Halbertal, a global visiting professor of law and Gruss Visiting Professor of Law since 2003, joins the faculty as the tenured Gruss Professor of Law this fall. He will continue his practice of spending the spring semester in Israel, where he is a professor of Jewish thought and philosophy at Hebrew University. At NYU, he teaches Jewish Law and Legal Theory and the Ethics of Obligation in Jewish Law. Though he doesn’t have a J.D., he has become, through his careful readings of others’ work and long philosophical discussions, “indispensable to so many of us on the faculty,” says Amy Adler, who specializes in art law. Indeed, the news that Halbertal secured a permanent position on the faculty prompted an outpouring of unusually gushy praise, with colleagues calling him “beloved,” “a dear man,” and “joyful and soulful.”

Halbertal’s extraordinary dedication and generosity may be the result of lessons learned from his father. Born in Montevideo, Uruguay, he grew up trilingual. His father, Meir, spoke Yiddish, his mother, Henya, was fluent in Hebrew, and both also spoke Spanish. A Jew born in Poland, Meir survived the Holocaust by fleeing to Russia. While much of his family perished, he spent time in a Siberian gulag and an orphanage, and escaped pogroms by joining distant relatives in Uruguay. There he met and married Henya, an elementary school teacher. They had two sons, Moshe and Dov, and moved to Jerusalem when Moshe was eight years old. Halbertal remembers his father, the educational director of a high school who died in his early 70s in 2001, as an optimistic person who taught him the power of gratitude and giving. “When I asked him how he came from there without being broken,” says Halbertal, “he said, ‘Whenever I was in distress, I saw someone in far more distress and gave help to him.’” Both parents also instilled a deep respect for education. “My father’s formative years were all about survival,” Halbertal says. “He wanted his children to have the gift of what he missed, the gift to study and grow, so in some ways, we were the children who fulfilled whatever he hadn’t had.”

Halbertal received a strong, Talmudic education in yeshiva, an Orthodox Jewish rabbinical seminary, and then attended Hebrew University, where he earned a B.A. and a Ph.D. in Jewish thought and philosophy. His work began to focus on the intersection of Jewish law and philosophy when he noticed a “constructive tension,” namely the question, “What is the role of value in adjudicating between possibilities?” For example, Halbertal notes that a saying such as “an eye for an eye” can be read in two plausible ways: the semantic, where one would actually demand an actual eye in retribution, and the moral, where one would accept monetary compensation and consider the eye a metaphor. Through such analysis, “you see the role that values play in the interpretive process,” says Halbertal.

One of Halbertal’s most notable works is the 1997 book People of the Book: Canon, Meaning and Authority (Harvard University Press), in which he applied his deep knowledge of religious thought to modern questions. “Part of Halbertal’s gift is that he manages to reveal how much the struggles within Jewish thought resonate with ongoing struggles in law, literature and politics today,” says Richard Pildes, Sudler Family Professor of Constitutional Law. Pildes cites current debates over the role of the Constitution in American law and culture, the proper methods of constitutional interpretation or the legitimate space for dissent from rulings of the Supreme Court as subject to illumination through Halbertal’s exposure of the centuries-long turmoil over surprisingly similar issues within the traditions of Jewish religious thought.

In 2001, Halbertal was appointed by a committee established by the Israeli Joint Chiefs of Staff to contribute to the drafting of the ethics code for the Israeli Army. Given the importance to Israel of its military, creating any restrictions on military might was a delicate operation. However, the ultimate product, says Yishai Beer, professor of law at Hebrew University, “was a masterpiece.”

More recently, Halbertal was the guest at the Colloquium in Legal, Political and Social Philosophy—known for convening some of the most incisive, even ruthless, intellectuals and philosophers for a thorough dissection of papers-in-process. Halbertal’s paper, “Self-Transcendence, Violence and the Political Order,” examines the suicide bomber and the terrorist who doesn’t try to escape punishment because he wants to prove that the aim was worth risking his life. Halbertal claims that this kind of sacrificial transcendence is morally misguided. Legitimate moral demands may, in some cases, require sacrifice, but sacrifice can never legitimize action that would not otherwise be legitimate. Thomas Nagel, who leads the colloquium along with Ronald Dworkin, says Halbertal’s argument boils down to, “If violent action is right, it’s right without sacrifice. If it’s wrong, sacrifice won’t make it right” and described the paper as a “lucid and original discussion of self-transcendence and its pathologies.”

