Sponsored by the AALS Section’s on: Associate Deans for Academic Affairs and Reasearch, Critical Theories, Leadership, New Law Professors, Pro Bono & Access to Justice, Professional Responsibility, and Women in Legal Education
The rule of law is one of the foundational principles of our democratic system. As evidenced by the Trump administration’s attacks on the independence of lawyers and judges, its refusal to comply with court orders, and its devastation of the civil administrative state, the rule of law is being threatened in unprecedented ways. In responding to these challenges, it is critical also to recognize that the rule of law has been instrumental in creating and perpetuating social, economic, and racial inequities in American society. In this light, it is perhaps not surprising that the current administration’s efforts to create an authoritarian government with power centralized in the executive are cloaked in assertions that it is defending and preserving the rule of law. In other words, the Trump administration does not see the rule of law as an obstacle or inconsistent with an authoritarian regime. To ensure that the current battle over the rule of law is not simply a means to preserve the status quo, we need to envision a rule of law that is not instrumental in perpetuating inequity, that is not able to be coopted to further authoritarianism, and that reflects the true democratic principles of our founding documents.
Zamir Ben-Dan, Assistant Professor of Law, Temple University, James E. Beasley School of Law
Zamir joined the faculty at Temple University Beasley School of Law in 2022. His research lies in the areas of constitutional law, criminal law, racism and American history, and his emerging scholarship interrogates the ways in which the Constitution promotes racism and anti-Blackness. His work has been published or is forthcoming in the UCLA Law Review, Boston University Law Review, Cardozo Law Review, Harvard Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Law Review, Iowa Law Review Online, and Columbia Law Review Forum. He has presented his work at several notable conferences, including the Harvard/Stanford/Yale Junior Faculty Forum, the Michigan Junior Scholars Conference, the Columbia, Georgetown, USC, UCLA, Penn & Stanford Law and Humanities Junior Scholars Workshop, and at various John Langston Conferences. One of his articles was reprinted in the 38th volume of the Civil Rights Litigation and Attorney Fees Annual Handbook, published by the National Lawyers Guild (NLG). Another article was cited by the Honorable Carlton W. Reeves of the Southern District of Mississippi.
Prior to joining Temple Law, Zamir spent six-and-a-half years at the Legal Aid Society in New York City. First he served as a staff attorney in the Bronx Criminal Trial Practice for four years, representing hundreds of clients on both felony and misdemeanor matters and winning most of his trials. In 2019, he joined the Community Justice Unit, where he provided wrap-around legal services to participants in non-profit organizations that do Cure Violence work. In 2017, he was a founding member of the Black Attorneys of Legal Aid caucus (BALA), an amalgamation of over 100 Black Legal Aid lawyers that advocates for racial justice both within and without the Legal Aid Society. He served in BALA leadership for nearly five years.
Also in 2019, Zamir began an adjunct professorship in the Black and Latino Studies Department at Baruch College, where he would teach for five semesters. He taught as an adjunct in CUNY Law’s first-year lawyering program for full-time students in the 2020-2021 academic year. He then served as the interim director of the program the following academic year, creating the simulation, writing the syllabi, and designing the curriculum for over 150 full-time students. He created a practitioner course through the National Association for Public Defense (NAPD) called “Warrior Motion Practice,” teaching a methodical approach to creative motion writing as a means of addressing social wrongs. He taught the course several times in 2021 and 2022 for the NAPD, and he has taught it on occasion at various organizations since then.
In 2024, Zamir was appointed to serve as a subject matter expert for the NexGen Bar Exam, a new assessment being developed by the National Conference of Bar Examiners. In this role, he has both crafted and renewed questions and scenarios that will be used on actual exams. His appointment ends in 2026.
Paul A. Gowder, Professor of Law, Northwestern Pritzker School of Law
Paul Gowder joined the Northwestern Pritzker School of Law faculty in 2020. His research focuses on the rule of law, democratic theory, social and racial equality, institutional and organizational governance, law and technology, and classical Athenian law and political thought. He has taught a variety of classes including constitutional law, torts, critical race theory, professional responsibility, and introductory programming and statistics for law students. In his practice days, he was a civil rights and legal aid lawyer. In those contexts, he represented victims of police misconduct, predatory lending, employment discrimination, unlawful eviction, domestic violence, and numerous other injustices. His affiliations, past and present, include service as a member of the Global Rule of Law Commission of the European Public Law Organization, a member (2014-5) of the School of Social Science of the Institute for Advanced Study, an elected member of the American Law Institute, and a founding fellow and former board member (founding to 2024) of the Integrity Institute. He is the author of three books: The Rule of Law in the Real World (Cambridge, 2016), The Rule of Law in the United States: An Unfinished Project of Black Liberation (Hart/Bloomsbury 2021), and The Networked Leviathan: For Democratic Platforms (Cambridge 2023). Each of those books can be downloaded in free open PDF form starting from the links at https://books.gowder.io.
