New Professors Join King Hall Faculty

Two distinguished new faculty members have joined UC Davis School of Law: William S. Dodge, most recently the Honorable Roger J. Traynor Professor of Law at UC Hastings College of the Law, and Jasmine Harris, previously at American University, Washington College of Law.

In an era in which law school faculty hiring has been stagnant, UC Davis School of Law has been fortunate to be in a position to expand its roster of outstanding scholar-educators. The successful recruitment of Professors Dodge and Harris continues the hiring of stellar lateral faculty from leading schools such as Harvard, Stanford, and UC Berkeley, among others.  Professor Dodge is the fourth tenured member of the UC Hastings law faculty to move to UC Davis School of Law in recent years. The School of Law expects to fill two faculty vacancies during the 2015-2016 academic year.

"We are extremely pleased to welcome Professors Dodge and Harris to UC Davis School of Law," said Dean Kevin R. Johnson. "It is exciting to see our faculty, which is already one of the most highly regarded, most productive, and most-cited of any law school, continue to progress in ways that directly benefit our students, legal scholarship, and our King Hall community."

Professor Dodge's scholarly interests include international law, international transactions, international dispute resolution, and contracts. He earned his B.A., summa cum laude, in History from Yale University and his J.D. from Yale Law School. Following graduation, Professor Dodge clerked for Judge William A. Norris of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and then for Justice Harry A. Blackmun of the U.S. Supreme Court. Professor Dodge is an influential international law scholar. He serves as a Co-Reporter for the American Law Institute's Restatement (Fourth) of Foreign Relations Law: Jurisdiction and as a member of the State Department's Advisory Committee on International Law. He is a co-author (along with former Yale Law School Dean Harold Koh and two others) of the casebook Transnational Business Problems (5th ed. Foundation Press 2014) and a co-editor of International Law in the U.S. Supreme Court: Continuity and Change (Cambridge University Press 2011), which won the American Society of International Law's 2012 certificate of merit. He has authored more than 40 other publications in books and law reviews. From 2011 to 2012, he was the Counselor on International Law to the Legal Adviser at the U.S. Department of State.

Professor Harris will teach in evidence and disability law. She graduated from Dartmouth College with a B.A., magna cum laude, in Latin American and Caribbean Studies and earned her J.D. from Yale Law School, where she served as Senior Editor of the Yale Law & Policy Review, as Public Service Chair of Yale's Latino Law Students Association, and as a consultant for the World Bank's Legal & Judicial Reform Practice Group. After law school, Professor Harris clerked for the Honorable Harold Baer, Jr. in the Southern District of New York, and then worked at Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale & Dorr before joining the Advancement Project, where she was as a staff attorney with the Schoolhouse to Jailhouse and Quality Education projects.