New Faculty

GW Law Welcomes New Faculty Members

Donald Braman
Associate Professor of Law
BA, Columbia University
PhD, Yale University
JD, Yale University

Braman joins GW Law after serving as the Irving S. Ribicoff Fellow at Yale Law School. His featured writings include Doing Time on the Outside: Incarceration and Family Life in Urban America (University of Michigan Press, 2004) and “Punishment and Accountability,” which appears in UCLA Law Review 2006.

David Fontana
Associate Professor of Law
BA, University of Virginia
JD, Yale University

Fontana’s research focuses are constitutional law, comparative constitutional law, comparative law, administrative law, judicial behavior, and public policy. He joins the GW Law faculty while also completing a doctoral degree in socio-legal studies at Oxford University. Fontana clerked for Judge Dorothy W. Nelson of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit. His articles appear in UCLA Law Review, Georgetown Law Journal, Virginia Law Review, Connecticut Law Review, and Fordham Law Review. Fontana also has written for The New Republic Online, Legal Affairs, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Atlantic Monthly, and the Los Angeles Times. He has advised congressional and presidential campaigns on legal and foreign policy issues, and also has advised governments on the process of constitution-drafting in emerging democracies.

Edward T. Swaine
Associate Professor of Law
BA, Harvard University
JD, Yale University

Before joining the GW Law faculty, Swaine was an associate professor of legal studies and business ethics at the Wharton School and associate professor at the Law School of the University of Pennsylvania. While on leave from Penn Law during the 2005-06 academic year, he served as the counselor on international law at the Department of State. After graduating from law school, where he was the editor-in-chief of the Yale Law Journal, Swaine clerked for the late Judge Alvin B. Rubin of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit. Swaine was also a member of the civil appellate staff at the Department of Justice, and he practiced law at the Brussels office of Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen, and Hamilton, where his work focused on European community law and antitrust. His research interests include public 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, William and Mary Law Review, and Yale Journal of International Law, among others. Swaine has consulted on matters involving antitrust, intellectual property, and international litigation and arbitration.

Visiting Faculty

Shamnad Basheer
Frank H. Marks Visiting Associate Professor of Law and Administrative Fellow
BA, LLB, National Law School of India University
BCL, MPhil, Oxford University

Following his law school career, Basheer joined Anand and Anand, a leading intellectual property law firm in New Delhi, where he worked on a variety of contentious and non-contentious IP matters before heading the firm’s IT and telecommunications law division. While in practice, he was rated as one of the leading technology lawyers in India by IFLR 1000. He completed a bachelor of civil law degree with distinction at Oxford as a Shell Centenary scholar, where his thesis outlining biotechnology and patent law in India was awarded second prize in a writing contest held by the Stanford Technology Law Review. He is currently an associate with the Oxford Intellectual Property Research Centre and is a Wellcome Trust scholar in the doctoral program at Oxford. Basheer’s research interests include patents and developing countries and the interface between patents and antitrust. He has spoken on these themes at various conferences and also published papers in leading technology journals such as the Intellectual Property Quarterly, European Intellectual Property Law Review, and Journal of International Law and Policy. Basheer is writing a book on Indian patent law.

S. Alan Childress
Visiting Professor of Law
BA, University of Alabama
MA, PhD, University of California, Berkeley
JD, Harvard University

Previously a clerk for the late Chief Judge Henry Politz of the U.S. 5th Circuit, Childress also practiced with Brobeck, Phleger & Harrison in San Francisco. He did graduate work in jurisprudence and social policy at Berkeley while teaching law part-time at Golden Gate University, before joining the Tulane faculty in 1988. His dissertation analyzed the roles of judges and juries in constitutional adjudication. Childress has published articles on appeals, jurisdiction, and the First Amendment, and is co-author of the treatise Federal Standards of Review (3rd ed., 1999), which has been cited by more than 200 courts, including the Supreme Court. Childress teaches evidence, professional responsibility, comparative legal professions, and torts.

Martha M. Ertman
Visiting Professor of Law
BA, Wellesley College
JD, Northwestern University

Before entering academia, Ertman clerked for the Hon. Peter H. Beer, a U.S. judge for the Eastern District of Louisiana, and practiced law in Denver and Seattle. She joined the faculty of the University of Utah Law School in 2002 and taught contracts and commercial law, as well as a seminar on commodification theory. Her writing bridges contracts and intimate affiliation, suggesting ways that commercial models can improve family law as well as feminist and gay/lesbian legal theory. Ertman published Rethinking Commodification: Cases and Readings in Law and Culture (NYU Press, 2005). Ertman is writing articles that explore feminist perspectives on contract law and contractual perspectives on polygamy. Prior to joining the Utah Law faculty, she was an associate professor at the University of Denver, and she also has been a visiting professor at the Universities of Michigan, Connecticut, and Oregon.

