New York Law School Welcomes New Faculty Members, Announces Promotions

 
New York, September 18, 2007—New York Law School’s Associate Dean for Faculty Development, Stephen J. Ellmann, has announced the appointment of new faculty, including five full-time and four visiting professors, and the promotion of two existing faculty members.
 
“New York Law School has just had one of its most successful hiring years ever,” Dean Ellmann said. “We’re delighted with our new colleagues, of course; we’re also proud that in hiring them we were building ‘strength on strength’—bringing new faculty who were drawn here by the colleagues they would join and the programs they would become part of. It will be great to watch these new scholars grow and to see the ways they help the Law School grow as well.”
 
Promotions and Votes of Tenure
During the 2006–07 academic year, the Law School Faculty and Board of Trustees voted tenure for Professor of Law Beth Noveck. Deborah Archer was also voted a full Professor of Law and received a long-term contract.
 
  • Beth Simone Noveck, Professor of Law
 
Beth Noveck, Director of the School’s Institute for Information Law & Policy, has been appointed full Professor of Law with tenure. Formerly an information technology and corporate lawyer, Professor Noveck teaches in the areas of intellectual property, innovation, and constitutional law. Her research and design work lie at the intersection of technology and civil liberties and are aimed at building more democratic institutions. In 2002, Professor Noveck founded the State of Play Conference, the world’s first research conference on virtual worlds. She also created the State of Play Academy, New York Law School’s online distance learning platform for open legal education in There.com. In addition, she launched Democracy Island, an experimental space in Second Life to study and do citizen participation and engagement using the virtual world medium. She is the co-editor of The State of Play: Law, Games, and Virtual Worlds (NYU Press, 2006). Professor Noveck directs the “Peer-to-Patent: Community Patent Review” project, in cooperation with theUnited States Patent and Trademark Office, which has piloted public participation in the patent examination process. She and her students blog at http://cairns.typepad.com.
 
Education: Harvard, A.B. 1991 magna cum laude, A.M. 1992; Oxford, Rotary Foundation Doctoral Fellow 1993–94; University of Innsbruck, Ph.D. 1994, Fulbright Scholar; Yale, J.D. 1997; Founding Fellow, Yale Law School Information Society Project.
Law Clerk, Hon. Leonard B. Sand, United States District Court, Southern District of New York.

  • Deborah N. Archer, Professor of Law
 
Professor Archer joined the Law School in 2003 and has recently been appointed to full Professor of Law with a long-term contract. She teaches Racial Discrimination & American Law, Externship Seminar & Placement, and the Urban Law Clinic, and she directs the Racial Justice Project at the School’s Justice Action Center. Professor Archer’s scholarly work has addressed the rights of ex-offenders coming out of prison and, most recently, the constitutionality of considering race in assigning students to public schools in order to achieve racial balance. Previously, she worked at Simpson Thatcher & Bartlett as a litigation associate and also performed pro bono work on behalf of political asylum seekers and battered women. She was assistant counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, Inc., where she was involved in a number of important cases, including Maxwell v. Foster, which defended a challenge to majority-minority voting districts; Lewis v. Chicago, which challenged the Chicago Fire Department’s hiring practices; and Simms v. Oklahoma, which dealt with employment discrimination litigation. Professor Archer is a member of the Civil Rights Committee of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York and the Committee on Civil Rights of the New York State Bar Association.
Education: Smith College, B.A., 1993 cum laude; Yale, J.D., 1996 (Yale Journal of Law and Feminism, The Yale Policy Review).
Law Clerk, Hon. Alvin W. Thompson, United States District Court, District of Connecticut.

New Full-Time Faculty Appointments
  • Richard H. Chused, Professor of Law
Professor Chused is a prolific scholar and an expert on property law, law and gender, copyright law, and cyberlaw. Hewill join New York Law School in the 2008–09 academic year. He is currently Professor of Law at the Georgetown University Law Center, and is the Webmaster for the Society of American Law Teachers. During 2004–2005 he received a Senior Scholar Fulbright Grant to teach at the Law Faculty of Hebrew University in Jerusalem.Before joining Georgetown’s faculty in 1973, he taught for five years at Rutgers School of Law in Newark. Professor Chused is also a member of various history associations and the Society of American Law Teachers, on whose board of governors he sat for 12 years. He has published numerous books and articles on the legal history of gender and property law, and teaching texts in copyright and property. His recently published work includes a book chapter on the treatment of the poor in American landlord-tenant law, an article on copyright law in the digital age, a lengthy history of the famous landlord-tenant case Javins v. First National Realty Corporation, a historical essay on Myra Bradwell’s Chicago Legal News, and a history of landlord-tenant court in New York City at the turn of the twentieth century.
 
