New Faculty & Deans

Eleanor Brown
Professor of Law
BS, Brown University,
MPhil, Oxford University
JD, Yale University

Eleanor Brown joins the Law School from Harvard Law School, where she was the Reginald F. Lewis Fellow. She is also a Schwartz Fellow at the New America Foundation. Brown was a senior executive at the Caribbean Investment Fund, L.P., the first pan-Caribbean private equity fund in the British Commonwealth Caribbean and was chairman of the Trade Board, the government entity with historical responsibility for aspects of Jamaica’s importation policies. She also has served on the boards of several publicly traded Caribbean companies. Brown writes about the intersection of U.S. immigration and global development policies, and she has been published in the Yale Law Journal, New York University Law Review, Fordham Law Review, The New York Times, and The Los Angeles Times. She is a Rhodes Scholar and a former law clerk on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Jessica L. Clark
Associate Professor of Legal Research and Writing, Associate Director of the Legal Research and Writing Program, and Co-Director of the Scholarly Writing Program
BA, Lawrence University
MSSc, Syracuse University
JD, George Washington University

Jessica L. Clark returns to the Law School as the associate director of the legal research and writing program after two years as a visiting associate professor of legal research and writing. Prior to joining the faculty, she spent three years at the Office of the General Counsel, Department of the Navy, as a law clerk and later as assistant counsel. She practiced federal procurement law and federal employment law. In the 2006 to 2007 academic year, Clark taught in the Law School’s legal research and writing program and received the Best Contribution to the Program Award. While in law school, she was the senior managing editor of the Public Contract Law Journal. Clark published her note in the Public Contract Law Journal and a paper in State Tax Notes. Before law school, she served on active duty in the United States Navy and received an honorable discharge as a cryptologic technician (Collection) second class petty officer. Clark’s scholarship interests include legal research and writing, law school pedagogy, and federal procurement law and policy.

Lisa M. Fairfax
Leroy Sorenson Merrifield Research
Professor of Law
BA, JD, Harvard University

Lisa M. Fairfax is the Leroy Sorenson Merrifield Research Professor of Law and teaches corporations, securities regulation, and other courses in business. Fairfax’s scholarly interests include corporate governance matters, shareholder activism, fiduciary obligations, and securities fraud, and she is a permanent writer for the blog, the Conglomerate. Fairfax is chair of the business associations section of the Association of American Law Schools. Fairfax is also a member of the American Bar Association’s business law section’s Committee on Corporate Laws, which has jurisdiction over the Model Business Corporation Act, and co-chair of the American Bar Association Governmental Corporation Law Committee, which assists in developing guidelines and commentary for laws regulating government chartered corporations. Fairfax serves on the National Adjudicatory Council and the NASDAQ market regulation committee of FINRA. Prior to joining GW, Fairfax was a professor of law and director of the business law program at the University of Maryland School of Law, where she was voted Teacher of the Year. Before entering academia, she practiced corporate law with Ropes & Gray in Boston and the District of Columbia. 

Robert L. Glicksman
J.B. & Maurice C. Shapiro Professor of
Environmental Law
BA, Union College
MA, Harvard University
JD, Cornell University

Robert L. Glicksman is a nationally and internationally recognized expert on environmental, natural resources, and administrative law issues. A graduate of Cornell Law School, he teaches courses, does research, and makes presentations in the areas of environmental, natural resources, administrative, and property law. Before joining the Law School faculty, Glicksman taught at the University of Kansas School of Law. Before joining academia, he practiced with a firm in D.C., focusing on environmental, energy, and administrative law issues. He has consulted on various environmental and natural resources law issues, including work for the Secretariat of the Commission for Environmental Cooperation in Montreal, Canada. Glicksman has written many publications, including books on environmental protection, natural resources law, risk regulation, and administrative law. He has also written numerous book chapters and articles on a variety of environmental and natural resources law topics.

