International and Comparative - Faculty Activities
The law school's faculty includes a number of international and comparative law specialists. Click here for recent updates on international and comparative faculty activities.
Maggi Carfield, Faculty Fellow
Professor Carfield's research focuses on the intersection of law and international development. She is specifically interested in how the law can be utilized to enhance the capabilities of people living in poverty.
Kathleen Clark, Professor of Law
Kathleen Clark is an expert on national security law, legal ethics, and anti-corruption measures. She has served as an ethics consultant for the United Nations Development Program and the ABA’s Europe and Eurasia Program (CEELI), and has led ethics workshops in Europe, Africa and South America. A member of the American Law Institute, Clark is past chair of the National Security Law Section of the Association of American Law Schools, and has served on the board of Servicemembers Legal Defense Network.
Gerrit De Geest, Professor of Law and Director of the Center for Law, Innovation and Economic Growth
Gerrit De Geest specializes in law and economics and in comparative law. Before joining the Washington University Law faculty in 2007, he was a professor of law and economics at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. Past president of the European Association of Law and Economics, he is a member of the Economic Impact Group of the Common Principles of European Contract Law. He is series editor of the forthcoming 2nd edition of the Encyclopedia of Law and Economics, co-editor of the New Horizons in Law and Economics book series (Edward Elgar), and consultant editor of the European Review of Contract Law. He has published numerous books and articles applying economic analysis to contract, tort, and comparative law. He is co-editor of the Review of Law and Economics and consultant editor of the European Review of Contract Law. He has published numerous books and articles in the fields of economic analysis of contract law, tort law, and comparative law.
John N. Drobak, George Alexander Madill Professor of Law, Professor of Economics & Director, Center for Interdisciplinary Studies
John Drobak is a pioneer in interdisciplinary study, ranging from his leadership role with the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies to the course he co-teaches with Nobel Laureate (Economics), Douglass North, to his many joint programs with other departments on campus. He has served as a consultant to the governments of Czechoslovakia and the Republic of Georgia; Secretary and Executive Committee member for the Society for New Institutional Economics; and as a fifteen-year member of the M.B.A faculty for the U.S. Business School in Prague. His recent scholarship includes extensive work on privatization and democratization.
Dorsey D. Ellis, Jr., Dean Emeritus and William R. Orthwein Distinguished Professor of Law Emeritus
Dorsey D. Ellis, Jr. served as dean of the School of Law for more than a decade. His teaching and scholarship focus on the areas of torts and antitrust. In recent years, he has taught in England, Japan, New Zealand, and the Netherlands, has published on U.S. antitrust law throughout the world, and has taught Comparative Competition Law in the Law School’s Summer Institute for Global Justice. He also participated in the 2004 APEC Competition Policy Conference in Tokyo.
Frances H. Foster, Edward T. Foote II Professor of Law
Frances Foster specializes in the legal systems of socialist and former socialist countries and in trusts and estates law. In recent work, she has compared approaches to trusts and inheritance in the United States and in China, based on her original translations of Chinese legislation, cases, and scholarship. She is a member of the Board of Directors of the American Society of Comparative Law and an associate member of the International Academy of Comparative Law.
Leigh Hunt Greenhaw, Senior Lecturer in Law
Leigh Hunt Greenhaw teaches the law school’s “Introduction to U.S. Law,” an intensive, two-semester course for foreign Masters and exchange students. She brings varied U.S. experience as a judicial clerk, legal services lawyer, civil litigator in private practice, legal writing instructor and constitutional law professor to bear, teaching distinctive aspects of U.S. legal method through the written resolution of legal problems. An expert in religion and the U.S. Constitution, she has published and taught comparative religious liberty law.
