On April 23, 2020, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS) announced that Stanford Law School’s Jenny Martinez, dean and Richard E. Lang Professor of Law, and Anne Joseph O’Connell, Adelbert H. Sweet Professor of Law, have been elected to the academy. Founded in 1780 by John Adams, John Hancock and 60 other scholars, the AAAS is both an honorary society that celebrates the excellence of its members and an independent research center that brings together leaders from across disciplines, professions and perspectives to address significant challenges in society. The academy is committed to interdisciplinary, nonpartisan research that provides pragmatic solutions for complex challenges.  

Martinez and O’Connell, along with 13 other Stanford professors, will join the 285 current Stanford AAAS members as well as the illustrious academy members who came before them, including Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, Margaret Mead, Martin Luther King, Jr. and many others.

To read about the other Stanford electees, click here.

Jenny S. Martinez

Martinez is a leading expert on international law and constitutional law, including comparative constitutional law, and has deep experience on the role of courts and tribunals in advancing human rights. She joined Stanford Law School as a faculty member in 2003, served as associate dean for curriculum from 2013 to 2016, and in 2018, chaired a key working group that developed a plan to advance diversity and inclusion in the school.

Martinez is the author of The Slave Trade and the Origins of International Human Rights Law (Oxford University Press, 2012) and numerous articles in leading academic journals. Martinez is a Senior Fellow (by courtesy) of Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and a faculty affiliate of Stanford’s Center on International Security and Cooperation and Stanford’s Center on Democracy Development and the Rule of Law.

An experienced litigator, Martinez has worked on numerous cases involving international law and constitutional law issues. She serves as a member of the U.S. State Department’s Advisory Committee on International Law. She is also a member of the American Law Institute.

Before joining the Stanford faculty in 2003, Dean Martinez clerked for Justice Stephen Breyer of the U.S. Supreme Court and Judge Guido Calabresi of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit; she was also an associate legal officer for Judge Patricia Wald of the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in the Hague, where she worked on trials involving genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes.

Anne Joseph O’Connell

O’Connell is a lawyer and political scientist whose research and teaching focuses on administrative law and the federal bureaucracy. Outside of the law school, she is a contributor to the Center on Regulation and Markets at the Brookings Institution, an elected fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration, and an appointed Public Member of the Administrative Conference of the United States, an independent federal agency dedicated to improving agency procedures.

O’Connell is a two-time winner of the American Bar Association’s Scholarship Award in Administrative Law for the best article or book published in the preceding year — for her 2014 article “Bureaucracy at the Boundary” and her 2009 article “Vacant Offices: Delays in Staffing Top Agency Positions.” Her co-authored article (with Farber), “The Lost World of Administrative Law,” won the 2014 Richard D. Cudahy Writing Competition on Regulatory and Administrative Law from the American Constitution Society. Her article, “Political Cycles of Rulemaking,” was the top paper selected for the Association of American Law Schools’ 2007-2008 Scholarly Papers Competition for faculty members with fewer than five years of law teaching. In addition, her research has been cited by Congress, the Supreme Court, and the D.C. Circuit, and has been featured prominently in the Washington Post. She is a co-editor of a leading textbook, Gellhorn and Byse’s “Administrative Law: Cases and Comments.”

Prior to joining Stanford Law School in 2018, O’Connell was the George Johnson Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, where she received the Distinguished Teaching Award in 2016 and Berkeley Law’s Rutter Award for Teaching Distinction in 2012. From April 2013 to July 2015, O’Connell served as Associate Dean for Faculty Development and Research, under three different Deans. In 2013-2014, she was Co-President of the Society for Empirical Legal Studies (co-organizing the 2014 Conference on Empirical Legal Studies).

Before joining the Berkeley Law faculty in 2004, O’Connell clerked for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg of the U.S. Supreme Court during the October 2003 term. From 2001 to 2003, she was a trial attorney for the Federal Programs Branch of the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Division. She clerked for Judge Stephen F. Williams of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit from 2000 to 2001.