For this academic year, the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School has added three standing professors and welcomes six additional distinguished teachers, lawyers, and leaders who will enhance our academic program and educate and mentor our students.
For this academic year, the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School has added three standing professors and welcomes six additional distinguished teachers, lawyers, and leaders who will enhance our academic program and educate and mentor our students.
The new hires are in addition to the eight standing faculty members who have joined the Law School in the previous four years. They bring a wealth of scholarly and experiential expertise and embody a range of diverse perspectives and methodologies in their teaching and research, and four of them are graduates of this Law School.
Standing Faculty
Kimberly Kessler Ferzan L’95
Ferzan writes in criminal law theory. She has co-authored two books, co-edited three volumes, and authored over 50 book chapters and articles. She received the American Philosophical Association’s Berger Memorial Prize in 2013 for “Beyond Crime and Commitment: Justifying Liberty Deprivations of the Dangerous and Responsible” (Minnesota Law Review, 2011), and was selected for the 2006 Stanford/Yale Junior Faculty Forum for “Beyond Intention” (Cardozo Law Review, 2008). Her recent works, “The Reach of the Realm,” and “#BelieveWomen and the Presumption of Innocence: Clarifying the Questions for Law and Life” are forthcoming in Criminal Law and Philosophy and NOMOS: Truth and Evidence, respectively.
Before joining the Law School faculty in 2020, Ferzan was the Harrison Robertson Professor of Law and the Joel B. Piassick Research Professor of Law at the University of Virginia, where three different graduating classes recognized her with their highest teaching honor at graduation. Prior to her time at Virginia, Ferzan was a member of the faculty at Rutgers Law, where she was twice awarded Professor of the Year and received the Chancellor’s Award for Teaching Excellence.
Ferzan has been competitively selected to serve as a Visiting Professor at the London School of Economics, an International Visiting Fellow at the University of Warwick’s Institute for Advanced Studies, and a Laurance S. Rockefeller Fellow at the Princeton University Center for Human Values.
Karen Tani L’07, GR’11
A celebrated legal historian, Tani’s work addresses poverty law and policy, disability, administrative law, federalism, and rights. Her book, States of Dependency: Welfare, Rights, and American Governance, 1935-1972 (Cambridge University Press, 2016), won the 2017 Cromwell Book Prize from the American Society for Legal History. The book sheds new light on the nature of modern American governance by examining legal contests over welfare benefits and administration in the years between the New Deal and the modern welfare rights movement. More recent work has explored historical examples of “administrative constitutionalism” and the history of disability law and sexual violence and rights.
Before joining the Law School faculty, Tani was a Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley. She was the first graduate of the University of Pennsylvania’s JD/PhD program in American Legal History and clerked for Judge Guido Calabresi of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.
Yanbai Andrea Wang
Her most recent work, Exporting American Discovery, won the American Society of International Law David D. Caron Prize and is forthcoming in the University of Chicago Law Review. This article presents the first comprehensive study of foreign discovery requests, demonstrating that U.S. judges routinely serve as gatekeepers of evidence for foreign disputes. Wang’s finding that such requests are granted at rates as high as 95% calls into question whether U.S. judges perform that gatekeeping role effectively.
Before joining the Law School faculty, Wang was a Thomas C. Grey Fellow and Lecturer in Law at Stanford Law School and an Associate Fellow at Stanford University School of Medicine’s Center for Innovation in Global Health. She is a graduate of Princeton University and Stanford Law School and holds a PhD from Oxford University in International Relations. She clerked for Judge M. Margaret McKeown of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
Distinguished Visitors and Extended Faculty for the 2020-2021 Academic Year
Benjamin Jealous
In 2008, Jealous was chosen as the youngest-ever president and CEO of the NAACP, and in 2013, the Baltimore Sun named him “Marylander of the Year,” honoring his work on marriage equality, death penalty abolition, and DREAM Act advocacy. He was also a partner at Kapor Capital, and previously served as director of the U.S. Human Rights Program at Amnesty International.
Jealous is a graduate of Columbia University and Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar. He has previously taught at the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton University.
Sandra G. Mayson
Sandra G. “Sandy” Mayson teaches Criminal Law, Evidence, and Criminal Justice Reform. She has served as a Research Fellow with the Quattrone Center for the Fair Administration of Justice at Penn and as a Furman Academic Fellow at the New York University School of Law. Mayson’s scholarship explores intersections between criminal law, constitutional law, and legal theory, with a focus on the role of risk assessment and preventive restraint in the criminal justice system. Her scholarship has appeared in the Yale Law Journal, Stanford Law Review, Duke Law Journal, Boston University Law Review, Boston College Law Review, Notre Dame Law Review, Georgia Law Review, and the international journal Criminal Law and Philosophy, among other places.
Before entering academia, Mayson represented indigent clients in criminal proceedings and trained public defenders on the immigration consequences of criminal conviction. After law school she worked as a trial attorney and Equal Justice Works Fellow at Orleans Public Defenders in New Orleans, a legal fellow at the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania, and a judicial clerk for Judge Dolores K. Sloviter L’56 on the U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals and for U.S. District Court Judge L. Felipe Restrepo in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.
