Date: Tuesday, May 12, 3:00 PM – 4:15 PM ET/2:00 PM– 3:15 PM CT/1:00 PM – 2:15 PM MT/12:00 PM – 1:15 PM PT
Section on Aspiring Law School Leaders
This panel will explore the challenges that associate deans of academic affairs and research have when advising faculty members, often previously their faculty colleagues/peers, about their scholarship and teaching. Faculty members experience pressure about the direction their scholarship should take or have concerns about whether topic choice may impact tenure decisions. Similarly, faculty members may experience pressure about courses they should or should not teach. For these and other matters, faculty may often look to the associate deans for guidance. This unrecorded session will provide associate deans an opportunity to discuss these challenges and possible strategies for assisting faculty with these decisions.
Vanessa Casado Pérez, Associate Dean for Research and Faculty Development; Professor of Law; Research Associate Professor of Agricultural Economics, Texas A&M University School of Law
Vanessa is an Associate Professor of Law and Research Associate Professor at Texas A&M School of Law. Prior to her faculty appointment at Texas A&M, she was the Teaching Fellow of the LL.M. Program in Environmental Law & Policy at Stanford Law School. Her research focuses on management of natural resources.
She graduated first at Universitat Pompeu Fabra Law School (’06) and second at Universitat Pompeu Fabra School of Economics (’08). She also holds LL.M. degrees from Universitat Pompeu Fabra (’08) and University of Chicago Law School (’09), where she was class representative and received “The LL.M. Award for Integration and Inclusion”, and is about to complete her J.S.D. at NYU School of Law.
Her dissertation analyzes the role of government in water markets, using California and Spain’s experiences as case studies.She has been R.A. at Universitat Pompeu Fabra, University of Chicago, and NYU Law Schools; Summer Associate at the Spanish law firm Uría Menéndez (Barcelona); and intern at the Colombian Environmental and Agricultural Affairs Area of the Procuradoría General de la Nación (Bogotá).
Emily Janoski-Haehlen, Dean, University of Akron School of Law
Emily Janoski-Haehlen joined the Akron Law faculty in 2017. Her current research explores social media law, internet privacy, legal research instruction strategies, and technology in the practice of law. Dean Janoski-Haehlen’s legal innovators profile can be seen here.
Prior to joining Akron Law, Dean Janoski-Haehlen served as Associate Dean of the Law Library at Valparaiso University Law School and as a faculty member and librarian at Northern Kentucky University, Chase College of Law.
Dean Janoski-Haehlen is a member of the Kentucky Bar, the American Association of Law Libraries, Ohio Regional Association of Law Libraries, and she serves on accreditation teams for the American Bar Association. She earned her B.S. in History from the University of Kentucky, her M.S. in Library Science from the University of Kentucky and her J.D. from Northern Kentucky University.
Emily Kadens, Edna B. and Ednyfed H. Williams Memorial Professor of Law and Associate Dean of Research & Strategic Initiatives, Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law
Professor Kadens is an award-winning legal historian with a particular focus on the medieval and early modern history of commercial law and practice. She has a JD from the University of Chicago and a PhD in medieval history from Princeton. An expert on English equity court archives, she is currently using previously unexamined equity court files to write a book on the history of commercial cheating in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England. She has also written on custom, the concept of the law merchant, and the early history of English bankruptcy. She most recently led a team that spent three years building a machine learning model on the AI platform Transkribus that can transcribe 16th- and early 17th-century English secretary hand with an average accuracy of 97%. Information about the model, named “Egerton,” can be found at https://sites.northwestern.edu/egerton/. She is currently leading a new project studying how to leverage AI to analyze witness testimony from Early Modern English courts.
Kadens’s Brooklyn Law Review article on the history of judicial education in England won the 2010 Sutherland Prize from the American Society of Legal Historians for the best paper in English legal history; her Columbia Law Review case study of an early seventeenth-century fraud and the limits of reputation to police the market was runner up for the 2020 Sutherland Prize; and her article on an early eighteenth-century bankruptcy scam won the 2011 Editors’ Prize from the American Bankruptcy Law Journal. Her other work has been published in such journals as the Duke Law Journal, the Texas Law Review, the Iowa Law Review, the Northwestern Law Review, and the Journal of Legal Analysis.
As an administrator, Kadens has been involved with creating, among other initiatives, the Perspective Project—a dialogue across difference program for incoming law students; the Northwestern Summer Law Academy—a pipeline program for college students; and the Orientation to Law program for Northwestern PhD Students.
Kadens has been a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, a Kluge Fellow at the Library of Congress, and the Richard & Diane Cummins Legal History Research Grantee at the George Washington University Law School. In 2019, Kadens was elected to the American Law Institute. She teaches Contracts, LLM Contracts, Torts, Complex Commercial Contracting, and Legal History. She has written original, innovative teaching material for each of these courses. At Northwestern, Kadens has won the Best 1L Professor award three times, the Childres Award for most outstanding teacher, and has been selected by the graduating class to give the ceremonial Last Lecture. Prior to coming to Northwestern, Kadens was the Baker and Botts Professor in Law at the University of Texas at Austin, and she clerked for the Honorable Danny J. Boggs on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit.
Melanie B. Jacobs, Dean and Professor of Law, University of Louisville, Louis D. Brandeis School of Law
Dean Melanie B. Jacobs is an internationally and nationally recognized expert in Family Law and has published extensively on the subject. In particular, she has advocated for legal recognition of non-traditional family units and the evolution of parentage law to engage with continuing developments in assisted reproductive technologies. Her most recent research explores the links between procreative autonomy and intentional parenthood. She is a former chair of the Association of American Law Schools’ Family and Juvenile Law Section. Dean Jacobs is also a notable as a feminist voice in legal scholarship and has several pieces in the Feminist Judgements Project series.
Dean Jacobs has entries in three books and published articles in a dozen law reviews. She has presented her scholarship at conferences and universities around the world and has also given many presentations on best legal education pedagogy practices. Dean Jacobs has taught courses in Child, Family & the State; Assisted Reproductive Technologies & the Law; Trusts & Estates; Property; and Law & Gender.
Dean Jacobs received her B.A from Columbia University in New York City, and her J.D. from Boston University, shortly after which she was admitted to the Massachusetts Bar, later gaining her LL.M. from Temple University.
