New Faculty for Fall 2012

UC Hastings is pleased to announce the addition of new members to the faculty this fall. Professors Scott Dodson, Morris Ratner, Jodi Short, and Yvonne Troya:

Professor Yvonne Troya is the new Legal Director of the Medical-Legal Partnership for Seniors, a partnership between UCSF and UC Hastings College of the Law. She previously served as Clinical Supervisor and Staff Attorney of the Health Practice of the East Bay Community Law Center, a community-based clinic associated with UC Berkeley Law. While there, Yvonne worked in two medical-legal partnerships serving low-income adults with HIV/AIDS and families seen at Children’s Hospital & Research Center Oakland. In addition, she comes with a broad range of experience in human rights work around the world. She is co-founder of a law school-based medical legal partnership between the Gender and Justice Program of Heal Africa and the Universityé des Pais des Grands Lacs, based in Goma, Democratic Republic of the Congo. She has also served in internships at the World Organization Against Torture in Geneva, Switzerland; the Boalt Hall International Human Rights Clinic in Berkeley; and La Raza Centro Legal in San Francisco. She holds a J.D. from Boalt Hall and her B.A. in Biology and Latin American Studies from Bowdoin College. She is fluent in Spanish and French.

Professor Scott Dodson teaches Civil Procedure and Federal Courts and has published extensively in both areas. He has authored more than twenty articles, appearing in Stanford Law Review, Michigan Law Review, California Law Review, University of Pennsylvania Law Review, Virginia Law Review, Northwestern University Law Review, and Vanderbilt Law Review, among others. He has published a coursebook on civil procedure and is currently under contract with Oxford University Press to write a monograph on civil pleadings. His writings have been cited by the Fifth, Seventh, Ninth, Tenth, and Eleventh Circuits. Professor Dodson is a frequent commentator in various news media and has been interviewed and quoted on CNN Radio and by BNA, Bloomberg News, and the Associated Press. He has authored and joined more than a dozen amicus briefs before the Supreme Court. He has been a guest blogger at SCOTUSblog, Civil Procedure & Federal Courts Prof Blog, and PrawfsBlawg. Professor Dodson has held prior appointments at Duke University School of Law, William & Mary Law School, and the University of Arkansas School of Law.

Professor Morris Ratner (B.A., Stanford University, 1988, Economics, with Distinction; J.D., Harvard Law School, 1991, cum laude) joins the UC Hastings faculty after having spent the past two years as a Visiting Assistant Professor at Harvard Law School (2010-2011), and previously having been a Lecturer at Harvard Law School (2009), teaching a variety of courses, including legal ethics, civil procedure, advanced procedure, and remedies. Before becoming an academic, Professor Ratner practiced as a litigator, spending most of his litigation career at San Francisco-based plaintiffs' firm Lieff, Cabraser, Heimann & Bernstein, LLP, where he was a partner for ten years, and where he had the opportunity to pursue and resolve large-scale mass actions in a variety of substantive law settings. Professor Ratner's scholarship currently focuses on the intersection of complex litigation and the legal profession, exploring how the structure of the profession influences individual attorneys' case management choices.

Professor Jodi Short joins UC Hastings from Georgetown Law, where she served as an Associate Professor and was the Senior Policy Scholar at the Georgetown Center for Business and Public Policy, at the McDonough School of Business. Her research is on the nexus of public and private institutions in regulatory governance. Prior work has examined the effects of corporate internal compliance auditing on regulatory performance, theoretical justifications for and critiques of public regulation, and tensions in the U.S. administrative state between cooperation and coercion, expertise and politics, and public and private interests. Her current research investigates the effects of private, transnational efforts to enforce labor and environmental standards in global supply chains. Professor Short will teach courses in administrative law, the regulatory state, and the role that private organizations play in public governance and law.