Living and teaching across an ocean and a continent can take its toll. But true to form, Halbertal, who is divorced and the father of three daughters, focuses on the positive. Living in two nations, he says, is “a gift” that confers the ability to be comfortable among different people and in different situations, and he is especially grateful to share that with his children. “We have a sense of the world not being a small place, which is a good thing,” Halbertal says. “There is empowerment in exploring and seeing and contributing.”

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From that inquiry, she developed her doctoral dissertation, “A Blighted Land: An Empirical Study of Residential Developer Bankruptcies in the United States—2007–2008,” a timely examination of the role the banks played in increasing asset liquidations and possibly prolonging the current housing crisis. Woo is currently expanding that work into a book. “Some legal scholars understand the law but don’t necessarily understand how to do economic analysis. She does both,” says Stanford’s Alan Jagolinzer, who sat on Woo’s dissertation committee. “She is among an elite body of researchers working at the intersection of law and economics.”

Woo is also a law and society scholar, mentored by Stanford’s Lawrence Friedman, a founding father of the law and society movement. She joins the faculty in September, and will teach international financial regulation and international insolvency.

Woo’s research interests center primarily on financially distressed companies and the legal and regulatory frameworks, domestic and transnational, that they operate in, such as the Basel II Accord. Her preferred methodology is large-scale empirical analysis, for which she is currently building databases on bankrupt companies, based on sources such as court filings and market data.

Growing up in Singapore, Woo was a self-confessed math and computer science geek in high school. She says: “I was that person in class who preferred to spend most of her free time writing computer codes and working out mathematical proofs.” At her parents’ urging, Woo tried out law at the National University of Singapore. After topping her class in her first year, she stuck with it.

Graduating in 2001 with First Class Honors, Woo went to Baker & McKenzie, where she worked on cross-border financing, bankruptcy, and debt restructuring projects. She left to follow her future husband to Stanford, earning an LL.M. in 2003, then worked as an associate at White & Case in San Francisco, focusing on transactional and bankruptcy work. Some months later, she got a call from Morgan Stanley, where she had interviewed people for her masters dissertation. “The chance to work on the ground with investors and analysts in an area of my research interest, instead of being a mere observer, was very appealing. I decided to take a chance on adventure.”

In 2005, she left Morgan Stanley to join Moody’s KMV in New York and London, consulting for financial institutions. She used her qualitative and quantitative skills to build financial risk assessment models. Realizing that legal expertise in corporate bankruptcy was rarely incorporated into quantitative risk models, “I was inspired to bridge the gap between law and finance by gathering data from legal dockets to inform what was happening on Wall Street,” she says. She returned to Stanford to build the database and complete her doctorate.

Woo sees her move to NYU Law as a strategic advantage. “It is very important to be in a city where I can meet industry players, and to be at a school that is supportive of interdisciplinary empirical research,” she says. “NYU is the place to work on issues relating to financial regulatory reforms.”

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Erin Murphy, who builds mentoring into her teaching relationships by requiring first-year students to attend her office hours, joins NYU Law as a tenured professor this fall from the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law where she could be spotted zipping around campus on a powder blue Vespa. A criminal justice scholar with a focus on forensic DNA typing and technology, Murphy, 36, has a reputation for being creative and energetic in the classroom. She experiments with technologies such as handheld voting devices, plays rap music, and shows videos of “The Wire” and other popular TV shows. And at the semester’s end, she organizes a criminal procedure “Jeopardy!”-style game and a criminal law-themed poetry slam. “She loves the material so much, it’s infectious,” says former student Josh Keesan, now a San Diego County public defender.

Murphy’s scholarship is influenced by her own years at the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia, where she was part of a team of lawyers dedicated to understanding the ins and outs of forensic DNA typing. She found that the law responded clumsily when it came to regulating new technologies, as when debate focused on the intrusiveness of swabbing a suspect’s cheek rather than the question “What are we going to do with this information?” Two of Murphy’s articles, including her popular DNA primer “The Art in the Science of DNA: A Layperson’s Guide to the Subjectivity Inherent in Forensic DNA Typing” (Emory Law Journal, 2008), were cited in a 2009 concurring opinion by Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito that denied a new DNA test for a convicted rapist. Murphy is currently working on “Relative Doubt: Partial Match of ‘Familial’ Searches of DNA Databases,” to be published in the Michigan Law Review, which examines the forensic method of locating partial DNA or possible kinship matches, when exact DNA matches to the crime scene sample are not found.

