Managing Director, Climenko Fellowship and
Assistant Dean for Academic Career Advising

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

Jennifer Barrow’s major scholarly interests lie at the intersection of criminal and constitutional law, with a particular interest in criminal sentencing.

Jacob Bronsther researches the theoretical foundations of criminal law and sentencing. His current projects examine the prohibition on degrading punishment, especially as it applies to long-term incarceration; the limits of retributive proportionality as a sentencing guide; and the legal and moral significance of intentions. He is also interested in the relationship between criminal punishment and private law remedies. Along these lines, he is developing a “corrective justice” theory of punishment, which conceives of deterrent punishment as an equitable remedy for an offender’s contribution to the criminality in society.

Colin Doyle’s research examines how technological upgrades to existing criminal legal processes affect both the application and meaning of state and federal constitutional law, with a specific focus on decisions at the margins of criminal law, including bail setting and fees and fines determinations. I’m particularly interested in how information that can be extracted from new technological processes can inform and challenge longstanding beliefs and practices within constitutional law, criminal law, and criminal procedure.

Gregory Elinson’s
scholarship explores the political economy of public law.  Much of his work examines how internal party dynamics shape the separation of powers, administrative law, and legislative process.  A separate strand of scholarship traces the varied ways the U.S. constitutional system has responded to the demands of groups and social movements representing the interests of racial minorities.

Owen Gallogly studies the jurisdiction and powers of the federal courts, with a particular focus on issues of structural constitutionalism.

Christopher Havasy’s research focuses on the normative foundations and institutional design of understudied political institutions and practices in democratic governance.

Hedayat Heikal is a Climenko Fellow and Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School. She recently completed a Doctorate of Juridical Science (S.J.D.) at Harvard Law School with a dissertation titled “Beyond Juristocracy: The Rise and Fall of Judicial Activism on National Identity Questions in the Middle East.”

Francesca’s scholarship focuses on structural constitutional rights, federalism, and the federal courts. In particular, her research examines the democratic relationships between citizens and government institutions, and how those institutions can be restructured to better advance legal and political equality.

Peter N. Salib’s research borrows tools from law-and-economics and cognate fields to resolve longstanding impasses in public law. He focuses on doctrinal problems that arise from apparently-inevitable trade-offs between important but competing values. For example, many lawmakers wish to enact regulations to reduce serious social harms like gun deaths and the spread of online disinformation.

Alicia Solow-Niederman’s research explores how algorithmic tools and technological innovations operate in social and political contexts — and what that does, and should, mean for regulatory and legal systems. She is especially interested in the intersections among digital technologies, civil liberties, and democratic governance.

James Toomey researches in bioethics and health law. He is currently working on questions related to when and how the law ought to intervene in the decision making of people with dementia, a project which relies on both empirical and normative work, and he has become particularly interested in the importance of the narrative coherence of life stories in this context. He is also interested in the intersection of bioethics and political philosophy, and has written about the constraints political liberalism places on regulations of biotechnologies that raise profound and contested questions about the good life.

Learn More

Sarah Winsberg’s research in legal history examines the process of making legal categories. Looking beyond the courtroom and the best remembered legal thinkers, she shows how long-forgotten writers’ and editors’ work in labeling and annotating cases produced gradual, yet ultimately profound, change in the law.

Carly Zubrzycki’s research focuses how powerful systems and institutions can be made more humane and responsive to the human experience, especially in the healthcare context.