Mayson received her BA in comparative literature summa cum laude from Yale University. She earned her law degree magna cum laude from New York University, where she was an articles editor of the New York University Law Review, an Institute for International Law and Justice Scholar, a Florence Allen Scholar, and a member of the Order of the Coif.
Jennifer E. Rothman
She holds the William G. Coskran Chair and is Professor of Law at LMU Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. Rothman is an elected member of the American Law Institute and an adviser on the Restatement of the Law (Third) of Torts: Defamation and Privacy. She is also an affiliated fellow at the Yale Information Society Project at Yale Law School. Rothman joined Loyola after serving on the faculty at the Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. She is the 2019-2020 recipient of the David P. Leonard Faculty Service Award for outstanding teaching and service.
Jim Sandman L’76
Sandman is President Emeritus of the Legal Services Corporation (“LSC”), which he led from 2011 to 2020. LSC is the single largest funder of civil legal aid for low-income Americans in the nation.
Sandman practiced law with the firm of Arnold & Porter LLP for 30 years, including 10 years as the firm’s managing partner. He is also a past president of the 100,000-member District of Columbia Bar and a former general counsel for the District of Columbia Public Schools.
Sandman is currently Chair of the American Bar Association’s Task Force on Legal Issues Arising Out of the 2020 Pandemic. He serves on the Board of Advisors to the Institute for the Advancement of American Legal Services (“IAALS”) and is a member of the American Law Institute. He previously served on the ABA’s Commission on the Future of Legal Services, on the Law School’s Board of Overseers, and as Chair of the Standing Committee on Pro Bono Legal Services of the District of Columbia Circuit Judicial Conference. Sandman has received the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School’s Alumni Award of Merit and its Howard Lesnick Pro Bono Award, as well as the District of Columbia Bar’s highest honor, the Justice William J. Brennan Award.
Sandman is a summa cum laude graduate of Boston College and a cum laude graduate of Penn Carey Law, where he served as Executive Editor of the University of Pennsylvania Law Review and was elected to the Order of the Coif. He began his legal career as a law clerk to Judge Max Rosenn L’32 of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.
Leo Strine L’88
A longtime successful adjunct professor and participant in the Law School’s intellectual life around corporate governance and other topics, Strine will bring his unique expertise and experience in this new role to the discussion around crucial issues facing business and financial law and policy and will work with Law School colleagues to develop new and innovative programming, both in-person and online.
Chief Justice Strine joined the Delaware Court of Chancery as a Vice Chancellor in 1988, later serving as a Chancellor in 2011 and becoming the eighth Chief Justice of the Delaware Supreme Court in 2014. During his decades of service on the bench, he became widely acknowledged as a preeminent expert in corporate law and governance. He has written hundreds of judicial opinions, including the Delaware Supreme Court decision in Rauf v. State, which held Delaware’s death penalty statute to be unconstitutional. He has also authored over 25 articles and book chapters. His most recent work, Development on a Cracked Foundation: How the Incomplete Nature of New Deal Labor Reform Presaged Its Ultimate Decline, was recently published in the Harvard Journal on Legislation.
In conjunction with deepening his relationship with the Law School, Strine holds a joint affiliation with the Ira M. Millstein Center for Global Markets and Corporate Ownership at Columbia Law School, where he is the Ira M. Millstein Distinguished Senior Fellow. Chief Justice Strine is a member of the American Law Institute and currently serves as an advisor on the project to create a restatement of corporate law. He is also Counsel at the New York law firm of Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen, and Katz.
Before joining the bench, Chief Justice Strine served as Counsel and Policy Director to Delaware Governor Thomas R. Carper and practiced corporate litigation with the firm of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom. He clerked for Judge Walter K. Stapleton of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit and Chief Judge John F. Gerry of the U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey.
Miguel Willis
Willis is also the inaugural Presidential Innovation Fellow at Law School Admission Council (“LSAC”), where he oversees the Access to Justice Tech Fellows Program, a fellowship program in which law students spend the summer working on a range of innovative projects and initiatives aimed at improving the civil legal system. Willis, who also focuses on growing professional networks for traditionally underrepresented professionals in both law and technology, was named a “Legal Rebel” by the American Bar Association in 2018 and was recognized as the 2016 National Jurist Law Student of the Year.
While earning his undergraduate degree in political science from Howard University, Willis worked at the Department of Justice. At Seattle University School of Law, he was President of the Black Law Students Association and served on the Board of the National Black Law Students Association. Willis has also worked with the Alaska Court System to help expand access to justice for low-income rural communities and co-developed CaseBooker, a marketplace app that reduces the cost of textbooks for law students.
Other standing faculty hired since 2016
Maggie Blackhawk
Allison Hoffman
David Hoffman
Herb Hovenkamp
Shaun Ossei-Owusu
Elizabeth Pollman
Natasha Sarin
Beth Simmons
