Top Students. Top Faculty

EMORY LAW IS FOCUSED ON RECRUITING the best and brightest students and faculty members.

Our median LSAT for last year's entering class was the highest in at least a decade and, over the past few years, Emory Law has achieved remarkable success in recruiting new tenure-stream faculty members. These new faculty members are the next generation who will shape the school and its students for decades to come. They include recruits from top universities (Michigan, Northwestern, Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Brooklyn, and Penn State, among others) and entry-level scholars with advanced degrees, prestigious clerkships, and practice experience. These new additions offer expertise in areas ranging from corporate law and tax to health law, artificial intelligence, and civil rights and social justice. Emory Law's new faculty members confirm the law school's commitment to national leadership and to student success.

Deepa Das Acevedo

Associate Professor of Law

Deepa Das Acevedo is an interdisciplinary scholar who offers expertise in the gig economy, employee benefits, and employment law as well as in the law and politics of India and legal anthropology. Her scholarly work has appeared in Southern California Law Review and the Employee Rights & Employment Policy Journal, among others. Her research blends ethno­graphic fieldwork and anthropological theory with doctrinal and policy analysis to provide new insights about legal rules and institutions. In addition to her work on the law and politics of India, she studies employment regulation and is exploring methodological and theoretical developments in the anthropology of law. 

She joined Emory Law in 2023 from the University of Alabama, where she was an associate professor of law. Before that, she was a Sharswood Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Carey School of Law.

Acevedo's research has been supported by the Fulbright Scholar program, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Social Science Research Council, the American Philosophical Society, the Committee on Southern Asian Studies at The University of Chicago, and the Research Grants Committee at the University of Alabama. Her monograph, The Battle for Sabarimala: Religion, Law, and Gender in Contemporary India, is forthcoming with Oxford University Press and her book, Beyond the Algorithm: Qualitative Insights for Gig Work Regulation, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2021.

"I am always excited about ways to bring my two disciplines into conversation with one another," she says. Employment law is such a happening area right now that I am always looking for ways to bring current events into the classroom, whether through arranging guest panels that consist of lawyers, policy workers, and journalists or by playing an interactive game that conveys the realities of living on the minimum wage."

Ifeoma Ajunwa

Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Law

lfeoma Ajunwa joined the faculty this fall, strengthening the school's offerings in Al and employment law. As Al.Humanity Professor of Law and Ethics, she will be part of the univer­sity's interdisciplinary Al.Humanity Initiative and become the founding director of a program dedicated to Al and the Law. Her new book, The Quantified Worker, was recently published by Cambridge University Press.

An award-winning multidisciplanary scholar of artificial intelligence, law, and ethics, Ajunwa was recruited from the University of North Carolina School of Law, where she served  as the founding director of the Al Decision­ Making Research Program. Her scholarship and teaching focus on the intersection of law and technology with an emphasis on the ethical governance of workplace technologies. She has received numerous grants and awards, and much recognition, including being named a Fulbright Scholar (2021-2022), earning the National Science Foundation CAREER (Early Career Development) Award for $526,878 in 2019, and securing an additional $1,254,944 in external funding since 2018.

Ajunwa is a recipient of the Derrick A. Bell Award from the Association of American Law Schools (AALS). Previously, she was an associ­ate professor in the Labor Relations, Law, and History Department of Cornell University's Industrial and Labor Relations School (ILR) where she received the Junior Faculty Champion Award from Cornell University and earned tenure in 2020.

"I'm thrilled to be joining Emory Law," says Ajunwa. "The Emory Law faculty is such a deeply vibrant and welcoming intellectual com­munity. I am honored to join such a world-class faculty in a world-class city."

Andrew Jennings

Associate Professor of Law

Andrew Jennings joined Emory Law as an associate professor after beginning his aca­demic career at Brooklyn Law School. Professor Jennings researches and teaches about corporate law, securities law, and white collar crime. He has published his scholarship in top journals, including the Duke Law Journal and the Yale Journal on Regulation. Before entering academia, Jennings practiced with Cravath, Swaine & Moore, where he handled mergers and acquisitions and corporate governance matters, and at Sullivan & Cromwell, where he practiced in criminal defense and investigations and civil litigation. Jennings also clerked for Judge Helene N. White, of the US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit.

His backgound includes advising public companies on securities compliance and representing clients that are being investigated by the SEC, DOJ, and other regulators. That experience in turn informs his scholarly research. He says, "At Emory, I'll be teaching securities regulation and corporate crime, and I'm excited to use both my practice experience and research to design those courses."

Jennings was glad to relocate to Georgia. He says, "Coming to Emory Law is what I'd call a triple opportunity: a fantastic law school in a major research university in a world-class city. Emory Law, the larger university, and Atlanta are all incredibly exciting places to join."

Kevin Quinn

Charles Howard Candler Professor of Law

Prior to joining Emory Law as a professor of Al and the Law with a joint appointment in the Department of Quantitative Theory and Methods at the Emory College of Arts and Sciences, Kevin Quinn was a professor in the political science department at the University of Michigan. Professor Quinn also previously served as a professor at Berkeley Law. His research focuses on questions of empirical legal studies and statistical methodology, has been supported by the National Science Foundation, and has appeared in leading journals in political science, statistics, and law. He also has expertise in voting and judicial behavior. Quinn is a former president of the Society for Political Methodology and his research has received multiple professional awards. He has expertise in Al and the law.

"Emory Law is at a very exciting point in its history. From my early conversations with members of the Emory Law community to now, I've been struck by the community's sense of excitement about the future and people's willingness to put in the hard work needed to realize collective goals. That is extremely attractive to me. Under the leadership of Dean Bobinski, there has been an influx of talented new faculty members and the possibilities for interdisci­plinary work have grown. The university-wide Al.Humanity Initiative is but one example of such interdisciplinarity at Emory. Part of what I hope to do at Emory is to play a role in building and maintaining bridges between Emory Law and other units on campus while staying true to the core mission of Emory Law."

