Payvand Ahdout
Associate Professor of Law
Payvand Ahdout’s research centers on modern uses of judicial power through the lens of federal courts. Focusing on the structures that compose and the institutions that are most often before the federal courts, her work incorporates multiple legal disciplines including constitutional law, civil procedure, and criminal law and procedure. Her current projects study the phenomena of litigating federal powers disputes as well as judicial agenda-setting outside of the federal courts. Ahdout graduated with highest distinction from the University of Virginia, where she was a Jefferson Scholar, with a B.A. in economics and government. She holds a law degree from Columbia Law School, where she was a James Kent Scholar and a recipient of the Ruth Bader Ginsburg Prize. Before joining the faculty, she served as a law clerk to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the U.S. Supreme Court and to Debra Ann Livingston on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.
Aditya Bamzai
Martha Lubin Karsh and Bruce A. Karsh Bicentennial Professor of Law
Aditya Bamzai teaches administrative law, advanced administrative law, civil procedure, computer crime and conflicts of law. His work on the development of American administrative law has been published in the Yale Law Journal, the Harvard Law Review and various other journals. He is a coauthor of the forthcoming ninth edition of the casebook Administrative Law: The American Public Law System, Cases and Materials.
From 2019 to 2021, Bamzai served as a Member of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, a federal agency charged with ensuring that government national security efforts are balanced with the need to protect privacy and civil liberties. He is an elected member of the American Law Institute. He has argued cases relating to the separation of powers and national security in the U.S. Supreme Court, Foreign Intelligence Court of Review, D.C. Circuit and other federal courts of appeals.
Melody C. Barnes
Senior Fellow
Melody Barnes is co-director for policy and public affairs for the Democracy Initiative, an interdisciplinary teaching, research and engagement effort led by the College and Graduate School of Arts & Sciences at the University of Virginia. She is the Dorothy Danforth Compton Professor and a professor of practice at the Miller Center, and is also a senior fellow at UVA Law’s Karsh Center for Law and Democracy.
During the administration of President Barack Obama, Barnes was assistant to the president and director of the White House Domestic Policy Council. Barnes’ experience also includes service as chief counsel to the late U.S. Sen. Edward M. Kennedy ’59 on the Senate Judiciary Committee and in other government, nonprofit and private-sector posts.
Franciska A. Coleman
Visiting Scholar
Franciska Coleman is an assistant professor of constitutional law at the University of Wisconsin Law School. She is an interdisciplinary scholar, whose work draws upon political theory, critical discourse analysis and constitutional law.
Coleman is interested in the social justice implications of race and class hegemony in constitutional interpretation and in the effects of institutionalized oppression on the self-governing capability of vulnerable groups. Professor Coleman’s current research projects focus on understanding the anatomy of cancel culture and its effects on marginalized groups as speakers, and understanding the relationship between equal protection and political power.
Prior to joining the faculty of UW Law School, Coleman was a visiting assistant professor at Washington University in St. Louis and also held a visiting scholar appointment at Harvard Law School.
Eugene Fidell
Karsh Distinguished Fellow
Eugene R. Fidell is of counsel at the Washington, D.C., firm Feldesman Tucker Leifer Fidell. He graduated from Queens College and Harvard Law School and served as a judge advocate in the U.S. Coast Guard. He graduated with honor from the U.S. Naval Justice School and has represented personnel in every branch of the armed forces, as well as the Commissioned Corps of the U.S. Public Health Service and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
He has taught Military Justice at Yale, Harvard, New York University and American University. His course subjects have included the Russo-Ukrainian War, Guantánamo, habeas corpus, the original jurisdiction of the Supreme Court, Native American law, tribal law, disasters, admiralty law and the law of the sea.
Fidell is president emeritus of the National Institute of Military Justice and former chair of the Committee on Military Justice of the International Society for Military Law and the Law of War. Since 2014, he has edited the Global Military Justice Reform blog. His military justice books include “Military Justice: Cases and Materials” and “Guide to the Rules of Practice and Procedure for the United States Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces,” which he co-authored, and “Military Justice: A Very Short Introduction,” which he authored.
