of Law, where he had taught since 1999. He graduated from Dartmouth College in 1990 and Harvard Law School in 1993. After law school, he served as a law clerk to Judge Michael Boudin of the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals (1993-94) and to Justice David Souter of the U.S. Supreme Court (1995-96). Professor Young practiced law at Cohan, Simpson, Cowlishaw, & Wulff in Dallas, Texas (1994-95) and at Covington & Burling in Washington, D.C. (1996-98), where he specialized in appellate litigation. He has also been a visiting professor at Harvard Law School (2004-05) and Villanova University School of Law (1998-99), as well as an adjunct professor at Georgetown University Law Center (1997).

Elected to the American Law Institute in 2006, Professor Young is an active participant in both public and private litigation in his areas of interest. He has been the principal author of amicus briefs on behalf of leading constitutional scholars in several recent Supreme Court cases, including Medellin v. Texas (concerning presidential power and the authority of the International Court of Justice over domestic courts) and Gonzales v. Raich (concerning federal power to regulate medical marijuana).

H. Jefferson Powell

Professor of Law
Powell@law.duke.edu or 919-613-7168

H. Jefferson Powell joined the Duke Law faculty in 1989. His academic career has included visiting positions at Columbia, Yale and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and he served as a professor of law at the University of Iowa prior to joining the Duke Law faculty, and at the George Washington University Law School in 2010-12.

Powell has served in a variety of positions in federal and state government during his career. He served in the U.S. Department of Justice in various capacities from 1993 to 2000, and again in 2011-12. In 1996, he was the principal deputy solicitor general. He has briefed and argued cases in both federal and state courts, including the Supreme Court of the United States. In the early 1990s, he was special counsel to the attorney general of North Carolina.

His scholarship has addressed the history and ethical implications of American constitutional law, the powers of the executive branch, and the role of the Constitution in legislative and judicial decision-making, among other subjects. His recent books include The Practice of American Constitutional Law (2022); Targeting Americans: The Constitutionality of the U.S. Drone War (2016); The President as Commander in Chief: An Essay in Constitutional Vision (2014), Constitutional Conscience: The Moral Dimension of Judicial Decision (2008) and No Law: Intellectual Property in the Image of an Absolute First Amendment (2009), which he co-authored with Duke Law Professor David Lange.

Powell holds a bachelor’s degree from St. David’s University College (now Trinity St. David) of the University of Wales; a master’s degree and PhD from Duke University; and a Master’s of Divinity and JD from Yale University. He was a law clerk to Judge Sam J. Ervin III of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. He has received numerous awards and honors including, in 2002, Duke University’s Scholar/Teacher Award. Powell currently serves as series editor of the Carolina Academic Press Legal History Series.

Sara Sternberg Greene

Katharine T. Bartlett Distinguished Professor of Law
greene@law.duke.edu or 919-613-7242
 

Sara Greene is a sociologist and legal scholar whose teaching and research interests include poverty law, housing law, consumer law, bankruptcy, family law, contracts, qualitative research methods, and law and sociology. Greene uses primarily qualitative empirical methods to study the relationship between law, poverty, and inequality. Her work focuses on how low-income families understand, experience, and interact with the law, how legal institutions may inadvertently perpetuate poverty and inequality, and how structural conditions create barriers to accessing law and justice for low-income families. Greene's work has been published or is forthcoming in the Columbia Law Review, the New York University Law Review, the Duke Law Journal, and the Minnesota Law Review, among others. She has also published work in popular outlets such as The New York Times, Politico, and The Hill.

Greene received her B.A. in 2002 from Yale University, magna cum laude and with distinction. She received her J.D. in 2005 from Yale Law School, where she received the Stephen J. Massey Prize for excellence in advocacy and served as notes editor for the Yale Law Journal and articles editor for the Yale Law and Policy Review. She also served as chair of the student board of directors for the Jerome N. Frank Legal Services Organization and as student director in the Housing and Community Development Clinic. After clerking for Judge Richard Cudahy on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, Greene focused on housing law and tax credit matters at the law firm Klein Hornig in Boston before beginning a Ph.D. program. She received her Ph.D. in social policy and sociology from Harvard University in 2014.

Veronica Root Martinez

Simpson Thacher & Bartlett Distinguished Professor of Law
martinez@law.duke.edu or 919-613-8540

Veronica Root Martinez is a nationally recognized expert in professional and organizational ethics, corporate misconduct, and compliance. She is the leading academic authority on the use of monitors and monitorships. Her interdisciplinary research shapes best practices in ethics, compliance, and governance across public and private sector organizations. In particular, she focuses on equipping organizations to foster ethical cultures, adhere to legal and regulatory mandates, and create inclusive workplace environments.

At Duke University, Martinez holds the Simpson Thacher & Bartlett Distinguished Professorship of Law and a courtesy appointment in the Fuqua School of Business. Her teaching portfolio includes courses on Contracts; Ethics & Professional Responsibility; Securities Litigation, Enforcement & Compliance; Legal Scholarship Seminar; and Corporate Compliance & Ethics. Additionally, Martinez teaches Judicial Ethics in the Bolch Judicial Studies LLM program and Management in Ethics at Fuqua. She chairs Duke Law’s Academic Careers Committee and serves on key university committees, including the University Priorities Committee and the Institutional Compliance Advisory Committee.

Before joining Duke, Martinez was the Robert & Marion Short Scholar and Professor of Law at Notre Dame Law School, where she became the first Black woman to receive tenure. Her contributions earned her multiple teaching and service awards, including the Distinguished Professor of the Year award and recognition from the Black Law Students Association. While at Notre Dame, she directed the Program on Ethics, Compliance & Inclusion for three years.

Martinez’s scholarly contributions are published in numerous legal journals, including the Harvard Law Review and Columbia Law Review. Martinez’s book, Building an Effective Ethics and Compliance Program, is forthcoming with Edward Elgar. She also serves as a co-author on the 5th Edition of the casebook, Securities Litigation, Enforcement and Compliance, and is a co-author on the forthcoming 6th Edition of the casebook, Professional Responsibility: A Contemporary Approach.

In addition to her work in academia, Martinez is a member of FINRA’s National Adjudicatory Council, the American Law Institute, and the American Bar Association’s Standing Committee on Ethics and Professional Responsibility. She has also served as a consultant for the OECD, advising on global anti-corruption compliance initiatives. Within the Durham community, she is a board member for the Durham Center for Senior Life, and is the current chair of the Governance Committee.

A Georgetown University alumna, Martinez earned her J.D. from the University of Chicago Law School, where she served as Managing Editor of the Chicago Journal of International Law. After law school, she clerked on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and practiced law at Gibson Dunn.

Samuel W. Buell

Bernard M. Fishman Distinguished Professor of Law

buell@law.duke.edu or 919-613-7193

Sam Buell's research and teaching focus on criminal law, corporations, and the regulatory state. He is the author of Capital Offenses: Business Crime and Punishment in America’s Corporate Age (W.W. Norton & Co. 2016). His new textbook, Corporate Crime: An Introduction to the Law and its Enforcement, is available bound at low cost, or free in downloadable form, at buelloncorporatecrime.com.

Buell’s scholarship explores the conceptual structure of white collar offenses, the problem of behaviors that evolve to avoid legal control, and the treatment of the corporation and the white collar offender in the criminal justice and regulatory systems.

Buell's publications have appeared, among other places, in Texas Law Review, Southern California Law Review, Georgetown Law Journal, Law & Contemporary Problems, Duke Law Journal, UCLA Law Review, NYU Law Review, Stanford Law Review, Cardozo Law Review, Indiana Law Journal, and leading handbooks and encyclopedias. He is a member of the American Law Institute, has testified before the United States Senate and the United States Sentencing Commission on matters involving the definition and punishment of corporate crimes, and has delivered invited lectures in Australia, China, and Taiwan.

Buell joined the Duke Law faculty as a professor in 2010, after serving as an associate professor at Washington University School of Law in St. Louis and a visiting assistant professor at the University of Texas School of Law. Prior to his academic career, he worked as a federal prosecutor in New York, Boston, Washington, and Houston. He twice received the Attorney General’s Award for Exceptional Service, the Department of Justice’s highest honor, and was a lead prosecutor for the Department’s Enron Task Force. Buell clerked for the Honorable Jack B. Weinstein of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York and practiced as an associate with Covington & Burling in Washington, D.C.  He graduated summa cum laude from New York University School of Law and magna cum laude from Brown University.

Brandon L. Garrett

L. Neil Williams, Jr. Professor of Law
Director, Wilson Center for Science and Justice

bgarrett@law.duke.edu or 919-613-7090
@brandonlgarrett

Brandon L. Garrett, a leading scholar of criminal justice outcomes, evidence, and constitutional rights, is the inaugural L. Neil Williams, Jr. Professor of Law and director of the Wilson Center for Science and Justice at Duke Law, an initiative that brings together faculty and students to improve criminal justice outcomes. 

Garrett’s current research and teaching interests focus on evidence, forensic science, constitutional rights, habeas corpus, corporate crime, and criminal law. He is the author of six books: Autopsy of a Crime Lab: Exposing the Flaws in Forensics (University of California Press, March 2021); The Death Penalty: Concepts and Insights (West Academic, 2018) (with Lee Kovarsky); End of its Rope: How Killing the Death Penalty Can Revive Criminal Justice (Harvard University Press, 2017); Too Big to Jail: How Prosecutors Compromise with Corporations (Harvard University Press, 2014); Federal Habeas Corpus: Executive Detention and Post-Conviction Litigation (Foundation Press, 2013) (with Lee Kovarsky); and Convicting the Innocent: Where Criminal Prosecutions Go Wrong (Harvard University Press, 2011). These books have been translated for editions in China, Spain, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan. For more information, visit Garrett’s website.

In addition to numerous articles published in leading law reviews and scientific journals, Garrett's work has been widely cited by courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court, lower federal courts, state supreme courts, and courts in other countries. Garrett also frequently speaks about criminal justice matters before legislative and policymaking bodies, groups of practicing lawyers, law enforcement, and to local and national media. He has been involved with a number of law and science reform initiatives, including the American Law Institute’s project on policing, for which he serves as Associate Reporter, and a National Academy of Sciences Committee concerning eyewitness evidence. Garrett serves as co-director of CSAFE (Center for Statistics and Applications in Forensic Evidence.) He also serves as the court-appointed monitor in the ODonnell v. Harris County misdemeanor bail reform consent decree. 

Garrett maintains online data sets relating to his research. These include:

• End of Its Rope: Data on Death Sentencing
• Corporate Prosecution Registry
• Convicting the Innocent: DNA Exonerations Database

Garrett received his BA in 1997 from Yale University. He received his JD in 2001 from Columbia Law School, where he was an articles editor of the Columbia Law Review and a Kent Scholar. After graduating, he clerked for the Hon. Pierre N. Leval of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and then worked as an associate at Neufeld, Scheck & Brustin LLP in New York City. Before joining Duke Law in 2018, Garrett was the White Burkett Miller Professor of Law and Public Affairs and Justice Thurgood Marshall Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Virginia. In 2015, he was a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford University.

Emilie K. Aguirre

Associate Professor of Law

aguirre@law.duke.edu; 919-613-7200

Emilie Aguirre is a business law scholar whose research focuses on companies pursuing both social purpose and profit. She joined the faculty of Duke Law School in June 2021.

In May 2021, Aguirre received a PhD in Health Policy and Management from Harvard Business School and Harvard Graduate School of Arts & Sciences. Her dissertation, “Pairing Purpose and Profit,” was based on empirical research with 14 companies, and she continues to do field work at two sites, one a tech startup and the other a large multinational corporation. Her previous scholarship has been published in the UC Davis Law Review, UCLA Law Review, and Journal of Food Law & Policy, as well as the peer-reviewed Handbook of Business Sustainability, British Medical Journal, Food & Drug Law Journal, and Global Health Governance.

Aguirre was previously the Earl B. Dickerson Fellow at the University of Chicago School of Law, where she taught and conducted research at the intersection of business law, management, and health and food systems. She has also been an Academic Fellow at the Resnick Center for Food Law and Policy at UCLA School of Law and a Fulbright scholar and Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Centre for Diet and Activity Research (CEDAR) at the University of Cambridge.

Aguirre holds a JD from Harvard Law School, where she was an editor on the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review and Harvard International Law Journal. She also received an LLM from the University of Cambridge, and an AB, summa cum laude, from Princeton University.

During law school, Aguirre worked in privacy law at Microsoft and in mergers and acquisitions and antitrust law at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen, & Katz. Before law school, she worked for an education and health nonprofit in the Dominican Republic as a Princeton in Latin America Fellow.

Brandon L. Garrett

L. Neil Williams, Jr. Professor of Law
Director, Wilson Center for Science and Justice

bgarrett@law.duke.edu or 919-613-7090
@brandonlgarrett

Brandon L. Garrett, a leading scholar of criminal justice outcomes, evidence, and constitutional rights, is the inaugural L. Neil Williams, Jr. Professor of Law and director of the Wilson Center for Science and Justice at Duke Law, an initiative that brings together faculty and students to improve criminal justice outcomes. 

Garrett’s current research and teaching interests focus on evidence, forensic science, constitutional rights, habeas corpus, corporate crime, and criminal law. He is the author of six books: Autopsy of a Crime Lab: Exposing the Flaws in Forensics (University of California Press, March 2021); The Death Penalty: Concepts and Insights (West Academic, 2018) (with Lee Kovarsky); End of its Rope: How Killing the Death Penalty Can Revive Criminal Justice (Harvard University Press, 2017); Too Big to Jail: How Prosecutors Compromise with Corporations (Harvard University Press, 2014); Federal Habeas Corpus: Executive Detention and Post-Conviction Litigation (Foundation Press, 2013) (with Lee Kovarsky); and Convicting the Innocent: Where Criminal Prosecutions Go Wrong (Harvard University Press, 2011). These books have been translated for editions in China, Spain, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan. For more information, visit Garrett’s website.

In addition to numerous articles published in leading law reviews and scientific journals, Garrett's work has been widely cited by courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court, lower federal courts, state supreme courts, and courts in other countries. Garrett also frequently speaks about criminal justice matters before legislative and policymaking bodies, groups of practicing lawyers, law enforcement, and to local and national media. He has been involved with a number of law and science reform initiatives, including the American Law Institute’s project on policing, for which he serves as Associate Reporter, and a National Academy of Sciences Committee concerning eyewitness evidence. Garrett serves as co-director of CSAFE (Center for Statistics and Applications in Forensic Evidence.) He also serves as the court-appointed monitor in the ODonnell v. Harris County misdemeanor bail reform consent decree. 

Garrett maintains online data sets relating to his research. These include:

• End of Its Rope: Data on Death Sentencing
• Corporate Prosecution Registry
• Convicting the Innocent: DNA Exonerations Database

Garrett received his BA in 1997 from Yale University. He received his JD in 2001 from Columbia Law School, where he was an articles editor of the Columbia Law Review and a Kent Scholar. After graduating, he clerked for the Hon. Pierre N. Leval of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and then worked as an associate at Neufeld, Scheck & Brustin LLP in New York City. Before joining Duke Law in 2018, Garrett was the White Burkett Miller Professor of Law and Public Affairs and Justice Thurgood Marshall Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Virginia. In 2015, he was a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford University.

James E. Coleman, Jr.

John S. Bradway Professor of the Practice of Law
Director, Center for Criminal Justice and Professional Responsibility
Co-Director, Wrongful Convictions Clinic

jcoleman@law.duke.edu or 919-613-7057
@jcolemanduke

Jim Coleman is the John S. Bradway Professor of the Practice of Law, Director of the Center for Criminal Justice and Professional Responsibility, and Co-Director of the Wrongful Convictions Clinic at Duke Law School. He is a graduate of Columbia University (J.D. 1974), and Harvard University (A.B. 1970).

Coleman is a native of Charlotte, North Carolina. His experience includes fifteen years in private practice in Washington, D.C., the last twelve as a partner at Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering. In private practice, Coleman specialized in federal court and administrative litigation; he also represented criminal defendants in capital collateral proceedings and was an active participant in his firm’s pro bono program. Jim also has had a range of government experience during the early part of his career, including stints as an assistant general counsel for the Legal Services Corporation, chief counsel for the U.S. House of Representatives' Committee on Standards of Official Conduct, and deputy general counsel for the U.S. Department of Education.

During his career, Coleman has been active in the American Bar Association, where he served as Chair of the ABA Section of Individual Rights and Responsibilities and of the ABA Death Penalty Moratorium Implementation Project, and has served on various state commissions focused on wrongful convictions, the death penalty, and criminal justice generally.

Coleman joined the Duke faculty full-time in 1996, where his teaching responsibilities have included criminal law, wrongful convictions, and the appellate litigation clinic, which he and Erwin Chemerinsky started. His academic work, conducted through the Center for Criminal Justice and Professional Responsibility, centers on the legal, political, and scientific causes of wrongful convictions and how they can be prevented. His administrative work for the University has included chairing the Lacrosse ad hoc Review Committee and the Duke Athletic Council.

Samuel W. Buell

Bernard M. Fishman Professor of Law

buell@law.duke.edu or 919-613-7193

Sam Buell's research and teaching focus on criminal law and on the regulatory state, particularly regulation of corporations and financial markets. He is the author of Capital Offenses:  Business Crime and Punishment in America’s Corporate Age (W.W. Norton & Co. 2016). His recent scholarship explores the conceptual structure of white collar offenses, the problem of behaviors that evolve to avoid legal control, and the treatment of the corporation and the white collar offender in the criminal justice system. Buell's publications have appeared in Georgetown Law Journal, Law & Contemporary Problems, Duke Law Journal, UCLA Law Review, NYU Law Review, Stanford Law Review, Cardozo Law Review, Indiana Law Journal, and the Oxford Handbooks. He is a member of the American Law Institute, has testified before the United States Senate and the United States Sentencing Commission on matters involving the definition and punishment of corporate crimes, and has delivered recent invited lectures in Australia, China, and Taiwan.

Buell joined the Duke Law faculty as a professor in 2010, after serving as an associate professor at Washington University School of Law in St. Louis and a visiting assistant professor at the University of Texas School of Law. Prior to his academic career, he worked as a federal prosecutor in New York, Boston, Washington, and Houston. He twice received the Attorney General’s Award for Exceptional Service, the Department of Justice’s highest honor, and was a lead prosecutor for the Department’s Enron Task Force. Buell clerked for the Honorable Jack B. Weinstein of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York and practiced as an associate with Covington & Burling in Washington, D.C.  He graduated summa cum laude from New York University School of Law and magna cum laude from Brown University.