Lindsey Simon

Associate Professor of Law

Lindsey Simon is an associate professor of law whose research focuses on the bankruptcy system, drawing concepts from bankruptcy structure and procedure to address broader institutional design challenges. Simon's articles have been published in the Administrative

Law Review, the Cardozo Law Review, the Indiana Law Journal and the North Carolina Law Review. Simon's most recent scholarship addresses the intersection between mass torts and bankruptcy, including an article on non-debtor relief in Chapter 11, forthcoming in the Yale Law Journal. She has assisted academics, judges, members of Congress and many other stakeholders on the subject of mass tort bankruptcies, and her commentary in connection with the Purdue Pharma, Boy Scouts of America, and USA Gymnastics bankruptcies has appeared in various media outlets, including The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times,Forbes, The Economist, NPR and Reuters.

Before joining the Emory Law faculty, Simon served as the Robert Cotten Alston Associate Chair in Corporate Law at the University of Georgia School of Law. Prior to becoming a professor, Simon was an associate at Kilpatrick Townsend & Stockton, where her practice involved a mix of commercial litigation and corporate restructuring matters.

She says, "My teaching style is problem based with a strong focus on practical consider­ations. I will ask you to understand the law, but also very quickly apply it to a real client's real problems. And as we're solving those things together, I will also ask you to think about not only how you can solve that for your client, but how you can also consider things from the perspective of a lawyer, for example. What ethi­cal implications are at play? How can you help? How will your firm deal with these issues? How can you make sure that the business will come back to you again?"

Mark Storslee

Associate Professor of Law (on leave 2023-2024)

Associate Professor Mark Storslee brings a wealth of academic and professional experience to his new role at Emory Law. Before accepting this position, he was an assistant professor at Penn State Law. His research focuses on the First Amendment freedoms of religion and speech, and topics in constitutional law generally. He served as executive director of the Constitutional Law Center at Stanford. He has published in the University of Chicago Law Review, the University of Pennsylvania Law Review,The Review of Politics, the Journal of Law & Religion, and other periodicals. In 2020, Storslee was awarded the Harold Berman Award for Excellence in Scholarship by the Law and Religion Section of the Association of American Law Schools. In 2021, he received the Penn State Law LLM Teaching Award.

After law school, he clerked for Judge Diarmuid O'Scannlain on the United States Court of Appeals, and later for Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch on the United States Supreme Court.

"Teaching and learning about the Constitution or any other area of law also involves learning about the world-the history surrounding a particular provision, the economic or moral rationale for a particular rule, or the ways that outside events have shaped courts and judicial decisions," Storslee explained. "In my teaching, I aim to help students understand not just the law, but the world that made it."

Stacie Strong

Professor of Law (beginning January 2024)

Stacie Strong will join Emory Law in January 2024 after completing her commitments as pro­fessor of comparative and private international law at the University of Sydney in Australia. She has also taught at the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford in the United Kingdom as well as Georgetown Law Center and the University of Missouri in the United States. Strong is

an experienced practitioner, having acted as counsel at Baker & McKenzie after working as a dual-qualified lawyer (US attorney and English solicitor) in the New York and London offices of Weil, Gotshal & Manges.

Strong has published more than 130 books, chapters and articles in Europe, Asia, and the Americas, including Legal Reasoning Across Commercial Disputes: Comparing Judicial and Arbitral Analyses (2020), Arbitration of Trust Disputes: Issues in National and International Law (2016), Class, Mass, and Collective Arbitration in National and International Law (2013), and Research and Practice in International Commercial Arbitration Sources and Strategies (2009), all from Oxford University Press.

Strong's scholarly work has been cited as authority by numerous state and federal courts and international tribunals, and she sits as an arbitrator on a variety of international commercial and trust-related matters.

She says, "I appreciate how stressful law school can be, so I use a unique approach to in-class participation called 'the preemption method' that gives students a high degree of autonomy over how and when to contribute orally. I also use prepublished questions, similar to the pre-class questions I used when I taught at Oxford and Cambridge, to help students hone in on the important parts of the reading. Together, these two techniques reduce student stress, increase the quality of class discussion, and result in about an 80-90% voluntary partici­pation rate in each class session." 

Alex Zhang

Assistant Professor of Law

Alex Zhang's teaching and research interests include federal income taxation, tax policy, partnership taxation, administrative law, and tax-exempt organizations.

Professor Zhang's research has been pub­lished by or is forthcoming from Virginia Law Review, Cornell Law Review, NYU Law Review Online, Stanford Law Review Online, and Tax Notes, among others.

Before joining the Emory faculty, Zhang served as a law clerk to the Honorable William A. Fletcher on the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, and to the Honorable Guido Calabresi on the Second Circuit. He served as managing editor of the Yale Law Journal and won the Clifford L. Porter Prize in Taxation, as well as the Christopher E. Bergin Award from Tax Notes.

"I believe that the introductory course to federal income taxation presents a wonderful pedagogical opportunity," he says. "In law school classrooms, students from disadvantaged backgrounds often lack the confidence to speak and participate. First-year courses speak the language of intuitions and probabilities: 'Correct' answers are few in torts and contracts. But in tax, grasping the doctrine and concepts begins with a solid understanding of the provisions of the code. Those provisions sometimes-even if not always-provide a precise answer to a question. A more diverse range of students may volunteer their views in a tax classroom, because they know that they are right. I hope to use this aspect of tax law to help more students find their voice in law school."