In “Paradigms of Restraint” (Duke Law Journal, 2008), which won an AALS “best paper” award, Murphy argued that the power to control criminals with new technologies can result in as great a deprivation of liberty as physical incarceration, but that the consequences of these methods have received little constitutional scrutiny. “It’s hard to assess the power of the monitoring eye of biometric systems or the virtual prison of a GPS alert,” writes Murphy. Says Murphy’s former Harvard Law School professor Carol Steiker: “She manages to think in broad terms about these technologies, but also talks with specificity about how the courts should address these problems.”

Murphy also looks at nontechnical questions with a fresh eye. “Manufacturing Crime: Process, Pretext and Criminal Justice” (Georgetown Law Journal, 2009) looks at prosecutors’ use of procedural offenses such as perjury, obstruction of justice and the like, to gain convictions when other evidence is weak. “It’s an extraordinarily insightful assessment of a development in criminal justice that many people knew about but that no one had thought about in the way Erin did,” says Berkeley colleague David Alan Sklansky.

Growing up in Windermere, Florida, Murphy inherited a joie de vivre and love of literature from her free-spirited mom, Carol, an English teacher and guidance counselor who, her daughter remembers, “thought it was fun to lower the windows in the car wash.” She and Murphy’s father J. Michael, a steel drum reconditioner with a Harvard M.B.A., raised Murphy and her brother with a sense of civic duty and a commitment to intellectual pursuits. Still, Murphy was no model student. Though she did well in high school, she’d skip classes that bored her, while seeking out extracurricular reading from teachers she admired. “I came to appreciate the real magic that a great teacher can do,” she says.

Studying law was never in doubt. “I’ve always been interested in the art of persuasion, and I love words,” says Murphy, who graduated from Dartmouth College with high honors in comparative literature. “Law allows me to use the beauty of language in service of something immensely important.” After earning her J.D. from Harvard Law in 1999, Murphy clerked for Judge Merrick B. Garland of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, then worked at the Public Defender Service in D.C. for five years before joining the Berkeley law faculty in 2005. Murphy, who was a visiting professor at NYU Law last fall, says she was drawn to NYU Law because of New York City’s wealth of resources, and the collegiality of the faculty. “There are so many talented, amazing people who meet weekly, share their work and ideas, and talk over lunch,” she said. “That kind of fertile ground is an ideal place to plant yourself if you want to grow as a thinker.”

In June, Murphy married Jeremy Tinker, 37, an astrophysicist who will join NYU’s physics department as a research professor. “My biggest decision now,” she joked a few weeks after the wedding, “is whether the Vespa will have a place in Manhattan.”

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These skills have other professional applications, too. “He’s a conference organizer at the highest level,” says NYU colleague Clayton Gillette. Last March at the University of Verona, where he has taught as a tenured full professor since 2002, Ferrari hosted the inaugural conference of the NYU School of Law’s new Center for Transnational Litigation and Commercial Law. “Typically, conferences are rather stuffy and formal. But this was a symposium in the true sense of the word,” says Leonardo Graffi, a transactional lawyer at Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer in Rome and a former student of Ferrari’s. “People were firing questions from the audience; everyone was genuinely engaged.” Heated discussions spilled over from the formal presentations into informal gatherings at the finest restaurants, chosen by Ferrari. “I’m a very enthusiastic person, whether it’s about colleagues, cities, movies, books, or food,” says Ferrari, 44, who speaks and writes in German, Italian, English, French, and Spanish, and speaks Dutch.

Joining the full-time faculty this September, Ferrari will teach International Business Transactions and direct the new center. He complements NYU Law’s concentration in public international law with an expertise in private international law and substantive commercial law in the international area. “Those of us who engage in comparative work now have a deeply knowledgeable person in Franco, who will enrich our own work,” says Linda Silberman, Martin Lipton Professor of Law.