Lisa Kern Griffin

Candace M. Carroll and Leonard B. Simon Professor of Law

griffin@law.duke.edu or 919-613-7112

Lisa Kern Griffin’s scholarship focuses on evidence theory, constitutional criminal procedure, and federal criminal justice. Her recent work concerns the status and significance of silence in criminal investigations, the relationship between constructing narratives and achieving factual accuracy in the courtroom, the criminalization of dishonesty in legal institutions and the political process, and the impact of popular culture about the criminal justice system.

Griffin’s book, Lying, Truth-Seeking, and the Law of Questioning, is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press. Her academic articles have appeared in the California Law Review, the Columbia Law Review, the Duke Law Journal, the Georgetown Law Journal, the New York University Law Review, the North Carolina Law Review, and the online editions of the Cornell Law Review and the Michigan Law Review, among others. She has also edited and contributed to volumes of Law & Contemporary Problems and published chapters in several books. Her opinion essays have appeared in popular outlets, including The Atlantic, Slate, and The New York Times.

Griffin joined the Duke Law faculty in 2008 and was the recipient of the 2011 Distinguished Teaching Award. She is an elected member of the American Law Institute, has filed amicus briefs with the United States Supreme Court, served as a legal advisor to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and has testified before the United States Congress on public corruption prosecutions and proposed revisions to the fraud statutes. 

Prior to coming to Duke, Griffin taught at the UCLA School of Law. She graduated from Stanford Law School, where she served as President of the Stanford Law Review and was elected to the Order of the Coif. After law school, she clerked for Judge Dorothy Nelson of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and Justice Sandra Day O’Connor of the Supreme Court of the United States. Griffin also spent five years as a federal prosecutor in the Chicago United States Attorney’s Office.

Ben K. Grunwald

Associate Professor of Law

grunwald@law.duke.edu or 919-613-7250 

Ben Grunwald’s academic interests include criminal procedure, criminal law, constitutional law, juvenile justice, and empirical methods. His recent work has examined police labor markets, wandering officers, Fourth Amendment regulation of law enforcement, sentinel event reviews, open-file discovery, sentencing, and the age of majority for separating the juvenile and adult justice systems. His work has been published in the California Law Review, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Journal of Legal Studies, and Yale Law Journal, among others. He has also published shorter work in The Washington Post. 

Grunwald joined the Duke Law faculty in 2017 after serving as a Bigelow Fellow at the University of Chicago Law School. He previously clerked for the Honorable Thomas Ambro on the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. He holds a JD, a PhD in Criminology, an AM in Statistics, and a BA from the University of Pennsylvania.

Shane Stansbury

Robinson Everett Distinguished Fellow in the Center for Law, Ethics, and National Security
Senior Lecturing Fellow

stansbury@law.duke.edu or 919-613-6931

Shane T. Stansbury is the Robinson Everett Distinguished Fellow in the Center for Law, Ethics, and National Security and a Senior Lecturing Fellow in Law.  Stansbury served for more than eight years as Assistant United States Attorney in the Southern District of New York (SDNY), where he led some of the office’s most sensitive and noteworthy prosecutions in the areas of terrorism, cybercrime, espionage, money laundering, international public corruption, and global weapons trafficking. 

Among Stansbury’s many accomplishments at SDNY were the successful prosecutions of Alfonso Portillo, the former President of Guatemala, for money laundering relating to his receipt of millions of dollars in bribery payments; Minh Quang Pham, a former associate of Anwar al-Awlaki and key operative for al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), for terrorism offenses; Xu Jiaqiang, for his theft of highly sensitive source code with the intent to benefit the Chinese government; and Rafael Garavito-Garcia, for his role in orchestrating an international weapons-and-narcotics trafficking scheme that extended to the highest levels of the Guinea Bissau government, including the head of the Armed Forces. Stansbury served in a number of other capacities at SDNY, including as Acting Deputy Chief of Appeals and as SDNY’s representative in the Department of Justice’s National Security Cyber Specialists Network, a group of prosecutors focusing on cyber threats to the national security.  He is the recipient of numerous awards for his work as a prosecutor, including the Attorney General’s Distinguished Service Award and the Federal Law Enforcement Foundation’s Prosecutor of the Year Award.

Prior to becoming a federal prosecutor, Stansbury was a litigator at WilmerHale where he focused on international litigation and arbitration, foreign anti-corruption investigations, and white-collar criminal matters. He also represented members of Congress and others in defending the constitutionality of the Bipartisan Campaign Finance Reform Act before the Supreme Court. Stansbury clerked for the Honorable M. Margaret McKeown of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and the Honorable Robert W. Sweet of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. He received his J.D. from Columbia Law School, where he was Articles Editor for the Columbia Law Review; his M.P.A. from Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs; and his A.B. from Duke.

Trina Jones

Jerome M. Culp Professor of Law

TJones@law.duke.edu or 919-613-7177

Trina Jones focuses her scholarly research and writing on racial and socio-economic inequality. She is a leading legal expert on colorism, which is the differential treatment of same-race individuals on the basis of skin color. At Duke Law, Jones teaches Civil Procedure, Employment Discrimination, Race and the Law, and Critical Race Theory.

Notable works include Shades of Brown: The Law of Skin Color, which draws upon historical and sociological materials to explain the past and continuing significance of colorism in the United States; Aggressive Encounters & White Fragility: Deconstructing the Trope of the Angry Black Woman (with Norwood), which explains how negative stereotypes render Black women vulnerable in a myriad of social and economic circumstances; A Different Class of Care: The Benefits Crisis and Low-Wage Workers, which examines the dearth of workplace benefits available to low-wage workers; A Post-Race Equal Protection? (with Barnes and Chemerinsky), which challenges the notion that the election of Barack Obama heralded the beginning of a post-racial America; and Law and Class in America: Trends Since the Cold War (NYU Press, with Carrington), which examines the effects on poor people of legal reforms in a variety of substantive areas. Jones’ current projects explore colorism from a comparative perspective and consider the interplay between DNA-based ancestry tests and racial identity.

Jones joined the faculty of Duke Law School in 1995, after practicing as a general litigator at Wilmer, Cutler, and Pickering (now Wilmer Hale) in Washington, D.C. From 2008-2011, she served as a founding member of the faculty at the University of California, Irvine, School of Law, where she created and directed the Center on Law, Equality and Race. She has been active in University service and recently co-chaired the Duke University Academic Council’s Task Force on Diversity. 

A native of Rock Hill, S.C., Jones received her undergraduate degree in government from Cornell University and her J.D., with honors, from the University of Michigan Law School. While at Michigan, she served as an articles editor on the Michigan Law Review.

Steven L. Schwarcz

Stanley A. Star Distinguished Professor of Law & Business
schwarcz@law.duke.edu or 919-613-7060

Steven L. Schwarcz is the Stanley A. Star Distinguished Professor of Law & Business at  Duke University and Founding Director of Duke’s interdisciplinary Global Capital Markets Center (now renamed the Global Financial Markets Center). His areas of research and scholarship include insolvency and bankruptcy law, international finance, capital markets, systemic risk, corporate governance, and commercial law. He holds a bachelor’s degree in aerospace engineering (summa cum laude) and a Juris Doctor from Columbia Law School. Prior to joining the Duke faculty, he was a partner at two of the world’s leading law firms and Visiting Lecturer at Yale Law School. He also helped to pioneer the field of asset securitization, and his book, Structured Finance, A Guide to the Principles of Asset Securitization (3d edition), is one of the most widely used texts in the field.

Schwarcz has testified before the U.S. Congress on topics including systemic risk, securitization, credit rating agencies, and financial regulation and has advised several U.S. and foreign governmental agencies on the financial crisis and shadow banking. His writings include Systemic Risk, 97 Georgetown Law Journal 193, the second most cited law review article of 2008; he also has been recognized as the world’s second most cited scholar, 2010-2014 and again 2013-2017, in commercial, contract, and bankruptcy law. He is also a Fellow of the American College of Bankruptcy, a Founding Member of the International Insolvency Institute, a Fellow of the American College of Commercial Finance Lawyers, Business Law Advisor to the American Bar Association Section on Business Law, a member of P.R.I.M.E. Finance’s Panel of Recognized International Market Experts in Finance, and Senior Fellow of The Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI).

Shane Stansbury

Robinson Everett Distinguished Fellow in the Center for Law, Ethics, and National Security
Senior Lecturing Fellow
stansbury@law.duke.edu or 919-613-6931

Shane T. Stansbury is the Robinson Everett Distinguished Fellow in the Center for Law, Ethics, and National Security and a Senior Lecturing Fellow in Law.  Stansbury served for more than eight years as Assistant United States Attorney in the Southern District of New York (SDNY), where he led some of the office’s most sensitive and noteworthy prosecutions in the areas of terrorism, cybercrime, espionage, money laundering, international public corruption, and global weapons trafficking. 

Among Stansbury’s many accomplishments at SDNY were the successful prosecutions of Alfonso Portillo, the former President of Guatemala, for money laundering relating to his receipt of millions of dollars in bribery payments; Minh Quang Pham, a former associate of Anwar al-Awlaki and key operative for al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), for terrorism offenses; Xu Jiaqiang, for his theft of highly sensitive source code with the intent to benefit the Chinese government; and Rafael Garavito-Garcia, for his role in orchestrating an international weapons-and-narcotics trafficking scheme that extended to the highest levels of the Guinea Bissau government, including the head of the Armed Forces. Stansbury served in a number of other capacities at SDNY, including as Acting Deputy Chief of Appeals and as SDNY’s representative in the Department of Justice’s National Security Cyber Specialists Network, a group of prosecutors focusing on cyber threats to the national security.  He is the recipient of numerous awards for his work as a prosecutor, including the Attorney General’s Distinguished Service Award and the Federal Law Enforcement Foundation’s Prosecutor of the Year Award.

Prior to becoming a federal prosecutor, Stansbury was a litigator at WilmerHale where he focused on international litigation and arbitration, foreign anti-corruption investigations, and white-collar criminal matters. He also represented members of Congress and others in defending the constitutionality of the Bipartisan Campaign Finance Reform Act before the Supreme Court. Stansbury clerked for the Honorable M. Margaret McKeown of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and the Honorable Robert W. Sweet of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. He received his J.D. from Columbia Law School, where he was Articles Editor for the Columbia Law Review; his M.P.A. from Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs; and his A.B. from Duke.

James E. Coleman, Jr.

John S. Bradway Distinguished Professor of the Practice of Law
Director, Center for Criminal Justice and Professional Responsibility
Co-Director, Wrongful Convictions Clinic

jcoleman@law.duke.edu or 919-613-7057
@jcolemanduke

Jim Coleman is the John S. Bradway Distinguished Professor of the Practice of Law, Director of the Center for Criminal Justice and Professional Responsibility, and Co-Director of the Wrongful Convictions Clinic at Duke Law School. He is a graduate of Columbia University (J.D. 1974), and Harvard University (A.B. 1970).

Coleman is a native of Charlotte, North Carolina. His experience includes fifteen years in private practice in Washington, D.C., the last twelve as a partner at Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering. In private practice, Coleman specialized in federal court and administrative litigation; he also represented criminal defendants in capital collateral proceedings and was an active participant in his firm’s pro bono program. Jim also has had a range of government experience during the early part of his career, including stints as an assistant general counsel for the Legal Services Corporation, chief counsel for the U.S. House of Representatives' Committee on Standards of Official Conduct, and deputy general counsel for the U.S. Department of Education.

During his career, Coleman has been active in the American Bar Association, where he served as Chair of the ABA Section of Individual Rights and Responsibilities and of the ABA Death Penalty Moratorium Implementation Project, and has served on various state commissions focused on wrongful convictions, the death penalty, and criminal justice generally.

Coleman joined the Duke faculty full-time in 1996, where his teaching responsibilities have included criminal law, wrongful convictions, and the appellate litigation clinic, which he and Erwin Chemerinsky started. His academic work, conducted through the Center for Criminal Justice and Professional Responsibility, centers on the legal, political, and scientific causes of wrongful convictions and how they can be prevented. His administrative work for the University has included chairing the Lacrosse ad hoc Review Committee and the Duke Athletic Council.

Brandon L. Garrett

L. Neil Williams, Jr. Distinguished Professor of Law
Director, Wilson Center for Science and Justice

bgarrett@law.duke.edu or 919-613-7090
@brandonlgarrett

Brandon L. Garrett, a leading scholar of criminal justice outcomes, evidence, and constitutional rights, is the inaugural L. Neil Williams, Jr. Distinguished Professor of Law and director of the Wilson Center for Science and Justice at Duke Law, an initiative that brings together faculty and students to improve criminal justice outcomes. 

Garrett’s current research and teaching interests focus on evidence, forensic science, constitutional rights, habeas corpus, corporate crime, and criminal law. He is the author of six books: Autopsy of a Crime Lab: Exposing the Flaws in Forensics (University of California Press, March 2021); The Death Penalty: Concepts and Insights (West Academic, 2018) (with Lee Kovarsky); End of its Rope: How Killing the Death Penalty Can Revive Criminal Justice (Harvard University Press, 2017); Too Big to Jail: How Prosecutors Compromise with Corporations (Harvard University Press, 2014); Federal Habeas Corpus: Executive Detention and Post-Conviction Litigation (Foundation Press, 2013) (with Lee Kovarsky); and Convicting the Innocent: Where Criminal Prosecutions Go Wrong (Harvard University Press, 2011). These books have been translated for editions in China, Spain, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan. For more information, visit Garrett’s website.

In addition to numerous articles published in leading law reviews and scientific journals, Garrett's work has been widely cited by courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court, lower federal courts, state supreme courts, and courts in other countries. Garrett also frequently speaks about criminal justice matters before legislative and policymaking bodies, groups of practicing lawyers, law enforcement, and to local and national media. He has been involved with a number of law and science reform initiatives, including the American Law Institute’s project on policing, for which he serves as Associate Reporter, and a National Academy of Sciences Committee concerning eyewitness evidence. Garrett serves as co-director of CSAFE (Center for Statistics and Applications in Forensic Evidence.) He also serves as the court-appointed monitor in the ODonnell v. Harris County misdemeanor bail reform consent decree. 

Garrett maintains online data sets relating to his research. These include:

• End of Its Rope: Data on Death Sentencing
• Corporate Prosecution Registry
• Convicting the Innocent: DNA Exonerations Database

Garrett received his BA in 1997 from Yale University. He received his JD in 2001 from Columbia Law School, where he was an articles editor of the Columbia Law Review and a Kent Scholar. After graduating, he clerked for the Hon. Pierre N. Leval of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and then worked as an associate at Neufeld, Scheck & Brustin LLP in New York City. Before joining Duke Law in 2018, Garrett was the White Burkett Miller Professor of Law and Public Affairs and Justice Thurgood Marshall Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Virginia. In 2015, he was a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford University.

Matthew Adler

Richard A. Horvitz Professor of Law and Professor of Economics, Philosophy and Public Policy
adler@law.duke.edu or 919-613-7172

Matthew D. Adler is the Richard A. Horvitz Professor of Law and Professor of Economics, Philosophy and Public Policy at Duke University, and is the founding director of the Duke Center for Law, Economics and Public Policy. His scholarship is interdisciplinary, drawing from welfare economics, normative ethics, and legal theory.  Adler’s current research agenda focuses on “prioritarianism”—a refinement to utilitarianism that gives extra weight (“priority”) to the worse off. He writes about the theoretical foundations of prioritarianism; its implementation as a policy analysis methodology, in the form of a “social welfare function” or cost-benefit analysis with distributional weights; and its application to a variety of policy domains, including climate change, risk regulation, and health policy.   

Adler is the author of numerous articles and several monographs, including New Foundations of Cost-Benefit Analysis (Harvard, 2006; co-authored with Eric Posner); Well-Being and Fair Distribution: Beyond Cost-Benefit Analysis, which systematically discusses how to integrate considerations of fair distribution into policy analysis (Oxford, 2012); and Measuring Social Welfare: An Introduction (Oxford, 2019), an overview of the social-welfare function approach. With Marc Fleurbaey, he edited the Oxford Handbook of Well-Being and Public Policy (2016). Along with Ole Norheim, he is the co-founder of the Prioritarianism in Practice Research Network, whose work will appear in an edited volume, Prioritarianism in Practice (under contract, Cambridge University Press). He is an editor of Economics and Philosophy.

Prior to joining the Duke Law faculty in 2012, Adler was the Leon Meltzer Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania School of Law. He has been a visiting professor at Bar-Ilan University, Columbia University, Duke, the University of Chicago, and the University of Virginia. In addition to his Duke appointment, Adler currently holds a 3-year position as the Ludwig M. Lachmann Professorial Research Fellow at the London School of Economics.

Adler has a B.A. and J.D. from Yale University, where he was a member of the Yale Law Journal. He also received an M. Litt. in modern history from St. Antony’s College at Oxford University, where he was a Marshall Scholar. He clerked for Judge Harry Edwards of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in 1991-1992 and for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor during the 1992-1993 term. Adler practiced litigation at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison in New York prior to joining the University of Pennsylvania law faculty in 1995.

Sarah Bloom Raskin

Colin W. Brown Distinguished Professor of the Practice of Law
Senior Fellow, Duke Center on Risk

sarah.raskin@duke.edu or 919-613-6931

Sarah Bloom Raskin, the former deputy secretary of the U.S. Department of the Treasury, was named the Colin W. Brown Distinguished Professor of the Practice of Law in 2021. She is also a senior fellow in the Duke Center on Risk. Raskin was previously a visiting professor of the practice of law at Duke and a Rubenstein Fellow.

From 2014 to 2017, Raskin was the second-in-command at the Treasury Department, where she was known for her pursuit of innovative solutions to enhance Americans’ shared prosperity, the resilience of the country’s critical financial infrastructure, and the defense of consumer safeguards in the financial marketplace. She was a champion of cybersecurity in the financial sector both nationally and internationally, helping to elevate this issue with corporate executives and boards. Her efforts, including leading the development of the G-7 Fundamental Elements of Cybersecurity for the Financial Sector, contributed to a more secure and resilient financial sector in the face of increasingly frequent and sophisticated threats.

