Richard H. Weisberg is a Professor Emeritus of Constitutional Law. He was an Obama appointee to the Commission on the Preservation of America's Heritage Abroad. Professor Weisberg has helped litigate successfully in American federal courts on behalf of Holocaust survivors and their heirs, providing a measure of justice for World War II victims of anti-Semitism.

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President Nicholas Sarkozy of France awarded him the Legion of Honor in 2008. The founding director at Cardozo of the Holocaust, Genocide and Human Rights Program and the Floersheimer Center for Constitutional Democracy, he writes widely in those areas, including his book Vichy Law and the Holocaust in France and essays on First Amendment developments in the U.S. Supreme Court. He is a pioneer in the growing law and literature movement worldwide, and his books The Failure of the Word and Poethics have been widely translated. In 2014, he published In Praise of Intransigence: The Perils of Flexibility (Oxford University Press). The book argues that a willingness to embrace intransigence allows us to recognize the value of our beliefs, which are always at risk of being compromised or equivocated. He has visited many undergraduate institutions in the U.S., at law schools around the country, and in France, Denmark and China, where he is an honorary professor of law at Wuhan University.
 

His staging of legal dilemmas in great fictional works has won notices from The New York Times, the National Law Journal, and The New Yorker magazine. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow and recipient of Rockefeller Foundation, NEH and ACLS grants. He holds a B.A. from Brandeis University, and his Ph.D. from Cornell is in French and comparative literature. While teaching those subjects on the graduate faculty of the University of Chicago, Professor Weisberg earned his J.D. from Columbia Law School, where he was an editor of the Columbia Law Review. He has been associated with the firm of Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton in New York and Coudert Freres in Paris.

Shaina Trapedo is an Assistant Professor in English at Stern College and Resident Scholar and Recruitment Officer at the Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought at Yeshiva University. She received her undergraduate degree at Barnard College and her PhD in English from UC Irvine where she specialized in early modern literature and religious studies. Her current book project, From Scripture to Script: The Hebrew Bible on the Early English Stage considers Shakespeare and his contemporaries' indebtedness to Judaism and its exegetical traditions. In her teaching and scholarship, she continues to explore the connections between literacy, cultural identity, and social engagement. 

Kenneth F. McCallion heads an accomplished team of civil litigation and estates/trusts attorneys at McCallion & Associates. He has more than 40 years of experience in a wide range of legal practice areas, including: complex civil litigation; environmental/pollution law; toxic torts/personal injuries; real estate and contract disputes; wills and trust litigation; employment discrimination; deprivation of civil rights/ human rights; consumer protection; product liability; and wrongful death. Mr. McCallion is a graduate of Yale University and Fordham Law School and is an adjunct professor at Cardozo Law School. He has an outstanding record of victories and has handled some of the country’s largest, multi-million dollar cases, including the Exxon Valdez oil spill case in Alaska, the Shoreham Nuclear Power Plant litigation, the Gulf War case, and the Bhopal Gas disaster litigation. As lead counsel in the federal class action litigation against various French banks, Mr. McCallion successfully represented Holocaust survivors and the families of victims, resulting in the establishment of a substantial settlement fund and claims procedure. Throughout his career, Mr. McCallion has litigated numerous significant civil RICO and other class actions that have collectively resulted in recoveries well in excess of $1 billion. Additionally, he represented thousands of World War II victims of forced and slave labor in their successful settlement claims against the German government and German industries. He also represented families of the victims of the American Airlines crash Flight 587; veterans of the first Gulf War (in 1991) who were injured after exposure to chemicals sold to the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq by various European chemical companies; families of victims of the 9/11 World Trade Center terrorist attack; and Yulia Tymoshenko, the former Prime Minister of Ukraine, in a case involving wrongful imprisonment and human rights violations.

Todd Grabarsky is a deputy attorney general with the California Department of Justice, Office of the Attorney General.*  He specializes in federal constitutional law, and in his practice he defends the constitutionality of California laws and policies including gun control legislation, labor protections, election laws, public health laws, policies that expand access to affordable housing, and the accuracy and completeness of the decennial census. Todd is also an adjunct professor at USC’s Gould School of Law where he teaches courses in constitutional law and the U.S. Supreme Court.

Todd earned his B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania and his J.D. from the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York (Yeshiva University), where he served as editor-in-chief of the Cardozo Law Review.  After law school, he served as a law clerk on the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California and also the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.  He also spent a brief period as an associate at a large corporate law firm in Los Angeles.

