We kick off season two with an engrossing conversation with Professor Robert Lawless about his new book, Debt’s Grip: Risk and Consumer Bankruptcy. The book explores financial precarity in the United States and utilizes original data from the Consumer Bankruptcy Project, including the words of bankruptcy filers themselves to shed light on their situations. Professor Lawless shared insight into how he began his work on this project, how the book came about, and how the research has helped him as a teacher at Illinois Law.
The College of Law welcomed our newest JD, LLM, MSL, JSD, and study abroad students at new student orientation beginning Wednesday, August 20. The program offered a chance to hear from professors, staff, alumni, and fellow students, welcoming them to law school and preparing them for the challenge that awaits.
On August 21, Dean Jamelle Sharpe offered his welcome and perspectives on law school in the Peer and Sarah Pedersen Pavilion, followed by Colleen Murphy, associate dean for academic affairs, who presented an introduction to expectations for law students.
Illinois Supreme Court Justice Lisa Holder White, a 1993 graduate of the College of Law, led our new students in the Pledge of Professionalism before sending them off for photographs, a mock class, and other orientation activities.
The orientation program provided a platform to help equip our students for success and also inspire a positive attitude about the exciting journey that lies ahead.
“Your attendance here today signifies your accomplishment, intelligence, and potential for influencing the legal profession, both here and abroad,” Dean Sharpe told the assembled students. “You will soon discover that law school is a transformative experience, one that is as challenging as it is rewarding.”
The incoming JD Class of 2028 includes 189 students from 26 different states and 8 foreign countries. The states most represented among new students include Illinois, California, Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin; the class comprises 57% non-Illinois residents and 43% Illinois residents. Students also hail from five countries outside the United States.
Students in the Class of 2028 went to 106 different undergraduate institutions; undergraduate schools with the most students represented include University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Loyola University Chicago, New York University, University of Florida, and University of Wisconsin-Madison. New JD students had 44 different majors and a median LSAT of 166 and GPA of 3.81. In terms of demographics, 47% of the class identifies as female, 46% identifies as male, 3% identifies as gender queer/gender fluid, trans or nonbinary, and 4% did not disclose a gender identity. Thirty-six percent of the students come from racial/ethnic backgrounds that are historically underrepresented in the legal profession. The average age of our new students is 24, 66% have work experience, and 19% are first generation college graduates.
The College of Law also welcomed 114 new graduate students, including 83 LLM students, 6 MSL students, 2 JSD students, and 23 study abroad students. Six of our new LLM students are Fulbright recipients. Overall, our graduate and international students represent 24 countries.
We are grateful to all those who helped make orientation a success and look forward to continuing to support our students on their path to becoming Illinois Law graduates.
*JD Class of 2028 profile is accurate as of the 10th day of classes and graduate student numbers are accurate as of the first day of classes.
Professor Jacob Sherkow has published “A ‘Bare Hope of A Result’: The Second CRISPR Patent Appeal” in The CRISPR Journal. In the article, Sherkow provides an overview of the dispute to date, reviews the Federal Circuit’s recent opinion, and provides a critique of its analysis.
On Friday, August 8, 2025, Professor Robin Fretwell Wilson had the privilege of attending the signing of bill SB 14 at the Wisconsin State Capitol, making Wisconsin the 29th state to afford patients respect in medical teaching. Wilson filed written testimony in May that was used in both Wisconsin Senate and Assembly hearings surrounding the bill, wherein she advocated for written, informed consent for educational pelvic exams. Wilson is pictured with Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers and Wisconsin patient advocate Sarah Wright. Wilson says that her Illinois Law students have benefitted from Sarah’s commitment to this cause, as she has guest lectured in class and will be returning again this fall to discuss the passage of SB 14 with Wilson’s students.
Professor Jason Mazzone recently spoke to the Alabama Reflector regarding an order from the U.S. Supreme Court to the parties in a Louisiana redistricting case. The Court asked parties to submit briefs on whether majority-minority congressional districts violate the 14th and 15th amendments to the U.S. Constitution. Experts say the Court may be considering invalidating Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which forbids election laws that discriminate based on race, color or membership in language minority groups.
“The case might result in the Court invalidating entirely Section 2 of the VRA on the basis that the Constitution is color blind and it bars race-conscious districting, including when mandated by Congress to remedy historical racial discrimination in voting,” Mazzone said. “Such a result would represent a massive change in election laws and practices with seismic consequences for democratic processes at every level of government.”