Earlier, Raskin was a governor of the Federal Reserve Board and a member of the Federal Open Market Committee, where she helped conduct the nation’s monetary policy and promote financial stability. She also served as commissioner of financial regulation for the State of Maryland from 2007 to 2010. She and her agency were responsible for regulating Maryland’s financial institutions during the height of the Great Recession.

As a Rubenstein Fellow, Raskin collaborated with faculty across the university to improve understanding of markets and regulation. She led an agenda focused on shaping a new relationship between regulation and resilience in financial markets and deepening understanding of the management of systemic risks from diverse sources such as financial instruments, cyber breaches, and climate events. She also mentored and advised undergraduate and graduate students on careers in the public sector, guest-lectured in courses, participated in public events, and led collaborative research projects.

Raskin, a graduate of Harvard Law School, has throughout her career worked across public and private sectors in both legal and regulatory capacities. Her work has centered on financial institutions, financial market utilities, consumer protection issues, the adaptation of financial regulatory tools as they pertain to climate risk, bolstered prudential standards, and resolution planning. Her private sector experience includes having served as managing director at the Promontory Financial Group, general counsel of the WorldWide Retail Exchange, and at the law firms of Arnold and Porter and Mayer Brown. Earlier in her career she served as banking counsel for the U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs.

Michael D. Frakes

A. Kenneth Pye Distinguished Professor of Law and Professor of Economics
michael.frakes@law.duke.edu or 919-613-7185 

Michael Frakes is the A. Kenneth Pye Professor of Law at Duke Law School. He holds a secondary faculty appointment in the Duke Economics Department. Frakes also serves as a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He joined the Duke Law faculty in June, 2016 from Northwestern University’s Pritzker School of Law, where he was an associate professor.

Frakes is generally interested in empirical research in the areas of health law and innovation policy. His research in health is largely focused on understanding how certain legal and financial incentives affect the decisions of physicians and other health care providers. His research in innovation policy centers on exploring the determinants of behaviors and outcomes at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. 

Frakes’ scholarship has appeared in leading economics, law and medicine journals, including the American Economic Review, American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, Review of Economics and Statistics, Stanford Law Review, University of Chicago Law Review and JAMA

He is currently serving as the Principal Investigator on an R01 award from the NIH, exploring the effects of immunizing physicians from medical liability on the extent and quality of the medical care they deliver.

Frakes received his BS in Economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2001, his JD, cum laude, from Harvard Law School in 2005, and his PhD in Economics from MIT in 2009. He was an associate at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom in Wilmington, Del., from 2005 to 2007. From 2009 to 2011, he was an academic fellow at the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School.

Crystal Grant

Associate Clinical Professor of Law
Director, Children’s Law Clinic
crystal.grant@law.duke.edu or 919-613-7104
@CGrantAdvocate

Crystal Grant joined the Duke Law faculty in 2018 and directs the Children’s Law Clinic, an interprofessional medical-legal partnership. Professor Grant’s research interests are in accommodating students with disabilities, health justice, and interprofessional education. Her research has been published by the Fordham Urban Law Journal, Loyola University Chicago Law Journal, Clinical Law Review and the NYU Journal of Legislation and Public Policy (forthcoming in 2023). In addition to the Children’s Law Clinic, Professor Grant teaches interdisciplinary project-based seminars.

Professor Grant previously taught law students at the University of Michigan Law School where she was a clinical fellow in the Pediatric Advocacy Clinic. Prior to teaching, Professor Grant practiced public interest law with Disability Rights Michigan and served as an adjunct professor at Spring Arbor University.

Grant has represented children and their families in administrative hearings and federal court. Her representation of students includes participation in IEP team meetings, Section 504 meetings, due process proceedings and administrative complaints. She has received favorable resolutions through the Office of Civil Rights and the Department of Justice. Professor Grant provides continuing education for attorneys and medical providers on special education and related topics such as trauma informed care, bullying and the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).

Professor Grant is a frequent presenter at national workshops and conferences and is an active member of the Clinical Legal Education Association (CLEA). Grant received her MSW from the University of Michigan and JD from Michigan State University College of Law. She clerked for Judge Janelle A. Lawless of the Ingham County Circuit Court where she conducted legal research on family law, child welfare, and juvenile justice issues.

Nita A. Farahany

Robinson O. Everett Professor of Law
Professor of Philosophy
farahany@duke.edu or 919-613-8514
@NitaFarahany

Nita A. Farahany is a leading scholar on the ethical, legal, and social implications of emerging technologies. She is the Robinson O. Everett Distinguished Professor of Law & Philosophy at Duke Law School, the Founding Director of Duke Science & Society, the Faculty Chair of the Duke MA in Bioethics & Science Policy, and principal investigator of SLAP Lab. 

Farahany is a frequent commentator for national media and radio shows and a regular keynote speaker. She presents her work to diverse academic, legal, corporate, and public audiences including at TED, the World Economic Forum, Aspen Ideas Festival, and Judicial Conferences for US Court of Appeals, and at scientific venues including the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Society for Neuroscience, the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine, and the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy. She has also testified before Congress as an expert witness.

Farahany's current scholarship focuses on the implications of emerging neuroscience, genomics, and artificial intelligence for law and society; legal and bioethical issues arising from the COVID-19 pandemic; FDA law and policy; and the use of science and technology in criminal law. In addition to publishing in legal and scientific journals, as well as edited book volumes, Farahany is the author of The Battle for Your Brain: Defending Your Right to Think Freely in the Age of Neurotechnology (St. Martin’s Press 2023).

In 2010, Professor Farahany was appointed by President Obama to the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues and served until 2017. She is an appointed member of the National Advisory Council for the National Institute for Neurological Disease and Stroke, an elected member of the American Law Institute and Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, past President of the International Neuroethics Society, an ELSI (ethical, legal, and social implications) advisor to the NIH Brain Initiative and to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, an appointed member of both the Forum on Neuroscience and Nervous System Disorders and the Standing Committee on Biotechnology Capabilities and National Security Needs for the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, and a member of the Global Future Council on Frontier Risks and Expert Network for the World Economic Forum. She served as Reporter for the Study Committee and later Drafting Committee on updating the Uniform Determination of Death Committee for the Uniform Law Commission. In 2022, she was appointed by Governor Roy Cooper to the NC Delegation for the Uniform Law Commission, and currently serves in that capacity. Farahany is a co-editor-in-chief and co-founder of the Journal of Law and the Biosciences and on the Board of Advisors for Scientific American. She also serves on scientific and ethics advisory boards for corporations.

Farahany received her AB in Genetics, Cell, and Developmental Biology from Dartmouth College, an ALM in biology from Harvard University, and a JD and MA from Duke University, as well as a Ph.D. in philosophy. In 2004-2005, Farahany clerked for Judge Judith W. Rogers of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, after which she joined the law faculty at Vanderbilt University. In 2011, Farahany was the Leah Kaplan Visiting Professor of Human Rights at Stanford Law School.

Trina Jones

Jerome M. Culp Distinguished Professor of Law
Director, Center on Law, Race & Policy

TJones@law.duke.edu or 919-613-7177

Michelle Nowlin

Clinical Professor of Law
Co-Director, Environmental Law and Policy Clinic

nowlin@law.duke.edu or 919-613-8502
@mbnowlin

Michelle Benedict Nowlin joined the Duke Law faculty in June 2008 as a supervising attorney for the Environmental Law and Policy Clinic and became co-director in 2019. She supervises clinic students from the Law School and the Nicholas School of the Environment and co-teaches the seminar portion of the clinic. Since joining the Clinic faculty in 2008, Nowlin has worked with students on a range of matters, including the development of a precedent-setting settlement with the state of North Carolina to protect endangered sea turtles, filing an amicus curiae brief with the U.S. Supreme Court on behalf of low-wealth communities challenging mountaintop-removal mining practices, collaborating with community partners for innovative approaches to reduce marine debris, and crafting measures to protect children from lead poisoning hazards. She also teaches a course in Food and Agricultural Law and Policy. Nowlin currently serves as chair of the board of advisors for the Duke Campus Farm, as a faculty advisor for the Duke Environmental Law and Policy Forum, and as a member of the Bass Connections Faculty Advisory Council and the Community Advisory Board for the Superfund Research Center. She is a past chair of the American Association of Law School’s Food and Agriculture Law Section, and serves on the AALS’ Environmental Law Section council. She received the University’s Faculty Award for Outstanding Leadership in Sustainability in 2013.

Nowlin has dedicated her career to the protection of natural resources and public health through the practice of environmental law. Prior to joining Duke’s faculty, she was a senior attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center in Chapel Hill where she led the organization’s initiative to develop and implement pollution control programs for Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, developed a template for integrating water resource and water quality planning, and litigated cases pursuant to the Clean Water Act, Endangered Species Act, and National Environmental Policy Act. She completed a fellowship awarded by the Ford Foundation and worked in private practice for two years in Washington, D.C., prior to joining SELC. 

Nowlin is a member of the North Carolina Bar and the D.C. Bar, and is admitted to practice in the state and federal courts of North Carolina, the U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, and the U.S. Supreme Court. She has served on the boards of directors of several nonprofit and civic organizations, including a term as chair of the Environment, Energy and Natural Resources Law Section of the North Carolina Bar Association. 

Nowlin earned her B.A. with Highest Honors from the University of Florida, where she was also inducted into Florida Blue Key and Phi Beta Kappa. She earned a dual J.D./M.A. from Duke Law School and the School of the Environment in 1992.

 

Ryke Longest

Clinical Professor of Law and Environmental Sciences and Policy
Co-Director, Environmental Law and Policy Clinic
Director, Clinical Programs

longest@law.duke.edu or 919-613-7207
@rykelongest

Ryke Longest currently serves as the co-director, with Michelle Nowlin, of the Environmental Law and Policy Clinic and a Clinical Professor of Law at the Duke University School of Law. He supervises students practicing in the clinic and teaches the seminar portion of the clinic.

Longest received his B.A. in English from the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill in 1987 and graduated from the University of North Carolina School of Law in 1991. Prior to coming to Duke he ran a solo law practice and worked for 14 years at the North Carolina Department of Justice. At NCDOJ, he litigated cases before administrative agencies, state courts, federal courts and appellate courts at all levels. He also drafted legislation and advised agencies on rulemaking. Longest also negotiated and led the state’s implementation of two multimillion dollar settlement agreements aimed at reducing the adverse impacts from swine farming in North Carolina.

 

 Lee Miller

Lecturing Fellow

dlmiller@law.duke.edu

Lee Miller is a lecturing fellow teaching Food, Agriculture and the Environment: Law and Policy and a fellow in environmental law in the Environmental Law and Policy Clinic. Prior to joining Duke Law in the spring of 2019, Miller developed expertise in environmental advocacy, clinical teaching, food and agriculture law and policy, research, regulated industries, policy innovation, and coalition-building across food and farm movements in the U.S. His work has primarily focused on subnational climate change mitigation and resilience; adoption of regenerative agriculture systems; concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs), environmental justice and animal welfare; the federal farm bill; development of local and regional food systems; as well as food justice, food sovereignty and the right to food; open markets and fair competition; and economic justice for restaurant workers.

Most recently, at the Harvard Law School Food Law and Policy Clinic he developed and coordinated a farm bill research project to advance agricultural sustainability, racial and economic justice, and rural resilience. The project spanned eight environmental, food, and public health clinics across the law schools at Harvard, Yale, Duke, UCLA, Pace and Vermont. Previously, at Yale Law School’s Environmental Law Clinic, Miller spearheaded a nationwide CAFO survey for the Natural Resources Defense Council that exposed information asymmetries between regulatory authorities and industry.

Miller also serves as policy director for Acre Policy, a nonprofit and “community toolshed” filled with implements for direct action and policy entrepreneurship. Miller works with Acre Policy’s grassroots stakeholders to design model state and local policy that advances a future where farmers reflect the diversity of America, where farmers can make a viable livelihood producing food for their communities, and where our working lands grow more resilient each year.

Miller has published pieces in the Yale Law Journal Forum, the American Journal of Public Health, the Journal of Food Law and Policy, and the Vermont Journal of Environmental Law, among others. He has co-authored numerous reports on the farm bill, CAFOs, and regenerative agriculture. Miller serves as faculty advisor for the Duke Food Law Society and on the Board of Advisors for the national Food Law Student Network.

Miller received his J.D. from Yale Law School, where he co-founded the Yale Food Law Society. He was awarded the post-graduate Jane Matilda Bolin Yale Law Journal Public Interest Fellowship and was an inaugural Exchange Fellow at the Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture in Pocantico Hills, N.Y. He received his B.S. summa cum laude from Duke, where he also received his MEM. 

 

 

Jonathan B. Wiener

William R. and Thomas L. Perkins Professor of Law
Professor of Environmental Policy
Professor of Public Policy

Wiener@law.duke.edu or 919-613-7054

Jonathan B. Wiener is the William R. and Thomas L. Perkins Professor of Law at Duke Law School, Professor of Environmental Policy at the Nicholas School of the Environment, and Professor of Public Policy at the Sanford School of Public Policy, at Duke University. He is the Co-Director of the Duke Center on Risk in the Science & Society Initiative. 

He served as President of the Society for Risk Analysis (SRA) in 2008, and he co-chaired the SRA's World Congress on Risk in Sydney Australia in 2012. In 2003 he received SRA’s Chauncey Starr Young Risk Analyst Award, and in 2014 he received SRA’s Richard J. Burk Outstanding Service Award. From 2015-19 he co-directed the Rethinking Regulation program at Duke, and from 2007-15 he directed the JD-LLM Program in International and Comparative Law at Duke Law School. From 2000-05 he was the founding Faculty Director of the Duke Center for Environmental Solutions, which was then expanded into the Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions, for which he served as chair of the faculty advisory committee from 2007-10.

He is a University Fellow of Resources for the Future (RFF); a Public Member of the Administrative Conference of the United States (ACUS); a board member of the Society for Benefit-Cost Analysis (SBCA); and an affiliated faculty member of the environment program at Duke Kunshan University (DKU) and of the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis (HCRA).  He is a member of advisory committees at the NYU Institute for Policy Integrity, the International Risk Governance Council (IRGC), the Chaire Economie du Climat (CEC), and the Cambridge Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER). He has been a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 5th Assessment Report (Working Group III) (2014), and the study team on “Environmental Risk Management” for the China Council for International Cooperation on Environment and Development (CCICED) (2015). 

His publications include the books Policy Shock: Recalibrating Risk and Regulation after Oil Spills, Nuclear Accidents, and Financial Crises (Cambridge University Press, 2017 [paperback 2020], with Ed Balleisen, Lori Bennear, and Kim Krawiec); The Reality of Precaution: Comparing Risk Regulation in the United States and Europe (RFF/Routledge, 2011, with Michael Rogers, Jim Hammitt, and Peter Sand), Reconstructing Climate Policy (AEI Press 2003, with Richard Stewart) and Risk vs. Risk (Harvard University Press 1995, with John Graham [Chinese translation, 2018]), and more than 100 articles in journals in law, policy, economics, risk and science. He has been a visiting professor at Harvard Law School, the University of Chicago Law School, Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense, Université Paris-Dauphine, Sciences Po, and EHESS and CIRED in Paris.

Donald H. Beskind

Professor of the Practice of Law

beskind@law.duke.edu or 919-613-7085

Donald H. Beskind directs and teaches in Duke Law School's Trial Practice program and teaches Torts and Evidence. He has been a trial lawyer representing plaintiffs in civil cases and defendants in criminal cases throughout his career. 

After beginning his career in practice in Denver, Beskind was a John S. Bradway Fellow at Duke Law from 1975 to 1977, at the conclusion of which he received his LLM. He then joined the governing faculty, first as an assistant professor and then as associate professor and director of the Clinical Legal Studies Program. 

In 1981, Beskind returned to private practice, co-founding Beskind & Rudolf (later Beskind, Rudolf & Maher) where he practiced until 1993. In 1993, he joined what became Twiggs, Beskind, Strickland & Rabenau, and practiced with that firm until 2010. While in private practice, as a Senior Lecturer in Law, he directed and taught in Duke Law School’s Trial Practice program and periodically taught Evidence. Beskind serves as co-counsel in cases with various national and local firms and as a mediator and arbitrator in complex cases.

Beskind is a fellow of the International Society of Barristers, its Administrative Secretary and the Editor of its Quarterly journal. He is also a fellow of the American College of Trial Lawyers. He has served on the Board of Governors of both national and North Carolina trial lawyer organizations and has chaired the committees on continuing legal education for both. He was a founding board member of North Carolina Prisoner’s Legal Services and served as its president. He is Vice President of the Board of the Center for Death Penalty Litigation. Beskind lectures on evidentiary and trial skills topics across the United States and has run trial training programs at major U.S. law firms and has trained solicitors and barristers in the United Kingdom.

Beskind received his AB in sociology from The George Washington University, his JD, with honors, from the University of Connecticut, and his LLM from Duke Law School.

Brandon L. Garrett

L. Neil Williams, Jr. Professor of Law
Director, Wilson Center for Science and Justice

bgarrett@law.duke.edu or 919-613-7090
@brandonlgarrett

Brandon L. Garrett, a leading scholar of criminal justice outcomes, evidence, and constitutional rights, is the inaugural L. Neil Williams, Jr. Professor of Law and director of the Wilson Center for Science and Justice at Duke Law, an initiative that brings together faculty and students to improve criminal justice outcomes. 

Garrett’s current research and teaching interests focus on evidence, forensic science, constitutional rights, habeas corpus, corporate crime, and criminal law. He is the author of six books: Autopsy of a Crime Lab: Exposing the Flaws in Forensics (University of California Press, March 2021); The Death Penalty: Concepts and Insights (West Academic, 2018) (with Lee Kovarsky); End of its Rope: How Killing the Death Penalty Can Revive Criminal Justice (Harvard University Press, 2017); Too Big to Jail: How Prosecutors Compromise with Corporations (Harvard University Press, 2014); Federal Habeas Corpus: Executive Detention and Post-Conviction Litigation (Foundation Press, 2013) (with Lee Kovarsky); and Convicting the Innocent: Where Criminal Prosecutions Go Wrong (Harvard University Press, 2011). These books have been translated for editions in China, Spain, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan. For more information, visit Garrett’s website.

