An expert in business law and complex litigation, Professor Winship has been a vital part of the College of Law since 2010, twice earning the Carroll P. Hurd Award for Excellence in Faculty Scholarship as well as serving as Interim Dean of the College of Law and the Senior Associate Dean for Academic Affairs. She has also served as fellow in the Academic Leadership Program in the Big Ten Academic Alliance and chaired the Securities Regulation section of the American Association of Law Schools during her time at Illinois. Her full bio is available on her faculty profile page.

Professor Winship’s endowed position was made possible through a generous gift from the late Edwin M. Adams, a well-known lawyer and actor, who earned his law degree at Illinois in 1939. Joined by her family, Winship was honored with speeches from Dr. Amy Santos, associate provost for faculty development and professor in the Department of Special Education, as well as Dean Jamelle Sharpe.

Watch the ceremony on our YouTube channel.

One of the lawsuits, filed by Novo Nordisk A/S against Hims & Hers Health Inc., takes aim at the practice of drug compounding and highlights the ambiguity between the FDA’s compounding framework and US patent law. Sherkow said that the lawsuit demonstrates that compounding pharmacies and direct-to-consumer telehealth platforms have grown from “minuscule operations” into “real players” that brand-name drugmakers now view as worth targeting in patent litigation. Read more from Sherkow on this case at bloomberglaw.com.

Another lawsuit, filed by BioNTech SE against Moderna Inc., claims patent infringement involving mRNA vaccine technology.

“This is typical of cutting-edge technology as it matures,” Sherkow said. “The original patents—and patent disputes—are often about using the technology more broadly, with one or few early entrants suing manufacturers. As the technology develops—and that first generation of patents gets older—we see more, albeit narrower, patenting focusing on specific products, and a great number of patent holders suing (and cross-suing) other manufacturers.” Read more from Sherkow on this case at bloomberglaw.com.

Professor Arden Rowell presented a paper called “Why Behavior?” The paper develops a model to systematize how different scholarly traditions approach the question of why law & behavior matters.

Professor Bob Lawless and recent graduate Emily Woo ’25 presented a paper that they co-authored with Jennifer Robbennolt and Angela Koo ’25, entitled “Who Gets the Last Word? Interruptions and Floor Control on the Supreme Court.” The paper, forthcoming in the University of Illinois Law Review, began as Emily and Angela’s class project for Empirical Methods. Using data scraped from transcripts of Supreme Court oral arguments, the paper reinforces past findings about gendered patterns of interruptions between the justices and also builds a more complex story by focusing on which justices retain floor control after being interrupted.

Finally, Professors Kenworthey Bilz, Lesley Wexler, and Verity Winship were commentators for papers at the colloquium.

In the episode, they discuss why people actually file for bankruptcy, the role of debt collection and litigation, potential policy reforms, and much more.

Listen to the episode.

“The primary goal of the FDA is to make animal testing the exception in 3-5 years, and a secondary goal is to get drugs to the market faster by reducing research and development costs,” she said. “Those are all worthy and ambitious goals, but it’s hard not to worry about the attendant risks in doing so. We really need to start thinking about how we ought to validate these new approach methodologies so that they’re at least as effective as animal testing.”

Read the full interview at news.illinois.edu.