Ferrari has published nine books and some 150 articles, many translated into multiple languages. He is best known for his work on the unification of law, particularly international sales law. He was instrumental to the development of the 2004 UNCITRAL Digest of Case Law on the United Nations Convention on the International Sale of Goods (CISG), which allows easy access to case law from 74 countries. “Creating a system by which these tribunals can know how the treaty is being interpreted was a real stroke of brilliance,” says Harry Flechtner of the University of Pittsburgh School of Law.

Ferrari is also known for his somewhat controversial view on forum shopping—seeking the jurisdiction that is most favorable to one’s clients—a topic on which he will offer a seminar in Spring 2011.

Though he believes in the CISG’s goal of uniformity, as a practitioner he advocates taking full advantage of the divergences that still exist. “I’m a realist and a positivist,” says Ferrari. “We have not yet reached the level of unification one wanted to achieve with this convention. As long as this is the case, you have to do everything possible to advance your client’s interest.” He lays out those views in “‘Forum Shopping’ Despite International Uniform Contract Law Conventions,” published in the prestigious International & Comparative Law Quarterly in 2002. Ferrari is currently writing on European conflict of laws and, of course, the CISG.

A middle child raised in Bavaria by a single Italian mother—“Italians are known for not being that strict, but you should tell that to my mother,” he jokes—he developed a rather German work ethic. “He’s always in the office,” says Gillette. “He’s a workaholic in six different languages.”

Ferrari earned his J.D. in 1990 from Bologna University and two years later received his LL.M. from the University of Augsburg Law School. In 1995, he accepted a research professorship at Tilburg University in the Netherlands, which allowed him to take on visiting professorships at 15 law schools around the world. He returned to his alma mater, Bologna University School of Law, where he taught as a tenured professor from 1998 to 2002.

From 2000 to 2002, Ferrari served as a legal officer at the U.N.’s International Trade Law Branch in Vienna. In 2005, he visited NYU for the first time as a Hauser Global Visiting Professor; he has wanted to return ever since. “The collegiality I’ve encountered here, I have not encountered at any other school,” he says.

Ferrari, who is divorced with no children, never tires of exploring Manhattan. During his 2005 stay, he ate at a different restaurant every day and walked the streets exhaustively, taking photos that he turned into a beautiful coffee-table book for his fellow professors. Says Ferrari, “That was my way to show my love of this city, and to thank my colleagues.”

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A sailor, singer, guitarist, and one-time computer programmer, Bubb has extracurricular activities that are certainly broad, but no more so than his scholarship. His work spans international development law, with a focus on organizational design and the allocation of property rights, to financial institutions and business law. “He is a true polymath,” says Mele. “I can argue with him about anything. I’ll make it up, but he’s actually read up.”

Though his first love was physics, for which he won top honors at the College of William and Mary, Bubb switched gears after spending the summer before senior year in rural Haiti. Using his physics know-how, he installed a power system at the local elementary school and was moved by “seeing people who lived in such poverty and without the basic societal infrastructure that I’d taken for granted,” he says.

Graduating in 1998 with a desire to “make the world a better place,” Bubb became a science teacher at a parochial school in Washington, D.C. “But herding middle school students didn’t play to my strong suits,” he jokes.

He entered Yale Law School, where he was an editor of the Yale Human Rights & Development Law Journal and delved into the study of economics. “Economic analysis sheds light on the role of legal institutions in shaping incentives in society,” says Bubb, an Olin Fellow in Law and Economics. Graduating in 2005 with both a J.D. and an M.A. in economics, he next attended Harvard, conducting fieldwork in Ghana under a Hewlett Foundation grant, and was a graduate fellow at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. He expects to receive his Ph.D. this year in political economy and government.

Bubb joins the NYU Law faculty in September after spending a year as a policy analyst for the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) and as a senior researcher for the bipartisan Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, charged with investigating the causes of the current economic meltdown. “Ryan’s interests intersect with those of several different groups on our faculty,” says Professor Oren Bar-Gill, naming the property law and financial institutions groups, among others. “And through his work for OIRA, he gained valuable insight into the real-world application of cost-benefit analysis in shaping regulation.”

