Scholarship & Influence

AT LMU LOYOLA LAW SCHOOL

LMU Loyola Law School faculty research and write to make a difference in the world. Their work is interdisciplinary and international, empirically supported, and theoretically innovative. They regularly receive national and international recognition, from Fulbright awards and prestigious fellowships to invited keynotes and achievement awards. Here is just a sampling of what some Loyola faculty are working on of late:

KIMBERLY WEST-FAULCON
Professor of Law | James P. Bradley Chair in Constitutional Law

Professor Kimberly West-Faulcon’s scholarship takes an interdisciplinary and empirical approach to examining antidiscrimination and constitutional law issues. Her article Exposing the Deceit About Disparate Impact in the Hofstra Labor & Employment Law Journal (2023) provides the first scholarly response to Professor Amy Wax’s article contending that American whites are cognitively superior to African Americans and Latinos. In doing so, the article defends Title VII disparate impact law’s presumption of racial group job ability equivalence as justified by industrial-organizational (I/O) psychology research findings. 

Several of West-Faulcon's recent and forthcoming publications focus on current challenges to affirmative action and other inclusion-motivated race attentiveness after the Supreme Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College. In Affirmative Action After SFFA v. Harvard: The Other Defenses in the Syracuse Law Review (2024), West-Faulcon identifies compelling interests other than diversity for inclusion-motivated consideration of race, and in The SFFA v. Harvard Trojan Horse Admissions Lawsuit in the Seattle University Law Review (2024), she analogizes attacks on inclusion-motivated civil rights laws and policies like the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and race-based affirmative action to battle tactics employed by the Greek army in its war against the Trojans as told in Virgil’s The Aeneid. Her forthcoming article in the Northwestern University Law Review focuses on the fallaciousness of using the term “colorblind” to describe recent attacks on inclusion-motivated race attentiveness.

West-Faulcon’s insights in this area have garnered national media attention. In August 2024, she participated as an expert in the White House Racial Equity Roundtable convened by the Office of the White House Counsel. 

JUSTIN HUGHES
Hon. William Matthew Byrne, Jr. Distinguished Professor of Law

Professor Justin Hughes writes in intellectual property and in international trade. His current scholarly projects include Comparative Online Bad Guys on internet site-blocking in different jurisdictions, forthcoming in the Harvard Journal of Law and Technology, and Secret Traditions as Trade Secrets (with Professor Margo Bagley) on using trade secrecy law to protect secret traditional knowledge and traditional cultural expression, forthcoming in the Harvard Journal of International Law. With Professor David Nimmer, Hughes is also rewriting the secondary liability chapter of the influential Nimmer on Copyright treatise. 

Hughes was recently re-appointed as a Visiting Professor of Law at Oxford University and, in 2024, served as a Fulbright Distinguished Professor at the Hanken School of Economics in Helsinki, Finland. He also shares his work widely at conferences nationally and abroad. In 2024, Hughes gave a keynote at Harvard Law School’s three-day Intellectual Property in Africa conference and organized a Patent Law Roundtable Commemorating the 400th anniversary of the Statute of Monopolies held in Washington, D.C. In addition, he was recently presenter, moderator, or panelist at conferences at UC Berkeley Law School, Fordham Law School, George Mason University Law School, Ohio State Law School, NYU Law School, and the Foreign Trade University of Vietnam.

COLIN DOYLE
Associate Professor of Law

Professor Colin Doyle’s research focuses on generative AI and legal reasoning. His article If You Give an LLM a Legal Practice Guide… (with Aaron Tucker) will appear in the CSLAW ‘25: Proceedings of the Symposium on Computer Science and Law. The article examines how providing large language models (LLMs) with information from legal practice guides affects their performance at answering related legal questions.

In a related empirical article LLMs as Method Actors: A Model for Prompt Engineering and Architecture, Doyle introduces “Method Actors” as a mental model for guiding LLM prompt engineering and architecture. Under this mental model, LLMs are thought of as actors; prompts as scripts and cues; and LLM responses as performances. Using the New York Times word puzzle game Connections as a benchmark, Doyle demonstrates how the Method Actors approach can significantly improve LLM performance with complex reasoning tasks over traditional approaches, increasing the rate at which OpenAI’s GPT-4o model can solve these puzzles from 27% to 86%.

To complement these empirical studies, Doyle is working on a law review article, Legal Reasoning in the Age of Its Mechanical Reproduction, that assesses LLMs' potential for performing legal reasoning tasks.

JENNIFER FAN
Professor of Law | Therese Maynard Chair in Business Law

Professor Jennifer Fan's scholarly research focuses on corporate law through the lens of entrepreneurship and innovation, with a particular emphasis on corporate governance and securities law. Her article Startup Biases in the UC Davis Law Review (republished in the Corporate Practice Commentator) addresses a critical gap in corporate diversity scholarship by analyzing DEI issues from a private company perspective. The work provides a novel descriptive account of how certain processes and practices in venture capital financing have shaped the entire ecosystem, influencing everything from funding decisions to board composition.

Fan has two forthcoming co-authored works. Founder Worship, Effective Altruism, and Corporate Governance (with Xuan-Thao Nguyen), forthcoming in the Kentucky Law Journal, examines the intersection of these contemporary phenomena using FTX as a case study. Novel Corporate Governance Structures (with Xuan-Thao Nguyen), forthcoming in the Harvard Journal of Law & Technology, evaluates whether novel corporate governance structures adopted by AI startups effectively balance their public good objectives (such as AI safety and human benefit) with sound corporate governance practices.

JONATHAN F. HARRIS
Associate Professor of Law

Professor Jonathan F. Harris writes about work law and theory, with a focus on worker mobility in its many forms—job-to-job, geographic, and social. His forthcoming Georgetown Law Journal article Credentialism at Work reveals the ways that policymakers and for-profit job training companies lean on the meritocracy narrative to persuade workers to stack nondegree credentials. The article argues that the resulting individualist credential arms race distracts workers from collective organizing and harms workers, especially people of color and immigrants.

Harris was cited in the Federal Trade Commission’s rule banning non-compete clauses and recently wrote for the Harvard Law Review Blog and Law and Political Economy Blog about the FTC’s history of reining in anticompetitive practices in labor markets. In addition, he was quoted in the New York Times about the FTC rule and has spoken at academic conferences on “stay-or-pay” contracts that make workers pay to leave their jobs. Harris is the chair of the AALS Section on Labor Relations and Employment Law and served recently on the organizing committee of the Michael Olivas Writing Institute at UC Davis School of Law.