Verity Winship – College of Law

Winship invested as Edwin M. Adams Professor of Law

Krista Gaedtke — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 20:19:53 +0000

On February 10, 2026, Verity Winship was invested as the Edwin M. Adams Professor of Law in a ceremony honoring her commitment to scholarship, teaching, and public engagement.

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.

6 faculty present research and provide commentary at St. Louis University Colloquium on Law, Behavioral Science, and Social Science

Krista Gaedtke — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 23:07:21 +0000

The College of Law was well-represented at the recent St. Louis University Colloquium on Law, Behavioral Science, and Social Science. Professor Jennifer Robbennolt presented a work-in-progress called “’The Rule of Law’ Silo” that is co-authored by Professors Verity Winship and Colleen Murphy. The paper presents the results of a survey to understand what people understand the phrase “the rule of law” to mean.

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.

Illinois Law faculty, students, and alumni present at LSA meeting

Chris Davies — Fri, 13 Jun 2025 18:04:05 +0000

Law and Society Association Annual Meeting

The Law and Society Association Annual Meeting took place in Chicago, Illinois, on May 22–25, 2025, and featured a number of College of Law faculty and JSD students as presenters. Illinois Law professors presenting included Kenworthey Bilz, Bob Lawless, Jennifer Robbennolt, and Verity Winship; affiliated faculty presenting included Jose Atiles and Anna Marshall; and JSD students presenting included Thallyta Cavoli, Elsa Zawedde, and Qiaoyuan Zhi. Among others at the conference affiliated with Illinois were Vanessa Villanueva Collao, JSD ’24; Catherine Grosso, visiting assistant professor from 2005-’08; Dara Purvis, visiting assistant professor from 2010-’13; and So Young Park, JD ’21. The 2025 meeting explored questions central to control and compassion related to the human body, ranging from reproductive justice and LGBTQ equality to disability rights and the death penalty.

Journal of Empirical Legal Studies selects article by Robbennolt and Winship for publication

Krista Gaedtke — Thu, 22 May 2025 21:08:17 +0000

The Journal of Empirical Legal Studies has selected “Settlementality,” an article co-authored by Professors Jennifer Robbennolt, Verity Winship, and alumna Jessica Bregant, for publication. Slated to be published later this year, the article is meanwhile available at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4773926.

According to the authors, “Settlementality” breaks new ground by exploring how everyday people perceive the role of settlements in the legal system. Their novel empirical study provides the first systematic investigation into lay opinions of settlement. They surveyed a nationally representative sample of more than 1,000 U.S. adults to ask them what they think about settlement. Respondents told them, for example, the extent they agreed or disagreed with statements like these: “A settlement between two parties is nobody’s business but their own.” “Settling parties are more interested in money than justice.” “Settlementality” promises to be a foundational article in an emerging body of empirical scholarship about settlement, reporting for the first-time what respondents thought settlement should look like.

The Journal of Empirical Legal Studies is a peer-edited, peer-refereed, interdisciplinary journal that publishes high-quality, empirically-oriented articles of interest to scholars in a diverse range of law and law-related fields, including civil justice, corporate law, criminal justice, domestic relations, economic, finance, health care, political science, psychology, public policy, securities regulation, and sociology.

Winship publishes review on JOTWELL

Law News — Fri, 30 Aug 2024 15:30:00 +0000

In the world of technology, there is a maxim about the division of labor that states, “The US produces technology and the EU produces rules.” This is the center of a new article by Anu Bradford, which was recently reviewed by Professor Verity Winship. In her review, Winship notes “Bradford’s super-power as a scholar is the ability to take something that has been recognized and analyzed in piecemeal form, and then to enlarge the framework and fundamentally shift how we talk about the area.” By applying this “super-power” to the US-EU technological rights conflict, Bradford creates an article that is “sophisticated, timely…well worth a read.”

Read Winship’s review on JOTWELL.

Winship authors post on suits against private companies brought by shareholders

Law News — Mon, 15 Jul 2024 13:00:00 +0000

In a new blog post published on the Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance, Professor Verity Winship examines a “blindspot in the law and its analysis”: suits brought by investors against the company in which they own shares. Reviewing literature on “unicorn” companies, private companies valued over $1 billion, Winship discovered a few interesting and unique aspects of shareholder suits against these groups. She found such cases are rare and predominantly based on state-law claims, and their rarity may be due to procedural limitations, investment structures, and the absence of market prices, necessitating a new approach to align regulatory frameworks with the realities of modern private companies.

The Civilian features Robbennolt and Winship article on settlement

Law News — Thu, 21 Dec 2023 15:30:34 +0000

People generally grasp the basic concept of settlement, recognizing it as an agreement between parties to resolve a dispute without the need for a trial, but some confusion exists regarding the settlement process. Professors Jennifer Robbennolt and Verity Winship, along with Jessica Bregant ’09, have made examining settlements one of the hallmarks of their scholarship, and their work was highlighted in The Civilian, an online journal out of Stanford that makes research accessible to lay audiences. The Robbennolt-Winship study surveyed more than 1,000 individuals to learn more about people’s perceptions of fault and responsibility in settled cases, revealing that about half of the respondents believe settlement implies some admission of responsibility, emphasizing the impact of public perception on individuals’ confidence in the legal system.

Read the full article at The Civilian.

Robbennolt and Winship author perception of settlement article for APA

Law News — Wed, 20 Sep 2023 19:15:00 +0000

Though the record-breaking settlement Dominion received in its settlement with Fox News is frequently characterized as a “win” by commentators, the statement from Fox with the settlement was not apologetic, did not acknowledge any responsibility, and was not a retraction. In a new article written for the American Psychological Association, Professors Jennifer Robbennolt and Verity Winship, along with Jessica Bregant ’09 (now a professor at the University of Houston Law Center), dig into the psychological reasons people tend to infer that a settling defendant was responsible. Based on their research on settlements, the article provides a fascinating look at how perceptions can affect how lawsuits are settled.

Read the full article online.