New Members of the Faculty

By Stefanie Ellis

Over the last six years, the School of Law has hired 15 full-time faculty members, whose specialty areas span everything from tax law to critical race theory, and have come from as close as Chicago, to as far away as Scotland. The divide in geography and specialization has never served to separate them, though, as all the School’s faculty are united by the common desire to educate tomorrow’s lawyers. Dean Jeffrey E. Lewis is proud of his faculty, and notes that “we look for faculty members who have good experience, sharp intellects and demonstrated commitment to teaching law. We have hired fine classroom teachers, productive scholars and excellent members of the law school community.”

The School’s most recent faculty recruits were selected among thousands of applicants, and have experience in the classroom, the courtroom and even the Supreme Court of the United States. Most importantly, they have a dedication that’s hard to ignore, and a commitment to share their knowledge of the law with their students. Just one of the many things that makes the School of Law what it is today — a place where knowledge touches lives.

Ann M. Scarlett

Assistant Professor of Law
July 2005-Present

Professor Ann Scarlett wants her students to be excited about the law. The heart of an attorney’s work, she says, is developing a successful strategy for the client. “That’s what makes the practice of law exciting regardless of whether you are a litigator, a transactional attorney, or in-house counsel,” she explains. She hopes to facilitate her students’ understanding of what those strategies are, by teaching them not only the doctrinal and theoretical concepts but also the practical applications of the law in her Civil Procedure and Business Associations classes. “I try to make my classes rich with real-life examples, and use stories from my practice to explain to students the kinds of things they will likely deal with as attorneys,” Scarlett says.

Before coming to the School of Law, Scarlett worked in a transactional practice at Stinson, Mag & Fizzell in Kansas City, dealing with mergers, acquisitions, formation of business entities, securities offerings, and regulatory and securities filings. She subsequently switched to a litigation and appellate practice with the same firm, now known as Stinson Morrison Hecker LLP. As a litigator, she handled cases in state and federal courts on a wide variety of legal issues including business torts, contracts, antitrust, fiduciary duties, shareholder rights, insurance, consumer protection, condemnation and products liability.

In addition, Professor Scarlett was a law clerk for Justice Clarence Thomas of the Supreme Court of the United States and a law clerk for Judge Pasco M. Bowman of the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit. Concurrently with her law practice, she was a lecturer at the University of Kansas School of Law.

As a result of her own positive experiences, Scarlett encourages students to consider judicial clerkships. “Clerking is the best job a student could ever have when it comes to viewing this legal system they’ve learned so much about,” she emphasizes. “They see things from the decision side. As a law clerk, you help the judge make decisions and draft opinions. At the same time, you see various styles and methods of advocacy by the lawyers involved in the cases before the court. Clerking gives young attorneys a unique and valuable kind of training that they take with them into private legal practice.”

It is the classroom that Professor Scarlett now calls home, and she is able to draw on the experience she’s had practicing law to help her students understand the options that a legal education can provide in terms of career choices. “When I entered law school, I had no idea where my legal education would take me,” she says. “Now that my career has led me to teaching, I am eager to see where a legal education will take my students.”

Kerry A. Ryan

Assistant Professor of Law
July 2005-Present

“It’s a challenge to make tax exciting,” admits Professor Kerry Ryan. Despite this, she finds that most law students who begrudgingly take tax find they like it in the end. Her theory is that tax has a more obvious link to the real world than many other subjects.

“I seriously love tax,” she laughs, noting that most people would not admit that out loud. Her students, of course, will be the direct beneficiaries of this enthusiasm.

Thank goodness for her students that Ryan was always sure she wanted to one day be in the classroom — on the other end of the podium. “Teaching was always in the back of my mind,” says Ryan. “I knew I would get there, but I wanted to first build a knowledge base in my specialty area.”