Professor Rob Kar has published “The Contractual Death and Rebirth of Privacy” in the Harvard Journal of Law & Technology. Co-authored with Xiaowei Yu, the abstract follows:
This Article proposes, for the first time, the application of “shared meaning analysis” — a method of contract interpretation grounded in traditional contract principles, as developed in Pseudo-Contract and Shared Meaning Analysis, 132 HARV. L. REV. 1135 (2019) (“PseudoContract”) — to online privacy policies. The method identifies when policy text adds enforceable terms to a contract, as opposed to mere unenforceable boilerplate, addressing an underappreciated paradigm slip in contract law that is enabling widespread digital surveillance. Consumers routinely click “I agree” to online privacy policies — which purport to permit cookies, other tracking devices (like pixels and SDKs), and AI-driven data analysis — without reading or comprehending their text, leading to massive transfers of personal information that erode privacy, facilitate consumer and political manipulation, and threaten freedom and democracy. Critiquing the binary debate over whether online privacy policies are contracts at all, this Article argues for a more nuanced reform: courts, operating within their common law authority, should revive privacy by focusing contract interpretation on the shared meanings of any contracts over privacy formed in digital contexts. Through examples involving policy scope, unilateral modifications, and conflicts between shared meaning and deceptive boilerplate, this Article demonstrates how contract interpretation — once returned to its rightful focus on shared meaning — can be used to counter modern surveillance harms without requiring new legislation, complementing other privacy frameworks and restoring the proper moral relationship between contract and privacy.
The number of police-involved lethal force incidents in the U.S. dropped 24% from 2021 to 2023, according to the Cline Center for Advanced Social Research and an interdisciplinary team of University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign experts, including College of Law professor Jennifer Robbennolt, who have developed a nationwide registry on the uses of lethal force by police officers in the U.S.
The Cline Center’s SPOTLITE project has compiled nearly a decade’s worth of data to track and identify police uses of lethal force across the U.S.
“SPOTLITE remains a work in progress. We have compiled data up through 2023 so far, but we’re not done yet,” Robbennolt said. “We’re actively looking for funding to bring SPOTLITE data up to the present, with national data that can be released in nearly real time, and with a level of detail that helps to inform research and conversations about policing across the country.”
Earlier this summer, Professor Suja Thomas participated in a panel at the National Employment Lawyers Association (NELA) Annual Convention. Thomas and her co-presenters led a discussion on the employment cases decided by the Supreme Court during its 2024-25 term; significant appellate court, legislative, and state law developments; and emerging issues in plaintiffs’ employment law.
The regulatory framework for artificial intelligence-based medical devices needs to be improved to ensure transparency and protect patients’ health, says Sara Gerke, the Richard W. & Marie L. Corman Scholar at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and expert in the ethical and legal challenges of artificial intelligence for health care. Gerke argues that the Food and Drug Administration should prioritize the development of labeling standards for AI-powered medical devices in much the same way that there are nutrition facts labels on packaged food.
Gerke spoke to the Illinois News Bureau about her new paper, recently published in the Emory Law Journal, “A comprehensive labeling framework for AI/ML-based medical devices: From AI Facts labels to a front-of-package AI labeling system — Lessons learned from food labeling.”
The University of Illinois College of Law is proud to welcome Eric Baudry and Sarah Lawsky as new faculty members this fall. Baudry joins as an assistant professor of law with a specialty in tax law, poverty, and redistribution; Lawsky will serve as the L.B. Lall and Sumitra Devi Lall Professor of Law and the co-director of the Innovation Law and Technology Program.
“I’m really excited about joining the law school here because of the vibrant intellectual life among the faculty,” Lawsky said. “The University of Illinois is such an incredible institution, and the opportunity to do interdisciplinary work here at the law school with the other parts of this university is really exciting.”
Lawsky comes to Illinois having previously taught at George Washington University Law School, UC Irvine School of Law, and, most recently, at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law. Her work focuses on computational law, with a focus on formal methods and the formalization of tax law. As part of the Innovation Law and Technology Program, she hopes to continue her work in conjunction with experts from the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science and the School of Information Sciences as well as others. At the College of Law, Lawsky will be teaching contracts and federal income tax courses, aiming to meet the existing high standards of the law school.
“Illinois has an amazing tax professor in Dick Kaplan, who’s terrific. My goal is to try to match the very high level of quality of tax instruction that he has established,” she said.
Also an expert in tax law, Baudry comes to Illinois Law with experience as a clerk in the Eastern District of Michigan and the Ninth Circuit, a Skadden Fellow at Mid-Minnesota Legal Aid, and a faculty fellow at the University of Michigan Law School. He will teach income taxation, corporate taxation, and a seminar on the intersections of taxation and poverty.
“I’m interested in planting roots in this community, both as a person who lives in Champaign and as a tax scholar who cares about inequality in our community. Specifically, I’m interested in how residents experience impoverishment and how our local and state governments can use tax law as a vehicle to help improve the lives of their citizens” Baudry said. “My long-term goal as a professor would be to bring that work into the law school.”
Both Lawsky, who has spent the last nine years at Northwestern, and Baudry, a native Minnesotan, expressed their excitement to be a part of Illinois Law and the local community. Having a son in the state university system gave Lawsky an idea what to expect, and she says she’s eager to “learn what it means to be a part of the University of Illinois system.” Baudry shared his enthusiasm to talk to students, alumni, and faculty about his professional expertise as well as his personal passion for games.
“Getting to know the faculty and the staff and the spaces at Illinois Law, I immediately felt like this is a place that would push me to be my best, while also offering fantastic resources and supports for my journey to get there,” he said.
The College of Law is pleased to welcome Baudry and Lawsky to the faculty and looks forward to their accomplishments as part of the University of Illinois.
