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About the Legal Studies Faculty

The faculty of the Legal Studies Program come from a wide variety of disciplines. Except for the Associate Director, all faculty have a primary affiliation with a tenure granting unit such as Law, History, Political Science, or Sociology.

The Core Faculty teach a combination of disciplinary courses with a law focus and courses specifically designed to be interdisciplinary. Their teaching includes the gateway courses in the new Legal Studies curriculum (Legal Studies 131 and 217) and the Legal Studies capstone course (Legal Studies 641). The Core Faculty also has primary responsibility for overseeing the development and implementation of legal studies curriculum.

In addition to the Core Faculty, a number of Associated Faculty, teach a variety of disciplinary courses that have a law or legal institution focus.



Core Faculty

Donald R. Davis, Jr.
Donald Downs
Robert E. Drechsel
Howard S. Erlanger
Kathryn Hendley
Alexandra Huneeus
Irene B. Katele
Howard Schweber
Mitra Sharafi
Karl Shoemaker



Associated Faculty

Leonard Kaplan, Law
Larry Nesper, Anthropology and American Indian Studies
Asifa Quraishi, Law
Alan Weisbard, Law, Medical Ethics and Jewish Studies



Donald A. Davis, Jr.
drdavis@wisc.edu

1244 Van Hise Hall
(608) 890-0138

Donald R. Davis, Jr. is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Languages & Cultures of Asia. He hold a PhD in Asian Languages & Cultures from the University of Texas at Austin. His research focuses on law and religion in India, especially in the classical and medieval periods, and on comparative religious law. He was a Fellow at the UW Institute for Research in the Humanities in 2007 and also received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities during 2007-08, during which time he completed a book entitled The Spirit of Hindu Law (New York: Cambridge UP, forthcoming 2009). Currently, he is co-editing (with Timothy Lubin and Jayanth Krishnan) Hinduism and Law: An Introduction (also Cambridge UP). Other recent publications include: "Before Virtue: Halakhah, Dharmasastra, and What Law Can Create," Law & Contemporary Problems 71:2 (2008): 99-108; "Law," In Studying Hinduism: Key Concepts and Methods. Eds. Sushil Mittal and Gene Thursby. New York: Routledge, 218-229; "Maxims and Precedent in Classical Hindu Law," Indologica Taurinensia 33 (2007): 33-56; "Hinduism as a Legal Tradition." Journal of the American Academy of Religion 75:2 (2007): 241-267; "A Realist View of Hindu Law." Ratio Juris: An International Journal of Jurisprudence and Philosophy of Law 19:3 (2006): 287-313.



Donald Downs
dadowns@wisc.edu
306 North Hall
263-2295

Donald Downs is a Professor of Political Science, Law, and Journalism. His primary interests are constitutional law and civil liberty; criminal law and justice; law and society broadly defined; political theory and jurisprudence; and legal, normative, and political issues in higher education. Downs has taught a wide variety of courses related to law and politics. He has published four books, two of which have won national awards: Nazis in Skokie: Freedom, Community and the First Amendment; The New Politics of Pornography; More than Victims: Battered Women, the Syndrome Society, and the Law; and Cornell `69: Liberalism and the Crisis of the American University. He is currently finishing a book on the politics and law of civil liberty struggles on campus, an area in which he has also been active.

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Robert E. Drechsel
drechsel@wisc.edu
5115 Vilas Communications Hall
263-3394

Robert Drechsel is Professor Journalism and Mass Communication and Professor of Law. He holds a Ph.D. in mass communication from the University of Minnesota, and has been a member of the Wisconsin faculty since 1983. He served as director of the Journalism School from 1991 to 1998. In 1999-2000, he served as director of the behavioral science and law major and as director of the criminal justice certificate program. Drechsel teaches courses including Journ. 559 (Law of Mass Communication); Journ 675, Topics in Government and Mass Media; and two graduate seminars in mass communication law and policy. His research has focused on tort law and constitutional law affecting mass communication, and on reporter-source interaction in state trial courts. Most recently, the former has focused on the relationship between law and ethics, and law and professionalism. Drechsel is the author of one book, News Making in the Trial Courts, and articles in a variety of legal and communication journals.

