Overview

Stanford Law School's faculty continues to engage in scholarly work that is both important and relevant. From their pioneering research on vexing constitutional and intellectual property issues to their historical inquiries that upend conventional wisdom, our faculty members continue to push legal frontiers and influence policymakers and leaders throughout the world. Equally notable is how much of the work is located at the intersection of different disciplines political science, sociology, computer science, education, and neuroscience, to name only a few-advancing the law school's commitment to exploring multidisciplinary approaches to complex legal problems. A full listing of this scholarship can be found on individual faculty bio pages from the Faculty Directory. Here, we offer a mere glimpse into their many endeavors.

Faculty Highlights

Alison D. Morantz – Do Unions Make A Difference?

Alison D. Morantz has an orange hardhat and a block of bituminous coal in her office—keepsakes from visits she made to a gold mine and a coal mine several years ago. "I found it interesting," she says, responding to a question about whether she was scared. The underground worlds were, she recalls, like underground cities—dark labyrinths of tunnels and off–shoots, extending for miles, hundreds of feet below the earth's surface.  Read more »

Ralph Richard Banks – Is Marriage For White People?

Should black women be held hostage to the failings of black men? That’s the provocative question at the heart of a new book by Ralph Richard Banks (BA '87, MA '87), the Jackson Eli Reynolds Professor of Law. His book–Is Marriage for White People?: How the African American Marriage Decline Affects Everyone–has attracted attention from an extraordinary range of media outlets, including The Wall Street Journal and ESSENCE magazine, each publishing exclusive essays or excerpts just prior to the book's release.  Read more »

Jenny S. Martinez – The Slave Trade and the Origins of International Human Rights Law

Jenny S. Martinez, Professor of Law and Justin M. Roach, Jr. Faculty Scholar, shares an exerpt from her forthcoming book on slavery and the evolution of International Human Rights Law: "In the year 1800, slavery was normal. European countries used international law to authorize and justify the ownership of human beings. In the first decade of the nineteenth century, an estimated 609,000 slaves arrived in the New World. Within a relatively short time span, however, things began to change."
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Stanford Law Welcomes Four New Faculty Members

Find out more about the new faculty members at Stanford Law by clicking on their names.

• George G. Triantis »
• Dan Reicher »
• James Cavallaro »
• Robert W. Gordon »

Mark G. Kelman Views Heuristic Reasoning Through the Legal Lens

New York City's Special Services for Children was in the midst of a severe financial crisis in 1976, with shrinking resources and rising need. Mark Kelman, fresh out of law school, was the director of criminal justice projects for the Fund for the City of New York.  Read more »

Barbara Babcock and Clara Foltz: First Women

Barbara Babcock feels very close to Clara Foltz, though the two have never met. Foltz was famous in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century as a jury lawyer, public intellectual, leader of the women's movement, inventor of the role of public defender, and legal reformer.  Read more »

Deborah L. Rhode Tackles the Beauty Bias

Uncomfortable shoes trouble Deborah Rhode. And not only because they hurt. She's concerned that ninety years after women got the vote and almost five decades after The Feminine Mystique was published—in a time dubbed "post-feminist" when women are now in the majority at universities and in the workforce (if not the boardroom)—there is a surgery specifically designed to sculpt a woman's foot so that it fits into pointed shoes.  Read more »

Linking Internet Architecture to Innovation

Barbara van Schewick's recently published book Internet Architecture and Innovation is a modern-day Christmas Carol, with the ghost of the Internet past meeting a present and future much constrained by tinkering. Written for a broad, interdisciplinary audience, this is not an overly technical text.  Read more »

Gould paper suggests revision of proposed labor reform legislation

The financial crisis and meltdown of 2008 and beyond poses the greatest economic challenge to the United States and the world economy since the Great Depression of the 1930s. The distress experienced by workers generally, and in the automobile industry in particular, has dramatized anew the widespread public hostility toward organized labor and some of its hard-fought gains.  Read more »

Sykes Paper Sheds Light on Transnational Forum Shopping

Plaintiffs regularly bring cases in U.S. courts seeking damages for harms that have occurred abroad, attracted by higher expected returns than are available in the jurisdiction in which the harm arose. This paper focuses on the potential distortion of trade and investment patterns that can result from implicit discrimination in the applicability of liability rules to producers or investors of different nationalities due to such forum shopping.  Read more »

Four SLS Faculty Awarded 'Innovation in International Studies' Grants

Professors Thomas C. Heller, Jenny S. Martinez, Joshua Cohen and Lecturer in Law Erik Jensen are being awarded money from the Share program designed to foster innovation in international research at Stanford. It has awarded $1 million in grants to research teams headed by faculty members. These grants are from Stanford's Presidential Fund for Innovation in International Studies.  Read more »