Faculty Feature: Professor Katherine Florey

Professor Katherine Florey researches and teaches private international law, federal Indian law, civil procedure, and public health law and policy. She particularly focuses on the extraterritorial application of law, theories of jurisdiction, and tribes’ regulatory and adjudicative powers. She has published scholarship in prestigious legal journals, including the NYU Law Review, Virginia Law Review, California Law Review, and UCLA Law Review, while also writing and commenting for media outlets, including Newsweek and CalMatters. Numerous state and federal courts have cited her scholarship. In 2023, she was elected to the American Law Institute, the nation’s most prestigious non-governmental law reform organization. In 2021, she received UC Davis School of Law’s Distinguished Teaching Award. 

Professor Florey was an associate at the San Francisco law firm Keker & Van Nest LLP before coming to King Hall. She also clerked for the Honorable William Fletcher of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. She graduated first in her class at UC Berkeley School of Law and holds an M.F.A. in creative writing from Warren Wilson College and a bachelor’s degree from Harvard College, where she graduated summa cum laude. She was an editor, travel writer, and theater critic for several years before law school.

How does a travel writer and theater critic decide to become a lawyer?

It’s a good question with a long answer! Law school barely crossed my mind until I was 29. I spent my first several years after college trying to write and sell a novel, supporting myself at the same time by working as an editor and doing freelance writing. Initially, I had some luck with the novel — I was taken on as a client by a fairly well-known agent who took me out for a couple of swanky lunches and showered me with optimism. But time went on and I just kept getting one rejection after another. Some of them were very gracious — I still keep the nice rejection letter I got from David Foster Wallace’s editor. Eventually, though, I began to come to terms with the fact that publishing this novel was probably not in the cards. So that left me a little at loose ends. 

At the time I was coming to this realization, I’d just moved to the Bay Area with my now-husband (and now-fellow King Hall professor John Hunt) and was working as an editor at a startup travel website. This was during the early dot-com boom, where there was this widespread societal belief that you could slap together some content and put it online and somehow you’d magically make money. Needless to say, that was not in fact the way things worked. The website I was working for ran out of cash and stopped paying me (and the other employees) and then laid us all off toward the end of 2000. And then, while I was collecting unemployment and trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life, the 2000 election happened — the incredibly close Bush/Gore contest that lasted for weeks and turned on a handful of ballots in Florida and the outcome of a couple of different lawsuits. And I started following the legal cases, listening to the hearings and reading the briefs, and was absolutely mesmerized. It’s hard to explain exactly why, but I was drawn to the idea of advocating passionately for a cause in the structured, systematic way that lawyers do. And even though I was very disappointed by the outcome, I felt that the lawyers had put up a good fight. And one day I woke up and had this realization — wow, I can go to law school and do this myself! And so I did.

When you were a travel writer, where was your favorite trip?

Unfortunately, I wasn’t really the exotic-trip type of travel writer; I wrote about local attractions for a couple of websites, as well as a few pieces for the Washington Post while I was briefly living in DC. But many of my assignments were really fun! I think my favorite was a story I wrote rating the best jukeboxes in the DC area.

What drew you to academia and to your areas of research?

Academia was in the back of my mind as something I might want to do from the time I started law school. Law professors just have an incredible amount of freedom to think and write about whatever they want to — more than just about any profession I can think of — and I value that a lot.

As far as my research, I’ve written on a somewhat eclectic array of subjects, but there are a couple of themes that I keep coming back to. One is the territorial aspect of law. This really dates from reading Burnham v. Superior Court in law school and being unable to wrap my head around the idea that, just because you happen to be briefly present in a state and served with process there, you are subject to the jurisdiction of that state’s courts. And that launched me into thinking about the surprisingly complex relationship between law and physical space. If you dump chemical waste in one state and it causes people to become ill in a bordering state, whose law should govern? What happens if someone violates British libel law by putting content on the internet in California, or if Texas wants to stop its residents from traveling to New Mexico for abortions? These are very difficult questions that no one really has clear answers to but that matter a lot in our mobile, interconnected world.

