News

9/1/04 Dean's Teaching Award Recipients

Congratulations to the recipients of the Dean's Teaching Awards for the 2003-2004 academic year. Good teaching is extremely important in our community, and these awards, along with our student-voted teaching awards, recognize those faculty members who have excelled in a given year. The Dean's Teaching Awards honor faculty members for high-quality teaching as measured by student evaluations.

Dean's Teaching Award Recipients:

Steve Drizin
Clinical Professor of Law and Assistant Director, Bluhm Legal Clinic
Professor Drizin has been teaching in the Bluhm Legal Clinic since 1991, representing children in delinquency and criminal cases in the trial and appellate courts, school disciplinary proceedings, parole and clemency hearings, and in political asylum proceedings. He and his students started the National Juvenile Clemency Project to represent former juvenile offenders who were convicted of crimes and sentenced as adults in proceedings before the Illinois Prisoner Review Board (and other state Boards) and in sentencing modification proceedings in court. He is also involved with the Juvenile Death Penalty Initiative, a collaborative project dedicated to the abolition of the juvenile death penalty, and he has been a leader in efforts to secure greater protections for children at police stations, including mandatory videotaping of police interrogations, parental presence and the right to counsel for youth.

Professor Drizin teaches criminal law to first-year law students. In October 2000, he was awarded the National Juvenile Defender Leadership Award by the ABA's National Juvenile Defender Center.

John Elson
Professor of Law
Professor Elson is a clinical faculty member who has taught skills-related courses, engaged in a wide variety of law reform efforts, and developed clinic projects to protect the rights of disabled students, prisoners, and divorce clients.

He is currently representing a class of disabled students enrolled in Chicago public schools who have sued the State Department of Education to overturn the teacher certification remedy entered in the Corey H. case.

A federal court ruled in 1998 that Illinois had ignored its duty to monitor the treatment of students with disabilities. The court found the state education department liable for the segregation of disabled students in Chicago public schools.

Lisa Huestis
Clinical Associate Professor of Law
As a member of the Law School’s clerkship committee, Professor Huestis counsels students interested in a post-graduate clerkship and teaches a judicial practicum, which places students as law clerks with a U.S. district court judge or magistrate, where they work on the preparing of research memoranda and drafting if opinions. She also regularly advises students on career options, including public service jobs and law firm employment.

Prior to joining Northwestern’s faculty, Professor Huestis was an Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois. She investigated and prosecuted hundreds of criminal cases, specializing in the areas of financial fraud, public corruption, commodities and securities fraud, tax fraud and healthcare fraud. She also regularly represented the United States before the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit.

Jim Lupo
Clinical Assistant Professor of Law
Co-Director of Academic Counseling
Prior to joining the Communication and Legal Reasoning Faculty in 2003, Professor Lupo was an instructor of legal writing and advocacy at Loyola University of Chicago School of Law where he also lectured in contracts in the Loyola Business Law Institute and led a Great Books for Law Students seminar. Prior to that, he was in private practice concentrating in commercial litigation.

Martin Redish
Louis and Harriet Ancel Professor of Law and Public Policy
Professor Redish is a nationally renowned authority on the subjects of federal jurisdiction, civil procedure, freedom of expression and constitutional law. In June 2004, he testified in front of the House Judiciary Committee about congressional power to control the jurisdiction of both the Supreme Court and the lower federal courts in relation to proposed legislation that would take jurisdiction away from these courts to interpret and enforce portions of the Defense of Marriage Act. Professor Redish is the author or co-author of 70 articles and 13 books, including Federal Jurisdiction: Tensions in the Allocation of Judicial Power and The Constitution as Political Structure. His latest book titled The Logic of Persecution: Free Speech and the McCarthy Era is scheduled to be published by Stanford University Press in spring 2005.

He has served as a visiting professor at Stanford, Cornell and the University of Michigan Law Schools. At Michigan he won the L. Hart Wright Outstanding Teacher Award. He has also won both the Robert Childress Memorial Award for Teaching Excellence and the Dean’s Teaching Award at Northwestern.

Sue Provenzano
Professor Provenzano teaches Communication and Legal Reasoning and co-directs Northwestern’s Academic Counseling program. She has written and spoken on topics ranging from labor and employment law to the pedagogical benefits of technology in the legal research and writing curriculum.

Before joining Northwestern’s faculty, Professor Provenzano practiced employment, labor and commercial litigation at the law firms of Kirkland & Ellis, Mayer, Brown & Platt, and Franczek Sullivan P.C. As a practicing attorney, she drafted petitions for certiorari to the United States Supreme Court and other appellate briefs. Among her written work is a Supreme Court amicus brief that culminated in one of the Court’s landmark ADA decisions on the meaning of “disability.”

Emerson Tiller
Professor Tiller joined the Northwestern faculty in 2002 as a professor of law with a courtesy appointment at the Kellogg School of Management. He served as a Visiting Professor at Northwestern Law in fall 2002 and taught a section of Contracts. Prior to joining the Northwestern faculty, Professor Tiller was an associate professor of Business, Technology and the Law at the University of Texas, Graduate School of Business, and the co-director of the Center for Business, Technology and Law at UT.

Professor Tiller’s research has primarily focused on the role of political forces in regulatory and judicial decision-making. He has published numerous papers in law and economic journals and has won research awards as well as fellowships (Olin Foundation, which he undertook at Yale Law School), and grants (Bradley Foundation) for his work.

Dean’s Teaching Awards Honorable Mentions include:
Lynn Cohn, Tony D'Amato, Grace Dodier, Caitlin Denker, Tom Geraghty, Allan Horwich, Sue Irion, Steve Lubet, Larry Marshall, Tom Morsch, Kathleen Narko, Judith Rosenbaum, Marshall Shapo, Jeff Urdangen, Kim Yuracko, and Cliff Zimmerman.

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