News - College of Law

Lawless and Kar honored with 2026 College of Law awards for scholarly excellence

Professor Robert Lawless was awarded the 2026 Wayne R. LaFave Award for Scholarly Excellence for his book “Debt’s Grip: Risk and Consumer Bankruptcy” (University of California Press, 2025), co-authored with Deborah Thorne and Pamela Foohey. This award was established in 2002 by Michael Moore, the Charles R. Walgreen, Jr. Chair, and Heidi Hurd, the Ross and Helen Workman Chair in Law. The award was established in honor of Professor Wayne LaFave, whose remarkable scholarly legacy in criminal law and procedure is best honored through the recognition of work that is of matching ambition and importance.

Professor Robin Kar was awarded the 2026 Carroll P. Hurd Award for Scholarly Excellence for his article “The Contractual Death and Rebirth of Privacy,” 38 Harvard Journal of Law & Technology 1103 (2025), co-authored with Xiaowei Yu. The Carroll P. Hurd Award for Scholarly Excellence was established in 2002, also by Michael Moore and Heidi Hurd, in honor of Carroll Parsons Hurd, whose work as a political theorist and lawyer elevated theoretical curiosity and intellectual rigor above all other virtues.

Lawsky delivers talk on law school hiring at AALS Candidates Workshop

Professor Sarah Lawsky spoke on a panel about law school hiring during an AALS Candidates Workshop on August 6, 2026. Her talk was specifically about “Trends in Entry Level Hiring.” The workshop provided faculty candidates an opportunity to hear from a panel of law school professors and administrators with experience in faculty hiring, discuss interview questions, and solicit advice in small groups.

Rowell op-ed: The End of NRC Independence and the Future of Nuclear Safety

What does the future of nuclear safety look like, and what might still be done to reduce the risk of nuclear disaster, given the demise of NRC independence following the Supreme Court decision in Trump v. Slaughter? An op-ed from Professor Arden Rowell and co-author Jud Mathews published in The Regulatory Review attempts to answer these questions.

Read the full op-ed.

Murphy appointed Vice Provost for Global Engagement

The Office of the Provost and Illinois International announced Colleen Murphy’s appointment as vice provost for global engagement earlier this month. In this role, effective as of August 16, 2026, she will serve as the university’s senior international officer, overseeing Illinois International and campuswide initiatives that promote global learning, discovery, and engagement.

Professor Murphy has served as interim associate chancellor and vice provost for global affairs and strategies since October 2025. In this interim capacity, she has been responsible for coordinating and advancing the university’s international activities, working in close collaboration with campus and system leadership. Professor Murphy has led ongoing initiatives strengthening connections between Illinois International and academic units, actively contributing to institutional planning for global engagement, and coordinating responses to emerging international matters affecting the university’s global community.

Read the full press release.

Article co-authored by Robbennolt and Winship wins Best Scholarly Article Award from AALS

Jessica Bregant, Jennifer Robbennolt and Verity Winship pose for a photo together

An article co-authored by Professors Jennifer Robbennolt, Verity Winship, and alumna Jessica Bregant ’09, originally published in the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, has been selected for the 2025 Best Scholarly Article Award by the AALS ADR Section. The Section annually selects an article that makes a significant contribution to the field of dispute resolution and reflects excellent scholarly analysis and writing. “Settlementality” provides an overview and analysis of how the general public views civil litigation and settlement.

Read the full article.

Illinois Law remembers Fred Bartlit ’60

Alumnus Fred Bartlit died on August 6, 2026. He was a member of the College of Law’s JD Class of 1960, among the top students in his class, and editor of the law review. Bartlit came to Illinois after earning a bachelor’s in engineering from United States Military Academy, West Point, New York, and serving eight years in the U.S. Army, including service with the Army Rangers.

After graduation, Bartlit worked with Kirkland & Ellis LLP before founding Bartlit Beck in 1993. His work earned him recognition as one of America’s “Lions of the Trial Bar” by the ABA Journal. Over the course of his career, he tried over 70 notable cases in more than 24 states, the Virgin Islands, and Scotland, including many complex and high-stakes cases. His reputation as a dedicated lawyer focused on winning for his clients helped Bartlit to gain work as counsel for President George W. Bush for the Tallahassee “hanging chads” election contest; he was later chosen as chief counsel by President Barack Obama a for the “National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling.”

Bartlit was an active member of the Class of 1960 and gave generously to the Class of 1960 Scholarship Fund, created in honor of their 40th reunion. He also supported the Law Building Renovation Fund, which aided the building’s many upgrades during the last decade. Prior to the pandemic, Bartlit returned to campus numerous times to lecture in the College of Law’s Fundamentals of Legal Practice course, a required course for first-year students. In connection with Fundamentals of Legal Practice, Bartlit focused on principles of leadership, which was one of his academic interests. His lectures ultimately led to the development of the College of Law’s Leadership Project, an initiative focused on preparing College of Law graduates to assume leadership roles.

