Law School gains 8 new professors

Eight new professors joined the staff of the University's Law School in one of the most significant faculty increases in its 140-year history.

"There are so many new faculty members this year partly because we just found lots of people we were interested in and we were very successful in recruiting them," said Christina Whitman, Law School associate dean for academic affairs.

The eight new professors, who join a staff of more than 70 active faculty members, bring a wide range of backgrounds - four have previous teaching experience.

Prof. Reuven Avi-Yonah, who will begin teaching in 2000, comes to the University from Harvard Law School; Prof. Omri Ben-Shahar taught at Tel-Aviv University; Prof. Evan Caminker joins the faculty from the UCLA Law School; and Prof. Robert Lloyd Howse comes from the Faculty of Law, University of Toronto.

"I was initially approached by the University to come as a visiting professor and the most compelling reason why I'm back here is that I had a magnificent time as a visiting professor. I was interested and attracted by the possibilities for interdisciplinary work that were available here," said Howse, who recently served as a visiting professor at Harvard Law School.

Profs. Daniel Halberstam, Ellen Katz, Nina Mendelson and Susanna Blumenthal, beginning in 2000 after she completes her Ph.D. at Yale University, are the four faculty members who will begin their teaching careers at the University.

Halberstam, Katz and Mendelson all come to Ann Arbor from the U.S. Department of Justice. Halberstam is a former attorney-adviser for the Office of Legal Counsel, while Katz and Mendelson both worked as attorneys in the Environment and Natural Resources Division.

"Michigan is a fabulous school. It's a high quality school of national reputation where the students are very good. Plus, I wanted to see what four feet of snow for six months in duration looked like," Halberstam said.

Katz, who is married to Halberstam, said, "Teaching seemed like a great job and now I finally decided to do it. I get to do research on things I care about and I have an opportunity to study issues more in depth than practice generally allows."

New faculty members completed a complex hiring process before being accepted by the University.

"One reason we were so successful this year is that we have a personnel committee who looked at the most exciting professors on other faculties and invited them to come and visit," Whitman said.

The personnel committee's goal is to identify professors of great scholarship and then make recommendations to the faculty about recruiting and hiring.

Law schools commonly recruit professors from other faculties.

"It is well known that the University along with several other leading U.S. law schools are recruiting in international trade law and areas concerning globalization," Howse said.

For those professors just entering academia, the selection process is very different. Those who are interested in becoming professors submit applications to law schools through the American Association of Law Schools, which then distributes the applications to schools. Institutions conduct personal interviews at a large conference usually held in November in Washington D.C. from which they then choose candidates for a second

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