F. Scott Kieff
Professor of Law
BS, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
JD, University of Pennsylvania

F. Scott Kieff, who joined the Law School in 2009, is also a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, where he directs the Project on Commercializing Innovation. He works on the law, economics, business, and politics of innovation, including entrepreneurship, corporate governance, finance, economic development, intellectual property, antitrust, bankruptcy, property rights, contracts, and dispute resolution. He also serves on Hoover’s Property Rights Task Force and as a faculty member of the Munich Intellectual Property Law Center at Germany’s Max Planck Institute. Previously, he was a professor at Washington University School of Law, with a secondary appointment in the School of Medicine’s Department of Neurological Surgery; and has been a visiting professor in the law schools at Northwestern, Chicago, and Stanford. He practiced law for over six years, as a trial lawyer and patent lawyer for Pennie & Edmonds in New York and Jenner & Block in Chicago and as law clerk to Judge Giles S. Rich. He previously served on the Federal Circuit’s Appellate Mediation Panel, and now serves on the Patent Public Advisory Committee of the Patent and Trademark Office. In May 2008, he was recognized as one of the nation’s “Top 50 under 45” by the magazine IP Law & Business.

Jeffrey D. Manns
Associate Professor of Law
BA, University of Virginia
DPhil, Oxford University
JD, Yale University

Jeffrey D. Manns is joining the Law School as an associate professor of law. His teaching and research interests focus on securities regulation, financial institutions, and insurance law. He is a graduate of Yale Law School and received his doctorate from Oxford University, which he attended as a Rhodes Scholar. Manns served as a senior editor of the Yale Law Journal, and his note on terrorism reinsurance received the Israel H. Peres Prize for the best student publication in the Yale Law Journal. Manns has written several law review articles on regulatory reform, most recently “Rating Risk After Subprime Mortgage Crisis: A User Fee Approach for Rating Agency Accountability,” which was published in the North Carolina Law Review. Before joining the Law School faculty, he clerked for Hon. J. Harvie Willkinson III of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit and spent several years in private practice in Washington, D.C., honing his skills as a securities litigator.

Alan B. Morrison
Lerner Family Associate Dean for Public
Interest/Service Law
BA, Yale University
LLB, Harvard University

Alan B. Morrison received his undergraduate degree from Yale College and his law degree from Harvard Law School. In between his studies, he served as a commissioned officer in the U.S. Navy. His early legal career includes working as an attorney at Cleary Gottlieb and as an assistant U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York. In 1972, Morrison teamed up with Ralph Nader to found and direct the Public Citizen Litigation Group, the litigating arm of the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen. Over the span of his career, Morrison has argued 20 cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. One of his more well-known cases is Immigration and Naturalization Service v. Chadha (1983) in which he defended a client with no real nationality who faced deportation from the U.S. In 2004, Morrison retired from Public Citizen to work at Stanford Law School as a senior lecturer on administrative and public interest law. He has taught at several law schools, including Harvard, American University, New York University, Tulane University, and China’s Fudan University.

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Visiting Faculty

Andrea J. Boyack
Visiting Professor of Law
BA, Brigham Young University
JD, University of Virginia
MALD, the Fletcher School, Tufts University

Andrea J. Boyack’s diverse legal background includes private practice work in corporate finance, real estate development, and capital markets. Boyack is counsel with Reed Smith and was previously in-house as regional counsel to Toll Brothers Inc., a national development company. Prior to that, she practiced corporate and real estate law in both New York City and Washington, D.C., with O’Melveny and Meyers, Goodwin Proctor and Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver and Jacobson, and she has taught at Catholic University and George Mason University. Following law school, she clerked for Judge John Gleeson of the U.S. District Court, Eastern District of New York. While in law school, Boyack was notes editor of the Virginia Journal of International Law. Her current research interests include comparative community governance law, property rules vs. standards, and international development and property rights.

Lawton Posey Cummings
Visiting Associate Professor of Law
BS, Tulane University
JD, Georgetown University

Lawton Posey Cummings is visiting GW Law from Washington and Lee University School of Law, where she teaches legal ethics and criminal law. Prior to entering academia, Cummings was a litigator at Davis Polk & Wardwell in New York, Slade & Associates in New York, and Wheeler Trigg Kennedy in Denver. She also was a judicial law clerk to Federal District Court Judge Peter K. Leisure in the Southern District of New York. Her scholarship focuses on legal ethics issues that arise in the practice of white collar criminal law and corporate in-house counsel.

