In his latest piece of scholarship, Professor Jason Mazzone reckons with the fallout from the case of SEC v. Jarkesy, decided by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2024. Because of the Court’s opinion, Mazzone writes “there are likely to be very few such claims ever decided by juries. Indeed, there are likely to be few such cases that make it to court at all.”
Most people think about bankruptcy the wrong way, NPR’s Planet Money argues. To support their argument, hosts Stephan Bisaha and Adrian Ma had Professor Robert Lawless on to provide his expertise. “It’s the solution to the problem, right? If, you know, the financial distress is disease, bankruptcy’s the hospital,” Lawless told the hosts.
The University of Illinois College of Law is pleased to welcome 10 new faculty members to our roster this fall.
Joining as an assistant professor of law and Richard W. & Marie L. Corman Scholar, Chan Tov McNamarah comes to Illinois from Cornell Law School, where they were a visiting assistant professor. A scholar of antidiscrimination theory and constitutional law, McNamarah studies the nature of discrimination, the purposes of its legal regulation, and the structure of legal arguments used to justify status-based inequality. Their work has been published in several top journals, selected for presentation at leading conferences, and twice been honored by the Dukeminier Awards for best legal scholarship on gender and sexual orientation. Before entering academia, McNamarah worked as a litigation associate in the New York and Sao Paulo offices of Davis Polk & Wardwell LLP, focusing on white collar defense and government investigations.
Also joining the faculty as an assistant professor of law and Richard W. & Marie L. Corman Scholar, Thomas Rousse will use his nontraditional background—including an MSc. in Games Analysis and Design at IT University of Copenhagen, where he produced and designed the award-winning arcade game LAZA KNITEZ!! as part of the Glitchnap studio, as well as work as a games critic and journalist—in teaching and writing about intellectual property, contracts, and the law of creative industries, focusing on video games and new media. Rousse also brings experience in intellectual property litigation and intellectual property strategy and land use disputes.
Fermín Méndez joins Illinois Law as a clinical professor of law and director of our new Innovation & Entrepreneurship Clinic. An expert on corporate law and securities law, Méndez previously directed the Community Economic Development Clinic at Albany Law School and co-taught the Entrepreneurship Clinic at the University of Michigan Law School. Méndez earned his JD from the University of Michigan Law School and AB from Harvard University. He also wrestled for Harvard’s D1 Varsity Wrestling Team and works to increase equitable access to the sport for women, girls, and communities of color.
Heather Beard joins the University of Illinois College of Law as a teaching assistant professor in the legal writing program. She is a double Illini, earning both her BA and JD with honors from the University prior to more than 20 years in federal appellate practice. In her role as senior attorney in the Appellate and Supreme Court Litigation Branch of the U.S. National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), Beard briefed and argued labor law cases before the U.S. Courts of Appeals and advised on Supreme Court litigation.
Joining the Kimball R. and Karen Gatsis Anderson Center for Advocacy and Professionalism as assistant director is Kelsey Myers. She comes to Illinois Law from North Carolina, where she worked as a trial attorney and gained experience with Chief Justice Beasley of the North Carolina Supreme Court, working in civil litigation focusing on construction defects and medical malpractice, and defending in criminal defense. As a lecturer, Myers will be teaching courses in foundational and advanced trial advocacy and coaching our competitive trial teams.
Alicia Uribe-McGuire joins the College of Law as a lecturer. She will be teaching as part of our legal studies minor and serving as an advisor to our undergraduate students. Her research interests focus on American political institutions, with a particular emphasis on the United States Judiciary and the intersection between the judiciary and other political actors or bodies.
Zachary Boyce and Steve Richardson both join the Law Library as teaching assistant professors. Boyce will teach the first-year Legal Research course as well as Advanced Legal Research. His research interests primarily lie at the intersection between Legal History, Book History, and Print Culture, with a particular focus on the materiality and social construction of legal authority. Richardson is a reference librarian and will be teaching Legal Research. He has previously worked in the non-profit sector practicing in the field of immigration law.
In addition to these full-time faculty members, the College also extends a warm welcome to the following visiting faculty.
Jason Bent is a visiting professor who currently serves as professor of law and director of the Martin H. Malin Institute for Law and the Workplace at Chicago-Kent School of Law. At Illinois, Bent will teach Civil Procedure and brings experience in employment discrimination law and worker safety regulation. Prior to teaching, he served as judicial clerk to Judge Cornelia Kennedy at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, and Judge Joan B. Gottschall at the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, and was a litigator in private practice in Chicago.
Brendan Gilligan joins the College of Law as the Stanton Fellow at the First Amendment Clinic and a visiting lecturer. Previously, Gilligan was a legal fellow at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, where he worked on digital speech, surveillance, and transparency issues. He also represented individuals charged with federal criminal offenses as a Deputy Federal Public Defender in the Central District of California.
On behalf of everyone at the College of Law, we are proud to have these individuals join our faculty and extend a warm welcome to our campus.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.