W&L Law Welcomes New Faculty W&L Law is pleased to announce the following faculty joining the law school as members of the permanent faculty.

By Law Communications
June 27, 2024

W&L Law is pleased to announce the following faculty joining the law school as members of the permanent faculty.

Suzette Malveaux will join W&L Law this fall with tenure as the Roger E. Groot Professor of Law. She comes to W&L from the University of Colorado at Boulder, where she is the Moses Lasky Professor of Law and Director of the Byron R. White Center for the Study of American Constitutional Law. She has taught Civil Procedure, Complex Litigation, Employment Discrimination, Civil Rights and Constitutional Law for over two decades. Her scholarship explores the intersection of civil rights and civil procedure, as well as access to justice issues. She is a member of the American Law Institute and former Chair of the American Association of Law School’s Civil Procedure Section. Professor Malveaux recently received the American Bar Foundation 2024 Outstanding Service Award and the National Civil Justice Institute 2024 Scholarship award.  She is co-editor of “A Guide to Civil Procedure: Integrating Critical Legal Perspectives” and co-author of “Class Actions and Other Multi-Party Litigation: Cases and Materials.” Her scholarship has been published in the Harvard Law Review Forum, George Washington Law Review, Boston University Law Review, Washington University Law Review, Kansas Law Review, Boston College Law Review, and the Berkeley Journal of Employment & Labor Law. Professor Malveaux was a civil rights attorney and class action specialist prior to joining the academy. For six years, she served as pro bono counsel for victims of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre in the lawsuit filed in the U.S. federal courts and international courts. She also appeared on behalf of the victims before the U.S. House of Representatives. Professor Malveaux represented over 1.5 million women alleging gender discrimination against Wal-Mart, the largest employment discrimination case to date. Professor Malveaux graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University. She earned her J.D. from New York University School of Law, where she was a Root-Tilden Scholar, Associate Editor of the Law Review, and a Fellow in the Center for International Law.

Catherine Smith will join W&L Law with tenure as the Vincent L. Bradford Professor of Law. Professor Smith teaches Torts and Children and the Constitution. Her teaching, scholarship, and service seeks to understand and contribute to a robust children’s equality law.  In 2010, her essay “The Rights of the Child” was selected as a winning essay in the Association of American Law School writing competition titled “On the Cutting Edge: Charting the Future of Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Scholarship.” In 2011, her article “Equal Protection for Children of Gay and Lesbian Parents: Challenging the Three Pillars of Exclusion – Legitimacy, Dual-Gender Parenting, and Biology” was awarded the Williams Institute’s Dukeminier Award as one of 2010’s best sexual orientation law review articles. In 2015, Professor Smith’s co-authored amicus brief on the rights of children of same-sex couples was cited and relied upon in the landmark same-sex marriage decision, Obergefell v. Hodges. Smith contributed to a child-centric chapter (“concurring opinion”) in the book “What Obergefell v. Hodges Should Have Said: The Nation’s Top Legal Experts Rewrite America’s Same-Sex Marriage Opinion” (Jack M. Balkin, ed., Yale University Press, 2020). Professor Smith currently serves as an expert in Juliana v. United States and Navahine v. Hawai’i Department of Transportation, two ground-breaking, youth-led climate cases. In 2023, with the support of a $2.2 million anonymous gift, Professor Smith co-founded the Consortium for the Advancement of Children’s Constitutional Rights with Professors Robin Walker Sterling (Northwestern Pritzker School of Law) and Tanya Washington (Georgia State College of Law). In 2024, the Duke Journal of Constitutional Law and Public Policy held a day-long symposium entitled, “Children’s Equality Law: Engaging the Work of Professor Catherine Smith.” After graduating from the University of South Carolina School of Law, Professor Smith clerked for the late Chief Judge Henry A. Politz of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and for U.S. Magistrate Judge William M. Catoe, Jr. She then served as a legal fellow at the Southern Poverty Law Center before entering legal academia. Immediately before joining W&L, Professor Smith served on the faculty the University of Denver Sturm College of Law for twenty years.