In addition to numerous articles published in leading law reviews and scientific journals, Garrett's work has been widely cited by courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court, lower federal courts, state supreme courts, and courts in other countries. Garrett also frequently speaks about criminal justice matters before legislative and policymaking bodies, groups of practicing lawyers, law enforcement, and to local and national media. He has been involved with a number of law and science reform initiatives, including the American Law Institute’s project on policing, for which he serves as Associate Reporter, and a National Academy of Sciences Committee concerning eyewitness evidence. Garrett serves as co-director of CSAFE (Center for Statistics and Applications in Forensic Evidence.) He also serves as the court-appointed monitor in the ODonnell v. Harris County misdemeanor bail reform consent decree. 

Garrett maintains online data sets relating to his research. These include:

• End of Its Rope: Data on Death Sentencing
• Corporate Prosecution Registry
• Convicting the Innocent: DNA Exonerations Database

Garrett received his BA in 1997 from Yale University. He received his JD in 2001 from Columbia Law School, where he was an articles editor of the Columbia Law Review and a Kent Scholar. After graduating, he clerked for the Hon. Pierre N. Leval of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and then worked as an associate at Neufeld, Scheck & Brustin LLP in New York City. Before joining Duke Law in 2018, Garrett was the White Burkett Miller Professor of Law and Public Affairs and Justice Thurgood Marshall Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Virginia. In 2015, he was a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford University.

Lisa Kern Griffin

Candace M. Carroll and Leonard B. Simon Professor of Law

griffin@law.duke.edu or 919-613-7112

Lisa Kern Griffin teaches and writes about constitutional criminal procedure, evidence, and federal criminal justice. Her recent scholarship concerns the criminalization of dishonesty in legal institutions, the treatment of silence in police interrogations, the use of personal history to impeach witnesses, the relationship between court-based accuracy and narrative constructs, and the impact of popular culture about the criminal justice system.

Griffin’s book, Honest Mistakes: Truth, Lies, and the Misleading Law of Questioning, is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press. Her academic articles have appeared in the California Law Review, the Columbia Law Review, the Duke Law Journal, the Georgetown Law Journal, the New York University Law Review, the North Carolina Law Review, the Stanford Law Review, the Texas Law Review, and the online editions of the Cornell Law Review and the Michigan Law Review, among others. She has also edited and contributed to volumes of Law & Contemporary Problems and authored chapters in several books. Her opinion essays have been published in The Atlantic, Slate, SCOTUSblog, and The New York Times.

Griffin joined the Duke Law faculty in 2008 and is the recipient of the Distinguished Teaching Award and the A. Kenneth Pye Award for Excellence in Education. From 2021-2023, she served as the Senior Associate Dean for Faculty and Research. Prior to coming to Duke, she taught at the UCLA School of Law, and she was the Daniel P.S. Paul Visiting Professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard Law School in 2024. Griffin is also an elected member of the American Law Institute, has filed amicus briefs with the United States Supreme Court, served as a legal advisor to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and has testified before the United States Congress on public corruption prosecutions and proposed revisions to the fraud statutes.

Griffin graduated from Stanford Law School, where she was President of the Stanford Law Review and elected to the Order of the Coif. She served as a federal prosecutor in the Chicago United States Attorney’s Office and also clerked for Judge Dorothy Nelson of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and Justice Sandra Day O’Connor of the United States Supreme Court.

Marin K. Levy

Professor of Law

Levy@law.duke.edu or 919-613-8529
@marinklevy

Marin K. Levy’s principal academic interests include judicial administration, civil procedure, remedies, and federal courts. Her work has been published in the Yale Law Journal, University of Chicago Law Review, University of Pennsylvania Law Review, Cornell Law Review, and California Law Review, among other scholarly journals, and has been discussed in The New York Times, Washington Post, Atlantic, and other public outlets.

Levy is also a co-author of Federal Standards of Review: Appellate Court Review of District Court Decisions and Agency Actions (2nd ed.) with Judge Harry T. Edwards and Linda A. Elliott, and Written and Unwritten: The Rules, Internal Procedures, and Customs of the United States Courts of Appeals, with Judge Jon O. Newman.

Levy joined the Duke Law faculty in 2009, and received the law school’s Distinguished Teaching Award in 2017. She previously served as the Director of Duke’s Program in Public Law, and is currently the Faculty Director of the Bolch Judicial Institute. Levy is an elected member of the American Law Institute, and has testified before Congress and the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States.

Prior to coming to Duke, Levy served as a law clerk to Judge José A. Cabranes of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and was an associate at Jenner & Block LLP in Washington, D.C. She received her J.D. in 2007 from Yale Law School, where she was the Editor-in-Chief of the Yale Law & Policy Review. She is a 2004 graduate of the University of Cambridge, where she earned an M.Phil in the History and Philosophy of Science and Medicine. Levy received a B.A. in Ethics, Politics, and Economics and in English from Yale College in 2003, graduating cum laude with distinction in both majors.

Ernest A. Young

Alston & Bird Distinguished Professor of Law

young@law.duke.edu; 919-613-8506

Professor Young teaches constitutional law, federal courts, and foreign relations law. He is one of the nation's leading authorities on the constitutional law of federalism, having written extensively on the Rehnquist Court's "Federalist Revival" and the difficulties confronting courts as they seek to draw lines between national and state authority. He also is an active commentator on foreign relations law, where he focuses on the interaction between domestic and supranational courts and the application of international law by domestic courts. Professor Young also writes on constitutional interpretation and constitutional theory. He has been known to dabble in maritime law and comparative constitutional law.

A native of Abilene, Texas, Professor Young joined the Duke Law faculty in 2008, after serving as the Charles Alan Wright Chair in Federal Courts at the University of Texas at Austin School of Law, where he had taught since 1999. He graduated from Dartmouth College in 1990 and Harvard Law School in 1993. After law school, he served as a law clerk to Judge Michael Boudin of the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals (1993-94) and to Justice David Souter of the U.S. Supreme Court (1995-96). Professor Young practiced law at Cohan, Simpson, Cowlishaw, & Wulff in Dallas, Texas (1994-95) and at Covington & Burling in Washington, D.C. (1996-98), where he specialized in appellate litigation. He has also been a visiting professor at Harvard Law School (2004-05) and Villanova University School of Law (1998-99), as well as an adjunct professor at Georgetown University Law Center (1997).

Elected to the American Law Institute in 2006, Professor Young is an active participant in both public and private litigation in his areas of interest. He has been the principal author of amicus briefs on behalf of leading constitutional scholars in several recent Supreme Court cases, including Medellin v. Texas (concerning presidential power and the authority of the International Court of Justice over domestic courts) and Gonzales v. Raich (concerning federal power to regulate medical marijuana).

Margaret H. Lemos

Robert G. Seaks LL.B. ’34 Distinguished Professor of Law

lemos@law.duke.edu or 919-613-7099

Margaret H. Lemos is a scholar of constitutional law, legal institutions, and procedure.  Her scholarship focuses on the institutions of law interpretation and enforcement and their effects on substantive rights. She writes in four related fields: federalism; administrative law, including the relationship between courts and agencies; statutory interpretation; and civil procedure. Her articles have been published in the Supreme Court Review as well as in the Harvard, New York University, Texas, Minnesota, Vanderbilt, and Notre Dame law reviews.

Lemos came to Duke Law in 2011 from the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, where she was an associate professor. Prior to joining the Cardozo faculty, Lemos was a Furman Fellow and program coordinator at New York University School of Law, a Bristow Fellow at the Office of the Solicitor General, and a law clerk for Judge Kermit V. Lipez of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, and for U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens. She graduated summa cum laude from New York University School of Law, where she was senior notes editor of the New York University Law Review.

Lemos was awarded Duke’s Distinguished Teaching Award in 2013, and students at Cardozo voted her the “best first-year teacher” in 2010 and in 2011.

Ernest A. Young

Alston & Bird Distinguished Professor of Law
young@law.duke.edu or 919-613-8506

Professor Young teaches constitutional law, federal courts, and foreign relations law. He is one of the nation's leading authorities on the constitutional law of federalism, having written extensively on the Rehnquist Court's "Federalist Revival" and the difficulties confronting courts as they seek to draw lines between national and state authority. He also is an active commentator on foreign relations law, where he focuses on the interaction between domestic and supranational courts and the application of international law by domestic courts. Professor Young also writes on constitutional interpretation and constitutional theory. He has been known to dabble in maritime law and comparative constitutional law.

A native of Abilene, Texas, Professor Young joined the Duke Law faculty in 2008, after serving as the Charles Alan Wright Chair in Federal Courts at the University of Texas at Austin School of Law, where he had taught since 1999. He graduated from Dartmouth College in 1990 and Harvard Law School in 1993. After law school, he served as a law clerk to Judge Michael Boudin of the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals (1993-94) and to Justice David Souter of the U.S. Supreme Court (1995-96). Professor Young practiced law at Cohan, Simpson, Cowlishaw, & Wulff in Dallas, Texas (1994-95) and at Covington & Burling in Washington, D.C. (1996-98), where he specialized in appellate litigation. He has also been a visiting professor at Harvard Law School (2004-05) and Villanova University School of Law (1998-99), as well as an adjunct professor at Georgetown University Law Center (1997).

Elected to the American Law Institute in 2006, Professor Young is an active participant in both public and private litigation in his areas of interest. He has been the principal author of amicus briefs on behalf of leading constitutional scholars in several recent Supreme Court cases, including Medellin v. Texas (concerning presidential power and the authority of the International Court of Justice over domestic courts) and Gonzales v. Raich (concerning federal power to regulate medical marijuana).

Elisabeth de Fontenay

Karl W. Leo Distinguished Professor of Law
defontenay@law.duke.edu or 919-613-7038

Elisabeth de Fontenay’s primary research interests are in the fields of corporate law and corporate finance. She joined the Duke Law faculty in 2013 after serving as a Climenko Fellow and Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School. At Duke Law, she teaches Business Associations, Corporate Finance, and Private Equity & Hedge Funds, and received the law school’s Distinguished Teaching Award in 2014.

Her broad research agenda focuses on how market actors behave in the less-regulated spaces of the financial markets. Her work (available here) has examined questions such as the ongoing decline in U.S. public companies and the rise of private capital, private equity firms’ role in the debt markets and in corporate governance, public versus private financial markets, complexity in financial contracting, and value creation by transactional lawyers and elite law firms. She has testified before Congress and presented to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on current topics in corporate finance.

De Fontenay received her B.A. summa cum laude in economics from Princeton University, where she was a two-time All-American rugby player. She received her J.D. magna cum laude from Harvard Law School. After graduating from law school, de Fontenay practiced as a corporate associate at Ropes & Gray, where she specialized in mergers and acquisitions, debt financing, and private investment funds. Her scholarly articles are available for download here.
 

Gina-Gail S. Fletcher

Professor of Law
fletcher@law.duke.edu or 919-613-7095

Gina-Gail S. Fletcher, a scholar of complex financial instruments and market regulation, is a Professor of Law at Duke University School of Law. She is nationally recognized for her research on financial regulation and market manipulation. Fletcher’s recent scholarship focuses on the interplay between public regulation and private ordering in balancing financial innovation against market stability and integrity. Her recent scholarship has been published in Yale Law Journal, New York University Law Review, and Vanderbilt Law Review.

Fletcher has testified before the U.S. Senate on financial market structure, investor protection, and market integrity. She serves as a member of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Investor Advisory Committee and as a member of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority Investor Issues Committee. Fletcher was also recently a member of the Regenerative Crisis Response Committee, which sought to identify and recommend changes in fiscal, monetary, and financial regulatory policy to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050.

Prior to joining Duke Law, Fletcher was an Associate Professor at Indiana University Maurer School of Law and a Visiting Assistant Professor at Cornell Law School. Before entering academia, she was an associate at Gibson Dunn & Crutcher in Washington, D.C., where she specialized in securities regulation, mergers and acquisitions, banking, and corporate governance. Fletcher received her B.A. magna cum laude from Mount Holyoke College and her J.D. cum laude from Cornell Law School.
 

Sarah Bloom Raskin

Colin W. Brown Distinguished Professor of the Practice of Law
Senior Fellow, Duke Center on Risk
sarah.raskin@duke.edu or 919-613-7077

Sarah Bloom Raskin, the former deputy secretary of the U.S. Department of the Treasury, was named the Colin W. Brown Distinguished Professor of the Practice of Law in 2021. She is also a senior fellow in the Duke Center on Risk. Raskin was previously a visiting professor of the practice of law at Duke and a Rubenstein Fellow.

From 2014 to 2017, Raskin was the second-in-command at the Treasury Department, where she was known for her pursuit of innovative solutions to enhance Americans’ shared prosperity, the resilience of the country’s critical financial infrastructure, and the defense of consumer safeguards in the financial marketplace. She was a champion of cybersecurity in the financial sector both nationally and internationally, helping to elevate this issue with corporate executives and boards. Her efforts, including leading the development of the G-7 Fundamental Elements of Cybersecurity for the Financial Sector, contributed to a more secure and resilient financial sector in the face of increasingly frequent and sophisticated threats.

Earlier, Raskin was a governor of the Federal Reserve Board and a member of the Federal Open Market Committee, where she helped conduct the nation’s monetary policy and promote financial stability. She also served as commissioner of financial regulation for the State of Maryland from 2007 to 2010. She and her agency were responsible for regulating Maryland’s financial institutions during the height of the Great Recession.

As a Rubenstein Fellow, Raskin collaborated with faculty across the university to improve understanding of markets and regulation. She led an agenda focused on shaping a new relationship between regulation and resilience in financial markets and deepening understanding of the management of systemic risks from diverse sources such as financial instruments, cyber breaches, and climate events. She also mentored and advised undergraduate and graduate students on careers in the public sector, guest-lectured in courses, participated in public events, and led collaborative research projects.

Raskin, a graduate of Harvard Law School, has throughout her career worked across public and private sectors in both legal and regulatory capacities. Her work has centered on financial institutions, financial market utilities, consumer protection issues, the adaptation of financial regulatory tools as they pertain to climate risk, bolstered prudential standards, and resolution planning. Her private sector experience includes having served as managing director at the Promontory Financial Group, general counsel of the WorldWide Retail Exchange, and at the law firms of Arnold and Porter and Mayer Brown. Earlier in her career she served as banking counsel for the U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs.

Sarah H. Ludington

Clinical Professor of Law
Director, First Amendment Clinic
ludington@law.duke.edu or 919-613-7048

Sarah Ludington ’92, a respected scholar in the fields of free speech and privacy law, joined the Duke Law faculty in July as a clinical professor of law and director of the First Amendment Clinic. She had served, since July 2017, as associate dean of academic affairs at Campbell University’s Norman Adrian Wiggins School of Law, where she also taught courses in constitutional law, information privacy, and civil procedure. She was previously an associate professor of law at Campbell Law, where she was granted tenure in 2015. She taught legal writing at Duke Law from 2001 to 2008.

Ludington’s work has examined the implications of tenure for the speech of professors and methods for deterring the misuse of personally identifiable information. She has also co-authored articles about the history of sovereign debt repudiation and the doctrine of odious debts, and published a chapter on the history of USDA farm and food subsidies in Food Fights: How the Past Matters in Contemporary Food Debates (UNC Press 2017).

Ludington has taught in the summer study abroad program that Campbell Law co-sponsors in Cambridge, England and has lectured on American constitutional law at University College Cork in Ireland and at the Duke-Geneva Institute in Transnational Law.

Prior to starting her academic career, Ludington practiced law in Washington, D.C., and New York. She clerked for Judges Harry T. Edwards of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and for Joyce Hens Green of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. She also has significant experience teaching literature and writing in secondary schools.

Ludington received her JD with high honors and was inducted into the Order of the Coif. She received the Hervey M. Johnson writing prize for best published note, was a note editor of the law journal, and received the American Jurisprudence Award for Constitutional Law.

Amanda Martin

Clinical Professor of Law
Supervising Attorney, First Amendment Clinic
amartin@law.duke.edu or 919-613-7142

Amanda Martin is a communications lawyer, representing traditional and social media on issues related to the libel and privacy, the internet, intellectual property, and other speech-based concerns. Ms. Martin is general counsel to the N.C. Press Association, an organization of approximately 200 N.C. newspapers. For more than 25 years, she routinely has counseled reporters, editors and news directors about avoiding libel suits, gaining access to closed government meetings and records and resisting subpoenas. With the advent of the internet, Ms. Martin expanded her practice to include counseling and representing non-media individuals and organizations with social media issues.

Ms. Martin is the co-author of the North Carolina section of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press Open Government Guide and co-editor of the North Carolina Media Law Handbook, to which she also contributes as an author.  She is a frequent speaker and panelist at media law forums and workshops and regularly contributes articles to legal, media and other publications.  Ms. Martin has taught as an adjunct instructor of media law at the UNC School of Law, the UNC School of Journalism and Mass Communication and Campbell Law School.

Ms. Martin has served as the chairman of the N.C. Bar Association’s Constitutional Rights and Responsibility Section Council and its Litigation Section, and she served as a director of the Wake County Bar Association and editor of its newsletter.  She enjoys reading, cooking, art and travel and is an active member of St. Michael’s Episcopal Church.

Lecturing Fellow

dlmiller@law.duke.edu

Lee Miller is a lecturing fellow teaching Food, Agriculture and the Environment: Law and Policy and a fellow in environmental law in the Environmental Law and Policy Clinic. Prior to joining Duke Law in the spring of 2019, Miller developed expertise in environmental advocacy, clinical teaching, food and agriculture law and policy, research, regulated industries, policy innovation, and coalition-building across food and farm movements in the U.S. His work has primarily focused on subnational climate change mitigation and resilience; adoption of regenerative agriculture systems; concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs), environmental justice and animal welfare; the federal farm bill; development of local and regional food systems; as well as food justice, food sovereignty and the right to food; open markets and fair competition; and economic justice for restaurant workers.

Most recently, at the Harvard Law School Food Law and Policy Clinic he developed and coordinated a farm bill research project to advance agricultural sustainability, racial and economic justice, and rural resilience. The project spanned eight environmental, food, and public health clinics across the law schools at Harvard, Yale, Duke, UCLA, Pace and Vermont. Previously, at Yale Law School’s Environmental Law Clinic, Miller spearheaded a nationwide CAFO survey for the Natural Resources Defense Council that exposed information asymmetries between regulatory authorities and industry.

Miller also serves as policy director for Acre Policy, a nonprofit and “community toolshed” filled with implements for direct action and policy entrepreneurship. Miller works with Acre Policy’s grassroots stakeholders to design model state and local policy that advances a future where farmers reflect the diversity of America, where farmers can make a viable livelihood producing food for their communities, and where our working lands grow more resilient each year.

