The Law School welcomes experts in voting rights, law and technology, constitutional law, legal ethics, and more.
This fall, the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School welcomes 12 scholars, teachers, and lawyers to our distinguished faculty. They each bring a wealth of scholarly and experiential expertise and embody a range of diverse perspectives and methodologies in their teaching and research.
Standing Faculty
Michael Morse C’13, Assistant Professor of Law
Morse has written extensively about the politics of felony disenfranchisement and the impact of fines and fees. He has also contributed to current debates about voter access and electoral integrity, evaluating voter identification laws, voter list maintenance, and the extent of double voting. Morse’s latest article, forthcoming in the Boston University Law Review, focuses on how states have quietly forged a novel bureaucracy to coordinate voter registration through the Electronic Registration Information Center. Beyond voting rights and election administration, Morse has also studied the election of local prosecutors across the country,
Morse is a proud Penn alumnus. After graduating from the College, he earned a JD from Yale Law and a PhD in political science from Harvard. Morse has served as a law clerk to the Honorable Myron Thompson of the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Alabama and the Honorable Marsha Berzon of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Prior to joining Penn Carey Law, he was a Bigelow Fellow at the University of Chicago Law School.
Senior Fellows & Center Directors
Justin (Gus) Hurwitz, Senior Fellow & CTIC Academic Director
He is Director of Law & Economics Programs at the International Center for Law & Economics (ICLE), a think tank based in Portland, Oregon, where he directs its law and economics-focused research program and helps to translate academic research into applied policy issues.
He also is, or has been, affiliated with the Classical Liberal Institute at New York University School of Law, the National Security Institute at George Mason University, and the American Enterprise Institute (AEI).
He was previously a full professor and founding director of the Governance & Technology Center at the University of Nebraska, prior to which he was the inaugural research fellow at the Center for Technology, Innovation & Competition (CTIC). From 2007 to 2010, he was a trial attorney with the U.S. Department of Justice Antitrust Division in the Telecommunications and Media Enforcement Section.
Before attending law school, Hurwitz worked at Los Alamos National Lab and interned at the Naval Research Lab. During this time his work was recognized by the Federal Laboratory Consortium, Los Alamos National Lab, IEEE & ACM, Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California, R&D Magazine, and even the Guinness Book of World Records.
Norman Powell, Senior Fellow & ILE Executive Director
Powell makes presentations for bar associations, trade groups, and law firms, and publishes in a variety of law journals and other periodicals. He is currently Secretary of the American Bar Association (ABA) Business Law Section and was formerly its Content Officer (2017-2022), a member of its governing Council (2015-2017), and Chair of its Uniform Commercial Code Committee (2012-2015).
An elected member of the American Law Institute (ALI), Powell is a Fellow and former President (2019-2020) of the American College of Commercial Finance Lawyers. He is a member of the Permanent Editorial Board for Uniform Commercial Code, the TriBar Opinion Committee, and The Working Group on Legal Opinions Foundation (Board of Directors (2019-2021); Advisory Board (2017-2019 and 2021-present)).
Powell began practicing law in Delaware in 1989 and is a partner in the firm Young Conaway Stargatt & Taylor, LLP. From 2014 through 2019, he taught secured transactions as an adjunct professor at the Temple University James E. Beasley School of Law. He is admitted to practice in Delaware, New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania.
Clinical Supervisors & Lecturers
Alia Al-Khatib, Clinical Supervisor & Lecturer, Civil Practice Clinic
Al-Khatib joins Penn Carey Law from legal practice dedicated to civil rights, employment law, and advancing justice for marginalized communities. Most recently, she worked as a Senior Associate with Katz Banks Kumin, where she represented individuals who faced employment discrimination or whistleblower retaliation in the workplace.
Al-Khalib is a former staff attorney with Justice at Work in Pennsylvania. She litigated wage theft and employment discrimination cases on behalf of immigrant and low-wage workers and provided bilingual community education about workers’ and immigrants’ rights. She also worked as a law fellow with the Southern Poverty Law Center, where she engaged in litigation and advocacy to advance criminal justice reform and immigrant and racial justice in the South.
Alia graduated Order of the Coif summa cum laude from American University Washington College of Law and earned the Dean’s Award for Professional Responsibility for her work in the Immigrant Justice Clinic. After graduation, she clerked for the Honorable Hilda G. Tagle in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas.
