Karen Woody Named a Herndon Fellow

Karen Woody, associate professor of law, has been selected for a fellowship with the Herndon Foundation aimed at preparing diverse professionals for positions on corporate boards.

THE PROGRAM, THE HERNDON DIRECTORS Institute, is a partnership between the foundation and America’s leading corporations and organizations to expand the participation of women and minorities in business leadership. Woody was one of 19 fellows selected to participate in the intensive six-month program.

“I am thrilled for the opportunity and have already gained so much insight and knowledge in just the first few weeks of the program,” said Woody. “We have already had a range of impressive speakers, including Ken Frazier, the current CEO of Merck, among others. I’m very much looking forward to the opportunities this fellowship will create.”

The program seeks to prepare fellows for positions as corporate directors by giving them hands-on experience in governance fundamentals, stakeholder capitalism, financial and risk management and market and brand dominance, among other topics.

Woody joined the W&L Law faculty in 2019. Her scholarship focuses on securities law, financial regulation and white-collar crime. She has published her work in a number of journals, including the Maryland Law Review, Stanford Law Review Online, Cardozo Law Review, Fordham Law Review and the Journal of Corporation Law. Her work on conflict minerals is widely cited, and she has testified for the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Financial Services regarding federal conflict minerals regulation.

Miller Receives Prestigious Research Prize

Miller is a globally recognized expert in German law and legal culture.

RUSSELL MILLER, J.B. STOMBOCK PROFESsor of Law, is the recipient of a Humboldt Research Prize from Germany’s Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. The Humboldt Research Prizes are among Germany’s highest academic honors.

Miller was nominated for the award by the Faculty of Law at the University of Münster, where he has conducted research and collaborated with several members of the faculty. He is currently on leave while he serves as the head of the Max Planck Law Network, a consortium of the 10 law-related Max Planck Institutes.

The Humboldt Research Prize is awarded to leading international scholars from all disciplines in recognition of their career achievements. Scholars are nominated for their fundamental discoveries, new theories or insights that have had a lasting impact on their field of study. The Münster Law Faculty’s nomination described Miller as “America’s leading scholar of German constitutional law and a profound contributor to German-American relations.”

Miller is a globally recognized expert in German law and legal culture. He is the author or editor of a number of books and articles in the fields of comparative law and international law. In 2012 he published a co-authored English-language treatise on German constitutional law that the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg described as “a masterful text.” Miller also is a frequent commentator in global media sources, including Germany’s “paper of record,” The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, which publishes his monthly column on law and transatlantic affairs. He is the co-founder and editor in chief of the German Law Journal, an online, English-language journal reporting on developments in German, European and international jurisprudence. Miller has also been recognized for his work on German law and transatlantic affairs with a Schumann Fellowship from the University of Münster and a KoRSE Fellowship

Can Law Keep Up?

A new book by professor Joshua Fairfield examines how the law can keep pace to govern rapid advancements in technology.

JOSHUA FAIRFIELD, THE WILLIAM DONALD Bain Family Professor of Law, has spent his entire academic career researching the cutting edge of technology from a legal perspective. He has examined property ownership and contracts in virtual worlds, big data privacy, bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, and the use of digital information to establish guilt or innocence in a criminal context. If there is one thing that ties his work together, it is the notion that the law is ideally suited to deal with advances in technology, no matter how rapid the change or how fundamental the impact on our lives.

“Throughout our history, the law has helped us deal with new questions, many times sprung from new technology, be it railroad transportation systems or skin grafting,” says Fairfield. “Law is the system for adapting human culture in response to technological change.”

It is this concept that Fairfield explores in his new book “Runaway Technology: Can Law Keep

Up” from Cambridge University Press. In an era of corporate surveillance, artificial intelligence, deep fakes, genetic modification, automation and more, at the University of Freiburg. In 2014 he testified before the German Bundestag, and he has twice been awarded a Fulbright Senior Fellowship in support of his research in Germany. law often seems to take a back seat to rampant technological change. In fact, giant technology companies actively work against attempts to regulate and reign in their efforts, pushing the myth that law is unable to match the speed of technological development.

However, Fairfield rejects this notion and argues that not only do legal frameworks already exist to govern most new technology, but the law itself is a uniquely human technology capable of rapid evolution.

“Law can keep up with technology because law is a kind of technology — a social technology built by humans out of cooperative fictions like firms, nations and money,” says Fairfield. “However, to secure the benefits of changing technology for all of us, we need a new kind of law, one that reflects our evolving understanding of how humans use language to cooperate.”