Faculty

The faculty at Illinois is one of the most respected and highly cited in the nation, boasting national leaders in the fields of bankruptcy law, corporate law, criminal law, elder law, health law, labor law, property law, and a variety of other fields. Collectively, they consistently rank in the top 25 in the nation for scholarly influence.

And they bring a range of perspectives to their teaching and research. More than 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, among other fields. At Illinois, teaching is not an afterthought. To the contrary, four members of the College's faculty have won the University of Illinois' prestigious Campus Award for Excellence in Graduate and Professional Teaching.

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).

Spotlight

Kurt T. Lash
Alumni Distinguished Professor of Law

One of the nation's leading scholars of constitutional law, Professor Kurt T. Lash joined the College in 2010 as the Alumni Distinguished Professor of Law and co-director of the Program on Constitutional Theory, History, and Law.

A graduate of Yale Law School, Professor Lash joined us from Loyola Law School Los Angeles, where he served as the James P. Bradley Chair of Constitutional Law. His recent book, The Lost History of the Ninth Amendment, was published in 2009. Notably, his research was cited by the U.S. Supreme Court in McDonald v. Chicago (2010), which addressed the conflict between gun restrictions in Chicago and the Second Amendment.