Miller has published pieces in the Yale Law Journal Forum, the American Journal of Public Health, the Journal of Food Law and Policy, and the Vermont Journal of Environmental Law, among others. He has co-authored numerous reports on the farm bill, CAFOs, and regenerative agriculture. Miller serves as faculty advisor for the Duke Food Law Society and on the Board of Advisors for the national Food Law Student Network.

Miller received his J.D. from Yale Law School, where he co-founded the Yale Food Law Society. He was awarded the post-graduate Jane Matilda Bolin Yale Law Journal Public Interest Fellowship and was an inaugural Exchange Fellow at the Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture in Pocantico Hills, NY. He received his B.S. summa cum laude from Duke, where he also received his MEM. 

Michelle Benedict Nowlin

Clinical Professor of Law
Co-Director, Environmental Law and Policy Clinic

nowlin@law.duke.edu or 919-613-8502
@mbnowlin

Michelle Benedict Nowlin joined the Duke Law faculty in June 2008 as a supervising attorney for the Environmental Law and Policy Clinic and became co-director in 2019. She supervises clinic students from the Law School and the Nicholas School of the Environment and co-teaches the seminar portion of the clinic.

Since joining the Clinic faculty in 2008, Nowlin has worked with students on a range of matters, including the development of a precedent-setting settlement with the state of North Carolina to protect endangered sea turtles, filing an amicus curiae brief with the U.S. Supreme Court on behalf of low-wealth communities challenging mountaintop-removal mining practices, collaborating with community partners for innovative approaches to reduce marine debris, and crafting measures to protect children from lead poisoning hazards.

She also teaches a course in Food and Agricultural Law and Policy. Nowlin currently serves as chair of the board of advisors for the Duke Campus Farm, as a faculty advisor for the Duke Environmental Law and Policy Forum, and as a member of the Bass Connections Faculty Advisory Council and the Community Advisory Board for the Superfund Research Center. She is a past chair of the American Association of Law School’s Food and Agriculture Law Section, and serves on the AALS’ Environmental Law Section council. She received the University’s Faculty Award for Outstanding Leadership in Sustainability in 2013.

Nowlin has dedicated her career to the protection of natural resources and public health through the practice of environmental law. Prior to joining Duke’s faculty, she was a senior attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center in Chapel Hill where she led the organization’s initiative to develop and implement pollution control programs for Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, developed a template for integrating water resource and water quality planning, and litigated cases pursuant to the Clean Water Act, Endangered Species Act, and National Environmental Policy Act. She completed a fellowship awarded by the Ford Foundation and worked in private practice for two years in Washington, D.C., prior to joining SELC. 

Nowlin is a member of the North Carolina Bar and the D.C. Bar, and is admitted to practice in the state and federal courts of North Carolina, the U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, and the U.S. Supreme Court. She has served on the boards of directors of several nonprofit and civic organizations, including a term as chair of the Environment, Energy and Natural Resources Law Section of the North Carolina Bar Association. 

Nowlin earned her B.A. with Highest Honors from the University of Florida, where she was also inducted into Florida Blue Key and Phi Beta Kappa. She earned a dual J.D./M.A. from Duke Law School and the School of the Environment in 1992.

Nita A. Farahany

Robinson O. Everett Professor of Law
Professor of Philosophy

farahany@duke.edu or 919-613-8514
@NitaFarahany

Nita A. Farahany is a leading scholar on the ethical, legal, and social implications of emerging technologies. She is a Professor of Law & Philosophy, the Founding Director of Duke Science & Society, Chair of the Duke MA in Bioethics & Science Policy, and principal investigator of SLAP Lab. 

Farahany is a frequent commentator for national media and radio shows. She presents her work to diverse audiences including the World Economic Forum, Aspen Ideas Festival, TED, Judicial Conferences for the US Court of Appeals, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, National Academies of Science Workshops, the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy, and by testifying before Congress.

In 2010, she was appointed by President Obama to the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues and served until 2017. She is a member of the National Advisory Council for the National Institute for Neurological Disease and Stroke, an elected member of the American Law Institute, President-Elect and Board member of the International Neuroethics Society, a member of the Neuroethics Working Group of the US Brain Initiative, the Global Precision Medicine Council for the World Economic Forum, and the President’s Research Council for the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. She is also the Chair Elect of the Section on Jurisprudence for the Association of American Law Schools. She serves on Scientific and Ethics Advisory Boards for several corporations.

Farahany is a co-editor-in-chief and co-founder of the Journal of Law and the Biosciences, an editorial board member of the American Journal of Bioethics (Neuroscience), and on the Board of Advisors for Scientific American. She is also the past Chair of the Criminal Justice Section of the American Association of Law Schools, and the recipient of the 2013 Paul M. Bator award given annually to an outstanding legal academic under 40.

Farahany received her AB in genetics, cell, and developmental biology at Dartmouth College, a JD and MA from Duke University, as well as a PhD in philosophy. She also holds an ALM in biology from Harvard University. In 2004-2005, Farahany clerked for Judge Judith W. Rogers of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, after which she joined the faculty at Vanderbilt University. In 2011, Farahany was the Leah Kaplan Visiting Professor of Human Rights at Stanford Law School. 

Michael D. Frakes

A. Kenneth Pye Distinguished Professor of Law and Professor of Economics

 michael.frakes@law.duke.edu or 919-613-7185 

Michael Frakes is the A. Kenneth Pye Distinguished Professor of Law at Duke Law School. He holds a secondary faculty appointment in the Duke Economics Department. Frakes also serves as a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He joined the Duke Law faculty in June, 2016 from Northwestern University’s Pritzker School of Law, where he was an associate professor.

Frakes is generally interested in empirical research in the areas of health law and innovation policy. His research in health is largely focused on understanding how certain legal and financial incentives affect the decisions of physicians and other health care providers. His research in innovation policy centers on exploring the determinants of behaviors and outcomes at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. 

Frakes’ scholarship has appeared in leading economics, law and medicine journals, including the American Economic Review, American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, Review of Economics and Statistics, Stanford Law Review, University of Chicago Law Review and JAMA

He is currently serving as the Principal Investigator on an R01 award from the NIH, exploring the effects of immunizing physicians from medical liability on the extent and quality of the medical care they deliver.

Frakes received his BS in Economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2001, his JD, cum laude, from Harvard Law School in 2005, and his PhD in Economics from MIT in 2009. He was an associate at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom in Wilmington, Del., from 2005 to 2007. From 2009 to 2011, he was an academic fellow at the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School.

Jesse McCoy

Associate Clinical Professor of Law
Director, Civil Justice Clinic

mccoy@law.duke.edu; 919-613-6936
@JHamiltonMcCoy2

J. Hamilton McCoy is director of the Duke Law Civil Justice Clinic. In that capacity he teaches a seminar course, mentors students in developing and improving basic civil litigation skills, and oversees their handling of cases for indigent clients who are often unable to obtain adequate representation in the traditional civil justice system through the clinic’s partnership with Legal Aid of North Carolina (LANC).

A Durham native, McCoy operated a boutique solo practice in Raleigh for four years before becoming a LANC staff attorney in the agency’s Winston-Salem and Durham offices. He has litigated cases in a variety of practice areas, including criminal defense, personal injury, public housing evictions and voucher terminations, landlord-tenant matters, and foreclosure defense. McCoy has also served as an advocate for victims of domestic violence in Wake, Durham, Granville, Vance, and Forsyth Counties, and has taught at both the North Carolina Central University and Wake Forest University Schools of Law.

McCoy, who joined the Duke Law faculty full-time in 2017, received his B.A. from Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University in 2005 and his J.D. from North Carolina Central University School of Law in 2008. 

Sara Sternberg Greene

Katharine T. Bartlett Distinguished Professor of Law

greene@law.duke.edu or 919-613-7242
@SaraJSGreene

Sara Greene is a sociologist and legal scholar whose teaching and research interests include poverty law, housing law, consumer law, bankruptcy, family law, contracts, qualitative research methods, and law and sociology. Greene uses primarily qualitative empirical methods to study the relationship between law, poverty, and inequality. Her work focuses on how low-income families understand, experience, and interact with the law, how legal institutions may inadvertently perpetuate poverty and inequality, and how structural conditions create barriers to accessing law and justice for low-income families.

Greene's work has been published or is forthcoming in the Columbia Law Review, the New York University Law Review, the Duke Law Journal, and the Minnesota Law Review, among others. She has also published work in popular outlets such as The New York Times, Politico, and The Hill.

Greene received her B.A. in 2002 from Yale University, magna cum laude and with distinction. She received her J.D. in 2005 from Yale Law School, where she received the Stephen J. Massey Prize for excellence in advocacy and served as notes editor for the Yale Law Journal and articles editor for the Yale Law and Policy Review. She also served as chair of the student board of directors for the Jerome N. Frank Legal Services Organization and as student director in the Housing and Community Development Clinic. After clerking for Judge Richard Cudahy on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, Greene focused on housing law and tax credit matters at the law firm Klein Hornig in Boston before beginning a Ph.D. program. She received her Ph.D. in social policy and sociology from Harvard University in 2014.

Arti K. Rai

Elvin R. Latty Professor of Law
Co-Director, The Center for Innovation Policy

rai@law.duke.edu or 919-613-7276
@rai_arti

Arti Rai, the Elvin R. Latty Professor of Law and Faculty Director, The Center for Innovation Policy at Duke Law, is an internationally recognized expert in intellectual property law, innovation policy, administrative law, and health law.

Rai's extensive research on these subjects has been funded by NIH, NSF, Arnold Ventures, the Kauffman Foundation, the Greenwall Foundation, and the Woodrow Wilson Center.  Her numerous publications have appeared in both peer-reviewed journals and law reviews. Peer-reviewed journals include Science, the New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, the Journal of Legal Studies, Nature Biotechnology, and the Journal of Law and the Biosciences.

Rai currently serves as a Senior Advisor on innovation-related law and policy issues to the Department of Commerce’s Office of General Counsel. She also regularly advises other federal and state agencies as well as Congress on these issues. She is a member of multiple distinguished councils, including the National Academies’ Forum on Drug Discovery, Development, and Translation, the Polaris Advisory Council to the Government Accountability Office, and the American Law Institute.  She has also served as a member of the National Advisory Council for Human Genome Research, as a public member of the Administrative Conference of the United States, and on numerous National Academies committees. 

From 2009-2010, Rai headed the Office of Policy and International Affairs at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). In that capacity, she led policy analysis of the patent reform legislation that ultimately became the America Invents Act and worked to establish the USPTO’s Office of the Chief Economist. Prior to entering academia, Rai clerked in the Northern District of California and was a litigator at Jenner & Block and the Department of Justice.

Rai graduated from Harvard College, magna cum laude, with a degree in biochemistry and history (history and science), attended Harvard Medical School for the 1987-1988 academic year, and received her J.D., cum laude, from Harvard Law School in 1991.

James Boyle

William Neal Reynolds Professor of Law

Boyle@law.duke.edu or 919-613-7287
@thepublicdomain

James Boyle is William Neal Reynolds Professor of Law and co-founder of the Center for the Study of the Public Domain at Duke Law School. He joined the faculty in July 2000 and teaches Intellectual Property, Law and Literature, Jurisprudence and Torts.

He is the author of The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind, and Shamans, Software and Spleens: Law and Construction of the Information Society. He was also the the editor of Critical Legal Studies (Dartmouth/NYU Press), Collected Papers on the Public Domain, and the co-editor of Cultural Environmentalism @ 10 (with Larry Lessig). He has also published two graphic novels: Bound By Law, on fair use and the permissions culture in intellectual property, and Theft: A History of Music, a 2000 year long history of musical borrowing from Plato to rap, and an open access casebook on Intellectual Property (all with Jennifer Jenkins). His essays include The Second Enclosure Movement, a study of the economic rhetoric of price discrimination in digital commerce, and a Manifesto on WIPO.

Boyle was one of the founding board members of Creative Commons, which works to facilitate the free availability of art, scholarship, and cultural materials by developing innovative, machine-readable licenses that individuals and institutions can attach to their work. He has been awarded a World Technology Network Award for Law and the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Pioneer Award for his work on the public domain and the second enclosure movement that threatens it, while his books have won the Donald McGannon Award for communications policy and the American Society for Information Science and Technology Award for book of the year.

Michael D. Frakes

A. Kenneth Pye Professor of Law and Professor of Economics

 michael.frakes@law.duke.edu or 919-613-7185 

Michael Frakes is the A. Kenneth Pye Professor of Law at Duke Law School. He holds a secondary faculty appointment in the Duke Economics Department. Frakes also serves as a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He joined the Duke Law faculty in June, 2016 from Northwestern University’s Pritzker School of Law, where he was an associate professor.

Frakes is generally interested in empirical research in the areas of health law and innovation policy. His research in health is largely focused on understanding how certain legal and financial incentives affect the decisions of physicians and other health care providers. His research in innovation policy centers on exploring the determinants of behaviors and outcomes at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. 

Frakes’ scholarship has appeared in leading economics, law and medicine journals, including the American Economic Review, American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, Review of Economics and Statistics, Stanford Law Review, University of Chicago Law Review and JAMA

He is currently serving as the Principal Investigator on an R01 award from the NIH, exploring the effects of immunizing physicians from medical liability on the extent and quality of the medical care they deliver.

Frakes received his BS in Economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2001, his JD, cum laude, from Harvard Law School in 2005, and his PhD in Economics from MIT in 2009. He was an associate at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom in Wilmington, Del., from 2005 to 2007. From 2009 to 2011, he was an academic fellow at the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School.

Jennifer Jenkins

Clinical Professor of Law
Director, Center for the Study of the Public Domain

jenkins@law.duke.edu or 919-613-7270
@DukeCSPD

Jennifer Jenkins is a Clinical Professor of Law teaching intellectual property and Director of Duke's Center for the Study of the Public Domain, where she heads its Arts Project - a project analyzing the effects of intellectual property on cultural production, and writes its annual Public Domain Day website. She is the co-author (with James Boyle) of the open coursebook Intellectual Property: Cases and Materials (4th ed, 2018) and two comic books -- Theft! A History of Music, a 2000-year history of musical borrowing and regulation, and Bound By Law?, a comic book about copyright, fair use and documentary film. 

While in practice, she was a member of the team that defended the copyright infringement suit against the publisher of the novel The Wind Done Gone (a parodic rejoinder to Gone with the Wind) in SunTrust v. Houghton Mifflin. While a student at Duke, she also co-authored, filmed, and edited “Nuestra Hernandez,” a video addressing copyright, appropriation, and culture. Jenkins received her B.A. in English from Rice University, her J.D. from Duke Law School, and her M.A. in English from Duke University.

Jayne Huckerby

Clinical Professor of Law
Director, International Human Rights Clinic

huckerby@law.duke.edu; 919-613-7228
@jaynehuckerby

Jayne Huckerby (@jaynehuckerby) is clinical professor of law and the inaugural director of the International Human Rights Clinic at Duke University School of Law.

Huckerby focuses on fact-finding, research, and advocacy in the areas of gender and human rights, gender and national security, human trafficking, and human rights in U.S. foreign policy. She frequently serves as a human rights law expert to international and regional governmental organizations and NGOs, particularly on gender, human rights, and national security, and the nexus between trafficking and terrorism. She has written and co-authored numerous articles, book chapters, and human rights reports and she is editor with Margaret L. Satterthwaite, of Gender, National Security, and Counter-Terrorism: Human Rights Perspectives and of the Research Handbook on Gender Issues and Human Rights (forthcoming). She has also authored opinion pieces in The New York Times, Newsweek, TIME, and Just Security, as well as appearing on media outlets including ABC News, CNN, and NPR. 

A native of Sydney, Australia, Huckerby received her LLB from the University of Sydney, with first class honors.  She has an LL.M. from NYU School of Law where she was a Vanderbilt Scholar, awarded the David H. Moses Memorial prize for graduating first in her LL.M. class, and was graduate editor on the Journal of International Law and Politics. She is admitted to the New York Bar.

Laurence R. Helfer

Harry R. Chadwick, Sr. Distinguished Professor of Law

helfer@law.duke.edu; 919-613-8573

Laurence R. Helfer is an expert in the areas of international law and institutions, international adjudication and dispute settlement, human rights (including LGBT rights), and international intellectual property law and policy. He is co-director of Duke Law's Center for International and Comparative Law and also serves as a Permanent Visiting Professor at the iCourts: Center of Excellence for International Courts at the University of Copenhagen, which awarded him an honorary doctorate in 2014.

Helfer was nominated by the United States as a candidate for the UN Human Rights Committee.  He was elected by the states parties to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights in 2022 and is serving as a member of the Committee from 2023 to 2026. He recently completed a four-year term as co-Editor-in-Chief of the American Journal of International Law.

Prior to joining the Duke Law faculty in 2009, Helfer was a professor of law and director of the International Legal Studies Program at Vanderbilt University Law School. He has also taught at Harvard Law School, Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, Princeton University, the University of Chicago Law School, and the University of Toronto Faculty of Law.

Helfer has authored more than 100 publications and has lectured widely on his diverse research interests. He is the coauthor of Transplanting International Courts: The Law and Politics of the Andean Tribunal of Justice (Oxford University Press, 2017); The World Blind Union Guide to the Marrakesh Treaty: Facilitating Access to Books for Print-Disabled Individuals (Oxford University Press, 2017); Human Rights and Intellectual Property: Mapping the Global Interface (Cambridge University Press, 2011) and Human Rights (2d ed., Foundation Press, 2009). He has also published International Court Authority (Oxford University Press, 2018) (co-editor); Intellectual Property and Human Rights (Edward Elgar, 2013) (editor), and a monograph, Intellectual Property Rights in Plant Varieties: International Legal Regimes and Policy Options for National Governments (2004), with the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization. His articles have appeared in leading American law reviews, including the Yale Law Journal, the Columbia Law Review, the California Law Review, the Virginia Law Review, the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, and Law and Contemporary Problems, as well as in numerous peer-reviewed political science and international law journals, such as International Organization.

Helfer holds a JD from New York University, where he graduated Order of the Coif and was articles editor of the New York University Law Review. He also holds an MPA from Princeton University, where he was a Woodrow Wilson Fellow, and a BA from Yale University. He served as a law clerk to Chief Judge Dolores K. Sloviter of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. Before beginning his academic career, Helfer practiced with the New York law firm of Rabinowitz, Boudin, Standard, Krinksy & Lieberman, P.C., focusing on international law, intellectual property litigation, and civil liberties.

