Mechele Dickerson, an expert in bankruptcy and commercial law who is the Cabell Professor of Law at the College of William & Mary, and Derek Jinks, a rising young star in international law at Arizona State University, have both accepted offers from the University of Texas School of Law, to start in the fall.
Professor Dickerson will join my colleagues Ronald Mann (recruited laterally from Michigan two years ago) and Jay Westbrook to form one of the strongest bankruptcy and commercial law groups in the country. (In addition, UT students reading this will be pleased to know that Professor Dickerson had the strongest teaching evaluations I can ever recall seeing from a lateral candidate, and we have hired some very strong ones over the last decade.)
Professor Jinks, who visited at the University of Chicago Law School last year and recently turned down an offer from Tulane, will, in effect, be replacing my former and esteemed colleague Steven Ratner, who moved to Michigan last year. Jinks will join a large group of faculty at Texas with interests in international law, private and public, including Sarah Cleveland and Karen Engle. (Jinks, by the way, has also been a very popular teacher at his prior places of employment.)
Also visiting next year will be the best youngish public law scholar in any Political Science Department in the United States, Keith Whittington, recently tenured at Princeton University. We will also be joined by two outstanding new assistant professors, Jens Dammann, a German-trained lawyer with a Yale SJD who specializes in corporate law, domestic and comparative, and Emily Kadens, a Chicago JD with a PhD in History from Princeton, who works in legal history, comparative law, and commercial law, among other areas.
Thanks in large part to an extraordinarily good Dean, Bill Powers, Texas has had unparalleled success in lateral recruitment in the last five years ("unparalleled" both in terms of our past history, and in terms of how other public and private schools have done recently at recruiting top faculty from peer and better institutions). During Dean Powers's tenure, for example, we have recruited tenured faculty away from Stanford, NYU, Michigan, Northwestern, George Washington, and BU, among many other places. Of course, anyone who recalls that NYU saw its academic reputation scores in US News decline during a time in the mid-to-late 1990s when its faculty and student body actually improved, will know that all these good developments can not go unpunished by our masters at US News!
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