W&L Law Welcomes New Faculty and Distinguished Visitors

By Peter Jetton
August 30, 2021

Washington and Lee University School of Law welcomes several new teachers and scholars to the faculty this year.

Carla Laroche joins W&L Law as an assistant clinical professor of law. She is the director of the law school’s new Civil Rights and Racial Justice Clinic. Her scholarship addresses the intersection between mass incarceration, gender and families.

Prior to joining W&L, Professor Laroche was a clinical professor at Florida State University College of Law, where she founded and directed the Gender and Family Justice Clinic, the Collateral Consequences Project and the Injunction Project. Professor Laroche also served as a criminal justice reform law fellow at the Southern Poverty Law Center in Florida, a pro bono fellow at Hunton Andrews Kurth LLP, a federal law clerk in the Southern District of Florida for the Honorable Donald M. Middlebrooks, and an associate at Paul Hastings LLP.

A first-generation Haitian-American, Professor Laroche earned her J.D. from Columbia Law School; Master’s in Public Policy from Harvard Kennedy School; and A.B. in History, with a certificate in Women and Gender Studies, from Princeton University.

Heather Kolinsky joins the Law School as a professor of practice teaching legal writing and professional responsibility. Prior to joining W&L, Professor Kolinsky served as a law clerk to Magistrate Judge Gregory J. Kelly in the United States Middle District Court of Florida from 2018 to 2021. She also practiced appellate law, representing clients in civil and family law appeals in Florida.  Professor Kolinsky was recognized as one of Florida Trend’s Florida Legal Elite in appellate practice in 2017 and 2018. She was also an Associate Professor of Law at Barry University School of Law where she taught legal research and writing, professional responsibility, and advanced appellate advocacy.

Professor Kolinsky’s scholarly writing focuses on the intersection of gender and the law as well as the relationship between the individual, institutions, and the state, particularly as it relates to corporate personhood. She earned an LL.M. from Emory University School of Law, a J.D. and an International Law Honors Certificate from Rutgers University School of Law-Camden, and a B.A. from Stetson University.

Barbora Hola is this year’s Lewis Law Center Scholar-in-Residence. She is an award winning empirical legal scholar whose teaching and research focuses on international criminal justice, transitional justice after mass atrocities, and etiology of collective violence. During her visit, Dr. Hola will work with Prof. Mark Drumbl on a manuscript entitled “‘Getting’ Collaborators: Stories and Sentiments Starting in Communist Prague.” Using original archival material and oral histories, the book explores processes of informing and snitching on others to state authorities in repressive times and considers what transitional justice should do with informers after repression ends.

Dr. Hola works as Senior Researcher at the Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement and as Associate Professor at the Department of Criminal Law and Criminology at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Beyond her research and teaching in the Master’s program for International Crimes and Criminology at VU Amsterdam, Dr. Hola is a co-director of the Center for International Criminal Justice, a knowledge center dedicated to interdisciplinary studies of mass atrocity crimes and international criminal justice and co-chair of the European Criminology Group on Atrocity Crimes and Transitional Justice.

Susan Carle will serve as a visiting professor at W&L Law for the entire academic year. Professor Carle is currently a member of the faculty at the American University Washington College of Law. Professor Carle teaches and writes about civil rights legal history, employment discrimination, labor and employment law, legal ethics, and the history and sociology of the legal profession. She is the author of “Defining the Struggle: National Organizing for Racial Justice, 1880-1915,” published by Oxford University Press in 2013. In 2014 she received the Organization of American Historians’ Liberty Legacy Award for “the author of the best book by a historian on the civil rights struggle from the beginnings of the nation to the present.”

Professor Carle attended Yale Law School, where she served as an editor of The Yale Law Journal. After graduation she clerked on the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit and then worked as an appellate attorney in the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice and at the leading union-side labor and employment law firm of Bredhoff & Kaiser.

Ben Davis will serve as a visiting professor at W&L Law in the spring. Professor Davis is an emeritus faculty member at the University of Toledo College of Law. Professor Davis teaches in the areas of contracts, commercial law, alternative dispute resolution, arbitration, public international law, and international business transactions.

Between 1983 and 1986, Professor Davis worked in Paris, France as a development consultant in West Africa, and as a strategic business consultant with Mars & Co in Europe. In 1986, he became the American Legal Counsel at the International Court of Arbitration of the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) where he supervised directly or indirectly over 5000 international commercial arbitration and mediation cases, made filings before courts around the world on behalf of the ICC, assisted with the drafting of arbitration laws in countries such as India and Sri Lanka, and led conferences in Eastern and Western Europe, North America, and Asia. In 1996, he was promoted to director, conference programs and manager of the Institute of World Business Law where he organized training sessions on international contracts, dispute resolution, project finance, and electronic commerce.

Professor Davis is a graduate of Harvard College (B.A.), Harvard Law School (J.D), and Harvard Business School (M.B.A.) where he was articles editor of the Harvard International Law Journal.

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