Gregory Dolin
Frank H. Marks Visiting Associate Professor of Law; Administrative Fellow
BA, Johns Hopkins University
JD, Georgetown University
MD, State University of New York at Stony Brook

Gregory Dolin joins the Law School after spending a year as a law clerk at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. Previously, he was a John M. Olin Fellow in Law at Northwestern University School of Law, and clerked at the Fourth Circuit at U.S. Court of Appeals. He was an associate at Kramer Levin Naftalis & Frankel LLP, where he worked in the intellectual property group, primarily on litigation issues. Dolin’s publications have appeared in the Indiana Law Journal, Georgetown Journal of International Law, Quinnipiac Health Law Journal, and Georgetown Journal of Law and Public Policy, and he has a forthcoming article in the Santa Clara Law Review.

David Freestone
Lobingier Visiting Professor of Comparative Law
and Jurisprudence
LLB, LLD, University of Hull
LLM, University of London

David Freestone joined the Law School in January 2009, after retiring from the World Bank, where he had served as senior adviser and as deputy general counsel, and for eight years was chief counsel and head of the Environment and International Law Group. He is also senior adviser to the USA Multilateral Office of the International Union of Nature and Natural Resources. Prior to joining the World Bank in 1996, he held a faculty chair in international law at the University of Hull in the United Kingdom, where he is still an honorary professor. He has written widely on international environmental law and law of the sea and is the founding editor of the International Journal of Marine and Coastal Law (now in its 24th year) and a member of the editorial boards of the British Yearbook of International Law, International Yearbook of Environmental Law, and European Yearbook of Environmental Law. He is general editor of a new monograph series, Legal Aspects of Sustainable Development, published by Martinus Nijhoff. He is the 2007 winner of the Elizabeth Haub Gold Medal for Environmental Law.

Brian Galle
Visiting Associate Professor of Law
BA, Harvard University
JD, Columbia University
LLM, Georgetown University

Brian Galle writes on tax and broader administrative law issues, with a particular focus on the impact that the designs of tax programs and other fiscal tools have on the relationship between the federal government, state and local governments, and private regulatory partners and stakeholders. He practiced for three years as an attorney in the Criminal Appeals and Tax Enforcement Policy Section of the Tax Division, U.S. Department of Justice, arguing more than a dozen cases before U.S. courts of appeals. Prior to that, he clerked for Hon. Robert A. Katzmann, of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, and Hon. Stephen M. Orlofsky, of the U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey. He earned an LLM in taxation from Georgetown University, where he was a graduate tax scholarship program fellow, and a JD from Columbia Law School, where he was a Kent Scholar and special issues editor of the Columbia Law Review.

Iselin Gambert
Visiting Associate Professor of Legal Research and Writing
BA, Pomona College
JD, George Washington University

Iselin Gambert will serve as the writing center director and will teach a section of legal research and writing. Prior to joining the faculty, Gambert clerked for Judge Ronna Lee Beck at the D.C. Superior Court, Civil Division, and worked as an attorney and legal writer for a local public interest advocacy organization. She is a graduate of GW Law School, where she was a two-year writing fellow in the legal research and writing program, the executive notes editor of the American Intellectual Property Law Association Quarterly Journal, and an editor and publication committee member of the GW Law Student Bar Association Student Legal Writing Review. She was a clinical fellow in the International Human Rights Clinic and received the National Association of Women Lawyers Outstanding Law Graduate Award upon graduation. Before law school, Gambert was the program director of WomensLaw.org, a national nonprofit organization providing state-specific legal information to domestic violence survivors. She is currently a member of the organization’s board of directors and is the faculty adviser for the GW Law chapter of the WomensLaw.org e-mail hotline.

