Colleagues,

Welcome to another edition of St. John’s Law Faculty News, our quarterly newsletter featuring our full-time faculty’s publications, activities, and achievements.

In August, I taught a section of our 1L class Introduction to Law. It was great to be back in the classroom, and the students’ curiosity about the law, and enthusiasm for learning it, was inspiring.

My students and their first-year classmates join us with outstanding credentials, including a median LSAT of 164 and a median GPA of 3.8. Ranging in age from 18 to 46, hailing from 14 different home countries, and speaking 36 different languages, they also bring a diverse range of talents, interests, and experiences to their legal studies. The 242 1Ls come from 23 states and 109 universities. More than half are women, 45% identify as students of color, 17% identify as LGBTQ+, and 28% are first-generation college students.

The excellence of our 1L class—and of our entire student body—is a testament to the faculty who educate and mentor them. Our faculty remains a pillar of the Law School as we celebrate our 100th anniversary and welcome our next century of excellence, prominence, and impact. So, I’m delighted to offer this look at their many contributions at and beyond St. John’s Law.

Best,
Jelani Jefferson Exum
Dean & Rose DiMartino and Karen Sue Smith Professor of Law

We’re pleased to welcome three new full-time faculty members to St. John’s: 

Sandeep Singh Dhaliwal joins the faculty from NYU School of Law, where he was a Research Scholar and Director of the Business Transactions Clinic. Before entering academia, Professor Dhaliwal was an associate in the New York office of Debevoise & Plimpton. At St. John’s he will teach courses on race and the law, business associations, and law and political economy. His scholarship has been published in the Georgetown Law Journal and UC Davis Law Review, and his other writing has appeared in outlets including the Law & Political Economy Blog, Inquest, and The New York Times.

Darren Rosenblum comes to St. John’s Law from McGill University Faculty of Law. They previously taught at Pace University School of Law. Their scholarship focuses on corporate governance and on inclusion initiatives and remedies for sex inequality. Prior to teaching, Professor Rosenblum clerked in the U.S. District Court of Puerto Rico, after which they practiced international arbitration at Clifford Chance and at Skadden Arps. They wrote the first queer legal theory article, “Queer Intersectionality” (1994), and the first article on transgender prisoners, “Trapped in Sing Sing” (2000). They have presented work on corporate governance in English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese.

Eric W. Shannon joins on the full-time faculty as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Legal Writing after serving as the Law School’s Dean of Students for five years. Since 2019, he has taught doctrinal and skills-based courses for J.D. and LL.M. students. Professor Shannon was previously an associate at an international law firm, representing healthcare industry clients in federal litigation and internal investigations. He received his J.D. cum laude from NYU School of Law. He received his M.S.T. from Fordham University after graduating from Cornell University with a Bachelor of Science degree, summa cum laude with distinction in research.

On Friday, September 19, 2025, the faculty presented the symposium Impact That Endures: Celebrating the Past, Present, and Future of St. John’s Law Faculty Scholarship. Through multiple panels, the day-long event showcased St. John’s Law faculty perspectives on the evolving role of legal scholarship and commentary. Designed to spark meaningful dialogue among students, faculty, and alumni, it highlighted how our scholars’ work continues to shape the legal community as the Law School marks its 100th Anniversary and looks ahead to its next century of excellence, prominence, and impact. In this Q&A story, Associate Dean for Faculty Scholarship Eva Subotnik talks about the inspiration behind this event that she helped to organize, which included a panel on The Supreme Court in Context: Insights from Legal Scholars moderated by Hon. Raymond J. Lohier, Jr., U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

“Legal Academia’s White Gaze,” an article by Professor Renee Nicole Allen, appears in the Minnesota Law Review. Introducing the article, she writes: “Since the late 1980s, Black law faculty have courageously used narrative in legal scholarship to highlight the challenges associated with teaching, scholarship, and service in the law school White space. Adding to that canon of literature, this Article examines how legal academia’s White gaze is an infrastructure of injustice for people racialized as Black.”

In “A Connoisseur of Experiences: Strategic Academic & Career Planning for JD Students,” an essay she wrote for the Legal Writing Institute’s The Second Draft, Professor Ashley B. Armstrong discusses a method she developed to help law students strategically shape their JD careers. She was also invited to contribute to The SAGE Encyclopedia of Refugee Studies, an important resource for understanding the historical, political, and cultural dimensions of displacement.

Professor Anna Arons’s article, "Prosecuting Families," has been published in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review. Hundreds of thousands of parents are prosecuted in the U.S. family regulation system each year. Their cases are investigated by family regulation agencies and prosecuted by lawyers employed by the government. Professor Arons’s article offers a critical examination of the role of these family regulation prosecutors.

Professor Robin Boyle-Laisure’s latest book, Taken No More: Protecting Your Children against Traffickers and Cults (Bloomsbury) will be published this year, and the second edition of her co-authored workbook, Becoming a Legal Writer (Carolina Academic Press) is out now. Her article, “Education Theory Integrated in Business Law,” has been accepted for publication in the peer-reviewed Journal of Legal Studies Education.

Professor Miriam Cherry recently completed “Lost in a Crowd: How Crowdworkers are Denied their Rights at Work (PDF),” a report published by the Solidarity Center and the International Lawyers Assisting Workers Network.

Professor Elaine Chiu’s article, “The Model Minority Victim,” appears in the Santa Clara Law Review. It explores the rise in xenophobia, hate, and violence against AAPI Americans inspired by the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Professor Keith Sharfman published an article, “Third Party Litigation Funding is Procompetitive: An Antitrust Agenda to Ensure Litigant Access to Capital Markets,” in Concurrences Review, a leading international journal of antitrust law.

