Sheldon Lyke

Lyke, Sheldon

Visiting Assistant Professor

Phone: (312) 503-5653
E-mail: lyke@law.northwestern.edu

Curriculum Vitae (pdf)

Sheldon Bernard Lyke uses empirical methods, comparative law, and property theory to study the role of law and its institutions in the stratification of marginalized people.  Generally, his research interests focus on anti-discrimination law for racial and sexual minorities in a comparative context.  His work is increasingly observing property law institutions (e.g., commons and charitable trusts, estates, and organizations) and their role in creating and ameliorating social inequality.

Professor Lyke has written a dissertation examining the social processes and resistance present when courts around the world communicate with each other on important civil and human rights issues.  His scholarship has appeared (or is forthcoming) in the Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law, the Northwestern University Law Review Colloquy, and the Tulane Law Review. At the University of Chicago, he served as a lecturer and taught a variety of courses, including: Race as Property, Contemporary Global Issues, and Sexuality & Human Rights.  Lyke was the inaugural Dorr Legg Law & Policy Fellow at the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law.

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Areas of Expertise

  • Law and Social Science
  • Comparative Law
  • Property Law
  • Empirical Legal Research
  • Estates and Trusts

Courses

Selected Publications

  • Diversity as Commons in 88 tulane law review (forthcoming).
  • Catch Twenty-Wu? The Oral Argument in Fisher v. University of Texas and the Obfuscation of Critical Mass in 107 northwestern university law review colloquy 209 (2013).
  • Brown v. Board of Education Abroad: An Empirical Analysis of Foreign Judicial Citation and the Metaphor of Cosmopolitan Conversation in 45 vanderbilt journal of transnational law 83 (2012).
  • Lawrence v. Texas as an Eighth Amendment Case: Sodomy and the Evolving Standards of Decency in 15 william and mary journal of women and the law 633 (2009).

Education

  • AB, Princeton University
  • JD, Northwestern University School of Law
  • PhD, University of Chicago

Prior Appointments

  • Dorr Legg Law & Policy Fellow, Williams Institute, UCLA School of Law
  • Lecturer, University of Chicago