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Howard S. Erlanger
erlanger@ssc.wisc.edu
9109 Law Building
263-7405

Howard S. Erlanger currently serves as the Director of the Legal Studies Program and the Criminal Justice Certificate Program. A member of the UW faculty since 1971, he is Voss-Bascom Professor of Law, Professor of Sociology, and Director of the Institute for Legal Studies. He holds a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California at Berkeley, and a J.D. from the University of Wisconsin.. Professor Erlanger is the recipient of a number of awards for his teaching and research, including the Steiger and Underkofler awards from the University for excellence in teaching, and is a past-President of the Law and Society Association. Since 1982 Professor Erlanger has been Review Section Editor of Law and Social Inquiry, where he has solicited and edited over 400 article-length essays representing the great diversity of views in socio-legal studies. His own socio-legal research has primarily focused on the legal profession -- especially on the careers of lawyers in public interest practice and the socialization of law students -- and on topics related to dispute resolution and to law and organizations.




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Kathryn Hendley
khendley@wisc.edu
Law Building, 975 Bascom Mall
263-5135

Professor Hendley's research focuses on legal and economic reform in the former Soviet Union. She is currently engaged in an inter-disciplinary project aimed at understanding how business is conducted in Russia and the role of law in business transactions and corporate governance. This project has been funded by the World Bank, the National Science Foundation, and the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research. She teaches Contracts, as well as courses related to her interest in Russia, such as Russian Law, International Business Transactions, Comparative Law, and Transitions to the Market. She has served as a consultant to the U.S. Agency for International Development and the World Bank in their work on legal reform in Russia. Professor Hendley is currently the Director of the Center for Russia, East Europe and Central Asia, which receives Title VI funding from the
U.S. Department of Education.

Professor Hendley's web site can be found at http://www.polisci.wisc.edu/users/hendley

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Alexandra Huneeus
huneeus@wisc.edu

Alexandra Huneeus studies the judicialization of politics, the politics of human rights, and legal culture in Latin America. Her Ph.D. dissertation centered on the Chilean judiciary’s changing attitude towards cases of Pinochet-era human rights violations. She teaches sociology of law, human rights, Latin American legal institutions, and international law.

Before joining the UW faculty in 2007, Professor Huneeus was a fellow at Stanford University’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law. She received her Ph.D. from U.C. Berkeley (2006), and her J.D. from Boalt Hall, the Berkeley Law School (2001). As a human rights fellow at the International Human Rights Clinic at Boalt Hall in 2004, she supervised students bringing a case before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. The successful challenge resulted in a ruling ordering the Dominican Republic to alter its citizenship policies and practices. She also worked on the case against Augusto Pinochet in Chile and Spain, through the Center for Justice and Accountability in San Francisco.

Prior to her turn to law, Professor Huneeus worked as an editor and journalist in Santiago, Chile, her native city, and in San Francisco, her home town.

If there were more days in the week, she would spend them dancing (modern/jazz), writing, reading novels, and with her family.


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Irene B. Katele
ikatele@ssc.wisc.edu
8137 Social Science Building
262-2083

Irene B. Katele is Associate Director of the Legal Studies Program. She earned a JD at the University of Wisconsin Law School, a PhD and AM in History from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and a BA in History from Northwestern University. Katele taught history for four years, first at The Ohio State University and then at the University of South Carolina. As an historian, her area of expertise was piracy, and she studied its impact on Venice during the Crusades. While in law school, Katele served as Editor-in-Chief of the Wisconsin Law Review, was a member of the Moot Court Board, and worked as a judicial intern to Judge John L. Coffey of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. She also received the Abner Brodie Award for Outstanding Contribution to Life at the Law School. After law school, she clerked for Justice David Prosser, Jr. of the Wisconsin Supreme Court and then was an associate in the estate planning practice area at the Madison office of Michael Best & Friedrich LLP. Katele is licensed to practice law in Wisconsin.