Aya Fujimura-Fanselow

Clinical Professor of Law
Supervising Attorney, International Human Rights Clinic

fujimura-fanselow@law.duke.edu or 919-613-7239
@AyaFanselow

Aya Fujimura-Fanselow is Clinical Professor of Law and Supervising Attorney of the Duke International Human Rights Clinic. Prior to joining Duke Law in Fall 2017, she developed extensive expertise in human rights advocacy, clinical teaching, fact-finding, research, litigation, capacity-building, and coalition-building within the United States and abroad. Her work has primarily focused on gender and human rights, as well as economic, social, and cultural rights; transitional justice; reproductive rights; and criminal justice with a focus on pre-trial detention.

Most recently, at ESCR-Net (International Network for Economic, Social and Cultural Rights) Fujimura-Fanselow strategically developed and coordinated collective advocacy projects to advance women’s economic, social, and cultural rights. Previously, at the International Center for Transitional Justice, based in New York and Kathmandu, Nepal, she spearheaded efforts to integrate gender into all aspects of transitional justice mechanisms in Nepal.

As Legal Adviser for International Litigation and Advocacy at the Center for Reproductive Rights in New York, she developed cases to protect and promote women’s reproductive rights before regional and international fora. Upon graduating from law school, as a Georgetown Women’s Law and Public Policy Fellow based at Bread for the City, Fujimura-Fanselow provided legal services to immigrant women to obtain or maintain public benefits and engaged in community outreach and systemic reform efforts. Additionally, while based in Mexico City, she undertook a range of consultancies with key national and international non-governmental organizations (NGO), including Amnesty International, US Human Rights Network, Open Society Foundations, and GIRE, a Mexico City-based reproductive rights NGO.

Her previous teaching experience consists of her work as Crowley Fellow and Adjunct Professor of Law at the Leitner Center for International Law and Justice at Fordham Law School where she led fieldwork and taught a seminar to investigate and subsequently develop advocacy strategies to respond to the human rights violations resulting from the excessive and arbitrary use of pretrial detention in Bolivia.

In addition to serving as a contributing author or researcher on various publications, Fujimura-Fanselow was lead author on a report emerging from the Bolivia project (“We are Left to Rot”: Arbitrary and Excessive Pretrial Detention in Bolivia (2013)).

Raised in New York and Tokyo, Fujimura-Fanselow received her J.D. from Fordham Law School, where she was a Stein Scholar in Public Interest Law and Ethics. Upon graduating, she was awarded a post-graduate Tolan Fellowship in Human Rights and the National Association of Women Lawyers Award for outstanding law graduate. She received her B.A. with honors from Bryn Mawr College. She is fluent in Spanish and Japanese.

Laurence R. Helfer

Harry R. Chadwick, Sr. Professor of Law

helfer@law.duke.edu or 919-613-8573

Laurence R. Helfer is an expert in the areas of international law and institutions, international adjudication and dispute settlement, human rights (including LGBT rights), and international intellectual property law and policy. He is co-director of Duke Law's Center for International and Comparative Law and a Senior Fellow with Duke's Kenan Institute for Ethics. He also serves as a Permanent Visiting Professor at the iCourts: Center of Excellence for International Courts at the University of Copenhagen, which awarded him an honorary doctorate in 2014. Helfer currently serves as the co-Editor-in-Chief of the American Journal of International Law.

Prior to joining the Duke Law faculty in 2009, Helfer was a professor of law and director of the International Legal Studies Program at Vanderbilt University Law School. He has also taught at Harvard Law School, Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, Princeton University, the University of Chicago Law School, and the University of Toronto Faculty of Law. He is a member of the Board of Editors of the American Journal of International Law and the Journal of World Intellectual Property.

Helfer has authored more than 100 publications and has lectured widely on his diverse research interests. He is the coauthor of Transplanting International Courts: The Law and Politics of the Andean Tribunal of Justice (Oxford University Press, 2017); The World Blind Union Guide to the Marrakesh Treaty: Facilitating Access to Books for Print-Disabled Individuals (Oxford University Press, 2017); Human Rights and Intellectual Property: Mapping the Global Interface (Cambridge University Press, 2011) and Human Rights (2d ed., Foundation Press, 2009). He has also published International Court Authority (Oxford University Press, 2018) (co-editor); Intellectual Property and Human Rights (Edward Elgar, 2013) (editor), and a monograph, Intellectual Property Rights in Plant Varieties: International Legal Regimes and Policy Options for National Governments (2004), with the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization. 

Helfer holds a JD from New York University, where he graduated Order of the Coif and was articles editor of the New York University Law Review. He also holds an MPA from Princeton University, where he was a Woodrow Wilson Fellow, and a BA from Yale University. He served as a law clerk to Chief Judge Dolores K. Sloviter of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. Before beginning his academic career, Helfer practiced with the New York law firm of Rabinowitz, Boudin, Standard, Krinksy & Lieberman, P.C., focusing on international law, intellectual property litigation, and civil liberties.

Rachel Brewster

Jeffrey and Bettysue Hughes Distinguished Professor of Law

Brewster@law.duke.edu; 919-613-7213

Rachel Brewster's scholarly research and teaching focus on international economic law and international dispute settlement. She writes on World Trade Organization (WTO) law, anti-corruption law (including the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and the OECD Anti-Bribery Treaty), and international relations theory. Brewster serves as co-director of Duke's Center for International and Comparative Law and co-chair of Duke's JD-LLM in International and Comparative Law Program.

Brewster's recent publications include: "Arbitrating Corruption," 101 Washington University Law Review 923 (2024); "Flexible Institution Building in the International Anti-Corruption Regime: Proposing a Transnational Asset Recovery Mechanism," 117 American Journal of International Law 559 (2023) (with Laurence Helfer and Cecily Rose); "ESG Accountability: Focusing on the Corporate Enterprise," 2022 Wisconsin Law Review 1367 (2022).

Brewster came to Duke Law in July 2012 from Harvard University where she was an assistant professor of law and affiliate faculty member of The Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. While there, Brewster took a leave of absence to serve as legal counsel in the Office of the United States Trade Representative in 2008. Before joining Harvard, Brewster was as a Bigelow Fellow at the University of Chicago Law School and clerked for Judge Phyllis A. Kravitch of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit. She has also taught at the University of Hamburg’s Institute of Law and Economics and the University of St. Gallen.

Brewster received her BA and JD from the University of Virginia, where she was an article editor for the Virginia Law Review. She holds a PhD in political science from the University of North Carolina — Chapel Hill, where she received the John Patrick Hagan Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching.
 

Timothy Meyer

Richard Allen/Cravath Distinguished Professor in International Business Law
meyer@law.duke.edu; 919-613-7014

Timothy Meyer is an expert in international law—with specialties in international trade, investment and environmental law—and U.S. foreign relations law. He is co-director of Duke Law’s Center for International and Comparative Law. Meyer also serves on the Board of Editors of the American Journal of International Law and is an elected member of the American Law Institute.

Meyer’s research examines the factors that influence the design, implementation, and evolution of international legal institutions, as well as the role of the constitutional separation of powers in U.S. foreign policymaking. Specific topics include the implementation of public policy exceptions in international trade agreements, the interaction of international and local rules on energy subsidies, the role of local governments in free trade agreements, and the creation of non-binding "soft law" obligations. Professor Meyer's work has appeared in the Columbia Law Review, the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, the California Law Review, the Journal of Legal Analysis and the American and European Journals of International Law, among others. He is also the author (with Andrew T. Guzman) of GOLDILOCKS GLOBALISM, forthcoming from Oxford University Press, and the editor (with Harlan Grant Cohen) of INTERNATIONAL LAW AS BEHAVIOR, from Cambridge University Press.

Meyer is the author (with Todd N. Tucker) of The Green Steel Deal, a proposal for an international arrangement on decarbonizing the steel sector through a mix of domestic and international trade measures. He has testified before the U.S. Senate Committees on Foreign Relations and the Judiciary and has served both as counsel and as an expert in international arbitrations and in cases raising international and foreign relations law issues in U.S. courts. The European Union has also named Meyer to its list of possible chairpersons for arbitrations and trade and sustainable development disputes arising under its trade agreements.

Prior to joining the Duke Law faculty in 2022, Meyer was a professor of law and director of the International Legal Studies Program at Vanderbilt University Law School. He has also taught at the University of Georgia School of Law. Before entering the academy, he served as an attorney-adviser in the U.S. State Department’s Office of the Legal Adviser and clerked for the Honorable Neil M. Gorsuch when Justice Gorsuch served on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit. Meyer earned his B.A. and M.A. (History) from Stanford University and his J.D. and Ph.D. (Jurisprudence and Social Policy) from the University of California, Berkeley.

 H. Timothy Lovelace, Jr.

John Hope Franklin Research Scholar
Professor of Law

lovelace@law.duke.edu or 919-660-3979
@DrTimLovelace

H. Timothy Lovelace, Jr., a noted legal historian of the civil rights movement, joined the Duke Law faculty in June 2020 from Indiana University where he was a professor of law at the Maurer School of Law and affiliated faculty in the Department of History. He previously taught at Duke Law as the John Hope Franklin Visiting Professor of American Legal History in the spring 2019 semester. During the 2019-2020 academic year he served as a visiting professor of law at the University of Virginia.

Lovelace’s work examines how the civil rights movement in the United States helped to shape international human rights law. He has published articles in journals including the Law and History Review, American Journal of Legal History, and the Journal of American History, and his article, “William Worthy's Passport,” was selected for the 2015 Law & Humanities Interdisciplinary Junior Scholar Workshop. His forthcoming book, The World is on Our Side: The U.S. and the U.N. Race Convention (Cambridge University Press), examines how U.S. civil rights politics shaped the development of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination.

Lovelace teaches American legal history, constitutional law, and race and the law. In 2015, he received the Indiana University Trustees’ Teaching Award. During the 2015-2016 academic year, he served as a Law and Public Affairs Fellow at Princeton University. His scholarship has also received support from the William Nelson Cromwell Foundation, Indiana University New Frontiers in the Arts and Humanities program, and John F. Kennedy Presidential Library Foundation.

Lovelace earned his J.D. and Ph.D. from the University of Virginia. During law school, he was an Oliver Hill Scholar, the Thomas Marshall Miller Prize recipient, and the Bracewell & Patterson LLP Best Oralist Award winner. As a doctoral student in history, Lovelace was a Virginia Foundation for Humanities Fellow and the inaugural Armstead L. Robinson Fellow of the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies.

Before joining the Indiana Law faculty, Lovelace served as the assistant director of the Center for the Study of Race and Law at the University of Virginia School of Law. The Center for the Study of Race and Law provides opportunities for students, scholars, practitioners and community members to examine and exchange ideas related to race and law through lectures, symposia and scholarship.

Jeff Ward

Associate Dean for Technology and Innovation
Clinical Professor of Law
Director, Duke Center on Law & Technology

ward@law.duke.edu or 919-613-7153

Jeff Ward is Associate Dean of Technology and Innovation and serves as the Director of Duke’s Center on Law & Technology (DCLT), which coordinates Duke’s leadership at the intersection of law and technology with programs such as the Duke Law Tech Lab, a pre-accelerator for legal technology companies, and the Access Tech Tools initiative, a program to help students and Duke’s community partners to employ human-centered design thinking and available technologies to create tools to enhance access to legal services.

Ward focuses his scholarship and professional activities on the law and policy of emerging technologies (blockchain, artificial intelligence, robotics, IoT, etc.), the future of lawyering, and the socio-economic effects of rapid technological change, with a focus on ensuring equitable access to the tools of economic growth and the resources of the law.

Ward currently teaches Law & Policy Lab: Blockchain and Frontier Robotics & AI: Law & Ethics, as well as Intellectual Property, Business Law, and Entrepreneurship for Duke’s Pratt School of Engineering’s Masters of Engineering Management Program.

Ward is involved with several law-tech leadership organizations, including the Kauffman Foundation-supported Legal Technology Laboratory, the American Association of Law Schools Section on Technology, Law, and Legal Education, the North Carolina Bar Association’s Committee on the Future of Law. Through this work and through his role as a 2017-2019 Duke Alumni Association “Faculty Fellow,” Ward frequently presents nationwide on technology- and economic development-related topics.

Prior to serving as director of the DCLT, Ward was director of the Start-Up Ventures Clinic, supervising attorney in the Law School’s Community Enterprise Clinic, and an associate with the Chicago office of Latham & Watkins, where he focused on M&A and capital markets transactions and served as a Public Interest Law Initiative Fellow with the at the Community Economic Development Law Project of the Chicago Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, Inc.

Ward earned both his JD and his LLM in International & Comparative Law from Duke Law School, his MA in Literature from Northern Illinois University, and his BA in the Program of Liberal Studies (Great Books) and a concentration in Philosophy, Politics, & Economics from the University of Notre Dame. Before turning to the law, Ward worked first as a business consultant with a global management-consulting firm in Chicago and then as an English teacher in the Chicago suburbs.

Ward is licensed to practice in North Carolina and maintains his own law practice, counseling start-ups and offering corporate and transactional legal services to for-profit and non-profit business entities. 

Charles J. Dunlap, Jr.

Professor of the Practice of Law
Executive Director, Center on Law, Ethics and National Security

dunlap@law.duke.edu or 919-613-7233
Lawfire blog

Major General Charles J. Dunlap, Jr. joined the Duke Law faculty in July 2010, where he is a professor of the practice of law and Executive Director of the Center on Law, Ethics and National Security. His teaching and scholarly writing focus on national security, law of armed conflict, the use of force under international law, civil-military relations, cyberwar, airpower, military justice, and ethical issues related to the practice of national security law.

Dunlap retired from the Air Force in June 2010, having attained the rank of major general during a 34-year career in the Judge Advocate General Corps. In his capacity as Deputy Judge Advocate General from May 2006 to March 2010, he assisted the Judge Advocate General in the professional supervision of more than 2,200 judge advocates, 350 civilian lawyers, 1,400 enlisted paralegals, and 500 civilians around the world. In addition to overseeing an array of military justice, operational, international, and civil law functions, he provided legal advice to commanders and civilian leaders at all levels.

In the course of his career, Dunlap has been involved in various high-profile interagency and policy matters, including his testimony before the U.S. House of Representatives concerning the Military Commissions Act of 2006.

Dunlap previously served as the senior lawyer (staff judge advocate) at Headquarters Air Combat Command at Langley Air Force Base in Virginia, at Headquarters Air Education and Training Command at Randolph Air Force Base in Texas, and at U.S. Strategic Command, Omaha, Nebraska, among other leadership posts. Additionally, he served on the faculty of the Air Force Judge Advocate General School where he taught various civil and criminal law topics. An experienced trial lawyer, he also spent two years as a military trial judge for a 22-state circuit. He served tours in the United Kingdom and Korea, and deployed for operations in the Middle East and Africa, including short stints in support of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He also led military-to-military delegations to Colombia, Uruguay, South Africa, and the Czech Republic.

A prolific author and accomplished public speaker, Dunlap’s commentary on a wide variety of national security topics has been published in leading newspapers and military journals. His 2001 essay written for Harvard University’s Carr Center on “lawfare,” a concept he defines as “the use or misuse of law as a substitute for traditional military means to accomplish an operational objective,” has been highly influential among military scholars and in the broader legal academy. His article, “Lawfare 101: A Primer,” appeared in the May-June 2017 issue of Military Review.

Dunlap’s legal scholarship also has been published in the Stanford Law Review, the Yale Journal of International Affairs, the Harvard Law’s National Security Journal, the Wake Forest Law Review, the Fletcher Forum of World Affairs, the University of Nebraska Law Review, the Texas Tech Law Review, and the Tennessee Law Review, among others.

He is the author of “The Origins of the Military Coup of 2012”, originally published in 1992, which was selected for the 40th Anniversary Edition of Parameters (Winter 2010-2011). He also authored “Airpower” in Understanding Counterinsurgency (Thomas Rid and Thomas Keaney, eds., Routledge, 2010), and his essay on “The Military Industrial Complex” appeared in the summer 2011 issue of Daedalus.  His article on international humanitarian law was published in 2012 in the German Red Cross in their Journal of International Law of Peace and Armed Conflict, and No Good Options against ISIS Barbarism? Human Shields in 21st Century Conflicts, in the American Journal of International Law (Unbound) in 2016.

His chapter on military law appeared in The Modern American Military (David Kennedy, ed., Oxford University Press, 2013). His op-ed “Bringing Bergdahl Home Was the Right Choice—Deserter or Not,” was published by Time Magazine (online) in March 2015, and “Can Defense Counsel Ever Be Lawfully Surveilled by the Government?” on Just Security in 2017.“Clarifying the Law of Military Orders” appeared on CAAFlog in 2018.

Additionally, he’s authored numerous commentaries in a range of publications. In 2018 these included: “The Case for a Big, Beautiful Military Parade, in The Atlantic; “Want to save teens? Driving restrictions could save at least as many lives as gun control,” in The Hill; “Why the Mueller Indictment Doesn't Allege the Russians Swung the Election,” on Lawfare; “Let’s Temper the Rhetoric About Civil-Military Relations, in Small Wars Journal; and “No, Ceasefires and Armistices Are Not “outmoded”,” on Just Security.

Dunlap’s 2019 writings include “Trump's next top military adviser wants Americans to forget 4 'myths' about war, but he needs to explain a few things first,” in the Business Insider; “Reviewing the Facts on Trump's Proposed Pardons in Military Justice Cases,” on Lawfare, “Booksplat: A Misfire on the Use of Force by Western Democracies” in the Journal of Genocide Research, “Body Counts Are Terrible Way for the Public to Assess US Counter-Terrorism Operations” on Just Security, and “Housing privatization brings corporate attitude onto bases,” appeared in the Air Force Times.

Additionally, his “Practitioners and the DoD Law of War Manual” chapter in The United States Law of War Manual: Commentary and Critique was published by Cambridge University Press in January 2019. His chapter on “Civil-Military Relations” will be published in the National Security Law and Policy: A Reader (forthcoming 2019).

Maj Gen Dunlap’s blog is Lawfire, and since its founding in 2015 he’s written over 200 posts on a wide variety of subjects.

Charles J. Dunlap, Jr.