William P. Marshall
Visiting Professor of Law
BA, University of Pennsylvania
JD, University of Chicago

William Marshall joins the GW Law faculty from UNC-Chapel Hill, where he is the William Rand Kenan Jr. Distinguished Professor of Law. He received his law degree from the University of Chicago and his undergraduate degree from the University of Pennsylvania. Marshall served as deputy White House counsel and deputy assistant to the president of the United States during the Clinton administration; he worked on issues ranging from freedom of religion to separation of powers. He has published extensively on constitutional law issues and is a nationally recognized First Amendment scholar. He is also a leading expert on federal judicial selection matters and on the interrelationship among media, law, and politics. He teaches media law, civil procedure, constitutional law, First Amendment, federal courts, and the law of the presidency.

H. Jefferson Powell
Visiting Professor of Law
BA, University of Wales
MA, PhD, Duke University
MDiv, JD, Yale University

Jeff Powell has served in both the federal and state governments, as a deputy assistant attorney general and as the principal deputy solicitor general in the U.S. Department of Justice, and as special counsel to the attorney general of North Carolina. He has briefed and argued cases in both federal and state courts, including the Supreme Court of the United States. Powell is a member of the faculties of the law and divinity schools at Duke, where among other courses he teaches constitutional law and seminars on the culture of American law and theological dimensions of law. Powell’s recent books include Constitutional Conscience: The Moral Dimension of Judicial Decision (2008) and No Law: Intellectual Property in the Image of an Absolute First Amendment (2009), which he wrote with David Lange. His current research interests in law focus on the history and practice of executive-branch interpretation of the Constitution.

Karen DaPonte Thornton
Visiting Associate Professor of Legal Research and Writing
BA, Providence College
JD, Georgetown University
LLM, George Washington University

Karen DaPonte Thornton joins the faculty as a visiting associate professor of legal writing and co-director of the scholarly writing program. Prior to joining GW, she was a deputy assistant general counsel at the U.S. Government Accountability Office, where she served as legal adviser to numerous audits of Department of Defense procurement programs, conducted at the request of the House and Senate Armed Services Committees. She joined the Government Accountability Office after serving as a procurement attorney for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, first as a JAG officer and then as a civilian. Before entering the Army JAG Corps, Thornton clerked for the chief judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces. She earned a master of laws in government procurement law with highest honors from GW. Her thesis was selected for first place in the Public Contract Law Journal Writing Competition (professional division). She also published a student note while serving as senior articles editor of the Georgetown International Environmental Law Review.

Jessica Tillipman
Visiting Associate Professor of Law; Director of Outside Placement
BS, Miami University
JD, George Washington University

Jessica Tillipman joins the faculty as a visiting associate professor of clinical law and co-director of the outside placement program. Prior to joining GW, she was an associate in Jenner & Block’s Washington office, where she was a member of the firm’s government contracts and white collar criminal defense and counseling practice groups. Tillipman joined Jenner & Block after serving as a law clerk to Hon. Lawrence S. Margolis of the U.S. Court of Federal Claims. While attending law school, she served as a judicial intern to Hon. Ricardo M. Urbina of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. Tillipman graduated cum laude from Miami University (Oxford, Ohio) and obtained her JD, with honors, from GW, where she was a member of the George Washington University International Law Review, and published articles in the Public Contract Law Journal and the Public Procurement Law Review.

Paulette Williams
Visiting Associate Professor of Clinical Law
BA, Brown University
JD, New York University

Paulette Williams has been an associate professor at the University of Tennessee College of Law since 1999. Initially, she taught in the advocacy clinic and, since 2002, she has taught a business law clinic where students learn to practice business and transactional law. The clinic represents start-up businesses, nonprofit community groups, and individuals with transactional legal issues. She also has taught a family law seminar. Before her time at the University of Texas, Williams taught for one year as a visitor at Cornell University Law School in its legal aid clinic, and for many years she was a legal aid lawyer in New York City. In addition to developing the new business law clinic, she has pursued her interests in the subjects of wealth and poverty, clinical legal education, and domestic violence in the law school curriculum through her scholarship and her participation in a variety of professional development activities.