Amy Kapczynski, John Thomas Smith Professor of Law and Faculty Director, Global Health Justice Partnership, Yale Law School
Amy Kapczynski is a Professor of Law at Yale Law School. She is also the Faculty Director of the Law and Political Economy Project, co-founder and member of the editorial board of the Law and Political Economy blog, and Faculty Co-Director of the Global Health Justice Partnership. Prior to joining the Yale faculty, she taught at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law.
Kapczynski’s work investigates how law shapes, and is shaped by, political economy. She has written in a wide variety of areas, including IP law, health, international law, and constitutional law. Her recent writing includes “Building a Law-and-Political-Economy Framework: Beyond the 20th-Century Synthesis,” Yale L. J. (2020) (with Jedediah Purdy, David Grewal, and Sabeel Rahman); “The Public’s Secrets: The Law and Political Economy of Trade Secrets,” U.C. Davis L. Rev. (2022); “Administering a Democratic Political Economy,” Harvard L. & Pol’y Rev. (2024) (with Joel Michaels); and “The Law of Informational Capitalism,” Yale L. Rev. (2020).
Kapczynski has worked closely with social movements involved in campaigns for access to medicines around the world, testified before state and federal legislatures, and written for venues including Boston Review, Democracy, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. In 2022 her teaching was recognized with the YLW Faculty Excellence Award at Yale Law School.
Before teaching, Kapczynski served as a law clerk to Justices Sandra Day O’Connor and Stephen G. Breyer at the U.S. Supreme Court, and to Judge Guido Calabresi on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.
Andrew King-Ries, Davis-Johnston Professor of Law; Associate Dean of Professionalism and Community Engagement, Alexander Blewett III School of Law at the University of Montana
Professor King-Ries teaches Domestic Violence, Criminal Law, Criminal Procedure, Race and Racism, Juvenile Justice, Evidence, and Law and Literature. He also supervises the Domestic Violence Clinic and the Prosecution Clinics. He has written numerous articles dealing with race, racism, and professional identity, in addition to articles about prosecution of domestic violence offenses. He is a frequent presenter on domestic violence, criminal law, criminal procedure, and race and racism.
Before coming to Montana, he was a speechwriter for the Secretary of Education, Lauro Cavazos; a clerk for the United States Court of Appeals of the Eighth Circuit; and, for eight years, a prosecutor, specializing in domestic violence cases, for the King County Prosecutor’s Office in Seattle, Washington. Professor King-Ries is married to a writer and lawyer and they have an eighteen-year-old science and soccer fanatic.
Professor King-Ries graduated from Brown University in 1988 with a degree in History. He received his law degree from Washington University in St. Louis, where he was Order of the Coif and an editor on the Washington University Law Quarterly. He currently serves as a member of the Just Response Sexual Assault Resource Center Advisory Board. In addition, he is a member of the Montana Supreme Court Criminal Jury Instructions Committee. For a number of years, King-Ries was the chair of the University of Montana’s Discrimination Grievance Committee.
Jocelyn Simonson, Herman Badillo ’54 Professor of Law, Brooklyn Law School
Professor Jocelyn Simonson, who was previously associate dean for research and scholarship, was named Herman Badillo ’54 Professor of Law in July 2025. Professor Jocelyn Simonson is the author of Radical Acts of Justice: How Ordinary People are Dismantling Incarceration, published with the New Press in August 2023. Professor Simonson writes and teaches about criminal law, criminal procedure, evidence, and social change. Her scholarship explores ways in which the public participates in the criminal process and in the institutions of local governance that control policing and punishment. In particular, she studies bottom-up interventions in the criminal legal system, such as bail funds, copwatching, courtwatching, and participatory defense, asking how these real-life interventions should inform our conceptions of the design of legal institutions, the discourse of constitutional rights, and the meaning of democratic justice. Her most recent law review articles have appeared in the Stanford Law Review, Harvard Law Review, Yale Law Journal, Columbia Law Review, California Law Review, and Michigan Law Review. Professor Simonson’s scholarship has been cited twice by the Supreme Court, and was designated “Must Read” by the NACDL Getting Scholarship Into Courts Project.
Prior to joining the Brooklyn Law School faculty in 2015, Professor Simonson was an Acting Assistant Professor of Lawyering at New York University School of Law. Previously, Professor Simonson spent five years as a public defender with the Bronx Defenders. She clerked for the Hon. Barrington D. Parker, Jr., U.S. Court of Appeals, Second Circuit.