Bubb co-wrote a June 22, 2009, op-ed for the New York Times called “A Fairer Credit Card? Priceless.” The authors take aim at credit card companies that exploit missed payments and other consumer mistakes by levying punishing fees. Comparing investor-owned credit card firms with customer-owned credit unions, they found that although credit unions charge higher upfront costs, they impose smaller and fewer penalties. The findings belie credit card companies’ claims that the Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility, and Disclosure Act will force fundamental changes in credit cards. “Credit unions largely conform to the new rules already,” they wrote, “while profitably maintaining the basic features that users know and love.”

In a work in progress, “States, Law, and Property Rights in West Africa,” Bubb investigates the evolution of property institutions. Drawing on economics, he uses a statistical technique called regression discontinuity to estimate the effects of the divergent de jure property law of Ghana and neighboring Côte d’Ivoire on de facto property rights institutions. He finds that even though the formal laws change when you cross the border, people in both countries maintain similar land-transfer rights. Thus, the results suggest that “a top-down model of legal reform has limitations,” he says. “Institutions are determined in large part by a bottom-up evolutionary process.”

Bubb, who in December plans to wed Claire Coiro, a Harvard Ph.D. candidate in classics, chose NYU Law for its strength in business law as well as law and development. “NYU is clearly a place where students and faculty are tackling the questions that first captivated me when I was in Haiti,” he says. “That’s not true at most law schools.”

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Blank, 33, attributes his remarkable capacity to having found his purpose and passion. “This is my dream job,” he said. “I view NYU as the center of the tax universe.”

He began identifying his dream as an associate at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, when he realized that he most enjoyed his work when he was acting as a teacher, explaining tax policy to his colleagues and clients. Despite the firm’s famously grueling hours, he was able to publish two academic papers and also earn an LL.M. “I had to slay dragons,” he said, to leave his office once a week at 5:45 p.m., but he found the pull irresistible. “It was a way to think about policy, not just the client of the day.”

Blank has a special appreciation for NYU’s Graduate Tax Program, which offered him flexibility when he needed it most. “When my son, Ariel, was born I just could not make it to NYU for every class and juggle my work responsibilities,” he recalls. So he participated in the pilot program of the online Executive LL.M. in Taxation in 2005. Rocking his newborn in his arms and viewing video of lectures online, he remembers being grateful that he wasn’t “forced to pause progress toward the degree.”

Now a sympathetic administrator, Blank has expanded the online course offerings and thoughtfully improved details, like replacing chalkboards that can be difficult for students to read online with “smart tablets” that digitally copy professors’ notations. He also encourages professors to use online discussion boards when answering student questions so that more students can participate. The investment in time, money, and effort is worth it, says Blank. “The Executive LL.M. program is the way a lot of legal education will be.”

As a professor, Blank displays a similar attention to detail, bringing tax studies alive in the classroom by doing things like playing the Willie Nelson song “Who’ll Buy My Memories?” before launching into a review of civil tax penalty rules that are all related to Nelson’s problems with the IRS. “Colorful examples are essential to my teaching style,” says Blank. Sima Gandhi ’07 (LL.M. ’09), now an analyst at the Center for American Progress, agrees. “It would have been just as easy to lay out the rules—one, two, three,” she says. But “he was passionate and engaged me.” She credits Blank with helping her choose a taxpolicy career.

Blank’s scholarship focuses on tax administration and compliance, taxpayer privacy, and taxation of business entities. In his 2009 article “What’s Wrong with Shaming Corporate Tax Abuse,” published in the Tax Law Review, he probed public attitudes toward corporate taxation to conclude that publicizing corporate tax cheating might backfire and hurt compliance. Shaming individuals has been highly successful, partly because the public views individual tax laws as relatively clear. Because corporate taxation is more complicated, people see corporations as participating in a legitimate “game” to lower their taxes. In fact, investors might reward a tax director who was seen as “pushing the envelope.”

But for Blank, who lives in northern New Jersey with his wife, Jessica Blumenfeld, 33, his son, Ariel, now 4, and daughter, Kira, 2, there appear to be few limits in sight as he thrives on being an extraordinary teacher, administrator, scholar, and family man.