Professor of the Practice of Law
Executive Director, Center on Law, Ethics and National Security

dunlap@law.duke.edu or 919-613-7233
Lawfire blog

Major General Charles J. Dunlap, Jr. joined the Duke Law faculty in July 2010, where he is a professor of the practice of law and Executive Director of the Center on Law, Ethics and National Security. His teaching and scholarly writing focus on national security, law of armed conflict, the use of force under international law, civil-military relations, cyberwar, airpower, military justice, and ethical issues related to the practice of national security law.

Dunlap retired from the Air Force in June 2010, having attained the rank of major general during a 34-year career in the Judge Advocate General Corps. In his capacity as Deputy Judge Advocate General from May 2006 to March 2010, he assisted the Judge Advocate General in the professional supervision of more than 2,200 judge advocates, 350 civilian lawyers, 1,400 enlisted paralegals, and 500 civilians around the world. In addition to overseeing an array of military justice, operational, international, and civil law functions, he provided legal advice to commanders and civilian leaders at all levels.

In the course of his career, Dunlap has been involved in various high-profile interagency and policy matters, including his testimony before the U.S. House of Representatives concerning the Military Commissions Act of 2006.

Dunlap previously served as the senior lawyer (staff judge advocate) at Headquarters Air Combat Command at Langley Air Force Base in Virginia, at Headquarters Air Education and Training Command at Randolph Air Force Base in Texas, and at U.S. Strategic Command, Omaha, Nebraska, among other leadership posts. Additionally, he served on the faculty of the Air Force Judge Advocate General School where he taught various civil and criminal law topics. An experienced trial lawyer, he also spent two years as a military trial judge for a 22-state circuit. He served tours in the United Kingdom and Korea, and deployed for operations in the Middle East and Africa, including short stints in support of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He also led military-to-military delegations to Colombia, Uruguay, South Africa, and the Czech Republic.

A prolific author and accomplished public speaker, Dunlap’s commentary on a wide variety of national security topics has been published in leading newspapers and military journals. His 2001 essay written for Harvard University’s Carr Center on “lawfare,” a concept he defines as “the use or misuse of law as a substitute for traditional military means to accomplish an operational objective,” has been highly influential among military scholars and in the broader legal academy. His article, “Lawfare 101: A Primer,” appeared in the May-June 2017 issue of Military Review.

Dunlap’s legal scholarship also has been published in the Stanford Law Review, the Yale Journal of International Affairs, the Harvard Law’s National Security Journal, the Wake Forest Law Review, the Fletcher Forum of World Affairs, the University of Nebraska Law Review, the Texas Tech Law Review, and the Tennessee Law Review, among others.

He is the author of “The Origins of the Military Coup of 2012”, originally published in 1992, which was selected for the 40th Anniversary Edition of Parameters (Winter 2010-2011). He also authored “Airpower” in Understanding Counterinsurgency (Thomas Rid and Thomas Keaney, eds., Routledge, 2010), and his essay on “The Military Industrial Complex” appeared in the summer 2011 issue of Daedalus.  His article on international humanitarian law was published in 2012 in the German Red Cross in their Journal of International Law of Peace and Armed Conflict, and No Good Options against ISIS Barbarism? Human Shields in 21st Century Conflicts, in the American Journal of International Law (Unbound) in 2016.

His chapter on military law appeared in The Modern American Military (David Kennedy, ed., Oxford University Press, 2013). His op-ed “Bringing Bergdahl Home Was the Right Choice—Deserter or Not,” was published by Time Magazine (online) in March 2015, and “Can Defense Counsel Ever Be Lawfully Surveilled by the Government?” on Just Security in 2017.“Clarifying the Law of Military Orders” appeared on CAAFlog in 2018.

Additionally, he’s authored numerous commentaries in a range of publications. In 2018 these included: “The Case for a Big, Beautiful Military Parade, in The Atlantic; “Want to save teens? Driving restrictions could save at least as many lives as gun control,” in The Hill; “Why the Mueller Indictment Doesn't Allege the Russians Swung the Election,” on Lawfare; “Let’s Temper the Rhetoric About Civil-Military Relations, in Small Wars Journal; and “No, Ceasefires and Armistices Are Not “outmoded”,” on Just Security.

Dunlap’s 2019 writings include “Trump's next top military adviser wants Americans to forget 4 'myths' about war, but he needs to explain a few things first,” in the Business Insider; “Reviewing the Facts on Trump's Proposed Pardons in Military Justice Cases,” on Lawfare, “Booksplat: A Misfire on the Use of Force by Western Democracies” in the Journal of Genocide Research, “Body Counts Are Terrible Way for the Public to Assess US Counter-Terrorism Operations” on Just Security, and “Housing privatization brings corporate attitude onto bases,” appeared in the Air Force Times.

Additionally, his “Practitioners and the DoD Law of War Manual” chapter in The United States Law of War Manual: Commentary and Critique was published by Cambridge University Press in January 2019. His chapter on “Civil-Military Relations” will be published in the National Security Law and Policy: A Reader (forthcoming 2019).

Maj Gen Dunlap’s blog is Lawfire, and since its founding in 2015 he’s written over 200 posts on a wide variety of subjects.

Shane Stansbury

Robinson Everett Distinguished Fellow in the Center for Law, Ethics, and National Security
Senior Lecturing Fellow

stansbury@law.duke.edu or 919-613-6931

Shane T. Stansbury is the Robinson Everett Distinguished Fellow in the Center for Law, Ethics, and National Security and a Senior Lecturing Fellow in Law.  Stansbury served for more than eight years as Assistant United States Attorney in the Southern District of New York (SDNY), where he led some of the office’s most sensitive and noteworthy prosecutions in the areas of terrorism, cybercrime, espionage, money laundering, international public corruption, and global weapons trafficking. 

Among Stansbury’s many accomplishments at SDNY were the successful prosecutions of Alfonso Portillo, the former President of Guatemala, for money laundering relating to his receipt of millions of dollars in bribery payments; Minh Quang Pham, a former associate of Anwar al-Awlaki and key operative for al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), for terrorism offenses; Xu Jiaqiang, for his theft of highly sensitive source code with the intent to benefit the Chinese government; and Rafael Garavito-Garcia, for his role in orchestrating an international weapons-and-narcotics trafficking scheme that extended to the highest levels of the Guinea Bissau government, including the head of the Armed Forces. Stansbury served in a number of other capacities at SDNY, including as Acting Deputy Chief of Appeals and as SDNY’s representative in the Department of Justice’s National Security Cyber Specialists Network, a group of prosecutors focusing on cyber threats to the national security.  He is the recipient of numerous awards for his work as a prosecutor, including the Attorney General’s Distinguished Service Award and the Federal Law Enforcement Foundation’s Prosecutor of the Year Award.

Prior to becoming a federal prosecutor, Stansbury was a litigator at WilmerHale where he focused on international litigation and arbitration, foreign anti-corruption investigations, and white-collar criminal matters. He also represented members of Congress and others in defending the constitutionality of the Bipartisan Campaign Finance Reform Act before the Supreme Court. Stansbury clerked for the Honorable M. Margaret McKeown of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and the Honorable Robert W. Sweet of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. He received his J.D. from Columbia Law School, where he was Articles Editor for the Columbia Law Review; his M.P.A. from Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs; and his A.B. from Duke.

Arti K. Rai

Elvin R. Latty Distinguished Professor of Law
Co-Director, The Center for Innovation Policy

rai@law.duke.edu; 919-613-7276
 

Arti Rai, the Elvin R. Latty Distinguished Professor of Law and Faculty Director, The Center for Innovation Policy at Duke Law, is an internationally recognized expert in intellectual property (IP) law, innovation policy, administrative law, and health law.

Rai's extensive research on these subjects has been funded by NIH, NSF, Arnold Ventures, the Kauffman Foundation, the Greenwall Foundation, and the Woodrow Wilson Center.  Her numerous publications have appeared in both peer-reviewed journals and law reviews. Peer-reviewed journals include Science, the New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, the Journal of Legal Studies, Nature Biotechnology, and the Journal of Law and the Biosciences.

From March to December 2021, Rai served as Senior Advisor on innovation law and policy issues to the Department of Commerce’s Office of General Counsel. She also regularly advises other federal and state agencies as well as Congress on these issues. She is a member of multiple distinguished councils, including the National Academies’ Forum on Drug Discovery, Development, and Translation, the Polaris Advisory Council to the Government Accountability Office, and the American Law Institute.  She has also served as a member of the National Advisory Council for Human Genome Research, as a public member of the Administrative Conference of the United States, and on numerous National Academies committees. 

From 2009-2010, Rai headed the Office of Policy and International Affairs at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). In that capacity, she led policy analysis of the patent reform legislation that ultimately became the America Invents Act and worked to establish the USPTO’s Office of the Chief Economist. Prior to entering academia, Rai clerked in the Northern District of California and was a litigator at Jenner & Block and the Department of Justice.

Rai graduated from Harvard College, magna cum laude, with a degree in biochemistry and history (history and science), attended Harvard Medical School for the 1987-1988 academic year, and received her J.D., cum laude, from Harvard Law School in 1991.

Michael D. Frakes

A. Kenneth Pye Distinguished Professor of Law and Professor of Economics

 michael.frakes@law.duke.edu; 919-613-7185 

Michael Frakes is the A. Kenneth Pye Distinguished Professor of Law at Duke Law School. He holds a secondary faculty appointment in the Duke Economics Department. Frakes also serves as a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He joined the Duke Law faculty in June, 2016 from Northwestern University’s Pritzker School of Law, where he was an associate professor.

Frakes is generally interested in empirical research in the areas of health law and innovation policy. His research in health is largely focused on understanding how certain legal and financial incentives affect the decisions of physicians and other health care providers. His research in innovation policy centers on exploring the determinants of behaviors and outcomes at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. 

Frakes’ scholarship has appeared in leading economics, law and medicine journals, including the American Economic Review, American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, Review of Economics and Statistics, Stanford Law Review, University of Chicago Law Review and JAMA

He is currently serving as the Principal Investigator on an R01 award from the NIH, exploring the effects of immunizing physicians from medical liability on the extent and quality of the medical care they deliver.

Frakes received his BS in Economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2001, his JD, cum laude, from Harvard Law School in 2005, and his PhD in Economics from MIT in 2009. He was an associate at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom in Wilmington, Del., from 2005 to 2007. From 2009 to 2011, he was an academic fellow at the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School.

Sara Sternberg Greene

Katharine T. Bartlett Distinguished Professor of Law
greene@law.duke.edu or 919-613-7242
@SaraJSGreene

Sara Greene is a sociologist and legal scholar whose teaching and research interests include poverty law, housing law, consumer law, bankruptcy, family law, contracts, qualitative research methods, and law and sociology. Greene uses primarily qualitative empirical methods to study the relationship between law, poverty, and inequality. Her work focuses on how low-income families understand, experience, and interact with the law, how legal institutions may inadvertently perpetuate poverty and inequality, and how structural conditions create barriers to accessing law and justice for low-income families. Greene's work has been published or is forthcoming in the Columbia Law Review, the New York University Law Review, the Duke Law Journal, and the Minnesota Law Review, among others. She has also published work in popular outlets such as The New York Times, Politico, and The Hill.

Greene received her B.A. in 2002 from Yale University, magna cum laude and with distinction. She received her J.D. in 2005 from Yale Law School, where she received the Stephen J. Massey Prize for excellence in advocacy and served as notes editor for the Yale Law Journal and articles editor for the Yale Law and Policy Review. She also served as chair of the student board of directors for the Jerome N. Frank Legal Services Organization and as student director in the Housing and Community Development Clinic. After clerking for Judge Richard Cudahy on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, Greene focused on housing law and tax credit matters at the law firm Klein Hornig in Boston before beginning a Ph.D. program. She received her Ph.D. in social policy and sociology from Harvard University in 2014.

H. Jefferson Powell

Professor of Law

Powell@law.duke.edu or 919-613-7168

H. Jefferson Powell returned to the Duke Law faculty in May 2012 after serving as deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel at the U.S. Department of Justice and as a professor at George Washington University Law School. He previously served on the Duke Law faculty from 1989 to 2010.

Powell has served in a variety of positions in federal and state government during his career. In addition to his recent tenure as deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel, which provides legal advice to the president, the attorney general and other executive branch officers, he served in the U.S. Department of Justice in various capacities from 1993 to 2000, and in 1996, he was the principal deputy solicitor general. He has briefed and argued cases in both federal and state courts, including the Supreme Court of the United States. In the early 1990s, he was special counsel to the attorney general of North Carolina.

Powell's academic career has included visiting positions at Columbia, Yale and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and he served as a professor of law at the University of Iowa prior to joining the Duke Law faculty. His scholarship has addressed the history and ethical implications of American constitutionalism, the powers of the executive branch, and the role of the Constitution in legislative and judicial decision-making, among other subjects. His recent books include Targeting Americans: The Constitutionality of the U.S. Drone War (2016); The President as Commander in Chief:  An Essay in Constitutional Vision (2014), Constitutional Conscience: The Moral Dimension of Judicial Decision (2008) and No Law: Intellectual Property in the Image of an Absolute First Amendment (2009), which he co-authored with Duke Law Professor David Lange.

Powell holds a bachelor’s degree from St. David’s University College (now Trinity St. David) of the University of Wales; a master’s degree and PhD from Duke University; and a Master’s of Divinity and JD from Yale University. He was a law clerk to Judge Sam J. Ervin III of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. He has received numerous awards and honors including, in 2002, Duke University’s Scholar/Teacher Award. 

Jonathan B. Wiener

William R. and Thomas L. Perkins Distinguished Professor of Law
Professor of Environmental Policy
Professor of Public Policy
Wiener@law.duke.edu or 919-613-7054

Jonathan B. Wiener is the William R. Perkins Distinguished Professor of Law at Duke Law School, Professor of Environmental Policy at the Nicholas School of the Environment, and Professor of Public Policy at the Sanford School of Public Policy, at Duke University.  He is the Co-Director of the Duke Center on Risk in the Science & Society Initiative. 

He served as President of the Society for Risk Analysis (SRA) in 2008, and he co-chaired the SRA's World Congress on Risk in Sydney Australia in 2012.  In 2003 he received SRA’s Chauncey Starr Young Risk Analyst Award, and in 2014 he received SRA’s Richard J. Burk Outstanding Service Award.  From 2015-19 he co-directed the Rethinking Regulation program at Duke, and from 2007-15 he directed the JD-LLM Program in International and Comparative Law at Duke Law School.  From 2000-05 he was the founding Faculty Director of the Duke Center for Environmental Solutions, which was then expanded into the Nicholas Institute for Energy, Environment & Sustainability, for which he served as chair of the faculty advisory committee from 2007-10.

He is a University Fellow of Resources for the Future (RFF); a Public Member of the Administrative Conference of the United States (ACUS); a board member of the Society for Benefit-Cost Analysis (SBCA); and an affiliated faculty member of the environment program at Duke Kunshan University (DKU) and of the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis (HCRA).  He is a member of advisory committees at the NYU Institute for Policy Integrity, the International Risk Governance Council (IRGC), the Chaire Economie du Climat (CEC), and the Cambridge Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER).  He has been a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 5th Assessment Report (Working Group III) (2014), and the study team on “Environmental Risk Management” for the China Council for International Cooperation on Environment and Development (CCICED) (2015).

His publications include the books Policy Shock: Recalibrating Risk and Regulation after Oil Spills, Nuclear Accidents, and Financial Crises (Cambridge University Press, 2017 [paperback 2020], with Ed Balleisen, Lori Bennear, and Kim Krawiec); The Reality of Precaution: Comparing Risk Regulation in the United States and Europe (RFF/Routledge, 2011, with Michael Rogers, Jim Hammitt, and Peter Sand), Reconstructing Climate Policy (AEI Press 2003, with Richard Stewart) and Risk vs. Risk (Harvard University Press 1995, with John Graham [Chinese translation, 2018]), and more than 100 articles in journals in law, policy, economics, risk and science.  He has been a visiting professor at Harvard Law School, the University of Chicago Law School, Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense, Université Paris-Dauphine, Sciences Po, and EHESS and CIRED in Paris, and a visiting scholar at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and at NYU Law School.

Before coming to Duke, he served at the White House Council of Economic Advisers (CEA), at the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), and at the US Department of Justice (DOJ/ENRD), in the first Bush and Clinton administrations. He helped negotiate the Framework Convention on Climate Change, attended the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, and helped draft Executive Order 12866 (1993).  He also helped organize the Americorps National Service program in 1993, the annual City Year servathon in Boston in 1989, and the D.C. Cares servathon in Washington D.C. in 1991; served on the North Carolina State Commission on National and Community Service from 1994-98; and founded the "Dedicated to Durham" community service day held at Duke Law School since 1995.

He clerked for Judge (now U.S. Supreme Court Justice) Stephen G. Breyer on the U.S. Court of Appeals in Boston in 1988-89, and for Chief Judge Jack B. Weinstein on the U.S. District Court in New York in 1987-88. He received his A.B. in economics (1984) and J.D. (1987) from Harvard University, where he was a research assistant at the NBER, assistant coach of the 1985 college debate champions, and an editor of the Harvard Law Review.

Joseph Blocher

Lanty L. Smith ’67 Distinguished Professor of Law
Co-Director, Duke Center for Firearms Law

blocher@law.duke.edu; 919-613-7018

Joseph Blocher's principal academic interests include federal and state constitutional law, the First and Second Amendments, legal history, and property. His current scholarship addresses issues of gun rights and regulation, free speech, sovereignty, and the relationship between law and violence.

He has published articles on those and other topics in the Harvard Law Review, Yale Law Journal, Stanford Law Review, Duke Law Journal, Yale Journal of International Law, and other leading journals. He is co-author of Free Speech Beyond Words (NYU Press, 2017) and The Positive Second Amendment: Rights, Regulation, and the Future of Heller (Cambridge University Press, 2018). He serves as co-director, with Darrell Miller, of the Duke Center for Firearms Law, and has spoken before Congress and written for the New York Times, Washington Post, Slate, Vox, and other public outlets.

He returned to his hometown of Durham to join the Duke Law faculty in 2009, and received the law school's Distinguished Teaching Award in 2012. Before coming to Duke, he clerked for Guido Calabresi of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and Rosemary Barkett of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit. He also practiced law at O'Melveny & Myers LLP, where he assisted the merits briefing for the District of Columbia in District of Columbia v. Heller.

Blocher received his B.A., magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, from Rice University, and studied law and economic development as a Fulbright Scholar in Ghana and as a Gates Scholar at Cambridge University, where he received an M.Phil in Land Economy. He received his J.D. from Yale Law School, where he served as comments editor of the Yale Law Journal, symposium editor of the Yale Law & Policy Review, notes editor of the Yale Human Rights & Development Law Journal, participated in or directed several clinics, and was co-chair of the Legal Services Organization.

