Our Inaugural faculty investiture ceremony shone a spotlight on how faculty boost UW Law’s national reputation.
University of Wisconsin Law School recently hosted its inaugural faculty investiture ceremony to honor its distinguished faculty holding named professorships, chairs and other honors. This ceremony is part of a more significant effort tied to the Law School’s strategic plan to elevate faculty scholarship and visibility and shed light on how faculty boost UW Law’s national reputation.
A named professorship is one of the highest honors a school or university can bestow on a faculty member. It is an honor to the faculty member who holds the position and a long-lasting act of admiration to the donor who established the opportunity.
“I’m thrilled we could take an opportunity to honor UW Law faculty for their influential scholarship and research,” said Dean Dan Tokaji. “Our faculty is the largest factor in our reputation and prestige. Ensuring this group is supported so they continue to have an impact is critical to ensure UW Law School remains a national leader in legal education.”
This year’s honorees highlight the depth and breadth of our exceptional faculty. Among them are esteemed scholars whose names have been synonymous with UW Law School for years, alongside emerging thought leaders who are reshaping legal scholarship with their innovative teaching and fresh ideas. Regardless of their tenure at the Law School, it is clear UW Law is where great legal minds gather.
Visit our Directory for detailed profiles on all of our faculty.
This year’s honorees are:
Tonya Brito
George H. Young Chair; Vilas Mid-Career Investigator Award
An award-winning scholar, Professor Brito’s scholarship critically examines the role of the civil justice system in exacerbating social inequality and the intersection of family law and poverty law. Professor Brito is a national expert in child support law and policy. Additionally, she is the principal investigator of a multi-year, multidisciplinary empirical study examining the experiences of low-income civil litigants in family court.
Emily Cauble
Thomas G. Ragatz Professorship in Tax Law
Professor Cauble’s research focuses on business taxation, tax administration and other aspects of tax policy. She has received numerous awards for her teaching and scholarship. Before becoming a law professor, Professor Cauble worked at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve in Washington, D.C., and practiced in the tax transaction group at Mayer Brown in Chicago.
Anuj Desai
Volkman-Bascom Professorship in Law
In addition to being a sought-after legal scholar, Professor Desai served as an administrative appellate judge on the Administrative Review Board of the U.S. Department of Labor; as a Senate-confirmed member of the Foreign Claims Settlement Commission; as a member of the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine’s panel; and as counsel to the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in the General Counsel’s Office of Management and Budget, part of the Executive Office of the President.
Kathryn Hendley
Theodore W. Brazeau Professor of Law
Professor Hendley’s research focuses on legal and economic reform in the former Soviet Union. Following the Wisconsin Law-in-Action tradition, her research explores how ordinary Russians experience law. She formerly served as a consultant to the U.S. Agency for International Development and the World Bank in their work on legal reform in Russia.
Alexandra Huneeus
Evjue-Bascom Professorship in Law
Professor Huneeus’ scholarship focuses on international law and human rights, with an emphasis on Latin America. She is currently serving a 10-year term as a Foreign Expert Jurist in the Colombian Jurisdicción Especial para la Paz, a court created as part of the Colombian peace process.
Heinz Klug
John and Rylla Bosshard Professorship
Growing up in Durban, South Africa, Professor Klug participated in the anti-apartheid struggle, spent 11 years in exile and returned to South Africa in 1990 as a member of the ANC Land Commission and researcher for Zola Skweyiya, chairperson of the ANC Constitutional Committee. He was also a team member on the World Bank mission to South Africa on Land Reform and Rural Restructuring. Professor Klug’s research interests include constitutional transitions, constitution-building, human rights and international regimes.
Yaron Nili
Kinnie Smith Jr. and John W. Rowe Faculty Fellowship in Business Law
Professor Nili’s scholarly interests include corporate law, securities law and corporate governance, with a particular focus on the role and function of the board of directors, shareholder activism, hedge funds and private equity. Four of his law review articles have been voted by business law professors as among the top 10 corporate and securities law articles of the year.
