The Commons | Faculty Focus
“I speak to everyone’s level as best I can and I don’t presume certain knowledge. When you indicate to students that you are willing to meet them where they are and build from there, they tend to find the material a lot more engaging. So I strive to level the playing field.” Fletcher said she greatly enjoyed teaching at Duke last fall. “My students in Business Associations were some of the most amazing students I’ve ever worked with.” The feeling was mutual; Curtis Bradley, the William Van Alstyne Professor of Law, who chaired the selection committee, said her students made it clear they would love for her to join the faculty permanently. One of those was Gerardo Parraga ’21, who said Fletcher made Business Associations his favorite class. “I have seldom enjoyed a class like I did Professor Fletcher’s,” Parraga said. “She is funny, holds a strong command over the classroom and, most importantly, is a master of the material. I am positive that anyone who takes her class next year will benefit from it.”
Fletcher said she is thrilled to join other members of Duke Law’s highly esteemed corporate law faculty, including Professor Elisabeth de Fontenay and James Cox, the Brainerd Currie Professor of Law, as well as Baxter and Schwarcz. “Coming to Duke is an amazing opportunity to be on a faculty with such well-known legal and scholarly minds, and to be able to contribute to that community is something I’m truly excited about,” Fletcher said. “It’s very important to look at what other scholars have done before me and build on that in meaningful and innovative ways. And I think that opportunity for collaboration is there for me at Duke.” She has already built relationships with faculty scholars through her long participation in Duke’s Culp Colloquium and Emerging Scholars Program and calls Guy-Uriel Charles, the Edward and Ellen Schwarzman Professor of Law and co-founder of the Culp Colloquium, “one of my biggest mentors and cheerleaders as I’ve been growing as an academic. He has been very instrumental in my development as a legal scholar even though we are not in overlapping fields.” Fletcher also has reunited with her Indiana Law colleague H. Timothy Lovelace, Jr., who joined the Duke Law faculty in June. “I’m looking forward to building new relationships at Duke and it’s also great to be able to maintain one that has been very near and dear to me in Indiana,” Fletcher said. d — Jeannie Naujeck
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Duke Law Magazine • Summer 2020
Photo: Ann Schertz
A strong addition to an already formidable group
H. Timothy Lovelace, Jr.
Legal historian of civil rights movement joins Duke Law faculty
H.
Timothy Lovelace, Jr., a noted legal historian of the civil rights movement, joined the Duke Law faculty in June from the Indiana University Maurer School of Law, where he was a professor of law. Lovelace, whose work examines how the civil rights movement in the United States helped to shape international human rights law, is the author of numerous articles and a forthcoming book, The World is on Our Side: The U.S. and the U.N. Race Convention (Cambridge), which examines how U.S. civil rights politics shaped the development of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination. He served as Duke’s John Hope Franklin Visiting Professor of American Legal History in the spring 2019 semester, when he delivered the Robert R. Wilson Lecture. He is returning to the faculty as the John Hope Franklin Research Scholar.