And that she did. After receiving a Master’s degree in Accounting from Tulane University, Ryan continued on to law school at the same institution. After law school, she received her LL.M. in Taxation from the University of Florida. From there, she became an Associate in the Estate and Business Succession Planning Department at Bose McKinney & Evans in Indianapolis, where her client base consisted of closely held business owners. “My practice was so much more than document drafting,” Ryan says. “The modern estate planner needs to be a jack of all trades with the ability to provide business, tax and personal planning advice.”

With more field experience under her belt, she then took a position as Visiting Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Florida, where she taught Income Taxation, Corporate Taxation and Federal Tax Research. Now, she’s joined the School of Law faculty at Saint Louis University, and is ready to share her knowledge — and love of tax — with her students.

In addition to her teaching, she plans to focus her scholarship on the ways in which tax policy intersects with and influences social policy. Her current work- in-progress analyzes the relationship between the tax incentives for higher education and traditional forms of student aid, such as grants, loans and work study.

Ryan argues that the increasing tendency of Congress to provide federal dollars through the tax system rather than through traditional aid channels represents a disturbing shift in governmental higher education policy — a shift away from increasing access for lower income families towards increasing choice for middle and upper income families.

Nicole Porter

Assistant Professor of Law
July 2004-Present

From the time she was a law student, Professor Nicole Porter exhibited a keen interest in finding the inadequacies of our laws, and thinking about ways to change the laws for the better.

As a practitioner specializing in labor and employment law, Porter enjoyed the challenges of law practice, but was often frustrated by how little she was able to influence the employers she represented to change troubling policies and practices.

So when an opportunity to serve as corporate counsel for a Michigan-based manufacturing company presented itself, Porter was hoping her luck would change. As corporate counsel, she was able to teach her employer how to comply with the law while still considering their business needs. Nevertheless, she saw many instances where the employer’s interests were in conflict with the interests of the employees and saw these circumstances as fertile ground for more exploration.

Luckily, that exploration came in the form of a new role as professor at the School of Law. Here, Porter is able to focus her scholarship and teaching on areas of law about which she is most passionate — disability issues, and issues surrounding women with children. Her approach is very reform-oriented. “I tried to get away from focusing so heavily on reforming the law,” says Porter, “but I couldn’t escape it. My brain is wired to find a way to solve problems, and my research is very goal oriented. I realized that’s definitely not something I should be trying to stifle.”

Another thing Porter isn’t stifling is her displeasure regarding the lack of rights she feels working mothers have in the legal workplace. “There is a lack of protection for them,” she says, “and employers are often unwilling to recognize that women with children have very different obstacles than women who don’t have them.” She discusses this inequity in her upcoming Duke Journal of Gender Law and Policy essay, “Redefining Superwoman: Overcoming the Maternal Wall in the Legal Workplace” (of which a condensed version appears on page 22). In it, Porter says that as long as our society keeps perpetuating the myth of “the perfect mom” (i.e. the one who bakes cookies, attends PTA meetings, picks up the kids from school, works full time and still finds time to fix dinner for her family), then women will keep themselves from what could otherwise be fulfilling legal careers, simply because they feel pressured to do everything all at once, and beat themselves up for not being able to do so. As a working mother of three, this is something Porter fully understands.

“I’m all in favor of stay-at-home moms, but I hate to see women quit their legal jobs only because they think they can’t have a career and be the mother they want to be,” says Porter. “What most women with children want is to have a career and still have balance in their life – and the more you work, the less that’s going to happen.”
What Porter suggests is that legal workplaces implement a reduced-hour policy that’s available to everyone, not just working mothers. If a firm is going to make a committed effort to decrease attrition — which is a major problem due to women with children leaving — they need to adopt a non-stigmatized reduced-hour proposal. And more importantly, she says, firms needs to offer training to explain to employees why they’re implementing such a policy.

"The number of firms that allow this kind of flexibility has increased, but only a small percentage does it right,” Porter says. “And if a woman’s only choice is to work the same hours as her male counterpart and ignore her children or quit her job, that’s not a real choice, and it shouldn’t be her only choice.”