Tammi Etheridge, who was a visiting professor at W&L Law during the 2023-24 academic year, will join the permanent faculty in the fall as an associate professor. She teaches in the areas of torts, administrative law, law and economics, and public health law. Professor Etheridge’s scholarship concerns the business of food and agriculture, its regulation, and questions of food accessibility, as informed by law and economics, consumer protection, legal realism, and critical race theory. She is primarily interested in government intervention in the market for reasons other than market failure. Her articles have appeared or are forthcoming in the UCLA Law Review, Florida Law Review, and Washington and Lee Law Review, among others. She also serves as an Academic Affiliate with the International Center for Law and Economics, a nonprofit, nonpartisan research center that promotes the use of law and economics methodologies to inform public policy debates. Professor Etheridge began her career in the Minneapolis office of Barnes & Thornburg LLP, where she practiced complex commercial litigation, multidistrict litigation, and product liability law. After graduating from law school, she clerked for the Honorable Joseph R. Goodwin in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of West Virginia, where she worked exclusively on the judge’s 100,000 transvaginal mesh cases. Professor Etheridge earned a B.A., with honors, from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a M.A. in Public Policy from the University of Minnesota Humphrey School of Public Affairs, and her J.D. from the University of Minnesota Law School. Before joining Washington and Lee, she was on the faculties of the Villanova University Charles Widger School of Law, Howard University School of Law, and Elon Law School.

Shannon Fyfe will join W&L Law from George Mason University, where she is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy, the Director of Graduate Studies in Philosophy, an Adjunct Professor of Law, and a Fellow in the Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy. In addition to her position as an assistant professor in the law school, Professor Fyfe will have a courtesy appointment in W&L’s philosophy department. Professor Fyfe’s research interests are in legal philosophy, ethics, and political philosophy, with a focus on philosophy and international conflict, particularly international criminal law. Her work in this field seeks to provide a philosophical framework for defending and criticizing current practices of holding individuals legally and morally accountable for their participation in mass atrocities. She has published articles and book chapters that engage with international and domestic criminal law, bioethics, speech act theory, just war theory, epistemology, social ontology, and aesthetics, and she co-authored “International Criminal Tribunals: A Normative Defense” (Cambridge University Press, 2017) with Larry May. She holds both a Ph.D. in philosophy and a J.D. from Vanderbilt University.

Alexandra Klein, a former Visiting Assistant Professor at W&L Law will rejoin the faculty this fall as an Assistant Professor of Law after a stint teaching at St. Mary’s University School of Law in San Antonio, Texas. Professor Klein researches and teaches in the area of criminal law, criminal procedure, and the death penalty. Her scholarship, which addresses the Eighth Amendment, the death penalty, and methods of execution, has appeared in or is forthcoming in the Ohio State Law Journal, the Florida Law Review, the Nevada Law Journal, and the Northeastern University Law Review. A summa cum laude graduate of W&L Law, Klein served as a judicial law clerk to the Honorable Sally D. Adkins of the Supreme Court of Maryland and the Honorable Danny J. Boggs of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit.

Sarah Gottlieb will join W&L Law as the new director of the Criminal Justice Clinic. She is currently a clinical teaching fellow in the Innocence Project Clinic at the University of Baltimore School of Law. Professor Gottlieb researches in the areas of criminal law and criminal procedure, with a focus on evaluating the efficacy of criminal legal reforms.  Prior to her academic career, Professor Gottlieb spent eight years in the Maryland Office of the Public Defender, most recently as an assistant public defender in the felony division, where she represented hundreds of defendants at bail review hearings, suppression hearings and trials. She began her career in criminal defense representing indigent defendants for approximately three years at the Committee for Public Counsel Services in Springfield, MA. Professor Gottlieb received her J.D. from Boston College Law School.

Heather Skeeles-Shiner will become a full-time legal writing professor, following a year as a visiting faculty member. Previously, Professor Skeeles-Shiner was a staff attorney in the Office of the General Counsel at Washington and Lee University. In addition, she was an assistant city attorney for the City of Alexandria, an assistant attorney general in the Civil Litigation Division for the District of Columbia, and Senior Counsel in the General Litigation Division of the New York City Law Department. She began her legal career as an associate for Arnold & Porter in New York, following a federal clerkship for Judge Norman K. Moon in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Virginia. Professor Skeeles-Shiner is a 2004 graduate of W&L Law.

If you know any W&L faculty who would be great profile subjects, tell us about them! Nominate them for a web profile.