Peter Robau, Clinical Supervisor & Lecturer, Entrepreneurship Legal Clinic
Prior to joining the Pollack Center, Peter was an associate at Kirkland & Ellis LLP where he advised financial institutions on issues arising under the Advisers Act and Investment Company Act, CFTC issues, regulatory compliance, and SEC enforcement, as well as regulatory issues in connection with private equity transactions and fundraising.
Peter maintains a pro bono practice advising on a range of small business and nonprofit issues, and he draws from his practice and research experience to help entrepreneurs realize their ideas.
Visiting Professors of Law
Amna A. Akbar, Visiting Professor of Law
Akbar writes and teaches about the theories and practices of social movements and social change, and policing, race, and inequality.Her academic work has appeared in Yale Law Journal, Stanford Law Review, Harvard Law Review Forum, NYU Law Review, California Law Review, Southern Atlantic Quarterly, Theory and Event, NOMOS, and more. Akbar’s popular essays and op-eds have appeared in the venues like The New York Times, New York Review of Books, Los Angeles Review of Books, Boston Review, The Nation, and Jacobin.
In the 2018-2019 academic year, Akbar was a fellow in the Program in Law and Public Affairs at Princeton University. In 2021, she was honored as a Marguerite E. Casey Foundation Freedom Scholar. In Spring 2023, Akbar served as a Senior Research Scholar at Columbia Law School. During the 2023-2024 academic year, Akbar will also be a visiting professor at Harvard Law School.
Akbar serves on the editorial board of the Law and Political Economy Blog. She is a current or past member of the boards of Ohio Voice, Law for Black Lives, and the Center for Constitutional Rights. She is affiliated with the Department of Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies and Asian American Studies at Ohio State.
Prior to Moritz, Akbar taught at New York University Law School and the City University of New York Law School in their clinical programs. She received her BA from Barnard College, Columbia University, and her JD from the University of Michigan, where she served as editor-in-chief of the Michigan Law Review. After law school, she clerked for the Honorable Gerard E. Lynch in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, and worked as a staff attorney at Queens Legal Service Corp.
Benjamin Brown, Gruss Visiting Professor of Talmudic Civil Law
Brown completed his undergraduate studies in law and philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. After practicing law for a year, he returned to the Hebrew University to study Jewish thought (Mahshevet Yisrael) through the Faculty of Humanities and Jewish law (Mishpat ‘Ivri) through the Faculty of Law.
His dissertation on the Hazon Ish, which integrated legal, theological, and historical analyses, later servedas a basis for his first book, The Hazon Ish: Halakhist, Believer, and Leader of the Haredi Revolution (Jerusalem: Magnes, 2011; Hebrew). Upon completion of his postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University in 2005, he taught Jewish law at Tel Aviv University and Bar-Ilan University. Shortly thereafter, he was appointed a faculty member in the Department of Jewish Thought at his alma mater, the Hebrew University.
While his primary institution is the Hebrew University, Brown also works as a researcher at the Israeli Democracy Institute, where he studies Israeli Haredi Jewry, and teaches a regular course on modern political philosophy at the Kohelet Policy Forum. He was recently named the Samuel L. Haber Chair in Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University.
Among other awards, Brown has received the 2019–2022 Israel Science Foundation (ISF) grant for his work on hasidic modes of interpretation, as well as the 2022–2024Yefroikin Grant of the Jewish National Fund (Keren Kayemet LeIsrael) for his examination of the politics of early Hasidism.
His books include The Lithuanian Musar Movement: Personalities and Ideas (Tel Aviv:Modan, 2014; Hebrew), based on a series of his radio lectures; The Haredim: A Guide to Their Beliefs and Sectors (Tel Aviv and Jerusalem: Am Oved and Israel Democracy Institute, 2017; Hebrew); Thoughts and Ways of Thinking: Source Theory and Its Applications (London: Ubiquity, 2017); “Like a Ship on a Stormy Sea”: The Story of Karlin Hasidism (Jerusalem: Shazar Center, 2018; Hebrew); A Society in Motion: Structures and Processes in Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Jerusalem: Israel Democracy Institute, 2021; Hebrew); and Holiness and Law: Kabbalistic Customs and Sexual Abstinence in Hasidism (forthcoming).