* Todd serves on the LHI Board in his personal capacity only, and makes no representation on behalf of the California Attorney General or Department of Justice.

Peter Brooks is Sterling Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at Yale University, where he was the founding director of the Whitney Humanities Center.  He taught also at the University of Virginia and Princeton University, and as visitor at Oxford, the University of Bologna, and the University of Copenhagen. He has published on narrative, and on psychoanalysis, largely in nineteenth and twentieth literature; he has published widely on issues in law and the humanities. Hee is author of two novels, World Elsewhere and The Emperor’s Body. His critical books include The Melodramatic Imagination Reading for the Plot, Troubling Confessions, Realist Vision, Henry James Goes to Paris, Enigmas of Identity, Flaubert in the Ruins of Paris, Balzac’s Lives, Seduced by Story: The Use and Abuse of Narrative. A new book: Henry James Comes Home. Revisiting America in the Gilded Age, will be published in 2025.

Professor Corcos received a bachelor's degree in history with high honors from the Honors College, and a master's degree in history, both from Michigan State University. She received the J.D. from Case Western Reserve University School of Law. She is a member of Phi Beta Kappa and Phi Kappa Phi.  At the Louisiana State University Law Center, she teaches in the areas of media law, entertainment law, privacy law, gender and the law, and Louisiana civil law of torts, and researches and writes in the areas of First Amendment law, legal history, and law and popular culture. She is also an affiliate member of the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Louisiana State University. Her book, Law and Magic II: A Collection of Essays (Carolina Academic Press) will be published later this year. Professor Corcos serves on the DigiCon Sci-Fi Advisory Board, the TechNomos: Law, Technology, Culture (Routledge), and The Arthur Conan Doyle Society, Doylean Honors Scholarly Writing Committee.

Professor Fish is one of this country’s leading public intellectuals, and a world-renowned literary theorist and legal scholar. He began his academic career in the English department at the University of California, then became the Kenan Professor of English and Humanities at Johns Hopkins University, where he taught from 1974 to 1985, before becoming Arts and Sciences Professor of English and Professor of Law at Duke. He was dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois from 1999 to 2004 and has since served as the Floersheimer Visiting Professor of Law at Cardozo. Professor Fish is a prolific author, having written over 200 scholarly books and articles, and is a contributor to "The Opinionator" blog for The New York Times.

Lawrence Joseph was born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1948. He was educated at the University of Michigan, where he graduated with High Honors in English Literature in 1970, and received first prize in the major Hopwood Award for Poetry; Magdalene College, Cambridge University, where he received both Bachelor and Master of Arts degrees with Honors in English Language and Literature, in 1972 and 1976 respectively; and the University of Michigan Law School, where he received a J.D. in 1975. He then served as law clerk to Justice (later Chief Justice) G. Mennen Williams of the Michigan Supreme Court. From 1978 to 1981, he was a member of the School of Law faculty at the University of Detroit. In 1981, he moved to New York City, where he was a litigation associate with the firm of Shearman & Sterling. He joined the faculty at St. John’s School of Law in 1987 and was named Tinnelly Professor of Law in 2003. He has published extensively in areas of labor, employment, tort and compensation law, and jurisprudence, law and literature, and legal theory. He has spoken on law, language and literature at law schools throughout the country, including Stanford, Columbia, Harvard, University of Michigan, University of Pennsylvania, New York University, Northwestern, and Georgetown, and is the former Chairperson of the Association of American Law School’s section on Law and Interpretation. He retired from St. John’s in 2020. Joesph is also an internationally acclaimed poet and writer. His poems, prose, essays, and criticism have appeared, and his work has been featured, in national and international publications, and has been translated into several languages. Described by David A. Skeel, Jr. in Legal Affairs magazine as “the most important lawyer-poet of our era,” he is the author of seven acclaimed books of poetry: A Certain Clarity: Selected Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020); So Where Are We? (FSG, 2017); Into It (FSG, 2005); Codes, Precepts, Biases, and Taboos: Poems 1973-1993 (FSG, 2005); Before Our Eyes (FSG 1993); Curriculum Vitae (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1988); and Shouting at No One (University of Pittsburgh Press,1983). He is also the author of Lawyerland (FSG, 1997), an internationally acclaimed non-fiction novel, and The Game Changed: Essays and Other Prose (University of Michigan Press, 2011). His work has been widely anthologized, reviewed and written about, and is included in the Oxford Book of American Poetry, and is the subject of over twenty articles and essays in Law and Literature and Law and Humanities legal scholarship, including the Columbia Law Review symposium “The Lawyerland Essays” (Volume 101, No. 7, November 2001) and “Some Sort of Chronicler I Am: Narration and the Poetry of Lawrence Joseph,” in the University of Cincinnati Law Review (Volume 77. No. 3. Spring 2009). Among his awards are a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, two National Endowment for the Arts poetry fellowships, and the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize, which he received for Shouting at No One. In April 2006, he was named the third recipient of the New York County Lawyers Association’s “Law and Literature Award” (prior recipients are Louis Auchincloss and Louis Begley). He has been a member of the board of directors of Poets House, the Poetry Society of America, and The Writer’s Voice, and has served on the PEN Events Committee. In 1994, he taught in the Creative Writing Program at Princeton University. His literary, professional, and personal papers have been acquired by the Special Collections Library of the University of Michigan, the archive to be held in Michigan’s Hatcher Graduate Library. He is married to the painter Nancy Van Goethem and lives in New York City.
 