Education: Brown University, B.A. 1965 cum laude; University of Chicago, J.D. 1968 (University of Chicago Law Review, Topics and Comments Editor).
 
  • Molly Katrina Land, Associate Professor of Law
 
Molly Land will teach Conflicts of Law, Civil Procedure, and International Intellectual Property at the Law School. Previously, she was the Robert M. Cover and Allard K. Lowenstein Fellow in International Human Rights and a visiting lecturer in law at Yale Law School, where she co-taught the Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic and International Human Rights: Law and Policy. She also taught International Human Rights as a lecturer at Yale College. Before returning to Yale to teach, Professor Land litigated trademark, copyright, and patent cases as an associate in the intellectual property group at Faegre & Benson LLP in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She also worked with Minnesota Advocates for Human Rights on a human rights report concerning the state’s response to domestic violence against immigrant and refugee women in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan area. Professor Land’s research and scholarship focuses on the intersection of intellectual property and international human rights and she is currently working on a project that seeks to marshal human rights arguments in support of compulsory licensing of educational materials.
 
Education: Hamline University, B.A. 1996 summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa; Yale Law School, J.D. 2001 (Yale Law Journal, Editor and Admissions Committee; Yale Journal of Law & Feminism, Editor).
Law Clerk, Hon.Denise Cote, United States District Court, Southern District of New York.
  • Doni Gewirtzman, Associate Professor of Law
Professor Gewirtzman is an expert on constitutional law and theory. His research focuses on the intersection between constitutional law and politics. Prior to joining New York Law School, Professor Gewirtzman taught Constitutional Law as a visiting fellow at Vanderbilt School of Law, and served as the Co-associate Director and Acting Assistant Professor of Law in New York University School of Law’s Lawyering Program. He began his legal career as a Skadden Fellow at the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, where he represented the mother of Brandon Teena, a Nebraska teen whose murder was portrayed in the film Boys Don’t Cry, in a wrongful death suit against a local police department. He also represented members of gay student organizations that were banned from meeting in Salt Lake City public schools, and spearheaded Lambda’s advocacy efforts on behalf of older lesbians and gay men. Previously, Professor Gewirtzman was a litigation associate at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, where he represented clients on a range of commercial and pro bono matters. He also served as a Coro Fellow in Public Affairs and worked as an educational consultant for Prep for Prep, a nonprofit organization that identifies and places intellectually gifted high school students of color in elite prep schools.
 
Education: Wesleyan University, B.A. 1993, Phi Beta Kappa; University of California–Berkeley, J.D. 1998 (California Law Review, Senior Notes & Comments Editor).
  • James Grimmelmann, Associate Professor of Law
James Grimmelmann comes to the Law School from the Information Society Project at Yale Law School, where he was a resident fellow. He will teach Copyright, Intellectual Property, and Internet Law. Last year, Professor Grimmelmann was an adjunct professor at New York Law School and he has been involved in the School’s State of Play Conference as an interviewer, speaker, and moderator. His background is in computer technology; he worked for Microsoft as a programmer and has been blogging since 2000. He studies how the law governing the creation and use of software affects the distribution of wealth, power, and freedom in society. As both a lawyer and a technologist, Professor Grimmelmann aims to help these two groups speak intelligibly to each other. He writes on such topics as intellectual property, virtual worlds, search engines, electronic commerce, online privacy, and the use of software as a regulator. Previously, Professor Grimmelmann was a legal intern for Creative Commons and the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
 
Education: Harvard, B.A. 1999; Yale, J.D. 2005 (LawMeme, Editor-in-Chief; Yale Law Journal, Member).
Law Clerk, Hon.Maryanne Trump Barry, United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.
  • Rebecca Roiphe,Associate Professor of Law
Rebecca Roiphe will teach American Legal History, Criminal Procedure, and Legal Profession. Her current research explores the history of the profession and the changing relationship between government, courts, and the individual. She taught for two years as a visiting assistant professor at Fordham University School of Law. Prior to joining academia, Professor Roiphe worked in the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, where she prosecuted complex financial fraud cases. She also worked as an associate at Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr LLP in New York, specializing in white collar criminal defense work. While at the firm she received her Ph.D. in American history from the University of Chicago. Her dissertation, titled “Law and the Modern Soul, 1890–1930,” addresses changing conceptions of the self in the law.
 
Education: Columbia University, B.A. 1993; Harvard Law School, J.D. 2000 cum laude; University of Chicago, Ph.D. 2002.
Law clerk, Hon.Bruce Selya, United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit.
 