Steven Gunn, Adjunct Professor of Law & Director of the American Indian Law & Economic Development Program
An expert in American Indian law, Steven Gunn represents American Indian tribes in actions to protect their land, resources, rights, and cultural heritage, including a recent case representing the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe. He has worked with students to coordinate a symposium on contemporary and comparative perspectives on the rights of indigenous peoples. Gunn directs the American Indian Law and Economic Development Externship, in which students spend a summer assisting with legal work and living on the Cheyenne River Indian Reservation in South Dakota. He has served as chair of the AALS Section on Indian Nations and Indigenous Peoples and vice chair for public service of the ABA Native American Resources Committee.
John Owen Haley, Wiley B. Rutledge Professor of Law
John Haley is one of the nation's outstanding international and comparative law scholars and is widely credited with having popularized Japanese legal studies. He has been teaching for more than 30 years at law schools in the U.S. and abroad. His numerous scholarly works span issues ranging from international trade policy and comparative law to Japanese land-use law, Japanese and East Asian business transactions, and Japanese law and contemporary society. A member of the American Law Institute, he is the author or editor of nine books or monographs, including several leading books in Japanese and comparative law topics. For several years, he directed the law school’s Whitney R. Harris Institute for Global Legal Studies, organizing conferences on topics ranging from corporate governance to U.S.-China business relationships. Haley serves on the Board of Trustees and Executive Committee of the Society for Japanese Studies and the Executive Committee for the American Society of Comparative Law.
Peter A. Joy, Professor of Law & Director, Criminal Justice Clinic (Law School Vice Dean beginning January 1, 2010)
Peter Joy is well known for his work in clinical legal education, legal ethics, and trial practice. The inaugural director of the School of Law’s Trial & Advocacy Program, he teaches Trial Practice & Procedure, Criminal Justice Clinic, Legal Profession, and Comparative Legal Ethics Seminar. He serves on the AALS Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure, the AALS Executive Committee of the Section on Professional Responsibility, the ABA Accreditation Committee of the Section on Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar, the Society of American Law Teachers (SALT) Board of Governors, and he is past chair of the AALS Clinical Education Section and past president of the Clinical Legal Education Association. He is on the Board of Editors of the Clinical Law Review, and he is a Contributing Editor to Criminal Justice, a quarterly publication of the ABA. Professor Joy is active in developing clinical legal education in Japan, publishing and teaching extensively on the subject, and has lectured in Australia, Canada, Indonesia, Japan, and South Africa on clinical education and legal ethics topics.
Tove Klovning, Foreign, Comparative & International Law Librarian and Lecturer in Law
As the Foreign/Comparative/International Law Librarian & Lecturer in Law, Professor Klovning oversees foreign, comparative and international law library services and assists with legal research questions relating to foreign law, comparative law and international law. She also assists with legal research questions relating to the American legal system. She maintains a series of international and comparative research guides available online at http://www.aallnet.org/sis/fcilsis/syllabi.html.
Michael H. Koby, Director of the Trial & Advocacy Program, Associate Director of Legal Writing, and Professor of Practice
Michael Koby teaches the law school’s “Introduction to U.S. Law,” an intensive, two-semester course for foreign Masters and exchange students. He has lectured in Japan and Spain on the distinctive aspects of U.S. law and legal methodology, and has lectured at the International Law Institute in Washington, D.C., to international and foreign procurement practitioners on the characteristics of common-law systems.
D. Bruce La Pierre, Professor of Law
Bruce La Pierre is an expert in school desegregation, election law, and federalism issues, and has established an Appellate Clinic for law school students. He has taught abroad at Universidade Católica Portuguesa in Portugal, the University of Navarra in Spain, and at the Law School’s Summer Institute for Global Justice. He is a frequent lecturer at Aoyama Gakuin University (Japan). He has also participated in the Jean Monnet Chair International Summer Seminar in Rome.