Judith Koffler is a professor, mediator, and writer with a passion for bridging the worlds of law and literature. With degrees from Harvard and Boston University, she spent decades teaching, writing, and mentoring across the globe—from China to Botswana to the U.S. She is deeply committed to exploring how law shapes culture and society, and is always looking for new ways to engage in meaningful conversations through her writing and speaking. In addition to her academic work, she had the privilege of serving in various pro bono roles—whether as a Fulbright Scholar, teaching law in prisons, or mentoring students. She is passionate about using her background in law to foster dialogue and help others navigate complex systems. When not writing or teaching, you can find her hiking, playing piano, or traveling the world in search of new stories to tell.

Sanford Levinson, who holds the W. St. John Garwood and W. St. John Garwood, Jr. Centennial Chair in Law, joined the University of Texas Law School in 1980. Previously a member of the Department of Politics at Princeton University, he is also a Professor in the Department of Government at the University of Texas. The author of over 450 articles and book reviews in professional and popular journals–and a regular contributor to the popular blog Balkinization–Levinson is also the author of seven books, including Constitutional Faith (1988, winner of the Scribes Award, 2nd ed. 2011) and, most recently, with Cynthia Levinson, Fault Lines in the Constitution (2017). He has also edited or co-edited books a number of books including Reading Law and Literature: A Hermeneutic Reader (1988, with Steven Mallioux); the Oxford Handbook of the United States Constitution (with Mark Tushnet and Mark Graber, 2015); and Constitutional Democracy in Crisis? (with Mark Tushnet and Mark Graber, 2018). He received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Law and Courts Section of the American Political Science Association in 2010. He has been a visiting faculty member of the Boston University, Georgetown, New York University, and Yale law schools in the United States and has taught abroad in programs of law in London; Paris; Jerusalem; Auckland, New Zealand; and Melbourne, Australia. He has been a regular visitor to the Harvard Law School since 2004, teaching a variety of reading courses on topics including torture; popular sovereignty; the Federalist; monuments and memorialization; and constitutional reform, as well as occasional seminars on the welfare state; emergency powers; and (with Larry Lessig) Reconstruction. He was a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in 1985-86 and a Member of the Ethics in the Professions Program at Harvard in 1991-92. A member of the American Law Institute, Levinson was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2001.

Daniel McTiernan is a civil litigation associate and recent graduate of the University of Pittsburgh School of Law. Before attending law school, he served as a staff member of the Point Park Conservatory of Performing Arts and as an accompanist for the Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre School. Daniel has directed and music directed award-winning musical theater productions in Pennsylvania and Maryland and continues to enjoy musical endeavors. Daniel received a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Pennsylvania and serves as the secretary for the International Poetry Forum. While Daniel spends his time practicing law in Pittsburgh, his great loves are literature, music, and the visual arts.

Michael Pantazakos is Adjunct Professor of Law at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. He has also been a Lecturer-in-Law at New York University, and has presented to conferences at the University of California, Berkeley; Columbia University; the University of Helsinki; the University of Kent; and the University of London. He is published and cited particularly in the fields of Law & Literature and Comparative Literature. He earned his B.A. from New York University, J.D. from the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, and M.A. from Columbia University.

Marco Wan is Professor of Law and Director of the Programme in Law and Literary Studies at the University of Hong Kong. His research focuses on the intersections between law and the humanities, especially law and literature, law and film, and the ways in which perspectives from the humanities shed light on the legal regulation of gender and sexuality.

