New Professors Bring Intriguing Mix of Scholarly Backgrounds to Our Community

The Brooklyn Law School community extends a warm welcome to a slate of new professors who are certain to bring fresh ideas and viewpoints to a faculty known for its vibrant discourse.

Professor Anna Roberts and Assistant Professors Shirley Lin, Brittany Persson ’07, Lisa Washington, and Sarah Winsberg officially join Brooklyn Law on July 1.  

Their scholarship and insight across a wide range of legal issues and practices will broaden the expertise of our faculty and diversify the experience of our students. Anna Roberts, formerly a Visiting Professor of Law at Brooklyn Law School, will be joining our tenured faculty as Professor of Law. Previously, she was Professor of Law at St. John’s University School of Law and Seattle University School of Law. She teaches evidence, criminal law and procedure, torts, and contemporary issues in criminal law and procedure. Her scholarship focuses on aspects of trial procedure—peremptory challenges, prior conviction impeachment, jury disqualification, and jury decision-making—with a particular interest in the assumptions and stereotypes that fuel, and are fueled by, the criminal system. Her former practice includes service as a public defender with the Neighborhood Defender Service of Harlem and as a law clerk for the Honorable Constance Baker Motley in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

Brittany Persson ’07 joins Brooklyn Law, effective July 1, as Assistant Professor of Law and as the Director of the Brooklyn Law School Library after serving as a librarian and associate professor who taught advanced legal research at Seton Hall University School of Law. Her teaching focuses on legal research; emerging technology in legal research; legal research in appellate advocacy; regulatory, statutory, and legislative history research; and free online legal research tools. She began her legal career as a transactional attorney with White & Case in New York City.

Shirley Lin joins Brooklyn Law as Assistant Professor of Law after serving as Assistant Professor of Law at the Elisabeth Haub School of Law at Pace University and Acting Assistant Professor of Lawyering at New York University School of Law. She researches and teaches critical race theory, employment and contracts. Her scholarship explores constructions of race, disability, and gender, and their legal regulation within the political economy. Professor Lin was previously a senior associate at Outten & Golden LLP, a national labor and employment law firm, where she advised and litigated on behalf of plaintiffs in civil rights and commercial matters. Professor Lin clerked for the Honorable Denny Chin of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and served as a Skadden Fellow with the Asian American Legal Defense & Education Fund.

Lisa Washington joins Brooklyn Law School as Assistant Professor of Law, after serving as the William H. Hastie Research and Teaching Fellow at the University of Wisconsin Law School. Professor Washington is particularly interested in overlapping issues of poverty, race and gender in the carceral state. Her research focuses on the intersections of family regulation law and the criminal legal system. Prior to joining the University of Wisconsin, Professor Washington worked at The Bronx Defenders in New York City, where she was a fellow in the criminal defense practice and later became a staff attorney in the family defense practice. She also co-directed the Gertrude Mainzer Family Defense Clinic at Cardozo School of Law. Professor Washington has a background in comparative legal studies and is completing a comparative legal thesis as part of her Ph.D. studies at the Freie Universität in Berlin.

Sarah Winsberg joins Brooklyn Law School as Assistant Professor of Law after previously serving as Climenko Fellow and Lecturer in Law at Harvard Law School. Currently an advanced Ph.D. candidate in history at the University of Pennsylvania, Winsberg studies the way that sorting and organizing legal knowledge has produced profound changes in the common law of contracts, work, and business. Her research reveals these lost transformations, using history to offer deep insight into the theory of private law. It also explores the roots of modern economic conundrums, from the gig economy to the rise of subcontracting as corporate structure, and beyond. Professor Winsberg’s article Attorney ‘Mal-Practices’: An Invisible Ethical Problem in the Early American Republic, 19 Legal Ethics 187 (2016), received the Deborah Rhode Early Career Scholar Paper Prize.