Professor Lauren Willis’ scholarship centers on the intersection of consumer psychology, market structure, and law. Her recent publications include Consumer-Facing Competition Remedies, 2023 Utah L. Rev. 887 (2023), and Performance-Based Consumer & Investor Protection: Corporate Responsibility without Blame, in Culpable Corporate Minds (2022). After she developed a new, performance-based approach to consumer law several years ago, authorities in the UK and Australia sought her guidance; both countries have now deployed performance-based regulatory schemes for consumer financial transactions. Starting in January 2024, Willis will bring her expertise on consumer-facing remedies and other matters to the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice as an advisor to Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Kanter. 

Professor Priscilla Ocen studies how race, gender, and class make women of color vulnerable to various forms of violence and criminalization, and what to do about it. Her current projects include Policing Abortion, an article in which she shows that the regulation of reproduction and sexuality is a core component of policing and argues that protecting reproductive rights requires collaboration with abolitionist and decarceration movements. She is also working on a book on non-carceral responses to community harm. Ocen is a recently named policy advisor to John Legend’s freeamerica, a campaign that seeks to end mass incarceration, and she was recently appointed to the California Penal Code Revision Committee, where she brings her critical perspective on power allocated through the code to craft recommendations to the legislature and the governor.

Professor Colin Doyle researches the relationship between law and emerging technology, particularly machine learning and artificial intelligence. One work in progress, How to Think Like a Lawyer When You’re a Robot, introduces software that seeks to overcome large language models’ current inability to perform complex, technical reasoning tasks. A case study tests the software on landlord-tenant law in California, demonstrating the potential for generative A.I. to bridge the access-to-justice gap in areas of law where pro se litigants struggle to pursue their cases effectively. He is also working on a Restatements (Artificial) of Law project, which he will be presenting at the ACM Symposium on Computer Science and Law this spring, and which he presented at the International Conference on Machine Learning in July. In summer and fall 2023, Doyle served as advisor to the L.A. County Justice, Care and Opportunities Department on their plans to reform criminal pretrial services in L.A. County.

Professor Jennifer Fan’s scholarly interests lie in the realm of corporations and start-ups, corporate governance, and bias. In her recent article, Startup Biases, 56 UC Davis L. Rev. 1423 (2023), Fan identifies phenomena in the startup context that exacerbate gender and racial bias and offers legal and non-legal tools to address them. The article forms the basis for her blog post on the Oxford Business Law Blog. She also recently published Corporations and Abortion Rights in a Post-Dobbs World, 57 UC Davis L. Rev. 819 (2024). Fan was an invited guest speaker for a recent ABA session on corporate purpose, which featured her work on “woke capital.” She is currently working on a piece co-authored with Professor Xuan-Thao Nguyen on the dangers of founder worship as amplified by “do gooderism.”

Professor Rebecca Delfino studies law at the intersection of current events and emergencies. Her recent article, Deepfakes on Trial: A Call to Expand the Trial Judge's Gatekeeping Role to Protect Legal Proceedings from Technological Fakery, 74 Hastings L.J. 293 (2023), proposed an amendment to the Federal Rules of Evidence (FRE) on the authentication of deepfake evidence, which was presented to the U.S. Federal Judiciary Committee charged with amending the FRE at the fall 2023 committee meeting. She is slated to present the proposal to the committee at a symposium in early 2024. Her forthcoming work, The Deepfake Defense: Exploring the Limits of the Law and Ethical Norms in Protecting Legal Proceedings from Lying Lawyers, will appear in the Ohio State Law Journal in 2024.

Professor Cesare P.R. Romano’s scholarship centers in the area of public international law, in particular international human rights and international courts and tribunals. He is a co-founder and director of Science for Democracy, a Brussels-based NGO whose goal is to promote the human right to science (the right to benefit from progress in science and technology) and the rights of science (the right of scientists to carry out research without undue interference). He has presented recently on the right to science at multiple international conferences, including at the Oxford University Sustainable Law Programme, where he spoke on the right to science applied to the climate change emergency. His forthcoming book, The Human Right to Science, is due out with Oxford University Press in 2024.

Professor Michael Guttentag studies how the ubiquity of surplus in our economy challenges us to find ways to share rather than compete for resources. His recent work, Law, Taxes, Inequality, and Surplus, 102 B.U. L. Rev. 1329 (2022), offers new insight into the tradeoffs between tax policy and legal rules as ways to redistribute wealth and also explores law as a tool to facilitate cooperation rather than competition, Evolutionary Psychology and Resource-Sharing Laws, 44 Evolution & Human Behavior 264 (2023). In a forthcoming chapter in The Handbook on Insider Trading (2024), Guttentag shows how well-crafted legislation can address problems of insider trading. He will bring his findings to a broader audience in the Business Scholarship Podcast, airing in January 2024, and is currently working to advance legislation in Congress.   

Professor Stephanie Richard’s scholarship focuses on legal efforts to protect against human trafficking and redress human trafficking harms. Richard’s recent article, Child Labor Trafficking: The Overlooked Child Welfare Issue, is forthcoming in the Connecticut Public Interest Law Journal and co-authored with practicing attorney Daniel J. Stephenson and LLS law student Mark R. Chernausek, reviews recent legislative efforts to ensure the child welfare system protects child sex trafficking victims and argues that this same model would benefit child labor trafficking victims. She also has a work-in-progress building from survivor experiences to argue for a restorative justice pilot program for sex and labor trafficking.