Georgetown Law

It is my pleasure to announce that I have named three of our colleagues Anne Fleming Research Professors: Alicia Plerhoples, Neel Sukhatme, and Yvonne Tew.

The Agnes N. Williams Research Professorships were established in 2015 at the Law Center through the generosity of Agnes N. Williams, L’54. The purpose was to recognize and support the scholarly activities of recently tenured members of the Georgetown Law faculty. In 2020, we changed the name to the Anne Fleming Research Professorship to honor our beloved late colleague Anne Fleming, who was a shining example of the kind of promising young scholar this professorship was created to support.

Alicia Plerhoples is a leading scholar in social enterprise law, nonprofit governance, and clinical legal education. Her most recent research focuses on ESG shareholder proposals, governmental and private regulation of firms’ ESG commitments, and corporate racial equity strategies. Alicia is Associate Dean for Clinics and Experiential Education, Professor of Law, and the founder and director of the Social Enterprise & Nonprofit Law Clinic at Georgetown Law. In 2017, Alicia received the American Bar Association’s Outstanding Nonprofit Lawyer of the Year (Academic) Award. She serves on the boards of the Arlington Partnership for Affordable Housing, the Hilltop Microfinance Initiative, and the Clinical Law Review. Her scholarship and writing have been published by Cambridge University Press, the Washington Post, University of Pennsylvania Journal of Business Law, Lewis & Clark Law Review, and Washington University Journal of Law and Policy, among others. Prior to joining the faculty at Georgetown Law in 2012, Alicia was the Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe Clinical Teaching Fellow at Stanford Law School and a Visiting Assistant Professor at University of California College of the Law San Francisco. She practiced with the law firms of DLA Piper in New York City and Cooley in Silicon Valley. Alicia received her J.D. from Yale Law School, an M.P.A. from Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs, and her A.B. from Harvard College.

Neel U. Sukhatme is a Professor of Law at Georgetown, Affiliated Faculty at the Georgetown McCourt School of Public Policy, and a Faculty Advisor at the Institute for Technology Law and Policy. He is an Andrew Carnegie Fellow for 2021–23, and the Thomas Alva Edison Visiting Scholar at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Neel’s research focuses on empirical issues related to innovation, courts, electoral processes, and the criminal justice system. In 2020, Neel co-founded Free Our Vote, a nonpartisan nonprofit that helps restore voting rights for people with past felony convictions. He also co-founded and coded Spindrop, a music technology startup with a novel approach for automatically mixing songs. Neel’s work has been profiled by major media outlets, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and ProPublica, and his research has been published in a number of top law journals. Neel received his Ph.D. in Economics from Princeton University, where he was awarded the 2014 Towbes Prize for Outstanding Teaching. He earned his B.S. in Computer Engineering (highest honors) from the University of Illinois. He also received his J.D., cum laude, from Harvard Law School, where he served as Notes Editor of the Harvard Law Review. After law school, Neel clerked for the Hon. Vaughn R. Walker on the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California and the Hon. Ann Claire Williams on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, and he practiced as a litigation associate at Latham & Watkins LLP.

Yvonne Tew, Professor of Law and Faculty Director of the Center for Transnational Legal Studies in London, has expertise in constitutional law, globally and in the U.S., and law and religion in a global perspective. She is the author of Constitutional Statecraft in Asian Courts (Oxford University Press, 2020). Her scholarship has been published in the American Journal of Comparative Law, Virginia Journal of International Law, Columbia Journal of Transnational Law, and Cambridge Law Journal, among many others. Yvonne currently serves as an elected member on the Executive Board of the American Society of Comparative Law and on the Executive Editorial Board of the American Journal of Comparative Law. She has advised international organizations and government officials on constitutional matters including judicial power, rights protection, and constitutional reform. Yvonne holds a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge, where she was a Gates Cambridge Scholar and served as the Editor-in-Chief of the Cambridge Student Law Review. She received her LL.M. from Harvard Law School and her first law degree from the University of Cambridge, with Double First Class Honors. Before joining the faculty at Georgetown Law, she held research fellowships at Columbia Law School and New York University School of Law.

Please join me in congratulating our colleagues on this honor.

Best regards,
Bill

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William M. Treanor
Dean and Executive Vice President
Paul Regis Dean Leadership Chair