Eric J. Miller

Assistant Professor of Law
July 2005-Present

In the office of Eric Miller, a casual observer will witness one of two things — a syncopated strumming of the keyboard as he works on scholarly research, or a slightly reclined position with the phone cord tangled around his finger, as he speaks with a reporter about said research. And should a casual observer need to speak with Miller during any of these moments, they will always be met with a kind glance and an acknowledgment, and usually a few minutes of waiting time so that Miller can finish a thought. In no time, however, he’ll be ready to answer most any question — particularly if it involves his latest research.

Recently, he has been studying the ways in which criminal law affects urban communities through the War on Drugs and its distinctive manner of policing, as well as unique proposals for reform, such as the development of drug courts that operate to divert addicts from prison and supervise their recovery.

"Understanding the real-world application of criminal law,” he says, “raises important and difficult questions about the values that underlie our system of criminal justice and the roles we expect the police, prosecutor and defense attorney to undertake.”

And as both scholar and professor, Miller finds great need to question and understand the basic components of this area of law. He urges his students to take active roles in this process, so that they will be able to interpret, on a broader scale, the social and ethical issues presented by criminal law and criminal procedure.

"Among those issues,” says Miller, “are the law’s engagement with inequality — particularly race and class-based inequalities. Criminal law provides one ready set of examples in which different communities receive disparate treatment.”

It is for reasons like these that Miller has involved himself in writing about and litigating seeking redress for historically significant race-based acts of violence — acts that he says “show the grim underbelly of American law — when justice was denied to American citizens, and the law and state organizations were used to oppress groups on the basis of race alone.”

"If law is, in some sense, about justice,” he says, “then we [as students of the law] need to understand and account for the whole picture, and determine our responsibility for accepting or changing the society in which we work.”

As someone who practices what he preaches, Miller suggests change through his research and scholarly writing. His article, “Role Based Policing: Restraining Police Conduct Outside the Legitimate Investigative Sphere,” has been accepted for publication by the California Law Review, and his article, “Representing the Race: Standing to Sue in Reparations Lawsuits,” was published in a 2004 edition of the Harvard Black Letter Law Journal. He has also presented at law schools across the country on such topics as “Reparations and Institutional Discrimination,” “Behavior Modification In Drug Courts: A Normative Alternative to Therapeutic Understandings” and “African American Reparations: Politics and Justice.”

Mark P. McKenna

Assistant Professor of Law
July 2003-Present

"You can’t walk down the street without seeing intellectual property in action,” says Professor Mark McKenna. He would know. With the several years spent litigating trademark and copyright infringe-ment cases — about half of which were related to the Internet and other computer technology — at a Chicago law firm, McKenna is more than a little familiar with the subject area. It was the intrigue of being able to explore more fully an area of law people think about or experience frequently that made him want to become a professor. And it’s his ability to put the world of IP into perspective that has made his elective course, Intellectual Property Survey, so popular.

"In the information economy, intangible assets are becoming a company’s most important asset,” he says. And because those assets are so important, McKenna believes it is critically important that the legal rules that define them be properly grounded. Such is the task he takes up with respect to the right of publicity in his most recent article, “The Right of Publicity and Autonomous Self-Definition.¹ " In it, McKenna explores the prevailing justification for legal protection against commercial use of an individual’s identity and argues that the normative case for awarding individuals the economic value of their identity is weak, since celebrities do not need additional incentive to invest in either their native skill or in developing a persona. But he does not side with those who would abolish the right of publicity altogether, and instead focuses on a different, and underappreciated interest every individual has in preventing uses of her identity that strip her of control over the meaning of her identity. “It is that interest, and only that interest,” McKenna argues, “that the law should protect.”

