Michele DeStefano Beardslee
Associate Professor of Law

University of Miami School of Law
1311 Miller Drive, Room G284
Coral Gables, FL 33146
mdb@law.miami.edu
website
CV

Michele DeStefano Beardslee is the founder and co-creator of LawWithoutWalls and an associate professor of law at Miami Law. Before joining the Miami Law faculty, she was a Climenko Fellow and lecturer on law at Harvard Law School, where she was previously the associate research director of the Program on the Legal Profession. Her primary area of scholarly interest is in the growing intersection between law and business, how this intersection is reshaping the role of both inside and outside counsel, and the consequences of these developments for clients, the profession, and the public. Employing a mix of qualitative and quantitative methodologies, Michele’s most recent published research investigates the role general counsels play in managing public relations for high profile corporate legal controversies. She is currently researching the changing role of compliance by conducting interviews of general counsels and chief compliance officers of large, publicly traded corporations.

Young-Kyu Kim
Assistant Professor of Management
Korea University Business School

Korea University Business School
Anam-dong 5-ga, Seongbuk-gu
Seoul, 136-701, Korea
youngkyu_kim@korea.ac.kr

Young-Kyu Kim is an assistant professor of management at Korea University Business School. From 2008 to 2010, he has been with the Program on the Legal Profession as a postdoctoral research fellow. During his fellowship, he has primarily worked on Corporate Purchasing Project. His exhaustive analysis on the project allowed the program to build extensive knowledge on how companies enter, manage, and terminate relationships with external counsel. In addition, he has studied the issues of lateral moves and a law firm’s commitment to diversity and presented research outcomes in leading conferences.

Young-Kyu received his PhD from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business in 2008. In his doctoral work, Young-Kyu examined the issue of social status and organizational identity in various empirical settings, such as the venture capital industry and legal/financial advisory services in the mergers and acquisitions markets. His research interests include social networks, organizational status and identity, and social mobility of individuals and firms. Currently, he looks into the legal education reform in Korea, based on his past experience on various legislative reform projects in Korean public sectors, and plans a career study of Korean law school graduates.

Department of Sociology
University of Chicago
rlancast@uchicago.edu
website

Ryon Lancaster's main project is a study of the processes by which the Medieval Catholic Church in England became a bureaucratic organization over the course of the 12th century. He is also beginning a study of the social determinants of monastery foundings in England prior to the Protestant Reformation. Lancaster's primary research and teaching interests are in organizational sociology, sociology of law, economic sociology, and historical sociology

Additionally, Lancaster is working on two projects that explore the intersection of law and organizations in the modern US. One project explores the changing economic behavior and organizational structures of large US law firms. The second project is affiliated with the American Bar Foundation and explores how the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission processes employment discrimination cases, and how they filter cases into the federal courts.

American Bar Foundation
750 N. Lakeshore Drive, 4th Floor
Chicago, IL 60611
rnelson@abfn.org
website

Robert L. Nelson is the director of the American Bar Foundation, the MacCrate Research Chair in the Legal Profession at the ABF, and professor of sociology and law at Northwestern University. He holds a J.D. and Ph.D. in sociology, both from Northwestern, and has held several positions of academic leadership throughout his career.  He is a leading scholar in the fields of the legal profession and discrimination law. He has authored or edited 6 books and numerous articles, including Legalizing Gender Inequality, which won the prize for best book in sociology in 2001. His most recent book is Urban Lawyers: The New Social Structure of the Bar, co-authored with John Heinz, Edward Laumann, and Rebecca Sandefur, which was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2005.

His current research includes After the JD, a national study of the careers of lawyers, which is tracking the entering bar class of 2000 for the first 10 years of their careers (with several collaborators), and the Changing Dynamics of Employment Discrimination project, which examines a large national sample of federal court filings between 1988 to 2003 and has interviewed parties and their lawyers about their experiences in these cases (with Laura Beth Nielsen and Ryon Lancaster).

