UC Davis Law Welcomes Professors Amar, Bala and Keitner to Faculty

The esteemed scholar/teachers Vikram Amar, Nila Bala and Chimène Keitner joined the UC Davis Law faculty this fall.

As previously announced, Amar returned to King Hall as a distinguished professor after serving for eight years as dean and Iwan Foundation Professor of Law at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign College of Law. Before that, he was a professor and the senior associate dean for academic affairs at UC Davis Law from 2008-2015. Amar is one of the most eminent and frequently cited authorities in constitutional law, federal courts and civil procedure.

Amar will teach Constitutional Law II: Equal Protection, Remedies and Federal Jurisdiction this academic year.

Bala joins UC Davis as an acting professor of law. Formerly the director of legislative initiatives and a senior attorney at the Policing Project at New York University School of Law, Bala focuses her research on children’s rights and the criminal justice system, as well as emerging technologies. She will teach Evidence and Children and the Law.

Her scholarship has appeared or is forthcoming in the Michigan Law Review, the Federal Sentencing Reporter, Duke Law and Technology Review, and the New York University Review for Law & Social Change. Her essays have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post and USA Today.

Bala previously served as assistant director of criminal justice policy at the R Street Institute policy research nonprofit and as a Baltimore assistant public defender. She holds a J.D. from Yale Law School and a bachelor’s degree in human biology from Stanford University, graduating with distinction. She was a clerk for United States District Court for the Southern District of Texas Judge Keith P. Ellison.

Keitner arrives at UC Davis as a Martin Luther King Jr. Professor of Law. A leading authority on international law and civil litigation, Keitner served as the 27th Counselor on International Law in the U.S. Department of State.

From 2007-2023, Keitner was a professor of law at UC College of the Law, San Francisco (formerly UC Hastings), where she held the Alfred & Hanna Fromm Chair in International and Comparative Law. She has authored two books and dozens of articles, essays, and book chapters on topics relating to law, communities, and borders, including issues of jurisdiction, extraterritoriality, migration, and foreign sovereign and foreign official immunity. She has also coauthored a leading international law casebook.

Keitner holds a J.D. from Yale Law School, where she was a Paul and Daisy Soros Fellow; a doctorate in international relations from Oxford, where she was a Rhodes Scholar, and a bachelor’s degree in history and literature with high honors from Harvard.

Among other professional service, Keitner has served on the executive council of the American Society of International Law, as co-chair of the ASIL International Law in Domestic Courts Interest Group, and as founding co-chair of the International Law Association Study Group on Individual Responsibility in International Law. She is a member of the American Law Institute and an adviser on the ALI’s Fourth Restatement of the Foreign Relations Law of the United States.

Keitner will teach Civil Procedure, International Law and International Human Rights.