John Ohnesorge
George Young-Bascom Professorship in Business Law
Professor Ohnesorge is the director of the Law School’s East Asian Legal Studies Center, senior advisor to the Graduate Program and founder and director of the Law School’s Compliance Initiative. Professor Ohnesorge just returned from South Korea, where he served as a Fulbright Scholar focusing on the renewed importance of the Korean experience in the areas of law, economic development and political change.
Margaret Raymond
Warren P. Knowles Chair; Dean Emeritus
Professor Raymond’s scholarship focuses on the professional responsibility of lawyers, constitutional criminal procedure and substantive criminal law. She participates regularly in providing ethics CLE programming to Wisconsin lawyers and is a member of the Board of Directors of the Wisconsin Lawyers Mutual Insurance Company.
David Schwartz
Frederick W. and Vi Miller Chair in Law; Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor
Professor Schwartz teaches and publishes on constitutional law, evidence and civil procedure. He recently created and serves as the editor-in-chief of the Journal of American Constitutional History, a peer-reviewed, web-based journal publishing high-quality scholarship on U.S. constitutional history. The journal features work from law faculty, historians and political scientists that focuses on historical questions touching on the American Constitution or that contain a substantial element of historical analysis in addressing contemporary issues of U.S. constitutional law.
Miriam Seifter
John W. Rowe Faculty Fellowship in Regulatory Law
Professor Seifter currently serves as the faculty co-director of the State Democracy Research Initiative, which seeks to advance research and dialogue on state-level democracy, government institutions and public law nationwide. Focusing on the states, which traditionally receive less attention than the federal government in legal circles, the Initiative serves as a much-needed resource for academics, courts, policymakers, advocates and the public. Professor Seifter’s research addresses questions of state and federal public law, focusing on challenges affecting democracy at the state level.
Mitra Sharafi
Evjue-Bascom Professorship in Law
Professor Sharafi is a legal historian of modern South Asia. Professor Sharafi’s research has been funded by the American Council of Learned Societies, Institute for Advanced Study, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, National Science Foundation and Social Science Research Council. Most recently, she was a recipient of an ACLS Frederick Burkhardt Residential Fellowship, a Davis Center Fellowship and an H.I. Romnes Faculty Fellowship.
Mark Sidel
James E. and Ruth B. Doyle- Bascom Professorship
In addition to Professor Sidel’s extensive scholarly work, he has served for many years as a consultant for Asia at the Washington-based International Center for Not-for-Profit Law, focusing on China, India and Vietnam. Advising and consulting assignments have included the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency, the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Danish Development Cooperation; the Ford Foundation; the Norwegian Centre for Human Rights; the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation; and many other international and donor organizations. Over the past several years, Professor Sidel has assisted a wide range of U.S. and other organizations with issues related to Chinese overseas NGO laws.
Nina Varsava
Vilas Mid-Career Investigator Award
Professor Varsava’s research focuses on procedure, courts, judicial administration, legal ethics and jurisprudence. She is especially interested in issues of precedent, interpretation and intersystemic adjudication. Professor Varsava was recently awarded the Association of American Law Schools’ Jurisprudence Future Promise Award, which is given annually to recognize research accomplishments of junior scholars working in the area of jurisprudence and philosophy of law. Her recent scholarship on precedent in relation to the Dobbs decision received national attention.
Ahmed White
James E. Jones Jr. Chair
Professor White’s research focuses on the fate of rule of law norms and the rule of law concept in capitalist society, and on the role of criminal law and punishment as mechanisms of social control of the working class. More recently, Professor White’s scholarship has taken a more historical turn. Much of his work concerns the history of law and labor relations from the early 20th century through the New Deal period, as well as the viability of a functional system of labor rights in liberal society. He is one of the country’s leading experts on the history of labor repression.
Robert Yablon
John W. Rowe Faculty Fellowship
Professor Yablon currently serves as the faculty co-director of the State Democracy Research Initiative, which seeks to advance research and dialogue on state-level democracy, government institutions and public law nationwide. His research interests include political and election law, constitutional law, federal and state courts and statutory interpretation.
Jason Yackee
Foley and Lardner Bascom Professorship
Professor Yackee’s research centers on international investment law, international economic relations, foreign arbitration and administrative law and politics. Professor Yackee is currently working on a major historical project that uses archival research to analyze the French government’s use of diplomatic and legal means to protect its foreign investors in Africa.