Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar spent much of his childhood in the Texas Rio Grande Valley and then in California’s Imperial Valley on the U.S.-Mexico border. It was during this time, he says, that he first observed the power of law and the importance of public policy. “The government had the power to [...]
Nora Freeman Engstrom on the Contingency Fee Cost Paradox
The spark for Nora Freeman Engstrom’s interest in “settlement mills” came at an unexpected moment while she was watching the 2004 World Series. One law firm ad stood out because it ran over and over again—with the lawyer in the ad enthusiastically encouraging clients to bring their cases to his [...]
David Freeman Engstrom on Qui tam
Qui tam—It’s not a term that many people can confidently pronounce, let alone define. But if Associate Professor David Freeman Engstrom, JD ’02, has his way, the qui tam lawsuit, which has enjoyed a recent renaissance, will soon be a serious topic of academic and policy debate. Engstrom has undertaken [...]
Pamela S. Karlan and the Law of Democracy
“We took a bunch of areas of law that people had thought of as separate silos. We showed that there are important relationships between them and that you can gain a vantage point to critically view one from looking at another; there’s an ecosystem. There are political scientists, sociologists, historians, computer scientists, and people who study the actual physical process of voting, ballot design, and voting machines. Campaign finance and political structure. Super PACs. It’s all part of our democracy.”
The Death Penalty in the Hot Seat
John J. Donohue III, C. Wendell and Edith M. Carlsmith Professor of Law, has brought his economic expertise and empirical techniques to bear on a number of cutting-edge social issues. In stark contrast to many legal academics, whose work deals largely with the historical or theoretical, Donohue is renowned for [...]
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. But her story was [...]









