August 3, 2023 | 4:00 – 5:30 PM EST
The last few years have changed many long-established practices in academic hiring, including the cancelation of the AALS Faculty Recruitment Conference. The conference has been a major part of law school hiring for 40 years, and we recognize that many aspects of it were helpful to our member schools and appointment committees.
The Appointments Committee Workshop will be an opportunity to discuss current hiring challenges and will offer all participants a broad overview of the varying strategies used by other law schools.
Portions of the Workshop were recorded for internal purposes only. Recordings will not be published.
Speakers
Danielle Conway
Danielle Conway is the Dean and Donald J. Farage Professor of Law at Penn State Dickinson Law. A leading expert in procurement law, entrepreneurship, and intellectual property law, Dean Conway joined Dickinson Law after serving for four years as dean of the University of Maine School of Law and 14 years on the faculty of the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, William S. Richardson School of Law. Dean Conway’s scholarly agenda and speeches have focused on, among other areas, advocating for public education and for actualizing the rights of marginalized groups and promoting systemic equity in legal education and the profession. Under her leadership, Dickinson Law’s Antiracist Development Institute (ADI) was created to facilitate the dismantling of structures that scaffold systemic racial inequality by using a systems design approach focused on implementing antiracist practices, processes, and policies throughout organizations. Dean Conway is the co-recipient of the inaugural Association of American Law Schools’ (AALS) Impact Award, which recognized her work in co-curating the Law Deans Antiracist Clearinghouse Project, a webpage for law deans, faculty, and the public that contains resources and information related to addressing systemic racism in law and legal education. Dean Conway is an elected member of the American Law Institute, a member of the AALS Executive Committee, and a director of the AccessLex Institute.
Mark Jia
Mark Jia is an Associate Professor at the Georgetown University Law Center. He specializes in comparative and transnational law, with a focus on the United States and China. His works have appeared or are forthcoming in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, the University of Chicago Law Review, and the Virginia Journal of International Law. Before entering academia, he was a law clerk to Justice David Souter, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Judge William Fletcher. Mark is a graduate of Princeton, Oxford, where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar, and Harvard Law School.
Johanna Kalb
Johanna Kalb was appointed to serve as the Dean of the University of Idaho College of Law in May 2021. She is the first woman to serve in this role. Prior to her deanship, Dean Kalb was the Associate Dean of Administration and Special Initiatives and an Edward J. Womac Jr. Distinguished Professor of Law at Loyola University New Orleans School of Law. Her research and teaching interests include constitutional law, federal courts, and the law of detention and democracy. She is a co-author, with Martha F. Davis and Risa Kaufman of the first law school textbook focused on domestic human rights, Human Rights Advocacy in the United States (West, 2014). Her recent scholarship appears in U.C. Irvine Law Review, the Yale Journal of International Law, the Yale Law and Policy Review, and the Stanford Journal of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, as well as the Washington Law Review Online, the NYU Law Review Online, and the Yale Law Journal Forum.
From 2014 to 2016, Kalb served as Visiting Associate Professor of Law and Director of the Arthur Liman Public Interest Program at Yale Law School. Dean Kalb is a fellow in the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law and an academic fellow of the Pounds Civil Justice Institute.
Dean Kalb is a graduate of Yale Law School and the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies where she completed her M.A. in International Relations with a focus on African Studies. After law school, she served as a clerk for the Honorable E. Grady Jolly of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and the Honorable Ellen Segal Huvelle of the District Court of the District of Columbia. She is admitted to practice in the states of Mississippi and New York.
Katie Kronick
Katie Kronick teaches constitutional criminal procedure and is director of the Criminal Defense and Advocacy Clinic at University of Baltimore Law. Kronick’s scholarship focuses on forensic science, sentencing, and intellectual disability. Previously, Kronick was a practitioner-in-residence in the Criminal Justice Clinic-Defense at American University Washington College of Law. Before entering academia, she was an assistant deputy public defender in New Jersey, a Prettyman Fellow in the Criminal Justice Clinic at Georgetown Law, and a law clerk for Judge Neal E. Kravitz on D.C. Superior Court. Kronick has a J.D., magna cum laude, and an LL.M. both from Georgetown Law.
Erin Adele Scharff
Erin Adele Scharff is Associate Dean for Research and Faculty Development and Professor of Law at the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law at Arizona State University. Scharff’s scholarship focuses on fiscal federalism, including the allocation of revenue authority between state and local governments, local government law, and state tax law. Professor Scharff is the coauthor of casebooks in both taxation and local government law. As an expert on local fiscal authority, Scharff has written several amicus briefs on the legal authority of local governments to raise revenue under state constitutions. She has three rambunctious and delightful children.
Planning Committee for Appointments Committee Workshop
Zachary Clopton, Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law
Jelani Jefferson Exum, University of Detroit Mercy School of Law
Margaret K. Lewis, Seton Hall University School of Law
Erin Scharff, Arizona State University Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law, chair
Ronald Weich, University of Baltimore School of Law