Michael D. Gilbert
Vice Dean
Martha Lubin Karsh and Bruce A. Karsh Bicentennial Professor of Law
Michael Gilbert teaches courses on election law, legislation, and law and economics, and his current research focuses misinformation, corruption, and the role of “prosocial” preferences such as empathy in law. In 2022, Oxford University Press published Gilbert’s book, Public Law and Economics. His research has appeared in multiple law reviews, peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes, and he has lectured throughout the United States and around the world.
Gilbert is a member of the UVA Democracy Initiative’s Corruption Lab for Ethics, Accountability, and the Rule of Law. He has been a visiting professor at Panthéon-Assas University in Paris and Universidad Torcuato di Tella in Buenos Aires. Gilbert has won UVA’s All-University Teaching Award and the Student Council Distinguished Teaching Award. He was the inaugural director of UVA Law’s Center for Public Law and Political Economy.
Linda Greenhouse
Karsh Distinguished Fellow
Linda Greenhouse is a senior research scholar in law at Yale Law School and teaches The Institutional Supreme Court at UVA Law. Greenhouse covered the Supreme Court for The New York Times between 1978 and 2008 and writes a biweekly op-ed column on law as a contributing columnist.
She received several major journalism awards during her 40-year career at the Times, including the Pulitzer Prize (1998) and the Goldsmith Career Award for Excellence in Journalism from Harvard University’s Kennedy School (2004). In 2002, the American Political Science Association gave her its Carey McWilliams Award for “a major journalistic contribution to our understanding of politics.”
Her books include “Becoming Justice Blackmun,” “Before Roe v. Wade: Voices That Shaped the Abortion Debate Before the Supreme Court's Ruling” (with Reva B. Siegel), “The U.S. Supreme Court, a Very Short Introduction,” and “The Burger Court and the Rise of the Judicial Right,” with Michael J. Graetz. Her latest book is “Just a Journalist: Reflections on the Press, Life, and the Spaces Between,” published by Harvard University Press in 2017.
Craig Konnoth
Martha Lubin Karsh and Bruce A. Karsh Bicentennial Professor of Law
Craig Konnoth teaches Medicalization and the Law, and Sexuality and the Law at UVA Law. Previously, Konnoth was an associate professor at the University of Colorado, where he ran the Health Law Certificate Program. Before that, he was a Sharswood and Rudin Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School and New York University Medical School, where he taught health information law, health law, and LGBT heath law and bioethics.
He writes in health, civil rights and health data regulation. He is also active in LGBT rights litigation, and has filed briefs in the U.S. Supreme Court and the Tenth Circuit on LGBT rights issues. In 2022, he was named UVA’s John T. Casteen III Faculty Fellow in Ethics, a program that supports integrating ethical analysis and reasoning into courses.
Konnoth has also served as a deputy solicitor general with the California Department of Justice, where his cases involved the contraceptive mandate in the Affordable Care Act, sexual orientation change efforts, Facebook privacy policies and cellphone searches.
Chinh Q. Le ’00
Karsh Distinguished Fellow
Chinh Le is a visiting professor of practice at the Law School. From 2011 to 2021, he served as legal director of the Legal Aid Society of the District of Columbia, the oldest and largest general civil legal services program in the nation’s capital. In that capacity, he was responsible for the organization’s legal program — including Legal Aid’s individual client representation, systemic appellate and policy advocacy, and impact litigation across all of its practice areas — and oversaw a staff of roughly 60 lawyers and more than a dozen legal assistants.
Prior to joining Legal Aid, Le was director of the division on civil rights in the office of the New Jersey Attorney General, where he led the state’s enforcement of state and federal civil rights and family leave laws. Between 2001 and 2006, he served as assistant counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Inc., in New York, the first two years as a Skadden Fellow. Le spent the 2008-09 academic year as a practitioner-in-residence at Seton Hall Law School and an adjunct associate research scholar at Columbia Law School, where he was affiliated with the Center for Institutional and Social Change. He has also worked as a litigation associate at Jenner & Block.
