Faculty
A Top 10 public law school, Illinois hosts a productive, engaging, and highly visible
faculty. Illinois faculty have long been known for groundbreaking work in legal
fields as diverse as bankruptcy, constitutional law, elder law, taxation, international
law, property law, labor law, business law, criminal law, and family law. Nearly
half of the College of Law faculty hold advanced graduate degrees beyond their juris
doctorates in fields such as medicine, economics, engineering, business, and psychology.
In the past seven years, the College has added 28 new tenure-track and tenured faculty,
achieving a student-faculty ratio of 13 to 1. The faculty is expected to grow by
15 percent over the next half decade.
College of Law faculty bring a wealth of experience and backgrounds to the classroom,
including:
- 15 served as judicial clerks in the United States Supreme Court, U.S. Circuit Courts
of Appeals, U.S. District Courts, state supreme courts, and others.
- 26 worked in the private practice of law prior to entering law teaching.
- Others have worked in high-profile positions within government agencies while others
paved new roads as entrepreneurs in business and engineering.
As a group, our faculty is:
- Consistently placed in the Top 20 among U.S. law schools in studies of scholarly
impact.
- Ranked 7th in the nation in per-faculty-member productivity for the last three years,
as measured by the number of articles posted by faculty on SSRN.
- Ranked 9th in total productivity, joining much larger schools in the Top 10 listing
of the most productive American law schools.
- Ranked in the Top 10 on SSRN for the number of downloaded Illinois faculty papers.
- Quoted more than 60 times per month in national print and electronic media outlets
such as the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Associated Press, National Law
Journal, NPR, and FOX.
Awards and Recognitions
- Professors Robert M. Lawless and Ralph Brubaker have been elected as fellows of
the American College of Bankruptcy, the most prestigious recognition that can be
awarded to a bankruptcy professional.
- Professors Leon Dash, Matthew Finkin, Fred Hoxie, Wayne LaFave, and Michael Moore
were honored in 2009 as Center for Advanced Study Professors, one of the highest
forms of scholarly recognition at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
- Professor Lawless won the 2009 Editor’s Prize from American Bankruptcy Law Journal
for his co-authored article “Did Bankruptcy Fail? An Empirical Study of Consumer
Debtors” (with Angela Littwin, Katherine Porter, John Pottow, Deborah Thorne, and
Elizabeth Warren).