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Miller, who joined NYU Law in 2007 as a University Professor after 35 years at Harvard Law School, is a singular figure in American law and culture. Both in and out of the classroom—clad in his trademark three-piece suit and red tie and pocket square—he presents a carefully crafted persona, fearsome and imperious. But as those offering accolades made clear, this is a front, behind which is a person capable of touching people deeply and offering them life-changing inspiration. “Everyone who has taken one of Professor Miller’s classes remembers the experience,” said Danielle Kantor ’10, the Annual Survey’s editor in chief.

Supreme Court Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who flew in from Washington just to speak at the dedication ceremony, offered personal observations dating to 1957, when she and Miller were both law students at Harvard. Back then, she noted, “he was a wee bit shy, would you believe?” Years later, she recounted, her daughter’s decision to take Miller’s copyright law class at Harvard “determined her life’s work.” (Jane Ginsburg now teaches intellectual property at Columbia Law School.) Ginsburg also read a statement from her fellow justice Stephen Breyer, who said Miller “has helped thousands of law students understand the intrinsic interest in, as well as the human importance of, the law.” Another jurist, Robert Sack of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, praised Miller’s work in privacy law.

The field of civil procedure connected many of the ceremony’s speakers to Miller, co-author of the 31-volume Federal Practice and Procedure. It was because he took Miller’s civil procedure class, Sexton said, that he went on to teach the subject. (In addition to serving as NYU’s president, Sexton is the Benjamin F. Butler Professor of Law at the Law School.) Two other distinguished civil proceduralists took to the podium to honor their longtime colleague. “Though I was technically his senior, he was always my mentor,” said David Shapiro, a visiting professor at NYU Law and colleague from Harvard Law School. And Martin Lipton Professor of Law Linda Silberman, who was Miller’s student and summer research assistant at Michigan Law School, noted that she “learned more in that summer than I did in the rest of my law school years.”

But Miller’s star power has extended far beyond the walls of academia. Most notably, he hosted his own TV shows on the law, Miller’s Court and Miller’s Law, and served as a legal commentator on many others, including ABC TV’s Good Morning America. Indeed, Jeffrey Toobin, a legal analyst for CNN Worldwide and the New Yorker, credited Miller with pioneering TV coverage of the courts. “Arthur was the first person—the very first person—to recognize that law could make compelling television,” Toobin said. Longtime Good Morning America anchor Charles Gibson said, “In my 33 years at ABC, I can count on one hand those academics who could make their subjects come alive for a mass audience. There’s no better teacher than Arthur Miller.”

Lawyers who have practiced with Miller praised his wide-ranging expertise—Simpson Thacher & Bartlett partner Henry Gutman for Miller’s work on copyright cases; Brad Friedman, a partner at the Milberg law firm (where Miller is now special counsel) for his guidance in class action litigation.

When it came time for Miller himself to speak a few words at the close of the dedication ceremony, he confessed that he was “filled with all sorts of emotions.” He offered: “I’m honored, I’m humbled. I might say I’m speechless—but nobody would believe that.”

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Read about Professor Miller’s collection of Japanese prints.

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To understand why Epstein is depicted doing a Saturday New York Times crossword puzzle, or why Kenji Yoshino is sitting with Yorick, click on each professor’s name for a full profile.

View the entire illustration closeup.

Samuel Rascoff, Katrina Wyman (and her interest in brightly plumed birds), Roderick Hills, Jennifer Arlen, Oren Bar-Gill

José Alvarez, Deborah Malamud, Florencia Marotta-Wurgler ’01, Mitchell Kane, Kenji Yoshino, Cynthia Estlund

Troy McKenzie ’00, Margaret Satterthwaite ’99, Jeremy Waldron, Robert Howse, Katherine Strandburg

Richard Epstein, Smita Narula, Barton Beebe, Samuel Scheffler, John Ferejohn

Catherine Sharkey, Daniel Hulsebosch, Ryan Goodman, Arthur Miller (and his collection of Japanese prints), Lily Batchelder, Stephen Choi

Moshe Halbertal, Rachel Barkow, Kevin Davis, Cristina Rodríguez, Samuel Issacharoff (and his role on the Obama campaign legal team)

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Nelson has helped to cement NYU Law’s reputation as a legal history leader. He moderates the Legal History Colloquium, which he founded in 1982. Nelson has also played an integral role in the Samuel I. Golieb Fellowship in Legal History Program, the oldest fellowship of its kind. The Golieb Fellowship has become a mandatory training ground for promising legal history scholars who come to NYU Law to conduct research and present their work in the colloquium before going on to secure top teaching spots in their chosen specialty.