This summer, St. John’s Law students worked as faculty research assistants, diving deep into projects that connect theory to practice, advance understanding in the legal field, and inform public discourse and policy. This St. John’s Law news story featuring Professors Ashley B. Armstrong and Philip Lee highlights two of those vital student-faculty connections.

In a Q&A story, Dean Jelani Jefferson Exum speaks with Professor Elaine Chiu about Professor Chiu’s work at the intersection of criminal law, cultural identity, and systemic reform—and the impact she makes in the classroom and as a mentor to St. John’s Law students and alumni.

Professor Robin Boyle-Laisure takes the guest seat for a two-part episode of A Little Bit Culty, a podcast hosted by former NXIVM cult members Sarah Edmondson and Anthony "Nippy" Ames. Edmondson and Ames were featured in the HBO documentary series, The Vow. Part 1 and Part 2 of their conversation are available online. 

Taking the mound at Citi Field, Dean Jelani Jefferson Exum threw the ceremonial first pitch to launch a year-long 100th Anniversary celebration at St. John’s Law.

Returning for a guest spot on the Law on Film podcast, Professor Peggy McGuinness discussed Syriana, the 2005 geopolitical thriller loosely based on the memoir of a CIA case officer. The film tackles complex themes of transnational corruption, power, and terrorism, making it an apt subject for Professor McGuinness, who co-directs St. John’s Center for International and Comparative Law.

In a post for the Volokh Conspiracy blog, Professor Mark Movsesian discusses three church-state decisions from the U.S. Supreme Court’s October 2024 Term. As Director of St. John’s Mattone Center for Law and Religion, he continues to produce the Landmark Cases in Religious Freedom animated video series as well as the Law and Religion Forum blog and the Legal Spirits podcast to foster dialogue on law and religion in the local, national, and international communities.

University World News taps Professor Rosemary Salomone’s expert insights for this story about the geopolitics of language in Francophone Africa and another story about Morocco’s efforts to implement a sweeping higher education reform law designed to expand the use of Arabic as an academic language. Professor Salomone was also featured in a WalletHub story that brought invited experts in the education field together to share their thoughts on what factors make for the best and worst school systems.

Professor Renee Nicole Allen helped to plan this year’s Association of American Law Schools (AALS) Workshop for New Law Teachers, where she also served as a panelist, moderator, and small group facilitator.

Professor Ashley B. Armstrong presented at the 10th Biennial Applied Legal Storytelling Conference and at the Legal Writing Institute’s New Teacher Training Bootcamp. She also completed her third summer teaching incoming law students through the New York Legal Education Opportunity Program administered by the New York State Judicial Institute.  

Professor John Q. Barrett’s presentation, Nazis, Lawyers, War, & Nuremberg, opened the LA Law Library's online discussion of Simone Ladwig-Winters’s book, Lawyers Without Rights: The Fate of Jewish Lawyers in Berlin After 1933. Presenting online again he gave a Supreme Court Update to the Federal Bar Association’s Eastern District of New York Chapter. The Robert H. Jackson Center in Jamestown, NY was the setting for Professor Barrett’s conversation with University of Michigan Law School Professor from Practice Barbara McQuade. They discussed The U.S. Department of Justice, Then & Now.

Professor Noa Ben-Asher has been named a 2025 Dukeminier Award winner. Presented by the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law and the student editors of its Dukeminier Awards Journal, the Awards recognize the best sexual orientation and gender identity legal scholarship published during the 2023-2024 academic year.

Professor Robin Boyle-Laisure presented at the annual International Cultic Studies Association Conference in Montreal. The title of her workshop was How the Media Gets It Wrong: Human Trafficking and Cults.

At New York University School of Law’s 78th Annual Labor & Employment Conference, Professor Miriam Cherry participated in a panel discussion about recent executive orders and disparate impact litigation. At the 9th Regulating for Decent Work Conference in Geneva, Switzerland, she spoke about Hybrid Employment Status for Platform Workers and moderated a panel on platform work in India.

Professor Elaine Chiu received the Asian American Bar Association of New York's (AABANY) Women’s Leadership Award at AABANY’s 36th Annual Dinner for her impactful work as an advocate and educator on issues of anti-Asian hate crimes.

Professor Philip Lee received a Values and Inclusion Program Award from St. John’s University in recognition of his commitment to inclusion. He was also selected to receive the Jay Newman Award for Academic Integrity from the Academic Freedom Committee of the University of Guelph Faculty Association in Ontario. Professor Lee served as a panelist for a AANHPI Heritage Month program titled A Legacy of Leadership and Resilience: Then and Now in the Context of Korematsu and Thind. 

Professor Mark Movsesian presented a paper, “COVID and the Rise of the ‘Nones’ in the U.S.,” at an online conference at the University of Messina (Italy)’s Department of Law. 

Professor Eva Subotnik presented her co-authored paper, "Digital Replica Rights and Postmortem Policy Levers," at the 25th Annual Intellectual Property Scholars Conference hosted by DePaul College of Law in Chicago. 

Professor Ray Warner participated in the World Bank’s Enhancing Credit Infrastructure to Support Climate Resilience colloquium in Washington, D.C. He is a member of the Bank’s Insolvency and Climate Change Working Group, which explores links between insolvency and climate change. Professor Warner also hosted the annual INSOL Academic Colloquium in Barcelona, Spain, marking the end of his term as Chair of INSOL’s Academic Group.

For more St. John’s Law faculty news, visit our Faculty Focus blog produced by Associate Dean for Faculty Scholarship Eva Subotnik. Professor Subotnik also organizes our annual Faculty Workshop Series that brings scholars from across the country together to discuss their current research and receive feedback on their works-in-progress from our faculty.

Please email Lori Herz, our Director of Strategic Communications, at herzl@stjohns.edu.

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