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His first book, Masculinity and the Trials of Modern Fiction (Routledge, 2017), examines literary trials in nineteenth-century England and France; it was awarded the Penny Pether Prize from the Law, Literature, and the Humanities Association of Australasia and the University Research Output Prize from HKU. His second book, Film and Constitutional Controversy (Cambridge University Press, 2021) explores how constitutional debates are refracted in Hong Kong cinema. His current work draws on literary and cultural theory to examine the legal regulation of sexuality. All three projects are supported by three-year grants from the General Research Fund (GRF) of the University Grants Committee.

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He is Managing Editor of Law & Literature, which was founded as the journal of the Law and Literature movement. He serves on the editorial boards of the Critical Studies in Law, Literature and the Humanities series (Edinburgh University Press); Law and Visual Jurisprudence (Springer); the Hong Kong Law Journal; and the Asia-Pacific Journal on Human Rights and the Law. He has held visiting positions at the University of Cambridge, the National University of Singapore, and the Käte Hamburger ‘Law as Culture’ Center for Advanced Study in the Humanities in Germany.

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Marco received his PhD and his law degree from the University of Cambridge, where he was an Evan-Lewis Thomas Law Scholar and a Sir Edward Youde Memorial Fellow. He also holds an LLM from Harvard Law School. He received his BA in Comparative Literature from Yale University, where he was awarded the Fox International Fellowship.

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Marco’s courses include: Law and Literature; Law and Film; Law, Meaning and Interpretation; Gender, Sexuality and the Law; Constitutional Law; and Contract Law. He has been the recipient of the University of Hong Kong Outstanding Teaching Award.

George advises clients and colleagues regarding US and EU regulation of financial institutions as it affects the powers of the institutions, their compliance with regulatory requirements, the structure of their transactions, the development of new financial products and the improvement of macroprudential supervision by regulators; he also advises regarding secured transactions, third-party legal opinion practice and the development of software relevant to the stress-testing of financial institutions and the financial system as a whole.

Peter Wolrich is an eminent leader in the field of international arbitration. He acts as Chairman of arbitral tribunals, sole arbitrator, co-arbitrator and counsel in arbitrations involving nation states and multinational corporations. Peter Wolrich has been the Managing Partner of the Paris office of Curtis, Mallet-Prevost, Colt & Mosle LLP for 30 years and served for 12 years as Chairman of the Commission on Arbitration and ADR of the International Chamber of Commerce. In that capacity, he was the principal draftsman of the revisions to the ICC Rules of Arbitration, the Mediation Rules, the Dispute Board Rules, and the Rules for Expertise.

Peter Wolrich has lectured at numerous universities worldwide and is a fequent speaker at international conferences. He is the author of numerous articles on dispute resolution. His contributions have been recognized by the French government, from which he received the distinction of Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur. Beyond his legal career, Peter Wolrich is an accomplished poet, having published two collections of poetry.

Professor Yankah holds degrees from the University of Michigan, Columbia Law School and Oxford University. His work focuses on questions of political and criminal theory and particularly, questions of political obligation and justifications of punishment. His work has appeared in law review articles, peer reviewed legal theory journals, books and medical journals, including NOMOS, Ratio Juris, Law and Philosophy, Criminal Law and Philosophy, the Fordham Law Review and the Illinois Law Review among others. He has been a Distinguished Visiting Faculty Member at the University of Toronto School of Law and a visiting fellow at the Israeli Institute of Advanced Studies (IIAS) among others. His work has been translated into Italian and Spanish.

While at Cardozo School of Law, he was been recognized numerous times by his students for his dedication to teaching. He was awarded an “Inspiration Award” by the Cardozo student body and the “Cardozo Alumni of the Year Award” by Cardozo BALLSA, becoming the first non-Cardozo graduate or faculty member to be recognized.

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His interests have also led him to develop expertise in voting rights and election law. For years he served as the co-chair of the New York Democratic Lawyers Council, the voting rights arm of the New York Democratic party and the coordinating arm of the DNC. In 2020, he was awarded the “Guardian of Democracy” Award by NYDLC. That year, he was appointed to New York’s Public Campaign Finance Board, which he now serves as Chairman.

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He also sits on multiple non-profit and start up boards including the Innocence Project, where he was awarded as an “Advocate for Justice” in 2017. He maintains a public presence writing for publications spanning The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Washington Post and Salon among others and has been a regular commentator on criminal law issues on television and radio including NBC, CNN, MSNBC, BBC, BBC International, NPR and PBS.