C.J. Larkin, Administrative Director of the ADR Program and Senior Lecturer in Law
C.J. Larkin has an extensive background as a public defender, appellate attorney, and family lawyer. Under her leadership, the ADR Program has received a three-year grant from the U.S. Department of State to establish exchanges between the Washington University and Kathmandu law schools and between Washington University and two civil-society NGOs in Nepal. Larkin provided mediation training to a Nepali delegation who visited the law school and met with ADR providers in the community in spring 2006. She and other law school representatives then made an exchange visit to Nepal in summer 2006. Along with the International Institute in St. Louis, Larkin received an ASC Foundation grant to train and mentor mediators within the immigrant-refugee communities and to develop an Ethnic Mediation Council in St. Louis.
David S. Law, Professor of Law and Professor of Political Science
David Law has published and lectured extensively on topics including comparative public law, law and social science, comparative judicial politics, and legal and political theory. He is a former Hitachi Fellow in Japan, where he was a visiting associate professor at Keio University Faculty of Law.
Stephen H. Legomsky, the John S. Lehmann University Professor
Stephen Legomsky specializes in immigration and refugee law and policy and was the founding Director of the Harris World Law Institute. A member of the American Law Institute, he has chaired the immigration law section of the AALS, the immigration professors section of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, and the refugee committee of the American Branch of the International Law Association. He has testified before Congress on several occasions and been a consultant to several U.S. Presidential administrations, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, the immigration ministers of Russia and Ukraine, and several foreign governments. He has held visiting appointments in Austria, Australia, Germany, Italy, Mexico, New Zealand, Portugal, Singapore, Suriname, Switzerland, and the UK. His immigration law casebook (co-authored, starting with the fifth edition) has been the required text at 172 law schools. Two of his other books - one on immigration and one on the theory of specialized courts – were published by the Oxford University Press.
Ronald M. Levin, Henry Hitchcock Professor of Law
Ronald Levin is a nationally known administrative law scholar who has coauthored a casebook and written many articles in that field. He is past chair of the ABA Section of Administrative Law and Regulatory Practice and of both the AALS Sections on Administrative Law and on Legislation. He has lectured in Japan and served as a consultant to the Supreme Court of Indonesia. He served as a reporter on judicial review for the ABA’s Project on the Administrative Law of the European Union, which work resulted in the publication of Administrative Law of the European Union: Judicial Review (George Bermann et al. eds., 2008) (with Frank Emmert and Christoph Feddersen).
Jo Ellen D. Lewis, Director, Legal Practice Program and Senior Lecturer in Law
Jo Ellen Lewis has served several times as a visiting professor at Aoyama Gakuin University in Tokyo, teaching courses ranging from real estate transactions to introductions to the American judicial system. She has also taught a Japanese graduate-level law course on, among other topics, an analysis of the First Amendment in the context of a recent federal court case. Since 2007, she has been a Fulbright Senior Scholar.
Wei Luo, Director of Technical Services and Lecturer in Law
Wei Luo is an expert in codification of law and of Chinese legal research, and has lectured and published widely on these subjects. He created and maintains the Internet Chinese Legal Research Center at http://law.wustl.edu/Chinalaw/. He was also an instructor at Xiamen University Law School in Xiamen, China.
Maxine Lipeles, Director, Interdisciplinary Environmental Clinic
Maxine Lipeles directs the law school’s Interdisciplinary Environmental Clinic, which offers pro bono legal and technical support to local environmental and community organizations. In addition to a number of environmental law and clinical courses, she teaches Global Warming & The Law.
Gregory Magarian, Professor of Law
Professor Magarian’s research and teaching interests focus on constitutional law, the First Amendment, and legislation. He has recently taught a course in China and will teach in the 2010 Summer Institute for Global Justice in Utrecht, The Netherlands.
Charles R. McManis, Thomas and Karole Green Professor of Law
Charles McManis is an internationally recognized expert in intellectual property law. He is a member of the American Law Institute and has served as a consultant for the World Intellectual Property Organization. A member of the International Association of Teachers and Researchers of Intellectual Property, he has taught, lectured, or researched throughout the United States and in Argentina, Brazil, China, Germany, India, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Switzerland, Taiwan, and the United Kingdom. In 2007, he was appointed an ambassador to Korea University as part of the university’s McDonnell International Scholars Academy.