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Howard Schweber
schweber@polisci.wisc.edu

Howard Schweber joined the University of Wisconsin-Madison in Fall 1999. He received his PhD in Government from Cornell University in 1999 and an MA in History from the University of Chicago after spending five years practicing law. He teaches courses focusing on constitutional law and legal and political theory. He is the author of Speech, Conduct and the First Amendment (Peter Lang Press, 2003), The Creation of American Common Law, 1850-1880: Technology, Politics, and the Construction of Citizenship (Cambridge 2004), and The Language of Liberal Constitutionalism (Cambridge 2007), as well as articles, essays, and book chapters on a variety of related topics. His current areas of research include comparative analyses of different constitutional systems and the construction of "public" and "private" as categories of legal and political discourse. He is a member of the Board of Directors of the Wisconsin Center for the Study of Liberal Democracy and in the past has been actively involved with the Center for Civic Education's We the People program. In addition, Schweber was the coach of the UW-Madison's College Mock Trial Team from 1999-2002, but has retired, according to a spokesman, "to spend more time with his family." Profesoor Schweber is regularly featured on Wisconsin Public Radio programs and gives frequent newspaper and television interviews. In 2004 he was the recipient of the William H. Kiekhoffer Award for Distinguished Teaching. He has also twice been selected as the Pi Sigma Alpha Professor of the year, and received the Stephen and Marjorie Russell Award for Outstanding Teaching at Cornell University.


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Mitra Sharafi
sharafi@wisc.edu

Mitra Sharafi joined the Legal Studies Program and UW Law School in Fall 2007. She holds two law degrees and a doctorate in history. Her PhD dissertation is a study of law and identity in the Parsi or Indian Zoroastrian community of colonial India and Burma, and was awarded the 2007 South Asia Council’s Dissertation Prize.

Having grown up in Canada with an Iranian father and American mother, Sharafi’s personal interest in comparative cultures led her to India, where the personal law system combines the common law with the religious legal traditions of Hindu, Muslim, and other communities. Sharafi first travelled to India during law school on the fiftieth anniversary of Indian independence in 1997. She has returned many times since, particularly for archival research at the Bombay High Court in Mumbai. In 2006-7, she spent six months in India, during which time her work also took her to Pakistan and Myanmar (formerly Burma).

Sharafi’s research interests include the legal history of marriage, divorce, and trusts in colonial South Asia; Parsi and Zoroastrian studies; legal pluralism; and the history of the legal profession in the British Empire. She is an organizer of the Law and Society Association’s International Research Collaborative on South Asian Colonial Legal History. Sharafi joins UW following a two-year research fellowship at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge University and a brief visiting fellowship at Griffith University’s Socio-Legal Research Center in Australia.


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Karl Shoemaker
kbshoemaker@wisc.edu
4046 Humanities
263-1830

Karl Shoemaker is Assistant Professor of History and Law. He holds a PhD in Jurisprudence and Social Policy from the University of California, Berkeley, and
a JD from Cumberland School of Law. He is a legal historian, with particular focus on pre-modern legal traditions. His research and teaching interests include the history of criminal law and punishment, and historical and philosophical approaches to the institutions of modern criminal justice. He is currently an Associate Editor
of the Journal of Law Culture and the Humanities. In 2006-07, Professor Shoemaker was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. He has also held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the North American Conference on British Studies. He is currently working on the history of the right to sanctuary as well as a set of medieval texts which imagined the devil as a litigant. Recent publications include (with William Courtenay) "The Tears of Nicholas: Simony and Perjury by a Parisian Master of Theology in the Fourteenth Century," Accepted by Speculum (forthcoming, 2008); "Revenge as a 'Medium Good' in the Twelfth Century" in 1 Law, Culture, and Humanities, 333-358 (2005); "The Birth of Official Criminal Prosecutions in American Law" in Rechtssystem im Vergleich: Die Staatsanwaltschaft (2005), The Problem of Pain in Punishment: A Historical Perspective," in Pain, Death, and the Law (A. Sarat, ed., 2001); and "Criminal Procedure in Medieval European Law: A Comparison Between English and Roman-Canonical Developments after the IV Lateran Council," Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte - Kanonistische Abteilung (1999).

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