Georgia State Law faculty members Charlotte Alexander, Erin Fuse Brown and Lauren Sudeall Lucas have been promoted to associate professor with tenure and associate professor Robert Weber was recently awarded tenure. This designation is a testament to the hard work and dedication each has to their students, Georgia State Law and their compelling research.
“It’s an honor to have one’s work recognized in such a significant way by colleagues at the law school and the university,” Lucas said. “I feel fortunate to work among a group of faculty members who are not only collegial, but have been incredibly supportive of my work and the direction I chose to take in my early years.”
Lucas teaches Constitutional Law and Capital Punishment and is the founding faculty director of the Center for Access to Justice. Her scholarly work focuses on the relationship between rights and identity, and the intersection of constitutional law and criminal procedure. She’s engaged in a research study of the civil legal needs of indigent legal defendants.
“I’ve become increasingly interested in interdisciplinary and empirical research, and have recently co-authored or plan to co-author articles with clinical faculty and practicing lawyers litigating these issues on the ground,” she said. “I’m hopeful these trends in my own research will lead to scholarship that has an even greater real-world impact.”
Fuse Brown teaches Administrative Law, Health Law: Financing & Delivery, and the Health Care Transactional & Regulatory Practicum. She’s also a faculty member of the Center for Law, Health & Society. An area of her research includes the Affordable Care Act, and she’s joining West’s Health Law casebook as an author.
“It is both challenging and exciting to teach and write about the Affordable Care Act in this time of national debate, due to the incredible uncertainty and upheaval in the U.S. health care system,” she said.
Fuse Brown credits her promotion and tenure to the collaborative effort of her mentors, research assistants, colleagues, peers and family—and she’s feels fortunate to be a part of the Georgia State Law faculty.
“It is an incredible community of colleagues, and I learn so much and draw inspiration from this group of talented teachers, scholars and advocates,” Fuse Brown said. “Beyond work, many colleagues are also good friends, with our kids growing up together and our families spending time together – it is a special place.”
Charlotte Alexander, assistant professor of legal studies in the Department of Risk Management and Insurance at the J. Mack Robinson College of Business, holds a secondary appointment at Georgia State Law, where she focuses on the employment relationship as a source of legal and economic risk for both workers and employers. She enjoys the opportunity to interact with a diverse group of colleagues across disciplines.
“I get to stretch beyond the way that a legal scholar might traditionally approach a problem and consider how an economist or organizational behavior scholar might tackle the same issue,” Alexander said. “This means learning to speak the languages of other disciplines to some extent, but also provides amazing opportunities for discovery and intellectual challenge with a great group of colleagues across colleges.”
Alexander is collaborating with Javad Feizollahi, a data scientist in Georgia State University’s Institute for Insight, to use text mining tools to study the way that judges decide misclassification cases – those with a dispute over a worker's proper classification as an employee or independent contractor, such as the class actions brought by drivers against Uber and Lyft.
“These cases are increasingly common, as both old and new-economy employers attempt to adopt all-contractor business models,” she said. “The law around employee status is somewhat of a mess, as judges can consider up to 13 different factors, depending on the jurisdiction, in distinguishing between employees and independent contractors.
“Working with the Free Law Project, Javad and I have begun to assemble all published and unpublished U.S. district court decisions, in which a judge made a worker classification ruling from 2008 through 2016,” Alexander said. “We'll then build text analysis tools to identify the factors that appeared to be the most important within the judges' multifactorial analyses, as well as other variables.”
Alexander feels fortunate to be part of the Georgia State community to give back to her colleagues and her students.
“What a privilege that my job allows me to think and write about the issues and problems that I care about, while helping students learn the law and – I hope – learn something about themselves and the kind of contributions they want to make in the world!”
Weber also considers it a privilege to be part of the Georgia State faculty. “With a quick walk down the hallway, I have the opportunity to be inspired by all sorts of colleagues, many of who are among the most committed legal scholars, teachers and advocates I've ever met – including some who combine all three of those attributes” Weber said.
Weber teaches courses in Corporations, Securities Regulation and Corporate Finance and his recent scholarship explores how legal-regulatory regimes can best promote regulatory objectives in complex, dynamic and unstable financial markets. He’s also working on a series of writing projects that attempt to open up lines of communication between administrative law scholars and financial regulation scholars.
“It's immensely gratifying to have my work as a teacher and scholar recognized by my colleagues at Georgia State Law and this energized, growing university,” he said.