Former Golieb Fellows presented original scholarship in panels over the course of the conference, on topics such as 19th-century U.S. legal history, the legal history of race, and courts and judges. Panel chairs included Vice Dean Barry Friedman; Charles Seligson Professor of Law Daniel Hulsebosch; AnBryce Professor of Law Deborah Malamud; Professor Troy McKenzie ’00; Vice Dean Liam Murphy; and John Phillip Reid (LL.M. ’60, J.S.D. ’62), Russell D. Niles Professor of Law Emeritus.

Hulsebosch, who organized the conference, wanted to harness the power of the Golieb Fellows’ scholarship. “The Goliebs represent some sizeable proportion of all legal historians who have come out of graduate school or law school over the last generation,” said Hulsebosch, a former Golieb Fellow himself. “I wanted the focus in large part to be on the scholarship, to show how much of an influence Bill has had on all these people who are producing the best work in the field.”

Colleagues discussed Nelson’s influence in the field of legal history. More than one panelist invoked “generosity” as the honoree’s primary characteristic.

Morton Horwitz, Charles Warren Professor of American Legal History at Harvard Law School, recalled the days when he and Nelson were Charles Warren Fellows at Harvard, each researching their first books. Nelson tirelessly combed various courthouse archives for his primary research, Horwitz recalled, but remarkably, freely shared the fruits of his labors with Horwitz.

“I have not seen that in the remaining 40 years of my academic life,” Horwitz said. “It was a sense of generosity and an investment in a common purpose. We were going to make legal history a field; we needed to try to help each other as best we could. Bill really did make a big difference in my understanding of that which I was working on.” Horwitz and other panelists pointed to Nelson as a pioneer of digging through original sources to examine everyday cases, in order to better understand developments in the history of the law.

Larry Kramer, dean of Stanford Law School and former associate dean of NYU Law, praised Nelson’s contributions to the Law School. “Bill has been incredibly prolific and done work across a ridiculous number of subjects, especially for a historian. Nonetheless, his greatest legacy will be the enormous number of lives he’s influenced and careers he’s shaped.”

Professor Lauren Benton of NYU’s Department of History, also an affiliate professor at NYU Law, pointed out that Nelson’s generosity extends far beyond the Law School to history graduate students from all over. “Bill has had a profound influence on me and on many who work outside American legal history,” Benton said. “He is a global comparative legal scholar, he is a model historian…. He is an institution builder, a field shaper, and a friend.”

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Thompson earned the student-, faculty-, and alumni-nominated Distinguished Teaching Award last April, given to faculty members across the University who have made significant contributions to NYU’s intellectual life through teaching. He received a medal and a $5,000 grant. Last January, Thompson was presented with the student-nominated Martin Luther King Jr. Faculty Award, for exemplifying King’s spirit by making a favorable contribution in the classroom and the greater University community. The prize carried $2,500 for research funding.

A 14-year veteran of the NYU Law faculty, Thompson teaches the Criminal and Community Defense and the Offender Reentry clinics and explores the effect of race, power, and politics on individuals and communities as they come into contact with our justice system. Current and former students laud his dedication and insight, especially when teaching courtroom skills, and his engagement with ideas about crime and communities. “He is an amazing trial lawyer,” says Shanti Hubbard ’09, E. Barrett Prettyman Fellow at Georgetown University Law Center. Vanessa Pai-Thompson ’08, a trial attorney at Brooklyn Defender Services, praises Thompson as a teacher and mentor who instills confidence in students. “He’s very good about trying to approach his students not just as students but also as professionals,” she says, “giving you the opportunity to rise to the occasion.” Eli Northrup ’11 agrees: “I’d never given any sort of oral argument. He makes you get up without any notes…it gave me a lot of confidence.”

In addition to producing influential scholarship, including his 2008 book, Releasing Prisoners, Redeeming Communities: Reentry, Race, and Politics, Thompson has served as faculty director of the Root-Tilden-Kern and the Bickel & Brewer Scholarship programs, undertaking administrative responsibilities at the Law School “with remarkable skill and effectiveness and a generous spirit,” says Dean Richard Revesz.

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