UC Davis Law Names New Endowed Chair Holders and Inaugural Research Scholar

UC Davis School of Law has appointed four luminary faculty members to open endowed chairs. The chairs were established previously through generous gifts from alumni and are awarded to faculty members who demonstrate excellence in scholarship, as well as in teaching and service.

Professor of Law Afra Afsharipour was named the John D. Ayer Endowed Chair. Honoring UC Davis Law Professor Emeritus Jack Ayer, a longtime teacher of bankruptcy and other commercial and corporate law courses, this chair recognizes a senior faculty member who specializes in business. Afsharipour is an expert in comparative corporate law, corporate governance, and mergers and acquisitions. 

Her scholarly work has appeared in leading law journals including the Columbia Law Review and University of Chicago Law Review and has enriched legal scholarship and influenced practice and policy across borders. Her role as co-editor of Comparative Corporate Governance and author of two editions of the Handbook on Corporate Governance in India reflects a sustained, global impact. Afsharipour’s article “Gender and the Social Structure of Exclusion in U.S. Corporate Law” was named a top 10 corporate and securities article for 2024.

Distinguished Professor of Law Vikram Amar received the Daniel J. Dykstra Endowed Chair. The chair honors the late Dean and founding King Hall faculty member Dan Dykstra and aims to enhance the reputation and effectiveness of the School of Law by helping recruit, reward, and retain exceptionally qualified faculty members who demonstrate a commitment to the highest levels of scholarly attainment, teaching excellence, and dedicated public, professional and university service.

An eminent authority in constitutional law, federal courts, and civil procedure, Amar is a prolific legal scholar, with more than seventy-five law review articles and major co-authored legal treatises. His work has been cited extensively in legal scholarship and by courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court. Amar is former dean of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign College of Law.

Professor of Law David Horton was named the Fair Business Practices and Investor Advocacy Endowed Chair. This chair is awarded to a senior faculty member who specializes in consumer or investor fraud prevention and enforcement and whose distinguished scholarship is nationally recognized. Horton is a renowned scholar in the fields of wills, trusts, estates, and arbitrations. His work is cited widely by leading academic journals and courts of all levels. His expertise regarding arbitration agreements makes him the go-to legal expert for major media outlets. 

Equally distinguished as an educator, Horton teaches high-enrollment core courses and receives consistently outstanding evaluations. Students chose him as faculty commencement speaker in 2018 and 2022.

Professor of Law Chimène Keitner received the Homer G. Angelo and Ann Berryhill Endowed Chair. Honoring founding faculty member Homer Angelo and his wife, the chair recognizes a senior faculty member who specializes in international law and/or communications studies. A faculty member at King Hall since 2023, Keitner is an acclaimed scholar in the fields of international law and civil litigation. 

Keitner served as the 27th Counselor on International Law in the U.S. State Department. She has authored five books and numerous articles, essays, and book chapters on questions surrounding the relationship among law, communities, and borders, including issues of jurisdiction, extraterritoriality, foreign sovereign and foreign official immunity, and historical understandings underpinning current practice in these areas.

UC Davis Law also named Distinguished Professor of Law Lisa Pruitt the inaugural Brigitte Bodenheimer Research Scholar. Professor Bodenheimer was an early King Hall faculty member whose work focused on legislative reform in areas of law – housing, family, children – that previously went ignored. Similarly, Pruitt’s significant, impactful work exploring rurality and the law challenges the metro-centric lens through which we usually view people’s relationship with the legal system and government. 

Bodenheimer’s purview was international: in private practice, she represented victims of Nazi persecution, along with children. Pruitt’s own extensive work abroad, before arriving at UC Davis, traversed settings that ranged from international organizations to private practice. She worked with lawyers in more than thirty countries, negotiating cultural conflicts in various arenas, from intellectual property rights to the prosecution of rape as a war crime.