Professor McKenna’s current project undertakes a similar exploration of the normative foundations of trademark law. He says the prevailing narrative of trademark law is that it is justified because of a concern about consumer confusion. Many modern doctrinal innovations, however, are difficult to fit into the consumer protection paradigm, leading most commentators to conclude that modern law is unjustified. McKenna says he finds the criticism too simplistic, however, because the historical record reveals a different motivation for traditional trademark protection. “My belief is that it’s never been about consumer confusion for its own sake,” he says. “It’s been about companies protecting an interest in existing consumers, and confusion is only one way in which that interest can be affected.” For this reason, McKenna seeks to fit the modern conception of trademark law into the broader intellectual tradition relating to property theory and wants to better understand the ways modern trademark law really has changed.

Both his explorations and discoveries translate seamlessly into the classroom. The students in his Intellectual Property Survey course are often shocked to realize that so much of what they know and see every day is IP. They see it even more in the visual aids he uses, which are often no more than a Boston Red Sox hat, a bag of Pepperidge Farm Goldfish Crackers, or a Tiffany’s jewelry box. And he does this, not only because it makes class more fun, but also because he feels it’s easier to help students better grasp the subject matter if they can see how it ties into the real world.
“That’s what you do in law,” he says. “You try and take rules and apply them to situations. In class, I take concrete examples of law and apply them to everyday life.”

¹67 University of Pittsburgh Law Review (2005)

Teri Dobbins

Assistant Professor of Law
July 2002-Present

Professor Teri Dobbins joined the Saint Louis University School of Law faculty after five years in private practice. She was an associate in the litigation section at Locke Liddell & Sapp, a Texas-based firm, where she primarily represented financial and insurance institutions in contract and tort cases.

"I loved the variety,” Dobbins says. “I liked the challenge of never knowing what was next.”

Professor Dobbins gained significant litigation experience in state and federal court. She also honed her writing skills through appellate experience that included drafting petitions for writ of mandamus, petitions for review and briefs on the merits in the state courts of appeal, the Texas Supreme Court and the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.

All of this experience took Dobbins to where she ultimately wanted to be — in academia. “I was attracted to academia as a law student,” she says. “I liked being able to explore issues from the policy perspective. It’s one thing to know the rule, it’s another to know why we have it or question whether we should change it. But I wanted to gain some practical experience before I began teaching.”

She has found it useful to draw on her experience to help students understand the practical effects of what they’re learning. “In the classroom, students learn the rules and read the cases but it’s not always clear how the rules are applied in the real world or why they matter,” she says.

In the teaching of a Contracts course, for example, Dobbins quickly learned that her students often came to class expecting to dig into big, thick legal documents and often viewed contracts strictly as a business course. “But what they don’t realize,” she says, “is that contracts are an integral part of their everyday lives. The lease on their apartment, for example, employment contracts, agreements between spouses, partners, or family members are all governed, at least in part, by the law of contracts. There is also a great deal of public policy involved both formally and informally. When they realize these things, they are able to connect with the material in a different way.”
In addition to actively engaging her students in class, Dobbins keeps herself actively engaged in scholarship, professional speaking engagements and administrative appointments. She has written an article in the Oregon Law Review¹ that deals with the Implied Covenant of Good Faith, and another in the Journal of Law in Society² that deals with barriers to justice in the law of contracts. She has presented to the Asian American Bar Association and Mound City Bar Association on the topic of “Decreasing Minority Enrollment in Law Schools,” and to the Society of American Law Teachers—Class in the Classroom—Contracts Panel on the topic of “Rights Without Access: Acknowledging (and Teaching About) Barriers to Justice in the Law of Contracts.” She serves on the law school Admissions Committee, the Student Life Committee, Retention Committee, Clinical Assistant Professor Search Committee and the Ad Hoc Diversity Committee.

¹ “Losing Faith: Extracting the Implied Covenant of Good Faith from (Some) Contracts,” 84 Oregon Law Review 227 (2005).
² “The Hidden Costs of Contracting: Barriers to Justice in the Law of Contracts,” Journal of Law in Society (Forthcoming Fall 2005).

