Current Climenko Fellows

Susannah directs the First-Year Legal Research and Writing Program and teaches a section in the program.

Siobhan Mukerji Barco is a Climenko Fellow and Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School. Her primary fields of teaching and research are contract law, American legal history, and labor & employment law.

Siobhan’s research centers on the profound but previously overlooked role of legal newspapers in the development of modern American law. She demonstrates how during the late nineteenth century’s second founding era the legal news functioned as both a key source of legal authority and a conduit for the development and dissemination of ideas about law. Furthermore, shifting the perspective to newspapers reveals a more varied legal profession—one that included women and other marginalized groups. Her research has been supported by the American Society for Legal History, the William Nelson Cromwell Foundation, and the American Historical Association.

Hannah Carrese works on the legal history of property, particularly of common and public land, and on the present and future of laws protecting land, water, and species. She has conducted research addressing these themes in the western United States, England, and Chile. Her current project is an article on the divergence between John Locke’s theory of property, which dismisses common rights to land, and the 17th century common law of property, which centered them. Hannah has also written on political theories regarding refugees, with a focus on Hannah Arendt’s concept of political homelessness. She earned an MPhil in political theory at Oxford and undergraduate and law degrees at Yale, and she clerked for Judge Harris L Hartz on the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals.

Gemma Donofrio is a Climenko Fellow and Lecturer in Law at Harvard Law School. Her research focuses on reproductive justice, intimate partner violence, and bodily autonomy. Her current project examines how tort law conceptualizes reproductive harm. Her scholarship has appeared in the North Carolina Law Review and the N.Y.U. Review of Law & Social Change.

Nina M. Gayleard is a Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School and a law clerk on the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts. Her scholarly interests revolve around health law, life sciences enforcement, the False Claims Act, and federal courts.

Previously, Nina was an associate at Covington & Burling LLP. Her practice focused on False Claims Act litigation and enforcement, drug and medical device regulatory matters, and other complex litigation. Nina received her J.D. from Harvard Law School where she was a member of the Harvard Law Review.

Andrew Manns is a Climenko Fellow and Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School. He studies policing, remedies, and civil rights. His work considers alternatives to traditional remedies for law enforcement misconduct such as state tort suits or the Justice Department’s civil rights suits, and explores how litigation prompts legal, social, and political change. His current project examines the use of traditional state tort remedies, such as trespass and battery actions, to regulate law enforcement misconduct.

Prior to the fellowship, Andrew was a trial attorney at the U.S. Department of Justice, where he prosecuted law enforcement misconduct and hate crime cases, including United States v. Ritter, the first federal hate crime trial for the murder of a transgender person.

Michael Mitchell is a Climenko Fellow and Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School. He is a scholar of the law and philosophy of democracy.

Michael received his J.D., magna cum laude, from Harvard Law School, and he is pursuing a Ph.D. in Philosophy at Harvard University. He holds an M.A. in Philosophy from Tufts University and an A.B. in Social Studies and Philosophy from Harvard College.

Dessie Otachliska is a Climenko Fellow and Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School, where her research explores how constitutional doctrine structures the conditions under which democracy functions and adapts. Her current project analyzes how courts shape the institutional and informational conditions of constitutional enforcement, particularly through doctrines governing standing, remedies, and interpretive method. It further examines how these legal forms interact with institutional alignment, epistemic fragmentation, and procedural deferral to enable democratic erosion without formal rupture.

Daniel W. Sack is a Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School, where he teaches First-Year Legal Research and Writing.

Outside of teaching, Mr. Sack is a practitioner in the Boston office of Latham and Watkins LLP, where he focuses on complex commercial litigation and policyholder-side insurance litigation. Mr. Sack previously served as a judicial law clerk to Judge Jon D. Levy of the United States District Court for the District of Maine and then to Judge Juan R. Torruella and Judge William J. Kayatta, Jr., of the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit.

Ash Smith is a Climenko Fellow and Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School. Her research examines the efficacy of structural reforms in the criminal legal system. Ash’s current work explores the efficacy of the “reform-minded” or “progressive prosecutor” movement across jurisdictions in the United States. It asks three overarching questions. First, who are “progressive prosecutors”? Second, what policy promises do they make, and do they keep them? And third, what barriers to changemaking do they face, and what strategies do they use to overcome opposition? This mixed-methods project employs quantitative and qualitative analysis, through an original database and interviews with nearly sixty elected district attorneys. Ash’s prior work has explored pretrial risk assessment instruments, legal financial obligations (fines and fees), collateral consequences of justice-system involvement, and the use of algorithms in the criminal legal system. Her teaching interests include criminal law, criminal procedure, civil procedure, and law and social change.

Todd Venook is a Climenko Fellow and Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School.

Todd’s research focuses on high-volume adjudication and access to justice. His work examines two behemoths of the American civil legal system—“lawyerless” state courtrooms and multidistrict litigation—to assess how courts manage crowded dockets, dispense mass justice, and get things done. His scholarship is forthcoming in the Yale Law Journal.

Kevin Zhang is Climenko Fellow and Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School. He is interested in private law theory, general jurisprudence, international law, and constitutional theory. He received his JD from the Yale Law School, his DPhil and BPhil in Philosophy from the University of Oxford, and his AB from Princeton University.

His current manuscripts focus on understanding the nature of legal and moral wrongs, on untangling the debate between legal positivism and natural law, and on developing a theory of Constitution-making. His scholarship on international law has appeared in The Georgetown Law Journal, and his doctoral dissertation developed a theory of normativity.