J. Michael Luttig ’81
Karsh Distinguished Fellow
Retired Judge J. Michael Luttig served on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit for 15 years, from 1991 to 2006, having been appointed by former President George H.W. Bush. Luttig is currently counselor and special adviser to the Coca-Cola Co. and its board of directors. He was executive vice president and general counsel of the Boeing Co. from 2006 to 2020. Before that, he served as assistant attorney general at the U.S. Department of Justice and as counselor to the attorney general of the United States. Luttig was assistant counsel to the president at the White House from 1981 to 1982 under former President Ronald Reagan. From 1982 to 1983, he was a law clerk to then-Judge Antonin Scalia of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. From 1983 to 1985, he served as a law clerk and then special assistant to U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren E. Burger. Luttig earned his bachelor’s degree from Washington and Lee University and his law degree from the University of Virginia.
Joy Milligan
Martha Lubin Karsh and Bruce A. Karsh Bicentennial Professor of Law
Joy Milligan studies the intersection of law and inequality, with a particular focus on race-based economic inequality. Her scholarship is interdisciplinary, drawing on social theory and methods, and has been published in the Yale Law Journal, Virginia Law Review, UCLA Law Review, NYU Law Review, Annual Review of Law & Social Science, and the Journal of Legal Education. Her current work examines the legal and political struggles over federal administrators' ling-term role in extending racial segregation.
Before joining UVA Law Faculty, Milligan practiced civil rights law at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Inc., where she was a Skadden Fellow, and clerked for Judge A. Wallace Tashima of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Milligan is a member of the state bars of California and New York.
Robert S. Mueller III ’73
Karsh Distinguished Fellow
Robert Mueller is participating in the short course The Mueller Report and the Role of the Special Counsel, sponsored by the Karsh Center, at the Law School in the fall of 2021.
Mueller currently is a partner at WilmerHale, where his practice is focused on high-profile investigations and crisis management.
Kimberly Jenkins Robinson
Martha Lubin Karsh and Bruce A. Karsh Bicentennial Professor of Law
Kimberly Jenkins Robinson is a professor at the School of Law as well as a professor at both the School of Education and Human Development, and the Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy. She is one of the nation’s leading education law experts and speaks throughout the United States about K-20 educational equity, school funding, education and democracy, equal opportunity, civil rights, Title IX and federalism. Most recently, Robinson's analysis of the Supreme Court decision on affirmative action was published in The Conversation, and her insights on one approach to increase student diversity in admissions without affirmative action was published in the Harvard Law Review. Robinson was nominated and selected to be a recipient of the 2023-24 All-University Teaching Award at UVA, which recognizes the most dedicated instructors at the university. She serves as director of the Law School’s Education Rights Institute and the Center for the Study of Race and Law.
Robinson is a prolific scholar who has published two edited books and a diverse array of articles, book chapters and editorials. In 2019, the New York University Press published her edited volume A Federal Right to Education: Fundamental Questions for Our Democracy. In 2015, Harvard Education Press published her book, edited with Professor Charles Ogletree Jr. of Harvard Law School, The Enduring Legacy of Rodriguez: Creating New Pathways to Equal Educational Opportunity. Her scholarship has been published widely in leading journals, including the Harvard Law Review, the Stanford Law & Policy Review, the University of Chicago Law Review, the North Carolina Law Review and the Boston College Law Review.
Aaron Zebley ’96
Karsh Distinguished Fellow
Aaron Zebley, a partner at WilmerHale, is teaching the short course The Mueller Report and the Role of the Special Counsel, sponsored by the Karsh Center, at the Law School in the fall of 2021.
Before rejoining WilmerHale in 2019, Zebley served as the deputy special counsel under Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III for the duration of the office’s investigation of Russian government efforts to interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. In that role, he was responsible for overseeing and managing all day-to-day investigation and prosecution matters. Zebley’s practice focuses on investigations, national security matters, and defending clients facing government enforcement actions or congressional inquiries.
Zebley has more than 18 years of public sector experience at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the U.S. Department of Justice and at a U.S. attorney’s office. He served as chief of staff for the FBI, including when Mueller was FBI director. He was also a senior counselor in the National Security Division at the Justice Department.