Because the legal writing faculty at Thomas Jefferson includes teachers who have become expert in a number of fields through their practice, their teaching, and their scholarship, they are especially qualified to help students begin to construct a foundation for their own practice of law.
Leah Christensen, who practiced medical malpractice and school law, focuses her scholarship on cognition, goal orientation and legal reading. She also writes in the area of education law. Ilene Durst, who has extensive litigation and immigration law experience, focuses her scholarship on language and narrative theory and their applications to advocacy, immigration, and literary representations of the legal culture.
Linda Keller, who served as a Fellow at the University of Miami Center for the Study of Human Rights, publishes in the area of international human rights and criminal law. Sandy Rierson, formerly a partner practicing intellectual property law with Quinn Emanuel Urquhart Oliver & Hedges, pursues scholarship in legal history and women's history, intellectual property, and civil procedure.
Jeff Slattery draws on his years in the music business and his experience as a practitioner in art and entertainment law to study the protection of cultural property. Ben Templin, whose law practice emphasized general corporate law for emerging technology companies, now focuses his research on corporate law. Priscilla Vargas Wrosh has practice experience in the areas of corporate restructuring and securities fraud litigation.
Faculty Fellows in Legal Writing Program
Anastasia Boles first came to TJSL in January 2010 as an Adjunct Professor of Legal Writing. She plans to focus her scholarship at the intersection of employment law and race, gender, disability, sexuality and class. Since her graduation from Columbia Law School, Professor Boles has practiced labor and employment law for several years with the Los Angeles office of Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP, the litigation department of O'Melveny & Myers LLP in Los Angeles and the litigation department of Davis Polk & Wardwell LLP in New York. Professor Boles also clerked for the late Honorable Napoleon A. Jones, Jr., Southern District of California.
Liz McCuskey practiced law with Drinker Biddle & Reath LLP in Philadelphia prior to becoming a TJSL Faculty Fellow. Her litigation practice focused on appellate, antitrust and professional responsibility matters, as well as federal jurisdiction and attorney general litigation over Medicaid and FDA issues. She also maintained an active pro bono practice in which she litigated First Amendment and federal habeas issues. Professor McCuskey graduated from Penn Law School and clerked for the Honorable David A. Faber on the United States District Court for the Southern District of West Virginia.
Beth Caldwell has worked as a public defender in Los Angeles County and has practiced appellate law, representing juveniles in delinquency appeals. She graduated from UCLA with a Juris Doctor as well as a Master’s in Social Welfare. Professor Caldwell’s research focuses on criminal law, with an emphasis on its intersection with race, class, gender, and age. As a Fulbright scholar, she recently conducted research in Mexico regarding the country’s criminal justice system.
