Faculty Directory

  • Benforado, Adam , Visiting Professor of Law
    B.A., Yale University
    J.D, Harvard Law School

    Teaches: Contracts


    Professor Adam Benforado joins Brooklyn Law School for the Spring 2013 semester. He is visiting from Drexel University, Earle Mack School of Law, where he is an Associate Professor of Law. His principal interest is in applying insights from the mind sciences—most notably embodied cognition, moral psychology and implicit social cognition—to law and legal theory. He is particularly focused on issues arising in corporate law, contract law and criminal law.

    His recent scholarly work includes three chapters in Ideology, Psychology, and Law (Oxford University Press 2012) and a forthcoming article in Topics in Cognitive Science. He is also working on a book, "Unfair: How Our Hidden Minds Lead to Injustice," to be published by Crown. His articles have appeared in the Emory Law Journal, Maryland Law Review, Indiana Law Journal, Cardozo Law Review, Oregon Law Review, Florida State University Law Review, St. Louis University Law Journal and Entrepreneurial Business Law Journal. He is also a contributor to "The Situationist," the blog of the Project on Law and Mind Sciences at Harvard Law School.

    Prior to teaching he clerked for Judge Judith Rogers on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, and he worked at Jenner & Block, LLP in Washington, D.C., where he handled trial and appellate litigation matters.

  • Fielder, Lauren , Visiting Associate Professor of Law
    B.A., University of Texas at San Antonio
    J.D., University of Tulsa College of Law
    LL.M. University of Texas School of Law

    Teaches: African Law


    ​Brooklyn Law School welcomes Visiting Associate Professor Lauren Fielder for the Winter 2013 session. Fielder is currently an Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Luzern in Switzerland, where she serves as Assistant Director of the Transnational Legal Studies Program. She also practices at the law firm of Fielder and Fielder, which provides transnational legal opinions for governments, courts, NGOs and law firms. She has previously been an Adjunct Professor and Lecturer at John Marshall Law School and an Adjunct Professor at Baylor Law School.

    Fielder is an expert in African Law and Policy, and her most recent scholarship includes a forthcoming book Cases and Materials on African Law and Policy (forthcoming, Carolina Academic Press) as well as book chapters on topics in African and international jurisprudence. Fielder also regularly organizes and presents at conferences on topics of African law and jurisprudence, as well as other transnational subjects.

  • Fischer, David A., Visiting Professor of Law
    B.A., University of Missouri
    J.D., University of Missouri School of Law


    Professor Fischer joins the Brooklyn Law School faculty for the Fall 2012 semester. He is visiting from the University of Missouri School of Law, where he is the James Lewis Parks and Isidor Loeb Professor Emeritus of Law. He teaches courses relating to torts, products liability, evidence, and courts-martial. He is also the co-author of Products Liability: Cases and Materials, a nationally used casebook, as well as the author of several articles covering the meaning of defect, comparative fault, market share liability, proportional liability, and causation. His expertise in military trials began in 1968 when he served for four years as a member of the Judge Advocate General’s Corps of the United States Army, which handles general court-martial cases on the trial and appellate levels.

    Fischer has also been a visiting professor at Vanderbilt University, the University of Texas at Austin, and the University of Oklahoma, and a Visiting Fellow at Clare Hall at the University of Cambridge and at the Australian National University in Canberra, Australia. He is a member of the American Law Institute and has served as Chair of the Tort Liability Study Committee of the Torts and Insurance Practice Section (TIPS) of the ABA; Vice-Chair of the Products, General Liability & Consumer Law Committee of TIPS; and Chair of the Academic Advisory Subcommittee of the Products, General Liability & Consumer Law Committee of TIPS.

  • Kettering, Kenneth , Visiting Professor of Law
    B.S., Carnegie Mellon University
    J.D., Harvard Law School

    Teaches: Debtors' and Creditors' Rights, Payment Systems, Secured Transactions


    Professor Kenneth Kettering joins Brooklyn Law School for the 2012-13 academic year. He has been a member of New York Law School’s faculty since 2000. Previously he was in private practice for nearly 20 years with Reed Smith in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he was a partner in the firm’s business and finance group. His practice included a broad range of sophisticated financing and corporate matters. He served as primary counsel to a major financial institution with respect to over-the-counter derivatives and foreign exchange, and had extensive experience with all forms of finance, including syndicated lending, asset-based lending, highly leveraged transactions, structured finance and securitization, and securities offerings.

    Professor Kettering studies the forces that shape commercial and financial law, particularly the continual dialectic between the legal systems built by law-crafters and the machinations of the marketplace to deal outside of those systems. He is vice chair of the Secured Lending Committee of the Business Law Section of the American Bar Association and is a member of the Uniform Laws Committee of the New York City Bar. For more than a decade he served on the Council of the Business Law Section of the Pennsylvania Bar Association and played a major role in revising Pennsylvania’s commercial and business laws. He has also participated in various national law reform efforts. He is a fellow of the American College of Commercial Finance Lawyers.