Richard D. Freer
Visiting Professor of Law
BA, University of California, San Diego
JD, University of California, Los Angeles

Freer is the Robert Howell Hall Professor of Law at Emory University. He taught courses on civil procedure, business associations, and complex litigation. Freer is co-author of casebooks in civil procedure and business associations as well as a text in federal courts. He also is the author of a single-volume treatise, Introduction to Civil Procedure (Aspen, 2006), and he is a contributor to two volumes of Moore’s Federal Practice and three volumes of Wright & Miller’s Federal Practice and Procedure. Freer was elected to membership in the American Law Institute in 1988 and served as an adviser to the ALI’s Federal Judicial Code Revision Project. Before joining the faculty at Emory, he practiced litigation with Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher in Los Angeles. Prior to that, Freer clerked for two federal judges, the late Edward J. Schwartz and the late Clement F. Haynsworth.

Susan R. Martyn
Visiting Professor of Law
BA, St. Olaf College
JD, Marquette University

At the University of Toledo College of Law, Martyn is the Stoepler Professor of Law and Values. She is also the adjunct professor of law and medical humanities at the University of Toledo College of Medicine. Prior to joining the UT faculty, Martyn was an assistant dean and associate professor at Wayne State University Law School. A national authority on issues of legal ethics, she was an adviser to the American Law Institute’s Restatement (Third) of the Law Governing Lawyers from 1987 until its publication in 2000, and she served on the American Bar Association’s Ethics 2000 Commission from 1997 through 2002. Since then, she has contributed as a member of the Ohio Supreme Court’s Task Force on the Rules of Professional Conduct, which recently finished its revision of Ohio’s professional code. She is a frequent speaker on issues of legal ethics, and serves as co-chair of the ALI-ABA’s annual Legal Ethics Update. Her most recent publications include four books about legal ethics that are intended for a wide variety of readers, including clients, law students, and practicing attorneys.

Michael Meyerson
Visiting Professor of Law
BS, Hampshire College
JD, University of Pennsylvania

Meyerson has been a professor of law and Piper & Marbury Faculty Fellow at the University of Baltimore School of Law since 1985. He also taught at Brooklyn Law School and New York Law School. His teaching and scholarship interests include constitutional law, contracts, American legal history, and communications law. Meyerson’s most recent book is Political Numeracy: Mathematical Perspectives on Our Chaotic Constitution (W.W. Norton, 2002). He is writing a book titled Liberty’s Blueprint: How Madison and Hamilton Wrote the Federalist, Defined the Constitution, and Made Democracy Safe for the World (Basic Books, 2007). He also has published numerous articles on constitutional law and contracts law, some of which have appeared in the Stanford Journal of International Law, Constitutional Commentary, Miami Law Review, Indiana Law Review, Georgia Law Review, Washington and Lee Law Review, Nebraska Law Review, Notre Dame Law Review, and Harvard Journal of Law and Technology.

Paula A. Monopoli
Visiting Professor of Law
BA, Yale University
JD, University of Virginia

Recognized as an innovative scholar in the field of inheritance law, Monopoli also has published in the area of ethics and fiduciary duty. She is a law professor at the University of Maryland School of Law and the founding director of its Women, Leadership & Equality Program. Her most recent publications include the forthcoming “Gender and Constitutional Design” in the Yale Law Journal and “Drafting Attorneys as Fiduciaries: Fashioning an Optimal Ethical Rule for Conflicts of Interest” in the University of Pittsburgh Law Review. Monopoli also is author of the book, American Probate: Protecting the Public, Improving the Process (Northeastern University Press, 2003). She speaks often on these topics, most recently as a panelist at a Yale Law School symposium on executive power. She is an elected member of the American Law Institute and she sits on the ALI’s Consultative Committees for the Restatement Third of Property (Donative Transfers) and the Restatement Third of Trusts. Monopoli was the 2004 Outstanding Professor of the Year at Maryland, and she is frequently consulted by national publications for her expertise in inheritance law.