The other driving force of my research — and this is where I owe a lot to Phil Frickey, a mentor of mine in law school — is wanting to respect and advance the sovereignty of Native nations within the United States. In some ways, this is an incongruous interest for me — I’m not Native and I’ve never lived on a reservation, and so this is an area where I try to be humble and to center the voices of Native people. But I also think it’s particularly important for non-Native people in the United States to learn about and understand the importance of tribal sovereignty, as a matter of both historical justice and current realities. Many tribes are doing amazing things against great odds and an often-hostile legal climate, and that’s a story I wish more non-Native people were familiar with. 

What would your students be surprised to learn about you?

I think students are always surprised that I had such a convoluted path to the law! But since I’ve already described that, I’ll just add a few random facts: I’ve lived in Germany and the Czech Republic as well as six different states. My mother wrote (among many other things) a book on sentence diagramming; my father wrote a book on women’s suffrage memorabilia. I had an array of odd jobs when I was young; I’m now a vegan (I try very hard to be a non-obnoxious one!), but in high school, I worked as a sushi maker at a Japanese market and then behind the cheese counter at a natural foods store. 

What do you most enjoy about teaching? What do you hope students gain from your courses?

I love many parts of teaching, but I think my favorite moments are just having the privilege of witnessing students learn. I still remember a time about ten years ago when a student came to office hours, very confused about a problem on one of the sample exams I had given out. She sat down, started describing the questions she had, and then stopped herself midsentence and said, “Oh wait, now I get it!” and explained perfectly what the correct answer was and why, without any intervention from me whatsoever. I love those moments of seeing students figure things out. If you’ve done a good job as a professor, you’ve maybe given a student a little nudge in the right direction, but ultimately they are the ones doing the work.

As for what I hope students gain from my classes, there are two things, probably a little contradictory. On the one hand, I’ve somehow ended up teaching a menu of courses that deal with intricate, difficult subjects, whether that’s the law of supplemental jurisdiction or the circumstances under which tribal courts can hear claims against nonmembers. I try to break these subjects down and teach them in a comprehensible way so that students can really master the underlying doctrines. At the same time, I also want to convey a sense that doctrine isn’t fixed or absolute. I wouldn’t say that I’m a hard-core legal realist, but it’s very clear to me that many of the important cases I teach didn’t turn out the way they did because that’s what the law demanded; rather, they had an unusual set of facts, or a particular justice saw a chance to advance their longstanding hobbyhorse, or some other element of happenstance intervened. 

Do you have any hobbies or notable interests outside of your law career?

I enjoy hiking, board games, the theater (especially Shakespeare), working on my still-far-from-fluent German, sometimes cooking. I still read a lot and try to keep up with current fiction to the extent I have time. 

Of what are you proudest?

I gab about my three kids a lot, both because I’m proud of them and because I feel that the legal profession will only become more family-friendly if we go all out to try to make it that way. In what certainly must be the most ill-advised time to have kids, they were all born while I was on the tenure track, but we all made it through, and for better or worse, they’ve grown up along with my academic career. Otherwise, one of the things I’m proudest of professionally is that several of my articles have been cited in judicial opinions. Of course, I am also gratified to be cited by other scholars, but feeling that I’m making a difference in real law on the ground, even if it’s a teeny tiny one, is rewarding on a different level.

Do you have one piece of advice for King Hall law students?

I think a really important skill, not only in law but in other parts of life, is to learn to accept that things will often not turn out the way you want. It’s something I see every fall when I teach 1Ls. I’m always struck by how incredibly accomplished each incoming class is — so many students with glowing recommendations, straight As in college, professional successes. And then they face the harsh realities of the 1L curve, not to mention the extremely competitive job landscape, and have to learn to deal with all of it without getting completely discouraged. 

Law is certainly not unique in this regard, but it’s a profession where you’re going to have your hopes dashed a lot, whether it’s because you missed out on a competitive job opportunity or lost a case you desperately wanted to win. And, as someone who came to law because a different career path didn’t work out, I feel a particular affinity with students who are wrestling with these disappointments. Occasionally, as was true in my case, they’re a sign that you should turn in another direction, but more often, they’re something that you have to learn to brush off and move on from. I don’t want to underestimate how difficult it is to cultivate persistence and resilience in the face of setbacks, but I think that it’s an incredibly valuable habit to have in your legal career.

Check out last month's Faculty Feature here.