Faculty Scholars at Forefront as 2025 AALS Annual Meeting Opens

Brooklyn Law School’s faculty are well positioned to get the 2025 annual meeting of the Association of American Law Schools (AALS) off to a riveting start in San Francisco today.

On the first full day of the conference, which is being held Jan. 7 to 11, faculty members will be sharing their scholarship, honoring and being honored at awards ceremonies, and participating in panel discussions on issues such as polarization in the criminal law classroom and how professors are demonstrating courage within and outside their teaching roles.

Les Fagen Professor Alice Ristroph will speak at a morning discussion on Jan. 8 titled, “Tightrope: Teaching Criminal Law to First-Year Students in a Polarized Moment.” The session will examine how criminal law instructors, who must present material that is inherently disturbing, are now doing so before an increasingly divided audience. Topics may result in classroom tension because of the instructor’s identities and perceived legitimacy, the students’ own identities, as well as students’ relationships to the course material. The participants will discuss best practices and tools to help improve students’ analytical and critical thinking skills through criminal law. (Session details, aals.org)

This afternoon, Professor Irene Ten Cate, associate professor of legal writing and co-director of the Dennis J. Block Center for the Study of International Business Law, will participate in a Women in Legal Education, co-sponsored by For the Law School Dean and titled, “Critiquing Courage in Action.” The panel examines how professors and academic leaders are increasingly called upon to exemplify courage not only in the work of teaching and scholarly research, but also in service or leadership activities within or beyond the academic realm. The panel will contemplate the deployment of courage, and whether it has a role as a value in our professional lives. (Session details, aals.org)

Later Wednesday afternoon, three other professors are scheduled to speak.

Professor Alexis Hoag-Fordjour, co-director of the Center for Criminal Justice and Dean’s Research Scholar, will present a new work-in-progress, Conflicting Interests and the Sixth Amendment Right to Counsel, at a session for junior criminal law scholars. (Session details, aals.org)

Additionally, on Thursday, Hoag-Fordjour will be recognized as Brooklyn Law School’s 2024 Teacher of the Year at an AALS awards ceremony. (Session details, aals.org). She received the same honor in 2023. (Read story in Brooklyn Law Notes.)

Professor Yuvraj Joshi, a Dean’s Research Scholar, will present a new project titled Intergenerational Law. In this work, he explores how our understanding of the relationships between past, present, and future generations shapes cases related to racial equality and the climate crisis, both in the United States and globally. Joshi will present this work twice on Jan. 8: first during the Comparative Law panel, “New Frontiers in Comparative Law: A Works-in-Progress Showcase” (Session details,aals.org) , and later in the AALS Minority Groups panel, “Lawyering for the Global Majority” (Session details, aals.org).

Also Wednesday afternoon, Professor James Macleod, director of the Center for the Study of Law, Language and Cognition, and chair of the AALS’s Section on Legislation and Law of the Political Process, will moderate a works-in-progress program titled, “New Voices in Legislation.” The panel will highlight the work of junior scholars concerning canon usage on the Supreme Court (Jonathan Choi, University of Southern California Gould School of Law); lenity and the major questions doctrine (Joel Johnson, Pepperdine University Rick J. Caruso School of Law); and legislative constitutionalism (Beau Baumann, Yale Law School, and Samuel Simon, Princeton University). (Session details, aals.org)

Professors Joy Kanwar and Bill Araiza joined the West Academic Publishing's authors’ reception Wednesday evening, which celebrated the publishing company's book writers.  Araiza is the author of A Short and Happy Guide to Administrative Law and Kanwar is an author on Writing and Analysis in the Law.

On Thursday afternoon, Jan. 9, Macleod is set to join a session titled, “Methodological Realignments in Statutory Interpretation,” where he will present an article titled “Standard Textualism.” The panel will examine whether the associations of textualists as conservative, purposivists as progressive, and so on, are outdated, and will discuss potential ideological realignments in statutory interpretation in the judiciary and the legal academy. (Session details, aals.org).

Also on Thursday, Professor Cynthia Godsoe will present an award to S. Lisa Washington of the University of Wisconsin Law School, who is being honored at AALS’s Family and Juvenile Law award ceremony.

Look to our website and social media channels this week for programming for details on faculty activities in the second half of the conference.