Visiting Faculty for Fall 2006

Leslie Griffin
Visiting Professor of Law
BA, University of Notre Dame
MA, MPhil, PhD, Yale University
JD, Stanford Law School

Griffin is the inaugural holder of the Larry and Joanne Doherty Chair in Legal Ethics at the University of Houston Law Center, where she teaches constitutional law and torts as well as legal ethics. She wrote the forthcoming Law and Religion: Cases and Materials (Foundation, Press 2007), which combines her academic interests in law and religion. Griffin holds a PhD in Religious Studies from Yale University. She has been a visiting professor at the University of Alabama School of Law, University of Utah College of Law, and Georgetown University Law Center, and she has held research fellowships at the Harvard University Program in Ethics and the Professions and the Emory University School of Law Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Religion. Prior to joining the UH faculty, Griffin clerked for the Hon. Mary M. Schroeder of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, and she was an assistant counsel in the Department of Justice’s Office of Professional Responsibility, which investigates professional misconduct by federal prosecutors. Griffin was elected to the American Law Institute in 2002.

Adam J. Hirsch
Visiting Professor of Law
BA, Vassar College
MA, JD, MPhil, PhD, Yale University

A leading authority on wills and trusts, Hirsch is the William and Catherine VanDercreek Professor of Law at Florida State University. He has served as the Roger Traynor Fellow at Hastings College of Law, as well, and he is an academic fellow of the American College of Trust and Estate Counsel. Hirsch holds a PhD in history from Yale University, where his doctoral dissertation received the George Washington Egleston Prize for the best dissertation in American history. He expanded this work into a book, The Rise of the Penitentiary: Prisons and Punishment in Early America (Yale University Press, 1992).

Laird Kirkpatrick
Visiting Professor of Law
BA, Harvard University
JD, University of Oregon

Kirkpatrick is the former Philip H. Knight Dean and Hollis Professor of Legal Procedure at the University of Oregon. During his distinguished career, he has served as counsel to the assistant attorney general, criminal division at the Department of Justice; commissioner ex officio, U.S. Sentencing Commission; and an assistant U.S. attorney. Kirkpatrick also has served as a visiting professor at the University of London, University of Adelaide, University of Sydney, Suffolk University, and University of California, Hastings College of Law. He is the co-author of a leading law school coursebook on evidence, as well as a five-volume treatise on the Federal Rules of Evidence. He is a life member of the American Law Institute and former chair of the Evidence Section of the American Association of Law Schools. He has received the University of Oregon’s Ersted Award for Distinguished Teaching.

Visiting Faculty for Spring 2007

Christopher A. Bracey
Visiting Associate Professor of Law
BS, University of North Carolina
JD, Harvard University

An expert in the fields of American race relations and criminal procedure, Bracey teaches and conducts research in the areas of the legal history of U.S. race relations law, constitutional law, criminal procedure, civil procedure, and civil rights. He is an associate professor of law and associate professor of African and African American studies at Washington University. Bracey served as a supervising editor of the Harvard Law Review, a general editor of the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review, and an editor on the Harvard Blackletter Law Journal. He clerked for the Hon. Royce C. Lamberth of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia and then joined the Washington office of Jenner & Block, where he litigated a variety of civil and criminal matters. Bracey joined the Washington University faculty in 2001 upon completion of a two-year visit as an assistant professor at Northwestern University School of Law. He has written extensively on various topics in American race relations, and his articles have appeared in a number of leading law reviews, including Northwestern Law Review, University of Southern California Law Review, University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law, and Alabama Law Review.

Neal Devins
Visiting Professor of Law
BA, Georgetown University
JD, Vanderbilt University

Devins is the Goodrich Professor of Law, professor of government, and director of the Institute of Bill of Rights Law at the William & Mary Marshall-Wythe School of Law, where he joined the faculty in 1987. He has served as assistant general counsel for the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and project director for the Vanderbilt Institute for Public Policy Studies. Devins is the author of Shaping Constitutional Values: The Supreme Court, Elected Government and the Abortion Dispute, and articles in the Columbia, Stanford, Michigan, California, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia, George Washington, and William and Mary law reviews. He is co-author of Political Dynamics of Constitutional Law (4th ed.) and The Democratic Constitution. He is co-editor of Congress and the Constitution, Redefining Equality and A Year at the Supreme Court. Devin is a consultant to the ABA Central and Eastern European Law Initiative and reporter for the Congressional Process Committee of the ABA. He also serves on the board of directors of AVALON, a shelter for female victims of violence.

Bruce P. Smith
Visiting Professor of Law
BA, Williams College
MA, University of Cambridge
JD, PhD, Yale University

As a member of the faculty of the University of Illinois College of Law, Smith serves as co-director of the Illinois Legal History Program and faculty editor of the Journal of Law, Technology & Policy. Before joining the faculty at Illinois in 2001, he practiced at Covington & Burling in Washington, primarily in the fields of IP litigation and sports law. His research and teaching interests include IP, internet law, legal history, and property. He has taught courses in intellectual property at the University of Oxford and the University of Victoria.