Stanford Law School’s New Faculty

Gregory Ablavsky

Gregory Ablavsky

 
When Greg Ablavsky was a fifth-grade teacher on the Zuni reservation in New Mexico, he hoped to learn about the community’s rich history and the people living there. “Life on the reservation was both very familiar and different. I would run into students at the local Walmart on the weekends. They watched satellite television and listened to rap music— they were typical kids,” he says. “But then there were moments when I’d become aware that I was living in a culture that had very deep roots and that my students and my colleagues and friends in the community often had very different cultural backgrounds from me.” He recalls seeing his students outside the classroom at tribal events. “The same students who couldn’t be still for five minutes in class would sit transfixed for three, four, five hours watching dances and ceremonies.” Read more »


Rabia Belt 1

Rabia Belt

From the time she was in elementary school, Rabia Belt imagined that a professor would be the “perfect job.” “Someone paying you to do reading, writing, and teaching seemed like a dream come true,” she says. Now, a few decades later and after earning multiple graduate degrees, Belt is about to enter Stanford Law School’s version of her dream—this autumn as a fellow and then as an assistant professor of law beginning in the 2016-2017 academic year.

Belt’s interest in law began when she was a Harvard undergraduate majoring in social studies. “I know that sounds like something you take in fifth grade, but social studies is actually an exploration of the philosophy of politics,” she explains.  Read more »


New Faculty

Alan O. Sykes

This fall, the law school welcomes back Professor Alan O. Sykes, a legal scholar of international standing who is widely recognized as a creator of the relatively new academic discipline of international economic law, which, as its name suggests, covers the convergence of a host of international legal issues and economics.

“We are acutely aware of how central the movement of goods, capital, and labor is both to businesses and policymakers. Al was way ahead of the law school curve on the significance of globalization and the need to apply rigorous economic analysis to the study of cross-border transactions,” says Vice Dean and James C. Gaither Professor of Law Mark Kelman. Read more »