Jill Fraley Named Inaugural Director of Pedagogy and Engaged and Inclusive Law Teaching In a new role focusing on pedagogy, W&L Law professor Jill Fraley will design faculty workshops to help the law school advance science-based teaching practices that further student learning and inclusivity.

By Law Communications
October 11, 2022

Melanie Wilson, Dean and Roy L. Steinheimer, Jr., Professor of Law, has announced the appointment of Professor Jill Fraley as the inaugural director of pedagogy and engaged and inclusive law teaching at W&L Law. Fraley’s appointment begins November 1 of this year.

Fraley, an expert in property and environmental law, is director of the W&L Law Center for Law and History. In her new role focusing on pedagogy, Fraley will design faculty workshops to help the law school advance science-based teaching practices that further student learning and inclusivity. She will also act as the school’s liaison with the Houston H. Harte Center for Teaching and Learning at W&L.

“This position is a great fit for Jill, who is steeped in an understanding of pedagogy and teaching techniques and who is passionate about issues of inclusion and access,” said Dean Wilson.

On three occasions Fraley has earned an Alumni Fellowship award for teaching excellence at W&L Law and is well known for her dedication to student learning and pedagogy. In the 2021-2022 year, she taught Environmental Law, Property, and Constitutional Law. As part of her Property course, she aligned old redlining maps with new maps to visually illustrate to students how police violence and water quality issues align with historic redlining. Fraley organized a panel on pedagogy at the AALS Annual Meeting, “Stuff You’ll Want to Steal: Ideas for Teaching about Race, Class, and Indigenous Peoples in Property Law,” with the goal to make actual lessons and materials for inclusive teaching, such as those from her Property class, available to other professors. She also published her own Property supplement, which has been adopted in courses and academic success classes at other schools.

“As someone who is passionate about inclusivity, rigor, and transparency in law teaching, I am delighted to be taking on this new role at the law school,” said Fraley.

Fraley is a graduate of Yale University, completing dual programs in History and Religious Studies. After earning her J.D. at Duke University School of Law and practicing for several years, working primarily at the intersection of property and environmental law, she returned to Yale where she earned an LL.M. and J.S.D.

Fraley’s recent research focuses on the intersection of environmental and constitutional law, particularly as those issues relate to environmental justice across race and class. Her most recently published article is about takings, race, and environmental destruction in the U.S. territories. She has recently written and spoken on the politicization of the Supreme Court, an issue that is critical for the interpretation of the major environmental statutes such as the Clean Water and Clean Air Acts.

Her work on the evolution of waste law won the American Association of Law Schools’ Scholarly Paper Award in 2016. Her research on English and Irish property law has won the Arthur Cox Visiting Research Fellowship at Trinity College Dublin, as well as a Fulbright scholar’s award for Ireland. Fraley received her second Fulbright Scholar award in 2019-2020, during which she conducted research on the development of international manufacturing trade by expat Americans living in Turkey in the first part of the Twentieth Century.

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