Faculty of Law at Allard Hall
The University of British Columbia
1822 East Mall
Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z1
sarfaty@law.ubc.ca
Website

Galit A. Sarfaty is an assistant professor at the Faculty of Law of the University of British Columbia. She holds a J.D. from Yale Law School, a Ph.D. and M.A. in Anthropology from the University of Chicago, and an A.B. summa cum laude from Harvard College. She was previously an assistant professor in the Department of Legal Studies and Business Ethics at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Professor Sarfaty's scholarship offers an anthropological perspective to the study of international law and regulatory governance, with a particular focus on non-state actors (including corporations, international organizations, non-governmental organizations, and indigenous communities). She uses ethnographic methods to understand the internal decision making and regulatory processes of legal institutions as well as the role of lawyers within them.

Professor Sarfaty's research has focused on such major international economic organizations as the World Bank, and she has recently published a book on the subject entitled Values in Translation: Human Rights and the Culture of the World Bank (Stanford, 2012). Her earlier article on the World Bank was the winner of the 2010 Francis Deák Prize, awarded to a younger author for meritorious scholarship published in the American Journal of International Law. Her study of the Bank's use of economic tools to measure human rights inspired her latest research on the implications of using quantitative indicators in global private regulation. Her article, "Regulating Through Numbers: A Case Study of Corporate Sustainability Reporting," is forthcoming in the Virginia Journal of International Law and was recently selected for presentation at the 2012 Stanford-Yale-Harvard Junior Faculty Forum.

Ann Southworth
Founding Faculty

University of California Irvine School of Law
401 East Peltason Drive, 3500-A
Irvine, CA 92697-8000
asouthworth@law.uci.edu
website

Ann Southworth is a founding member of the faculty of the University of California Irvine School of Law. She was previously a professor of law at Case Western Reserve University where she taught courses on the legal profession, professional responsibility, and civil procedure. Her research focuses on the norms and practices of the legal profession. She has written extensively about civil rights and poverty lawyers, and is now writing a book on lawyers of the conservative coalition.

From 2004-05, Professor Southworth was the Covington & Burling Distinguished Visitor at Harvard Law School. She taught a special seminar on “Cause Lawyering” during her time with the Program at HLS in conjunction with Professor Wilkins.

Harvard University Department of Sociology
William James Hall
33 Kirkland Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
coryway@fas.harvard.edu
website

Cory Way is lecturer on sociology, dean of Kirkland House and affiliated faculty at Harvard Law School's Program on the Legal Profession. He holds a doctorate from Oxford and is a licensed attorney who has practiced litigation and corporate law at Sullivan & Cromwell in New York and Zuckerman Spaeder in Washington, DC. He has maintained an active pro bono practice, recently winning political asylum for a Rwanda genocide survivor whose entire family had been murdered; his work on this novel case earned a pro bono award from the Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights. Cory holds degrees from Princeton, Harvard, Virginia and the University of Oxford, where he also served in dean positions at Merton and Corpus Christi Colleges. While in England he was also appointed as course director for a masters degree program at the University of Cambridge. Cory’s public service includes four years at the U.S. Department of Justice and one year as a law clerk for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. His broad areas of academic interest include: the intersection of crime, law and the media in England and America; the sociology of the legal profession (with a particular focus on mentoring and professional development); public relations in professional service firms; and white collar crime and high-profile offenders.

University of Texas School of Law
727 E. Dean Keeton Street
Austin, TX 78705
swilliams@law.utexas.edu
website

Sean Williams is assistant professor at the University of Texas School of Law where he teaches Family Law. Prof. Williams studies decision making dynamics in a wide variety of areas including jury damage awards, marriage markets, employment, and consumer contracts. Most recently, he has written about the prevalence of erroneous expectations about the protections that the law provides, and the difficulties of debiasing such overly optimistic beliefs. Professor Williams graduated with High Honors from the University of Chicago Law School. Before his appointment at the University of Texas School of Law, he was a Climenko Fellow and lecturer on law at Harvard Law School; he was then a research fellow at the Program on the Leagl Profession. Prior to his legal career, he analyzed large national datasets to uncover trends in teen pregnancy, diabetes, and kidney disease. Prof. Williams teaches Behavioral Law and Economics, Contracts, and Family Law