Visiting Faculty, 2007–2008
  • Lloyd Bonfield,Visiting Professor of Law
Professor Bonfield is a legal historian and internationally minded law professor, who teaches in the areas of trusts and estates, property, European Union law, and legal history. For the 2007–2008 academic year, he will be a visiting professor of law at New York Law School and will hold a concurrent professorship at Tulane University, where he serves as Thomas Andre Jr. Professor of Law and Associate Dean for International Graduate Studies and International External Relations. Beginning in 2008–09, Professor Bonfield will join New York Law School as a full-time tenured professor, teaching Comparative Legal History; Property; and Wills, Trusts, and Future Interests. He edits Continuity and Change, a journal of social history, demography, and the law published by the Cambridge University Press. He has written extensively on the historical aspects of marriage settlements and inheritance. In March 2006, West Law School published Professor Bonfield’s American Law and the American Legal System in a Nutshell as part of its Nutshell Series. He is also collaborating on a volume (1688–1760) for the Oxford History of English Law. In 2000, Professor Bonfield was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship and a Sumter Marks Award. He was awarded a Fulbright teaching and research award for the academic year 2005–06.
 
Education: University of Massachusetts, B.A. 1971; University of Iowa, M.A. 1974, J.D. 1975; University of Cambridge, Ph.D. 1978, Fulbright Scholar 1975–1977.

  • Dan Hunter, Visiting Professor of Law
 
Dan Hunter is Professor of Law at the University of Melbourne; Adjunct Associate Professor of Legal Studies at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania; and Visiting Professor at New York Law School. Last year, he taught Intellectual Property, Cyberlaw, and theInformation Law Capstone at the Law School and will teach here again for the 2008–09 academic year. He continues his involvement this year as co-organizer of the State of Play and Amateur Hour conferences. He is an expert on cyberspace and Internet law, artificial intelligence and cognitive science models of law, and electronic commerce regulation. He previously taught in the law faculty at Cambridge University, England, where he also held the Herchel Smith Research Fellowship in Intellectual Property Law at Emmanuel College. Professor Hunter regularly publishes on issues dealing with the intersection of computers and law, including the regulation of virtual worlds, the use of artificial intelligence in law, and high technology aspects of intellectual property. He was one of the first scholars to examine the social significance of virtual worlds. His research has appeared in journals such as the California Law Review, Texas Law Review, and the Journal of Legal Education. He co-founded the blog Terra Nova, and ran the 2006 and 2007 State of Play Conferences, presented by New York Law School.
Education: Monash University, B.S. 1987, LL.B. with honors, 1989; University of Melbourne, LL.M. 1996; University of Cambridge, Ph.D. 1999; Fulbright Postgraduate Fellowship, 1995; Herchel Smith Research Fellowship in Intellectual Property Law, Emmanuel College, Cambridge, 1995.
 
  • Sheldon L. Leader, Visiting Professor of Law
 
Sheldon Leader is Professor of Law at the University of Essex. He will join New York Law School in spring 2008 to teach Corporations. He has taught at the University of Paris X and in the United States at Brooklyn Law School, Rutgers School of Law in Newark, and Tulane Law School. He teaches and conducts research in the areas of corporate law, labor law, international economic law, and jurisprudence, and examines the links between these subjects and human rights. He is Chairman of the Pallas Consortium of Universities for European Business Law, Legal Advisor to Amnesty International UK, and a member of the Chatham House Advisory Committee on Corporate Social Responsibility. He is author of Freedom of Association (Yale University Press, 1992), and his articles have been published in the Journal of International Economic Law, the International Social Science Journal, Modern Law Review,and the Columbia Law Review.
 
Education: Yale University, B.A.; Oxford University, M.A., Ph.D.
 
  • Marshall Tracht, Visiting Professor of Law
 
Marshall Tracht will work with the School’s newest academic center, the Center for Real Estate Studies, and will be teaching Bankruptcy, Real Estate Transactions and Finance, and Advanced Real Estate Financing. Professor Tracht has been a member of the Hofstra University School of Law faculty since 1994, serving as Vice Dean from 2001 to 2006. He is a member of the editorial board of The Banking Law Journal, a contributing editor to the Real Estate Law Report, and has written extensively in the areas of real estate development and construction financing, workouts, and bankruptcy. His articles have appeared in the Cornell Law Review and Vanderbilt Law Review, among others, and he was a winner of the 1997–98 Grant Gilmore Award for excellence in legal scholarship. Before going into academia, Professor Tracht practiced in the real estate and bankruptcy groups at Arnold & Porter LLP in Washington, D.C.
 
Education: Yale University, B.A. 1983; University of Pennsylvania, J.D. magna cum laude, M.B.A. 1990 with distinction.
Law Clerk, Hon. S. Martin Teel, Jr., United States Bankruptcy Court for the District of Columbia.