    Professor Kettering served as editor and Supreme Court coeditor of the Harvard Law Review. After graduating from law school he clerked for Judge John Minor Wisdom of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.

  • Landsman, Stephan , Visiting Professor of Law
    B.A., Kenyon College
    J.D., Harvard University


    Professor Landsman is visiting for the Fall 2012 Semester from DePaul College of Law, where he is the Robert A. Clifford Chair in Tort Law and Social Policy. He is a nationally renowned expert on the civil jury system, and through his ongoing study of the American jury, has become a leader in applying social science methods to legal problems. He is a sought-after speaker at professional conferences and symposia, and among his recent publications are empirical and historical pieces regarding the jury, as well as an examination of legal responses to human rights abuses. Professor Landsman is also the author of Crimes of the Holocaust: The Law Confronts Hard Cases (University of Pennsylvania Press 2005). He has successfully argued cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, and is a member of the leadership of the American Bar Association Litigation Section.

  • Marcus, Stanley , Visiting Professor of Law
    B.A., Queens College, City University of New York
    J.D., Harvard University Law School


    Professor Stanley Marcus is visiting Brooklyn Law School for the Fall 2012 semester. He is a U.S. Court of Appeals Judge for the Eleventh Circuit in Florida. Judge Marcus is a member of the Judicial Conference Committee on Federal-State Jurisdiction and has been the committee's chairman since 1992. Prior to his appointment to the Eleventh Circuit, he was a U.S. District Court Judge for the Southern District of Florida and the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida, in Miami. Previously, he was chief of the Detroit Strike Force, Organized Crime and Racketeering Section of the U.S. Department of Justice, and he also served as the deputy chief of the Detroit Strike Force. Earlier in his career he was an assistant U.S. Attorney in the Eastern District of New York and was an associate with the New York law firm of Botein, Hays, Sklar and Herzberg. Following law school, he clerked for U.S. District Judge John Ries Bartels of the Eastern District of New York.

  • Mushlin, Michael , Visiting Professor of Law
    B.A., Vanderbilt University
    J.D., Northwestern University School of Law

    Teaches: Civil Procedure, Federal Courts and the Federal System


    Professor Michael B. Mushlin joins Brooklyn Law School for the 2012-13 academic year. He is the author of law review articles on a variety of subjects involving evidence, federal jurisdiction, civil procedure, children's rights, and prisoners' rights that have appeared in journals such as the Yale Law and Policy Review, UCLA Law Review, Harvard Civil Rights Civil Liberties Law Review, Brooklyn Law Review, and the Fordham Urban Law Journal. He is the author of the four volume treatise Rights of Prisoners (4th ed. 2009, West). He is also is the co-author of New York Evidence with Objections (NITA 2008) and chapters in books and encyclopedias.

    Professor Mushlin currently serves as a member of the Executive Committee of the New York City Bar, and was elected secretary of the Executive Committee. He is vice chair of the Correctional Association of New York, a member of the Task Force on the Legal Status of Prisoners of the American Bar Association, and co-chair of the Subcommittee on Implementation of the ABA Resolution on Prison Oversight. He was appointed by the Chief Administrative Judge of the State of New York to the Advisory Committee on Criminal Law and Procedure. Professor Mushlin is the former Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, chair of the Committee on Corrections of the New York City Bar, and former chair of the Board of the Correctional Association and the Osborne Association. He is a member of the Editorial Board of the Correctional Law Reporter. Professor Mushlin also served on the boards of Children's Rights Inc. and Pace Law School's John Jay Legal Services Inc.

    Professor Mushlin was appointed Charles A. Frueauff Research Professor of Law during the 1991-1992 academic year, and James D. Hopkins Chair in Law during the 2005-2007 academic years at Pace Law School. Prior to teaching, he practiced as a public interest and civil rights lawyer for 15 years as staff attorney with Harlem Assertion of Rights, Inc., as staff attorney and project director of the Prisoners' Rights Project of the Legal Aid Society, and as associate director of the Children's Rights Project of the American Civil Liberties Union.

  • Pittman, Thane , Visiting Professor of Law
    B.A., Kent State University
    M.A., Ph.D., University of Iowa

    Teaches: Intensive Negotiation Workshop


    Professor Pittman is visiting for the Spring 2012 semester to teach Intensive Negotiation Workshop. He has been Chair and Professor of Psychology in the Psychology department at Colby College in Waterville, Maine since 2004. Previously, he was on the faculty of Gettysburg College for 32 years. His research interests include the psychology of justice and morality. He has been a Visiting Professor and Visiting Research Psychologist at Princeton University, the University of Essex, and the University of California, Santa Barbara. The author and co-author of numerous articles and books, Professor Pittman has completed several scholarly studies with Professor John M. Darley on the psychology of justice and morality, including "The Psychology of Compensatory and Retributive Justice," in the Personality and Social Psychology Review (2003). Pittman's other recent works include the co-authored, "When bonuses backfire: The role of accumulated costs in procrastination" (2006, Manuscript under review); "Inaction inertia in the stock market," Journal of Applied Social Psychology (2004); and, "The dark side of opportunity: Regret, disappointment, and the cost of prospects,"  The Psychology of Economic Decisions (2004).

