The George Washington University Law School is pleased to announce that the following members of the faculty have been named to endowed chairs and research professorships.
"It gives me pleasure to announce the individuals who will assume several new or open chairs and research professorships.," said Dean Blake D. Morant. "We are deeply grateful to the generous donors who made these endowments possible and to the panel of distinguished chairs from law schools across the country who consulted with us on these selections."
Chairs
Michael Abramowicz
Oppenheim Professor of Law
Professor Abramowicz's scholarship focuses on law and economics, with special emphasis on the economics of litigation and the economics of patent law. In recent years, he has written a number of articles on cryptocurrencies, describing how governance can be decentralized on the blockchain. Currently, he is working on a project using machine learning to model litigation, adapting algorithms that have been used to play poker. His work has been published in the Harvard Law Review, the Stanford Law Review, the University of Chicago Law Review, the Yale Law Journal, and many other journals, and he is the author of Predictocracy, published with the Yale University Press.
Lisa M. Fairfax
Alexander Hamilton Professor of Business Law
Professor Fairfax's scholarly interests include corporate governance, fiduciary obligations, board diversity, shareholder activism, affinity fraud, and securities fraud. Her recent scholarship has appeared or is forthcoming in the Virginia Law Review, Minnesota Law Review, Boston University Law Review, Washington and Lee Law Review, Journal of Law and Contemporary Problems, and the Iowa Law Review. She is the author of Shareholder Democracy: A Primer on Shareholder Activism and Participation, and her new textbook, Business Organizations: An Integrated Approach, will be published by Foundation Press in 2019. She has presented her scholarship at Harvard, Cornell, Yale, Georgetown, Texas, Michigan, Illinois, Vanderbilt, UCLA, Notre Dame, and the University of Chicago. Professor Fairfax, who is the Founding Director of the Corporate Governance Initiative, is a member of the Investor Advisory Committee of the Securities and Exchange Commission, and was recently appointed by the American Law Institute Council to serve as an advisor for the Restatement of Law, Corporate Governance. Professor Fairfax has served on the American Bar Association Committee on Corporate Laws, as Chair of the AALS Section on Securities Regulation, and as Chair of the AALS Section on Business Associations, which bestowed upon her the "Outstanding Mentor Award" in 2018. In 2016, the Minority Group Section of the AALS awarded Professor Fairfax the “Trailblazer Award” in recognition of her teaching and scholarly contributions to the profession. In 2019, GW Law students voted to honor Professor Fairfax with the Distinguished Faculty Service Award.
Cynthia Lee
Edward F. Howrey Professor of Law
Professor Lee’s scholarship has examined the relationship between race, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, and criminal law. She is the author of a monograph, Murder and the Reasonable Man: Passion and Fear in the Criminal Courtroom (NYU Press); two casebooks published by West, Criminal Law: Cases and Materials (with Angela Harris) and Criminal Procedure: Cases and Materials (with L. Song Richardson & Tamara Lawson); and an anthology on the Fourth Amendment, Searches and Seizures: The Fourth Amendment, Its Constitutional History and the Contemporary Debate, published by Prometheus Books. Her law review articles include Making Race Salient: Trayvon Martin and Implicit Bias in a Not Yet Post-Racial Society (featured in Getting Scholarship Into Court, 38 The Champion 61 (September 2014)); Race and Self-Defense: Toward a Normative Conception of Reasonableness; The Gay Panic Defense; The Trans Panic Defense: Masculinity, Heteronormativity, and the Murder of Transgender Women; A New Approach to Voir Dire into Racial Bias (cited by Justice Samuel Alito, dissenting in Pena-Rodriguez v. Colorado, 580 U.S. ___ (2017)); and Race, Policing, and Lethal Force: Remedying Shooter Bias with Martial Arts Training. Model legislation proposed in her 2018 law review article, Reforming the Law on Police Use of Deadly Force, published in the University of Illinois Law Review, was the basis for a police accountability bill proposed in 2019 by Delegate Alonzo Washington (MD). She served as Chair of the AALS Criminal Justice Section in 2008 and is currently serving as Chair of the Teaching Committee at GW Law.
