Associate Professor Nakita Cuttino: Understanding Economic Opportunity in Theory and Practice

After graduating from Howard University and Duke Law, Nakita Cuttino had a clerkship with Judge Eric L. Clay of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, who is based in Detroit. She was fascinated by the once-vibrant city and wanted to understand how its majority-Black population could build a better future.

“For me, it was the economics of it all. I wanted to figure out how to create self-sustaining minority neighborhoods,” she says.

As an associate at Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP, she requested to work on corporate transactions, so she could learn the financial system from the inside. A couple of years later, she was accepted into a fellowship program at Duke, and returned to begin her academic trajectory.

In her scholarship, Cuttino has deepened and broadened her ideas about the tools that can boost economic opportunity in disadvantaged communities, from policy to fintech.

Associate Professor Janel George: Teaching the Skills of Advocacy

Janel George has joined Georgetown Law as founding director of the school’s newest clinic, the Racial Equity in Education Law and Policy (REELP) Clinic. George brings with her a wealth of experience in legislative law and policy advocacy.

The clinic will partner with selected clients whose work involves advancing racial equity in education, which could include nationally focused organizations, smaller local groups or even student-led organizations.

After graduating from Spelman College, George worked with domestic violence survivors, a role in which she often interacted with lawyers and saw the kind of advocacy that was possible with a law degree. While earning her J.D. at the University of Wisconsin Madison, she continued exploring a career in advocacy with an internship at the Children’s Defense Fund, then came to Georgetown Law as a Women’s Law and Public Policy Fellow.

Professor Anita Krishnakumar: Engaging Students in the Process

Georgetown Law’s proximity to both the U.S. Capitol and the Supreme Court was a big part of the reason why Anita Krishnakumar, a scholar of statutory interpretation and the legislative process, chose to join the faculty here. She’s looking forward to opportunities like bringing students to hear arguments at the Court, or having lawmakers come to speak to a class.

She had considered law and academia since childhood, thanks to her judge grandfather and professor father, but as an undergraduate at Stanford and law student at Yale, it took her some time to decide what to specialize in.

After clerking for the Hon. José A. Cabranes on the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and working as an associate at Mayer, Brown, Rowe & Maw and at Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton, Krishnakumar entered the academic market. She was drawn back to her roots as a political science major in college, and to a law school paper she’d written about the congressional budget reconciliation process — something often in the news lately, but not as closely studied then.

Associate Professor Dave Rapallo (LL.M.’97, LL.M.’99): Returning to Georgetown Law from Capitol Hill

Dave Rapallo (LL.M.’97, LL.M.’99) has returned to Georgetown Law after more than two decades as a lawyer on Capitol Hill and in the White House, to lead the Law Center’s Federal Legislation Clinic — where he was himself a fellow in the 1990s.

A California native, Rapallo discovered an affinity for legislative law after completing his undergraduate work at the University of California, Los Angeles and his law degree at The University of California, Hastings College of the Law. He had always imagined himself as a trial lawyer, but when he took a fellowship with the California governor’s office, “it just clicked,” he says.

The place to go to develop skills in legislative lawyering was (and still is) Georgetown Law. Rapallo came East to work at the clinic and earn two LL.M.s, in advocacy and international law.

Next, he joined the staff of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform under then-chairman Rep. Henry Waxman. Then, after President Barack Obama’s election, Rapallo took the opportunity to join the new administration as senior director and counsel for legislative oversight at the National Security Council.

Associate Professor Brishen Rogers: Labor and Law

Brishen Rogers’ first experiences with labor organizing took place while he was an undergraduate at the University of Virginia, when students got involved in a living wage effort on behalf of campus workers. He then went on to work as a labor and community organizer for several years. Eventually, though, he decided he wanted to interact with the labor movement as a lawyer.

“My big takeaway was that the law just did very, very little to protect workers’ rights to organize, and that’s something I wanted to understand better,” he says.

After attending Harvard Law School and again working for a labor union, Rogers decided the best path for him was into academia. He landed at Temple University’s Beasley School of Law, where he taught torts and labor, and dove deeper into investigating the changing relationship between workers and the economy.

Professor Emily Satterthwaite: Tax and the Real World

Emily Satterthwaite has just returned Stateside after more than a decade at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law. Focusing on her specialty of tax law while in Canada offered interesting new dimensions and insights to her scholarship. “Just seeing how two similar societies could do things so differently has been formative in my research,” she says.

Satterthwaite, who holds a B.A. from Yale, a J.D. from Stanford and an LL.M. and M.A. from the University of Toronto, has always enjoyed exploring complex systems. “I have a deep curiosity about how the world works. It’s what drew me to law in general and studying tax in particular, which can be formidably complex,” she says.

After an associateship at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP, she became the assistant director of the Institute for Justice Clinic on Entrepreneurship at the University of Chicago Law School, a role in which she saw how tax laws affect the real lives of low-income entrepreneurs. She continued studying how entrepreneurs and the self-employed interact with the tax system after moving to Toronto, with the added angle of the Canadian value-added tax.

Associate Professor David Wishnick: Exploring the Questions

As an urban studies major at Brown University, David Wishnick was curious about the laws and regulations behind the real estate boom going on at the time. Then, a few years later, he was working in affordable housing when the market went bust, and again had many questions about why.

“In part, I went to law school to figure it out — and maybe help prevent it from happening again,” he says.

Following his graduation from Yale Law School, he completed two clerkships, on the D.C. Circuit with Judge Thomas Griffith and on the Second Circuit with Judge Guido Calabresi. He then became an associate at Jenner & Block in Washington, D.C., where his work centered around financial institution monitoring and regulated industries.

While the firm experience was exciting, he found he missed the kind of exchanges he had in law school. A fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania Law School’s Center for Technology, Innovation, and Competition provided his on-ramp to teaching and scholarship.