  • Reisberg, Arad , Visiting Professor of Law
    LL.B., Bar-Ilan University, Israel
    LL.M., Bar-Ilan University, Israel
    D.Phil., University of Oxford


    Professor Arad Reisberg joins Brooklyn Law School for the Fall 2012 semester. He is currently a Reader in Corporate and Financial Law and Vice Dean for Research at the University College London (UCL). He is also the Director of the Centre for Commercial Law. He has been a full-time member of the faculty since September 2006. He was formerly a Senior Arts Scholar and a Tutor at Pembroke College Oxford, where he taught law at six colleges at Oxford University between 2001-2005. He has also been a Visiting Lecturer at Oxford University and a Lecturer at Warwick Law School. He is the recipient of numerous academic scholarships and awards and has written widely on shareholder remedies and directors' duties. He is an Academic Member of the European Corporate Governance Institute, a co-editor of Pettet's Company Law, sits on the editorial boards of the Journal International Corporate Rescue and the Journal of Corporate Ownership and Control, and is a contributing author to Annotated Companies Legislation (Oxford University Press).

    Professor Arad's research encompasses the interaction between different disciplines (i.e. economics, law, finance) and crosses the traditional subject-divide within law, covering four broad areas: corporate law, including corporate governance, the interrelationship between the remedies available to aggrieved shareholders in a company and directors' duties (and the interaction between these duties and environmental law); financial law and corporate finance; regulation of financial markets; and the interaction between corporate law and other areas/disciplines.

  • Trinch, Shonna , Visiting Professor of Law
    B.A., Pennsylvania State University
    M.A., Ph.D., University of Pittsburgh

    Teaches: Spanish for Lawyers


    Professor Trinch is visiting Brooklyn Law School from the Department of Anthropology at John Jay College, where she teaches linguistic anthropology as an Associate Professor. Her scholarship focuses on sociolinguistics, the ethnography of speaking, and the correlation between domestic violence and sexual assault and narrative and testimony. She has written extensively on these topics, publishing articles in the International Journal of Speech, Language, and the Law and Language and Society, as well as a book in 2003 entitled Latinas’ Narratives of Domestic Abuse: Discrepant Versions of Violence. Professor Trinch has also taught at Florida State University and the University of Pittsburg. In addition to her academic endeavors, Professor Trinch is a member of several anthropological and language associations. She is fluent in English and Spanish, and proficient in Portuguese.

  • Zieck, Marjoleine , Visiting Professor of Law
    LL.M., University of Amsterdam
    Ph.D., University of Amsterdam

    Teaches: Forced Migration: the Law of Refugees, Asylum Seekers, and Internally Displaced People, Introduction to International Refugee Law


    ​Professor Marjoleine Zieck is visiting Brooklyn Law School for the Spring 2013 semester. She is a Professor of International Refugee Law, Vice Dean of Education, and Director of the Graduate School of Law at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands. She is also a regular visitor at the Pakistan College of Law in Lahore, Pakistan, where she holds the title of Extraordinary Professor of Public International Law. In addition to teaching, Professor Zieck is a prolific author, including three books about the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and numerous law review and journal articles. Her most recent articles were published in the International Journal of Refugee Law and the International Journal of Legal Information. She received a degree in law as well as a Ph.D. in International Refugee Law from the University of Amsterdam.

  • Zimmerman, Adam , Visiting Associate Professor of Law
    B.A., University of California, Berkeley
    J.D., Georgetown University Law Center


    Professor Adam Zimmerman joins Brooklyn Law School for the Fall 2012 semester. He is a member of the faculty of St. John’s University School of Law, and in 2011, he was named "Best New Law Professor" by the Student Bar Association. Professor Zimmerman’s scholarship explores the way class action attorneys, regulatory agencies and criminal prosecutors provide justice to large groups of victims through overlapping systems of tort law, administrative law and criminal law. His recent articles have been accepted for publication in the Columbia Law Review, Duke Law Journal, New York University Law Review, and University of Pennsylvania Law Review. His most recent article, The Agency Class Action, was selected for the 2012 Stanford-Yale-Harvard Junior Faculty Forum and will appear in the Columbia Law Review.

    Professor Zimmerman was an associate editor of the Georgetown Law Journal and co-founded the first student chapter of the American Constitutional Society in the country. After graduation, he clerked for Judge Jack B. Weinstein in the Eastern District of New York. He then served as counsel to Special Master Kenneth R. Feinberg in the design and administration of the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund. He then practiced law with Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP, where he represented clients in complex commercial litigation and mass tort cases, as well as domestic and international arbitration. Professor Zimmerman also worked on global class actions involving the tobacco industry, gun manufacturers, and Agent Orange.

Experience Prof. Dana Brakman Reiser's Corporate Law class.

Have questions? We have answers.

Office of the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs 
250 Joralemon Street, 9th Floor
Brooklyn, NY 11201

Email: Michael.Cahill@brooklaw.edu