Robinson+Cole partner Keisha S. Palmer ’09 was named a finalist in 2025 Women, Influence & Power in Law Awards. She was selected as a finalist for “Law Firm Ally of the Year.” Read the full press release here.
Author: Hayden
Molly Land Quoted in LLM Guide
Associate Dean Molly Land was quoted by LLM Guide in an article titled “Looking to Specialize in Human Rights Law in the U.S.? Here’s what to Know.”
Julia Simon-Kerr Publishes “Bending the Rules of Evidence”
Professor Julia Simon-Kerr published “Bending the Rules of Evidence” in the Northwestern University Law Review. The article discusses the “bending” of evidence rules by courts, including the history of this problem and the possibility of its legitimation.
Loftus Becker One of First Amendment Scholars in Amicus Brief
Professor Loftus Becker is one of twenty-two scholars who filed an amicus brief urging the Supreme Court to take up Georgia Ass’n of Club Executives v. Georgia, a case regarding First Amendment issues.
Bureaucracy and Democracy
Investiture of Anya Bernstein as Jesse Root Professor of Law
Bureaucracy gets a bad rap. Illegitimate, unaccountable, grudging, mean—bureaucracy seems to need some extra justification to make it palatable to a democratic society. At the same time, democracy depends on bureaucracy: the decisions elected representatives make have few effects without someone to implement them. And because a steady pace of elections changes the makeup of political coalitions, the democratic decisions of the past need custodians to keep them efficacious and current over time, through change. Drawing on empirical research, this talk clears a place for bureaucracy at the heart of the democratic project. It argues that bureaucracy is the condition of possibility for democratic legitimacy in a modern mass democracy like the United States. It highlights key characteristics and functions that we should preserve, strengthen, and reform. And it explains why an attack on the administrative state is actually an attack on representative democracy itself.