Research Professorships
Francesca Bignami
LeRoy Sorenson Merrifield Research Professor
Professor Bignami’s research focuses on comparative administrative and privacy law, as well as EU law. Her articles have appeared in the American Journal of Comparative Law, Law and Contemporary Problems, the Michigan Journal of International Law, the Columbia Journal of European Law, and the Harvard International Law Journal. She has presented her research before the European Parliament, the European Data Protection Supervisor, and the Federal Trade Commission, among other venues. She is an elected member of the International Academy of Comparative Law, and she is an active member of the American Society of Comparative Law, currently serving on the editorial board of the American Journal of Comparative Law. She is co-editor of the book Comparative Law and Regulation: Understanding the Global Regulatory Process (Edward Elgar, 2016) and editor of the volume EU Law in Populist Times: Crises and Prospects (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2019).
Roger A. Fairfax, Jr.
Patricia Roberts Harris Research Professor
Professor Fairfax’s scholarship focuses on criminal law policy and the role of discretion in the criminal process, with a particular emphasis on the roles of grand juries and prosecutors. His scholarship has appeared or is forthcoming in the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review, William & Mary Law Review, Yale Law Journal, Georgetown Journal of Legal Ethics, Iowa Law Review, University of Chicago Legal Forum, Cornell Law Review, Fordham Law Review, UC Davis Law Review, and the Minnesota Law Review, in book chapters in the Oxford Handbook on Prosecutors and Prosecution, Bridging the Gap: Scholarship and Criminal Justice Reform, and Policing the Black Man: Arrest, Prosecution, and Imprisonment, and in his Foundation Press textbook, Adjudicatory Criminal Procedure: Cases, Statutes, and Materials. An elected member of the American Law Institute and fellow of the American Bar Foundation, Professor Fairfax was recently invited to participate in the Yale-Columbia-Stanford Criminal Justice Roundtable, and was appointed by Chief Justice Roberts to the prestigious Judicial Conference Advisory Committee on Criminal Rules. He founded the Criminal Law Initiative, served as Associate Dean for Public Engagement from 2014 to 2015, and has served as the Jeffrey and Martha Kohn Senior Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and Research Professor since 2015. He will assume the Patricia Roberts Harris Research Professorship when he vacates the Kohn Research Professorship.
David Fontana
Samuel Tyler Research Professor
Professor Fontana's scholarship focuses on constitutional law and comparative constitutional law. He focuses on several themes, including on the constitutional dimensions of geographical concentrations of power, the implications of public opinion for constitutional issues, and the constitutional treatment of pregnancy. He is the author or co-author of papers on constitutional or comparative constitutional law that have been published by leading scholarly journals in law and political science, including, for instance, recent articles in the Columbia Law Review, Virginia Law Review, UCLA Law Review, and the University of Chicago Law Review. Professor Fontana also writes about constitutional issues for a number of general interest publications, including, most frequently, The Washington Post. He consults with Congress, presidential campaigns, and foreign constitution-drafters on issues of constitutional law. He also works on cases and statutes considering many of the ideas articulated in his scholarship.
Todd D. Peterson
Carville Dickinson Benson Research Professor
Professor Todd Peterson’s diverse scholarly interests include separation of powers law, with articles in the Duke Journal of Constitutional Law and Public Policy and the University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law; personal jurisdiction law, with articles in the Washington & Lee Law Review and the George Washington University Law Review; and law student well-being and professional development, with articles in the Notre Dame Journal of Law, Ethics and Public Policy, the University of Arkansas, Little Rock Law Review, and the Yale Journal of Health Policy, Law & Ethics. Professor Peterson is also the Co-Director of the GW Law Inns of Court and Foundations of Practice Programs, which received the American Bar Association’s E. Smythe Gambrell Award for Professionalism in summer 2018.
Edward T. Swaine
Charles Kennedy Poe Research Professor
Professor Swaine teaches and writes in the areas of international law, foreign relations law, and international antitrust. He has published work in the American Journal of International Law, Columbia Law Review, Duke Law Journal, Harvard International Law Journal, Stanford Law Review, University of Pennsylvania Law Review, Virginia Journal of International Law, and Yale Journal of International Law, among others, and has contributed to a number of edited volumes—including the forthcoming revision of The Oxford Guide to Treaties. He is the co-author of U.S. Foreign Relations Law: Cases, Materials and Simulations. He is a longstanding member of the Advisory Committee on Public International Law for the U.S. State Department, and has served as a reporter for the American Law Institute’s Restatement of the Law (Fourth), Foreign Relations Law of the United States.