Carl Minzner, Associate Professor of Law
Carl Minzner specializes in Chinese law and politics. Before joining the law faculty in 2007, he served as senior counsel to the Congressional-Executive Commission on China and was an International Affairs Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He also served as a Yale-China Legal Education fellow at the Xibei Institute of Politics and Law in Xi’an. His published works include articles on Chinese citizen petitioning and social unrest, Party management of judicial and government institutions, and reforms to the regulations governing Chinese civil society organizations.
A. Peter Mutharika, Professor of Law
Peter Mutharika is an expert on international economic law, international law, and comparative constitutional law. He serves as a foreign policy adviser to the government of Malawi, participated in the U.N. World Summit, and was a Malawi delegate to the United Nations General Assembly 60th Session. He is also a member of the Panel of Arbitrators and Panel of Conciliators for the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes. He has participated in and presented a paper at the Malawi Constitutional Review Conference. He has taught or conducted research in Africa, Canada, Europe, and the United States.
Kimberly Norwood, Professor of Law & Professor of African & African American Studies
Kimberly Norwood has focused her research on Black identity issues and issues affecting poor students and students of color in the urban public education setting. Her recently created course entitled “Race Education & the Law,” is a service learning course involving judges, lawyers, law students and high school students working together throughout the school year and has received national recognition. She has recently won several awards based on her work in this course and in the community including the 2009 Women’s Justice Award, the 2009 Scovel Richardson Mound City Bar Association award and the 2009 National Bar Association’s Humanitarian Award. She also teaches Torts, Products Liability and occasionally works in the school’s renowned Civil Justice Clinic. Among her international work, she has co-founded and directed public interest externships for law students working in Ghana and Kenya, she has lectured in Japan on the American tort law system, she taught both undergraduate and law courses on American Tort Law at Aoyama Gakuin University in Tokyo, Japan, and she presented a lecture to the faculty at Waseda University Law School, also in Tokyo, entitled “Three Examples of Using Legal Curricula as Tools to Promote Personal Empowerment.” That lecture is being published as part of the Waseda Clinical Law Journal in the fall of 2009.
Stanley L. Paulson, William Gardiner Hammond Professor of Law & Professor of Philosophy
Stanley L. Paulson specializes in European legal philosophy and legal theory. A prolific author, he is a renowned authority on the work of legal philosopher and constitutional theorist, Hans Kelsen (1881-1973). He delivered the academic keynote address at a session honoring Kelsen on the occasion of his 125th birthday to the Upper House of the Austrian Federal Parliament. A recipient of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation’s Research Prize for scholars in the humanities, Paulson has held a number of post-doctoral fellowships in the United States and abroad. He received honorary doctorates from the Faculty of Law at the University of Uppsala (Sweden) and the Faculty of Law at the University of Kiel (Germany).
Michael Peil, Associate Dean for International Programs
Michael Peil coordinates the international programs of the law school, including student and faculty exchanges, conferences, summer internships and study-abroad opportunities. Previously, he served for five years as Executive Director of the International Law Students Association and practiced law in Chicago. He has lectured in international law in Armenia, under the aegis of the ABA’s Europe and Eurasia Program (CEELI). He serves on the Board of Directors for the World Affairs Council of St. Louis. He teaches European Union Law and has taught at the law school’s Summer Institute for Global Justice in Utrecht.
Adam H. Rosenzweig, Associate Professor of Law
Adam Rosenzweig concentrates his research and teaching in the area of tax law and policy, including international taxation and international business transactions. Before joining the Washington University faculty in 2007, he was a visiting assistant professor at Northwestern University. He also was in private practice in New York, where he focused on federal income tax law and specialized in the areas of private equity, hedge funds, equity derivatives, and cross-border capital markets.
