Master of Science
in Legal Studies

Michael C. Dorf is the Robert S. Stevens Professor of Law at Cornell Law School, where he teaches courses in constitutional law and related subjects. He has authored or co-authored six books and over 100 scholarly articles and essays for law reviews, books, and peer-reviewed science and social science journals. Professor Dorf received his undergraduate and law degrees from Harvard University. After law school, he served as a law clerk for Judge Stephen Reinhardt of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and then for Justice Anthony M. Kennedy of the Supreme Court of the United States. Professor Dorf occasionally consults with leading law firms on complex litigation and maintains an active pro bono practice chiefly consisting of writing briefs in Supreme Court cases. Before joining the Cornell faculty in 2008, Professor Dorf taught at Rutgers-Camden Law School for three years and at Columbia Law School for 13 years. His essays for general audiences appear regularly on “Verdict,” “Take Care,” “SCOTUSblog,” and his blog, “Dorf on Law.”

Brad Wendel joined the Cornell faculty in 2004 after teaching at Washington and Lee Law School from 1999 to 2004. Before entering graduate school and law teaching, he was a product liability litigator at Bogle & Gates in Seattle and a law clerk for Judge Andrew J. Kleinfeld on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Professor Wendel’s teaching interests are in the regulation of the legal profession and torts, and his research focuses on the application of moral and political philosophy to problems of legal ethics.

Oskar Liivak, Professor of Law, graduated from Rutgers College with highest honors in 1994; received a Ph.D. in physics from Cornell University in 2000, focusing on techniques for determining protein structure; and received a J.D. from Yale Law School in 2005. From 2000 to 2001, Professor Liivak was a postdoctoral scientist working on physical realization of quantum computing in the Quantum Information Group at IBM’s Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California. Prior to law school, he served as a patent agent in the Boston office of Fish & Richardson P.C. Most recently, Professor Liivak served as a law clerk to Judge Sharon Prost on the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.

Stewart J. Schwab is the Jonathan and Ruby Zhu Professor of Law at Cornell Law School and was its Allan R. Tessler Dean from 2004 to 2014. He has been a member of the Cornell Law School faculty since 1983.

A native of North Carolina, he obtained his J.D. as well as a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Michigan. Before joining the Cornell faculty, Professor Schwab clerked for Judge J. Dickson Phillips, Jr. of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, and then for Justice Sandra Day O’Connor of the United States Supreme Court.

Professor Schwab is a leading scholar in economic analysis of law and in employment law. He was a reporter for the American Law Institute’s Restatement of Employment Law and for the Uniform Law Commission Study Committee on Covenants Not to Compete, and he has been named by Human Resource Executive as one of the 50 most powerful employment attorneys in America. He is an editor of the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, as well as a member of the Society of Empirical Legal Studies and the American Law and Economics Association.

Professor Schwab has taught widely in the curriculum, including Torts, Contracts, Corporations, Discrimination Law, Employment Law, Labor Law, Law and Economics, and Whistleblower Law.

Jed Stiglitz is an Associate Professor of Law and the Jia Jonathan Zhu and Ruyin Ruby Ye Sesquicentennial Fellow. His research focuses on administrative law, with an emphasis on the relationship between judicial review and the values of trust and accountability in the administrative state. Professor Stiglitz also studies legislation and other areas of public law.

Professor Stiglitz’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Yale Law Journal; University of Pennsylvania Law Review; Cornell Law Review; Southern California Law Review; Journal of Legal Studies; Journal of Law, Economics, & Organization; Journal of Legal Analysis; Administrative Law Review; Theoretical Inquiries in Law; and the Oxford Handbook of Law and Economics, among other journals. His co-authored book on American elections was published by Princeton University Press in 2012. Professor Stiglitz is co-editor of the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies and is a member of the Board of Directors of the Society for Empirical Legal Studies. Following law school, he clerked for the Honorable Stephen F. Williams of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals.

George Hay is one of the foremost antitrust authorities in the United States. After he received his Ph.D. in economics from Northwestern University, Professor Hay taught economics at Yale University for five years, until he joined the U.S. Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division in 1972. He served as Director of Economics and won several awards for service to the Justice Department. Professor Hay became a Professor of Law and a Professor of Economics at Cornell University in 1979 and was named to the Edward Cornell chair in the Law School in 1992. He became the Charles Frank Reavis Sr. Professor of Law in 2014.

Professor Hay teaches a variety of law and law-related courses in both the Law School and the College of Arts and Sciences, and he lectures on antitrust throughout the United States and the rest of the world. He has appeared as an expert witness in many antitrust cases in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Professor Hay’s most recent articles include “A Tale of Two Cities: From Davids Holdings to Metcash,” coauthored with E. Jane Murdoch, and “Anti-competitive Agreements: the meaning of ‘agreement.’”

Kristen Underhill is a Professor of Law at Cornell Law School and a Professor of Population Health Sciences at Weill Cornell Medical College (Department of Population Health Sciences). She holds a JD from Yale and a DPhil from the University of Oxford in Evidence-Based Social Intervention.

Underhill completed her postdoctoral work in HIV prevention in the Center for Alcohol and Addictions Studies at Brown University, then pursued five years of NIH-funded research at Yale Law School and the Yale Center for Interdisciplinary Research on AIDS. She was previously Associate Professor at Columbia Law School and the Mailman School of Public Health (Department of Population and Family Health), and she joined the Cornell faculty in 2021.

Her research interests focus on the relationships among law, incentives, and health behaviors, and her recent work has included projects on access to Medicaid, postpartum health, laws enabling minors to consent to health care services, laws on sexual health education, and laws affecting prenatal and postpartum substance use.

Underhill teaches courses in Health Law, Torts, Public Health Law, and Law and Economics.

Charles K. Whitehead specializes in the law relating to corporations, financial markets, and business transactions. After clerking for the Hon. Ellsworth A. Van Graafeiland, U.S. Court of Appeals (2nd Circuit), Professor Whitehead practiced in the United States, Europe, and Asia as outside counsel and general counsel for several multinational financial institutions. His practice included representation involving IPOs and other exempt and registered securities offerings (from startups to seasoned global issuers), acquisitions and other strategic transactions, derivatives and other complex financial instruments, and loan and other credit transactions.

Before joining Cornell, Professor Whitehead was on the faculty of the Boston University School of Law and he was a research fellow at Columbia Law School. His current scholarship focuses on the financial markets, financial regulation, and corporate governance.