Scott Cummings, Visiting Professor of Law
A recipient of the UCLA Distinguished Teaching Award, Professor Cummings is the founding faculty director of the UCLA Program on Legal Ethics and the Profession, which promotes empirical research and innovative programming on the challenges facing lawyers in the twenty-first century, and a long-time member of the UCLA David J. Epstein Program in Public Interest Law and Policy. In 2021, Cummings was selected as the Fulbright Distinguished Chair at the European University Institute and a fellow at the Stanford Center for the Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences to study the role of lawyers in strengthening the rule of law. He was awarded a 2023 Guggenheim Fellowship to study the role of lawyers in democratic backsliding.
Cummings’s recent books explores how innovative legal mobilization produces transformative social change. He is co-author of the first public interest law textbook, Public Interest Lawyering: A Contemporary Perspective (with Alan Chen) (Wolters Kluwer, 2012), and co-editor of a leading legal profession casebook, Legal Ethics (with Deborah Rhode, David Luban, and Nora Engstrom) (8th ed. Foundation Press, 2016). He is the author of numerous articles on lawyers and social justice, which have appeared in leading law reviews and peer-reviewed journals.
Before joining the UCLA faculty in 2002, Cummings clerked for the Honorable A. Wallace Tashima on the Ninth Circuit, and James Moran on the district court in Chicago. He began his legal career in Los Angeles working with community groups to build economic opportunity and political empowerment. In 1998, he was awarded a Skadden Fellowship to work in the Community Development Project at Public Counsel in Los Angeles, where he provided transactional legal assistance to nonprofit organizations and small businesses engaged in community development efforts. He has proudly continued working with colleagues at Public Counsel to advance economic justice through research and policy advancing, producing groundbreaking reports on the legal barriers to street vending and the need for countywide rent control.
Ingrid Eagly, Visiting Professor of Law
Eagly writes and teaches in the areas of immigration law and criminal law. Her recent scholarship explores topics including the criminalization of migration, the role of public defenders in representing noncitizens, and access to counsel in U.S. immigration courts.
Her scholarship has appeared in leading journals, including Stanford Law Review, Yale Law Journal, University of Pennsylvania Law Review, California Law Review, and Law and Society Review and has been cited by major media outlets. In 2017 Eagly was recognized with UCLA’s Distinguished Teaching Award, the University’s highest teaching honor.
Prior to entering academia, Eagly was a Skadden Fellow at the Legal Assistance Foundation of Chicago, a Soros Justice Fellow at the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles, and a trial attorney for the Federal Public Defender’s Office in Los Angeles.
She is a graduate of Princeton University and Harvard Law School.
Fellows
Laura Ginsberg Abelson, Research Fellow at the Quattrone Center for the Fair Administration of Justice, studies criminal law, criminal procedure, sentencing policy, and evidence.
Her academic work draws on her experiences as an assistant federal public defender in Maryland, where she represented indigent clients in all stages of felony trial proceedings and violations of probation and supervised release.
She received an AB with highest honors from the School of Public and International Affairs (formerly the Woodrow Wilson School) at Princeton University and earned her JD, cum laude, from New York University School of Law.
Kierstan Kaushal-Carter is a Provost’s Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania with an appointment at Penn Carey Law. Her dissertation, “A New Ethical Foundation for Policing,” offers the first wholly normative account of “the police,” what citizens can expect them to do, and how they ought to do it.
Kaushal-Carter earned her PhD in African and African American Studies and her MA in Government from Harvard University. She earned her BA in English and American Culture Studies from Washington University in St. Louis. Her published writings can be found in The St. Louis Anthology (Belt Publishing, 2019), and The New Republic Magazine.
Christopher Muhawe, Postdoctoral Fellow, focuses on justice issues related to privacy in social-technical and digital spaces. He researches ethical approaches to safeguarding privacy and data privacy harms. He currently works under the supervision of Anita L. Allen, Henry R. Silverman Professor of Law and Professor of Philosophy.
Before embarking on his doctoral degree, he taught law at Uganda Christian University School of Law and practiced law at Bitangaro and Company Advocates in Uganda. He previously clerked for Justice Adolphe Udahemuka of the High Court of Rwanda and recently completed his JSD from the College of Law at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, where his dissertation centered on an empirical examination of privacy harms in data violation cases in the United States federal courts between 2000 and 2020.