Frederic Bloom

Assistant Professor of Law
July 2004-Present

Frederic Bloom has a way with words. When he’s standing at the front of the classroom giving a lecture, or seated around a conference table in his “Today’s Supreme Court” seminar, it’s difficult not to be drawn in by the words he uses. The quiet passion he has for the law is just as apparent as his ability for teaching and helping his students make more targeted connections to the material. Though, if you asked him, he’d modestly say it was the richness of the subject, not the professor, that helps them make such connections.

In his most recently published article, “Unconstitutional Courses,”¹ he argues that from time to time, the Supreme Court requires inferior federal courts and ultimately itself to make decisions in unconstitutional ways. “We spend a lot of time as observers of the Court,” he says, “concentrating on whether or not particular outcomes seem correct or incorrect, wise or unwise. It’s an absolutely sensible focus, but it’s also an incomplete one. In ‘Unconstitutional Courses,’ I argue that the Court can reshape and abuse the ‘judicial power’ through things other than bold pronouncements or obvious doctrinal revisions. It can do so through something more inconspicuous: the prescription of unconstitutional decision-making procedures. These procedures have attracted little sustained attention. But by charting ‘unconstitutional courses,’ the Court has refashioned the ‘judicial power’ in an untenable way.”

As a professor, Bloom’s hope is to convince his students to be precise, careful, and thoughtful about the positions they take and the arguments they craft.

"One of my favorite professors – Pam Karlan – once told us to read poetry,” he remembers. “She didn’t say what kind of poetry we should read, but her message struck me as profound. Law, like poetry, needs to be studied deeply and places great emphasis on words. And law, like poetry, has its own measure of art.”

¹Washington University Law Quarterly (2006)

Mark P. Bernstein

Director of the Law Library;
Assistant Professor of Law
July 2004-Present

For Mark Bernstein, Director of the Omer Poos Law Library, every day is its own adventure.

“I feel very fortunate to have a job that provides me with the kind of challenges that stretch my mind,” says Bernstein. “More than that, I get the opportunity to help others learn, help them sift through the clues and try to find resolution.”

Bernstein has many plans to make the process of resolution — of obtaining the most pertinent information in the most efficient way — easier for those who conduct research in the law library. In the future he hopes to be able to further develop the library’s collection to reflect the strength of the law school and ensure that the research needs of current and future students are amply met. He has already begun doing this by creating, along with his team of reference librarians, a new collection development policy that will be used as a guideline for determining the immediate and long-term collection priorities of the School of Law. And he has helped bolster research possibilities by collaborating with the University’s Pius Library and the Health Sciences Library to purchase a digitized version of the U.S. Serial Set of Reports and Documents. Together with the University librarian and the associate University librarian for the Health Sciences Library, Bernstein is also working to create a plan to address issues of importance at all three libraries, as well as exchange ideas that may benefit the entire University community.

Another area in which Bernstein and his colleagues hope to make strides is in technology. As chair of the Technology Committee, he is working closely with faculty, administration and the dean to initiate a pilot program that will allow students to take final exams on their laptops. The preliminary software has been tested in several classes already, and will be further tested this spring.

“The learning style of law students today is different than it was five, ten and 20 years ago,” says Bernstein. “Today’s students have grown up with technology being prevalent in their education, and we as legal educators need to ensure that the learning environment we provide successfully addresses this fact. I believe that a good library reflects the goals and mission of the school to which it is connected. Beyond that, a good library spends as much time anticipating the future needs of its researchers just as much as the present needs.”

Anticipating the future and insuring success for the present are things Mark Bernstein understands and has committed himself to as director of the law library. His vision, his enthusiasm and his experience will serve him well, but it is his ability to help others navigate through the research process with success that brings him the greatest satisfaction.

“When you see that a student has mastered a concept, understood more fully the road they took to arrive at resolution, it makes you proud,” says Bernstein. “There’s nothing more rewarding than knowing that something you did helped to make a difference in someone’s life.”