Leila Nadya Sadat, Henry H. Oberschelp Professor of Law and Director, Whitney R. Harris World Law Institute
Leila Sadat, an authority in international criminal law and human rights, is particularly well known for her expertise on the International Criminal Court (ICC). She is representing the government of East Timor in the upcoming ICC negotiations, and attended the diplomatic conference in Rome where the ICC was established on behalf of the International Law Association. She is also a member of the ABA Task Force on the ICC. Sadat is a co-author of the leading international criminal law casebook and has won several awards for her scholarship. She served on the United States Commission for International Religious Freedom and currently is leading the Crimes Against Humanity Initiative, an international group of experts in drafting a Specialized Convention on Crimes Against Humanity. A member of the American Law Institute, she practiced in Paris, France, and clerked on both of France’s Supreme Courts and the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.
Gilbert Sison, Adjunct Professor of Law
Gilbert Sison practices law with the St. Louis firm of Rosenblum, Schwartz, Rogers & Glass, PC. Prior to that, he practiced at Bryan Cave, LLP, and Thompson Coburn, LLP. He serves as the coach of the law school’s Philip C. Jessup International Law Moot Court Competition team and teaches a course in international courts and tribunals. In his seven years as coach, the law school has won three U.S. Regional Championships and has also won a number of written and oral awards.
Brian Tamanaha, Professor of Law
Professor Tamanaha is an expert in general jurisprudence, comparative law and society, and law and development. He has taught at the University of Amsterdam and Leiden University and was recently a member-in-residence at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University.
B. Don Taylor
Don Taylor came to WU Law in the summer of 2009 after three years as a legal officer in Trial Chamber II of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, during which time he also worked on cases in the Appeals Chamber of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. His research and teaching focuses on international criminal law with a special emphasis on international criminal procedure as developed and applied by international criminal courts and tribunals. Taylor is a member of the editorial board of the Leiden Journal of International Law and a member of the International Criminal Procedure Expert Framework established by the Hague Institute for the Internationalisation of Law, and has published several works on the procedural law of the ad hoc international criminal tribunals and the International Criminal Court. Taylor has taught at the law faculty of the VU Amsterdam.
Karen Tokarz, Charles Nagel Professor of Public Interest Law and Public Service, and Professor of African and African American Studies.
A conflict resolution expert and internationally recognized leader in clinical legal education, Professor Tokarz is the Director of the Washington University School of Law Dispute Resolution Program. While on sabbatical in 2008-09, Professor Tokarz was a visiting scholar at the Harvard Law School Program on Negotiation. In 2008, she also served as a Fulbright Senior Specialist for Africa, collaborating with the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban, South Africa, in the development of their dispute resolution masters program. She previously worked with the clinical education program at the University of Kwa Zulu-Natal in 2001. She has coordinated summer public internships in South Africa for approximately 60 law students during the past eight summers and facilitated a law student exchange program between Washington University and KwaZulu-Natal. Recipient of Washington University’s 2005 Founders Day Distinguished Faculty Award, Professor Tokarz serves on the steering committee for the University’s Richard Gephardt Institute for Public Service. In spring 2010, she will begin co-teaching a full-semester International Justice & Conflict Resolution Practicum to provide students opportunities to learn international criminal law and practice, and conflict resolution theory and practice, working with lawyers practicing before international courts and tribunals, with international judges, and with lawyers in international conflict resolution offices such as the UN.
Melissa Waters, Professor of Law
Melissa Waters is an expert in several areas of international and comparative law, including foreign relations law, international human rights law, international criminal law, and complex civil litigation. Her scholarship focuses on the incorporation of international law into domestic legal regimes, and in particular on the role of transnational judicial dialogue in developing international legal norms and in transforming U.S. and other domestic courts into key mediators between domestic and international law. Professor Waters serves as the university's ambassador to Utrecht University (Netherlands) under the McDonnell International Scholars Academy.


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