“Fred challenged us to focus on the teaching of leadership to our students, and we have been responding to that challenge more forcefully every year,” noted Greg Miarecki, the College’s Executive Assistant Dean for Career Planning and Professional Development. “We will be forever grateful to Fred for his support and encouragement in this endeavor, and will continue the important work of preparing our graduates to lead.”

Read Fred Bartlit’s full obituary online.

Robbennolt and interdisciplinary team introduce new ‘anomaly detector’ that flags outlier counties in police uses of lethal force

Jennifer K. Robbennolt, the Alice Curtis Campbell Professor of Law at Illinois; Scott Althaus, director and the Merriam Professor of Political Science at Illinois; Jay Jennings, the assistant director of research and a research scientist; and Ajay Singh, the assistant director of strategic research initiatives and a research scientist.

A new data-driven dashboard produced by the Cline Center for Advanced Social Research at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign uses predictive modeling to pinpoint U.S. counties that have unusually high or low numbers of police use of lethal force incidents relative to national benchmarks.

The Cline Center’s SPOTLITE project has compiled nearly a decade’s worth of data identifying police uses of lethal force across the U.S., making it the most comprehensive nationwide record available. It documents any law enforcement discharge of a firearm that risks human life, regardless of whether anyone was killed or injured, as well as any pursuit or other use of force that results in a civilian death.

SPOTLITE’s new “anomaly detector” feature will highlight parts of the country that may be in need of reform — or that might already be doing innovative things to reduce unnecessary uses of lethal force by police, said Scott Althaus, the Merriam Professor of Political Science at Illinois and the director of the Cline Center.

“SPOTLITE’s anomaly detector is the first national-scale resource for directing attention to counties with unusual numbers of lethal force incidents by police,” he said. “Up until now, there wasn’t a way to identify outliers, high or low, at a national scale. With the mountain of aggregated data our team has compiled through SPOTLITE, that’s enabled our researchers to do some modeling that can predict how many incidents we should expect to see in any given county.”

The interdisciplinary team of scholars and experts guiding the SPOTLITE project includes Althaus; Joseph Bajjalieh, a senior research manager at the Cline Center; Jay Jennings, the assistant director of research and a research scientist at the Cline Center; Michael Martin, a senior research coordinator at the Cline Center; Jennifer K. Robbennolt, the Alice Curtis Campbell Professor of Law at Illinois; Ajay Singh, the assistant director of strategic research initiatives and a research scientist at the Cline Center; and dozens of undergraduate and graduate student researchers who have worked since 2017 to compile the database.

Read the full story at news.illinois.edu.

Gerke named 2026-27 University Scholar

Sara Gerke is among five professors at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign that have been named 2026-2027 University Scholars in recognition of their achievements in teaching, scholarship and service. The program honors faculty excellence and provides $15,000 to each scholar for three years to enhance their academic careers. That money may be used for travel, equipment, research assistants, books or other purposes.

Gerke, the Richard W. and Marie L. Corman Scholar at the College of Law, is an expert in health law and bioethics with a particular focus on artificial intelligence and digital health. She also holds an affiliation as a professor in the European Union Center at Illinois.

Gerke’s research examines the ethical and legal challenges of AI and big data in healthcare as well as health law in the U.S. and Europe. She has led or contributed to numerous interdisciplinary projects that draw on her expertise in these fields, especially in emerging medical technologies such as artificial intelligence, robotics, bionics and stem cell research. Currently, Gerke is leading two major Illinois studies funded by the European Union through the Horizon Europe funding program: the legal and ethical implications of AI-assisted surgeries and the concerns raised by the use of AI in colonoscopies. With the explosion of interest in subject matters related to her research, Gerke’s work and perspective are in demand. She has more than 100 publications in her portfolio, is a frequent guest lecturer at institutions across the world and served as an external reviewer for the World Health Organization’s guidance on the “Ethics and Governance of Artificial Intelligence for Health.”

Learn more about the other faculty members selected for this prestigious honor at news.illinois.edu.

Rowell publishes new interdisciplinary article on nuclear regulation

University of Illinois researchers bridge engineering and law to modernize radiation protection regulation

Professor Arden Rowell, in conjunction with researchers from the University of Illinois Grainger College of Engineering, recently published an article in Nuclear News proposing an interdisciplinary framework for modernizing one of the foundational principles of radiation protection. The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) recently released a proposed rule that would remove the long-standing As Low As Reasonably Achievable (ALARA) principle from its radiation protection regulations while retaining existing dose limits and opening the proposal for public comment, making their article, “Don’t Scrap ALARA—Modernize It,” especially timely.

SCOTUS made right decision in Hikma, Sherkow writes

Ionic column at the Smith Memorial Hall.

In an new essay on Health Affairs, Professor Jacob Sherkow writes that the U.S. Supreme Court made the correct decision in Hikma Pharmaceuticals v. Amarin Pharma, giving generic drug manufacturers important protection against patent suits based on labeling approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). This decision will “help preserve patient access to lower-cost medicines,” he writes; however, it also shifts pressure onto FDA, which does not interpret patent claims or decide whether future prescribing will infringe.

Read his full essay on Health Affairs.