Jonathan B. Wiener

William R. and Thomas L. Perkins Professor of Law
Professor of Environmental Policy
Professor of Public Policy

Wiener@law.duke.edu or 919-613-7054

Jonathan B. Wiener is the William R. and Thomas L. Perkins Professor of Law at Duke Law School, Professor of Environmental Policy at the Nicholas School of the Environment, and Professor of Public Policy at the Sanford School of Public Policy, at Duke University. He is the Co-Director of the Duke Center on Risk in the Science & Society Initiative. 

He served as President of the Society for Risk Analysis (SRA) in 2008, and he co-chaired the SRA's World Congress on Risk in Sydney Australia in 2012. In 2003 he received SRA’s Chauncey Starr Young Risk Analyst Award, and in 2014 he received SRA’s Richard J. Burk Outstanding Service Award. From 2015-19 he co-directed the Rethinking Regulation program at Duke, and from 2007-15 he directed the JD-LLM Program in International and Comparative Law at Duke Law School. From 2000-05 he was the founding Faculty Director of the Duke Center for Environmental Solutions, which was then expanded into the Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions, for which he served as chair of the faculty advisory committee from 2007-10.

He is a University Fellow of Resources for the Future (RFF); a Public Member of the Administrative Conference of the United States (ACUS); a board member of the Society for Benefit-Cost Analysis (SBCA); and an affiliated faculty member of the environment program at Duke Kunshan University (DKU) and of the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis (HCRA).  He is a member of advisory committees at the NYU Institute for Policy Integrity, the International Risk Governance Council (IRGC), the Chaire Economie du Climat (CEC), and the Cambridge Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER). He has been a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 5th Assessment Report (Working Group III) (2014), and the study team on “Environmental Risk Management” for the China Council for International Cooperation on Environment and Development (CCICED) (2015). 

His publications include the books Policy Shock: Recalibrating Risk and Regulation after Oil Spills, Nuclear Accidents, and Financial Crises (Cambridge University Press, 2017 [paperback 2020], with Ed Balleisen, Lori Bennear, and Kim Krawiec); The Reality of Precaution: Comparing Risk Regulation in the United States and Europe (RFF/Routledge, 2011, with Michael Rogers, Jim Hammitt, and Peter Sand), Reconstructing Climate Policy (AEI Press 2003, with Richard Stewart) and Risk vs. Risk (Harvard University Press 1995, with John Graham [Chinese translation, 2018]), and more than 100 articles in journals in law, policy, economics, risk and science. He has been a visiting professor at Harvard Law School, the University of Chicago Law School, Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense, Université Paris-Dauphine, Sciences Po, and EHESS and CIRED in Paris.

Before coming to Duke, he served at the White House Council of Economic Advisers (CEA), at the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), and at the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ/ENRD).  He helped negotiate the Framework Convention on Climate Change, attended the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, and helped draft Executive Order 12866 (1993).  He also helped organize the Americorps National Service program in 1993. He clerked for Judge (now U.S. Supreme Court Justice) Stephen G. Breyer on the U.S. Court of Appeals in Boston in 1988-89, and for Chief Judge Jack B. Weinstein on the U.S. District Court in New York in 1987-88. He received his A.B. in economics (1984) and J.D. (1987) from Harvard University, where he was a research assistant at the NBER, assistant coach of the 1985 college debate champions, and an editor of the Harvard Law Review.

Paul H. Haagen

Professor of Law
Co-Director, Center for Sports Law and Policy

Haagen@law.duke.edu or 919-613-7088

Paul Haagen was born in Lancaster, Pennsylvania and raised in Connecticut. He received a B.A. in 1972 from Haverford College; a B.A. in 1974 and an M.A. in 1976 from Oxford; an M.A. in 1976 and Ph.D. in 1986 from Princeton; and a J.D. in 1982 from Yale.

After graduating from Haverford, he studied history first at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, and later at Princeton. At Yale, he was an editor of Yale Studies in World Public Order and editor-in-chief of the Yale Law and Policy Review. After law school he clerked on the United States Court of Appeals and then practiced law in Philadelphia for two years before coming to Duke in 1985.

Haagen has been a visiting faculty member on the law faculties of the Georg August University in Goettingen, Germany (2005), the Johannes Kepler University in Linz, Austria (2002) and the Escuela Libre de Derecho in Mexico City, Mexico (1998). He was Chair of the Academic Council of Duke University from 2005-2007, and Senior Associate Dean for Academic Affairs of the Law School (1991-93, 2009-2012). He is Co-Director of the Center for Sports Law and Policy. His principal academic interests are contracts, the social history of law and law and sports. 

Doriane Lambelet Coleman

Professor of Law
Co-Director, Center for Sports Law and Policy

dlc@law.duke.edu or 919-613-7075

Doriane Coleman is a Professor of Law at Duke Law School, where she specializes in interdisciplinary scholarship focused on women, children, medicine, sports, and law. Her recent work has centered on sex, including its evolving definition and its implications for institutions ranging from elite sport to medicine and, of course, to law. A first article in this series, Sex in Sport , is at 80 LAW & CONTEMPORARY PROBLEMS 63-126 (2017), and a second, Re-affirming the Value of the Sports Exception to Title IX's General Non-Discrimination Rule, is at 27 DUKE J. GENDER L. & POL’Y 69 (2020). She is currently working on a third article on Sex in Medicine and a book project called Sex in Law.

A regular teacher of Torts, Coleman is co-author of the first-year casebook Torts: Doctrine and Process (2019). She is also co-director of the Law School’s Center for Sports Law and Policy, a faculty affiliate of the University’s Kenan Institute for Ethics, the Trent Center for Bioethics, Humanities and the History of Medicine, and the Center for Child and Family Policy. Her recent cross-campus projects include co-leading a Bass Connections team on Cheating, Gaming, and Rule Fixing: Challenges for Ethics Across the Adversarial Professions (2018-19), and directing the program Head Trauma in Football: Implications for Medicine, Law, and Policy (2018).

Coleman received her Juris Doctor degree from Georgetown Law (1988), and her Bachelor of Arts degree from Cornell University (1982). She was a litigation associate at Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering before beginning her academic and teaching career at Howard University School of Law. While she was at Wilmer, she worked on the development of the world’s first random, out-of-competition drug-testing program for what is now USA Track & Field, a project which led to her years-long engagement with the Olympic Movement’s anti-doping efforts.

Before law school, Coleman ran the 800 meters in collegiate and international competition, where she was a multiple All American, All East, and All Ivy athlete, the U.S. National Collegiate Indoor Champion in 1982, the U.S. National Indoor Champion (with teammates) in the 4 x 400 meters relay in 1982, and the Swiss National Champion in 1982 and 1983. Over her athletic career she competed for Villanova, Cornell, the Swiss and U.S. National Teams, Athletics West, the Santa Monica and Atoms Track Clubs, and Lausanne Sports.

Neil S. Siegel

David W. Ichel Professor of Law and Professor of Political Science
Director, DC Summer Institute on Law and Policy

siegel@law.duke.edu or 919-613-7157
@NeilScottSiegel

Neil S. Siegel is the David W. Ichel Professor of Law and Professor of Political Science at Duke Law School, where he also serves as director of the DC Summer Institute on Law and Policy. His research and teaching fall primarily in the areas of U.S. constitutional law, constitutional politics, and constitutional theory.

Siegel teaches Duke Law students, undergraduates in Duke University’s Trinity College and in Duke Law School’s DC Summer Institute, and judges in Duke’s Master of Judicial Studies Program. Throughout the year, he offers U.S. Supreme Court updates and other talks at judicial conferences and law firms around the country.

Siegel served as special counsel to U.S. Senator Christopher Coons during the U.S. Supreme Court confirmation hearings of Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh, and he advised Senator Coons during the U.S. Supreme Court confirmation hearing of Neil M. Gorsuch. Professor Siegel also served as special counsel to U.S. Senator Joseph R. Biden during the U.S. Supreme Court confirmation hearings of John G. Roberts and Samuel A. Alito. During the October 2003 term, he clerked for Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg at the U.S. Supreme Court. He also served as a Bristow Fellow in the Office of the Solicitor General at the U.S. Department of Justice during the tenure of Solicitor General Theodore B. Olson, and as a law clerk to Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit.

Siegel is a member of the American Law Institute and the Bar of the State of North Carolina. He also serves on the Board of Directors and Board of Academic Advisors of the American Constitution Society.

In 1994, Siegel received his B.A. (Economics and Political Science), summa cum laude, from Duke University. In 1995, he received his M.A. (Economics) from Duke University. He graduated in 2001 with joint degrees from the University of California, Berkeley, receiving his J.D. from Berkeley Law and a Ph.D. in Jurisprudence and Social Policy. While at Berkeley Law, he served as the Senior Articles Editor of the California Law Review.

Marin K. Levy

Professor of Law

Levy@law.duke.edu or 919-613-8529
@marinklevy

Marin K. Levy’s principal academic interests include judicial administration, civil procedure, remedies, and federal courts. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in the Yale Law Journal, University of Chicago Law Review, University of Pennsylvania Law Review, Cornell Law Review, and California Law Review, among other scholarly journals, and has been discussed in the New York Times, Washington Post, Atlantic, and other public outlets. Levy is also a co-author of Federal Standards of Review: Appellate Court Review of District Court Decisions and Agency Actions (2nd ed.) with Judge Harry T. Edwards and Linda A. Elliott.

Levy joined the Duke Law faculty in 2009, and received the law school’s Distinguished Teaching Award in 2017. She currently serves as the Director of Duke’s Program in Public Law, and is a faculty advisor to the Bolch Judicial Institute. Prior to coming to Duke, she served as a law clerk to Judge José A. Cabranes of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and was an associate at Jenner & Block LLP in Washington, D.C.

Levy received her J.D. in 2007 from Yale Law School, where she was the Editor-in-Chief of the Yale Law & Policy Review. She is a 2004 graduate of the University of Cambridge, where she earned an M.Phil in the History and Philosophy of Science and Medicine. Levy received a B.A. in Ethics, Politics, and Economics and in English from Yale College in 2003, graduating with distinction in both majors.

Lawrence A. Zelenak

Pamela B. Gann Distinguished Professor of Law

zelenak@law.duke.edu or 919-613-7267

Lawrence Zelenak teaches income tax, corporate tax, and a tax policy seminar.  His publications include numerous articles on tax policy issues and a treatise on federal income taxation of individuals.  His most recent books are A Half-Century with the Internal Revenue Code: The Memoirs of Stanley S. Surrey (Carolina Academic Press, 2022) (Zelenak and Mehrotra, eds.) Figuring Out the Tax: Congress, Treasury, and the Design of the Early Modern Income Tax (Cambridge University Press, 2018), and Learning to Love Form 1040: Two Cheers for the Return-Based Mass Income Tax (University of Chicago Press, 2013). He is coauthor of an income tax casebook (with Schmalbeck, Lawsky, and Oei), of a treatise on the federal income taxation of individuals (with Bittker, McMahon, and McGovern), and of a leading student’s guide to the federal income tax (with Chirelstein).

Zelenak’s recent articles include  "The Income Tax, The Constitution, and the Unrealized Importance of Helvering v. Griffiths," Virginia Tax Review (forthcoming, 2024); "1924, 2021: Taxes of the Ultrarich, and Mark-to-Market Reforms," 172 Tax Notes Federal 583 (2021); “Leaving It Up to Treasury: Congressional Abdication on Major Policy Issues in the Early Years of the Federal Income Tax,” 81 Law and Contemporary Problems 137-165 (2018); “SALT Ceiling Workarounds and Tax Shelters,” 160 Tax Notes 542-556 (2018), “Mitt Romney, the 47 Percent, and the Future of the Mass Income Tax,” 67 Tax Law Review 471-500 (2014); “Custom and the Rule of Law in the Administration of the Income Tax,” 62 Duke Law Journal 829-855 (2012); and “The Great American Tax Novel,” 110 Michigan Law Review 969-984 (2012) (reviewing David Foster Wallace, The Pale King (2011).

Prior to joining Duke Law in 2003, Zelenak was a member of the Columbia Law School faculty. Earlier he was a faculty member at the University of North Carolina School of Law; professor in residence at the Office of the Chief Counsel, Internal Revenue Service, Washington, D.C.; an assistant professor at Lewis and Clark Law School in Portland, Oregon; and an associate with the firm of LeSourd and Patten in Seattle. He has also been a visiting professor at the University of Utah and Northwestern University schools of law.

Zelenak received his B.A., summa cum laude, from the University of Santa Clara, and his J.D., magna cum laude, from Harvard Law School in 1979.

Stuart M. Benjamin

William Van Alstyne Distinguished Professor of Law
Co-Director, The Center for Innovation Policy

benjamin@law.duke.edu or 919-613-7275

Stuart Benjamin is the William Van Alstyne Distinguished Professor of Law and co-director of the Center for Innovation Policy at Duke Law School. He specializes in telecommunications law, the First Amendment, and administrative law. From 2009 to 2011, he was the first Distinguished Scholar at the Federal Communications Commission.

Benjamin is a coauthor of Internet and Telecommunications Regulation (2nd ed. 2023, 1st ed. 2019) and Telecommunications Law and Policy (multiple editions), and has written numerous law review articles. He has testified before House and Senate committees as a legal expert on a range of topics.

From 2001 to 2003 he was the Rex G. & Edna Baker Professor in Constitutional Law at the University of Texas School of Law, and from 1997 to 2001 he was an associate professor of law at the University of San Diego School of Law.

Before he began teaching law, Benjamin clerked for Judge William C. Canby of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and for Supreme Court Justice David H. Souter; worked as an attorney-advisor in the Office of Legal Counsel in the U.S. Department of Justice; worked as an associate with Professor Laurence Tribe; and served as staff attorney for the Legal Resources Centre in Port Elizabeth, South Africa. He received his B.A. and J.D. from Yale University.

Jennifer Jenkins

Clinical Professor of Law
Director, Center for the Study of the Public Domain

jenkins@law.duke.edu or 919-613-7270
@DukeCSPD

Jennifer Jenkins is a Clinical Professor of Law teaching intellectual property and Director of Duke's Center for the Study of the Public Domain, where she heads its Arts Project - a project analyzing the effects of intellectual property on cultural production, and writes its annual Public Domain Day website. She is the co-author (with James Boyle) of the open coursebook Intellectual Property: Cases and Materials (4th ed, 2018) and two comic books -- Theft! A History of Music, a 2000-year history of musical borrowing and regulation, and Bound By Law?, a comic book about copyright, fair use and documentary film. 

While in practice, she was a member of the team that defended the copyright infringement suit against the publisher of the novel The Wind Done Gone (a parodic rejoinder to Gone with the Wind) in SunTrust v. Houghton Mifflin. While a student at Duke, she also co-authored, filmed, and edited “Nuestra Hernandez,” a video addressing copyright, appropriation, and culture. Jenkins received her B.A. in English from Rice University, her J.D. from Duke Law School, and her M.A. in English from Duke University.

James E. Coleman, Jr.

John S. Bradway Distinguished Professor of the Practice of Law
Director, Center for Criminal Justice and Professional Responsibility
Co-Director, Wrongful Convictions Clinic

jcoleman@law.duke.edu or 919-613-7057
@jcolemanduke

Jim Coleman is the John S. Bradway Professor of the Practice of Law, Director of the Center for Criminal Justice and Professional Responsibility, and Co-Director of the Wrongful Convictions Clinic at Duke Law School. He is a graduate of Columbia University (J.D. 1974), and Harvard University (A.B. 1970).

Coleman is a native of Charlotte, North Carolina. His experience includes fifteen years in private practice in Washington, D.C., the last twelve as a partner at Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering. In private practice, Coleman specialized in federal court and administrative litigation; he also represented criminal defendants in capital collateral proceedings and was an active participant in his firm’s pro bono program. Jim also has had a range of government experience during the early part of his career, including stints as an assistant general counsel for the Legal Services Corporation, chief counsel for the U.S. House of Representatives' Committee on Standards of Official Conduct, and deputy general counsel for the U.S. Department of Education.

During his career, Coleman has been active in the American Bar Association, where he served as Chair of the ABA Section of Individual Rights and Responsibilities and of the ABA Death Penalty Moratorium Implementation Project, and has served on various state commissions focused on wrongful convictions, the death penalty, and criminal justice generally.

Coleman joined the Duke faculty full-time in 1996, where his teaching responsibilities have included criminal law, wrongful convictions, and the appellate litigation clinic, which he and Erwin Chemerinsky started. His academic work, conducted through the Center for Criminal Justice and Professional Responsibility, centers on the legal, political, and scientific causes of wrongful convictions and how they can be prevented. His administrative work for the University has included chairing the Lacrosse ad hoc Review Committee and the Duke Athletic Council.

Jamie T. Lau

Clinical Professor of Law
Supervising Attorney, Center for Criminal Justice and Professional Responsibility

jamie.lau@law.duke.edu or 919-613-7764
@LauDurham

Jamie Lau is an associate clinical professor of law, supervising attorney for the Duke Law Wrongful Convictions Clinic, and faculty adviser to the Innocence Project. He also co-teaches a seminar on wrongful conviction. Lau’s law practice includes representing inmates asserting innocence in state and federal court.  He has played a role in several exonerations, including that of Wrongful Convictions Clinic client Howard Dudley in May 2016, after nearly 24 years of wrongful incarceration. 

Previously, Lau worked for the North Carolina Innocence Inquiry Commission, where he investigated post-conviction claims of innocence and served as  lead investigator in the case of State v. Kenneth Kagonyera. Following the NCIIC investigation, Mr. Kagonyera and four co-defendants were exonerated by the courts for their alleged role in a murder. Notably, all five defendants in the Kagonyera case had pleaded guilty, which Lau says highlights the great pressure defendants face to accept plea deals even when they are innocent.

Lau earned his JD cum laude from Duke Law School. He has a BA in Economics (with distinction) from the University of California, Berkeley.  Before entering law school, Lau taught middle school mathematics in New York City and earned an MS in Secondary Mathematics Education from Lehman College.

Lau is licensed to practice law in North Carolina. He is also a member of the bars for all federal district courts in North Carolina and the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. Lau is a member of numerous professional organizations, including the American Bar Association, the North Carolina Bar Association, and the North Carolina Advocates for Justice.