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.”
In today’s complex regulatory and litigation environment, the demand for business professionals who can anticipate and understand potential legal issues has never been more pressing. Earning a Master of Science in Legal Studies from Cornell Law School will prepare you to navigate your organization’s most urgent legal and regulatory issues, and to be a confident, informed partner to your legal team. You will graduate ready to make sense of legal language, apply legal concepts to the business realities you face on the ground, and spot potential issues before they become costly and difficult legal problems.
- Core Courses
- Introduction to the U.S. Legal System
- Working with Business Contracts
- Business Organizations and Corporate Governance
- Compliance Systems
- Regulatory Policy and Process
- Elective Options (subject to change)
- Business Ethics
- Employment Law
- Navigating the Intellectual Property Landscape
- Criminal Liability of Organizations
- Business Transactions
- Human Rights Obligations of Organizations
- U.S. Antitrust Law and Policy
- Business Immigration Law
- Working with Legal Professionals
- Cross-Border Transactions
- Cybersecurity: Policy & Governance
- Privacy Law, Regulation, and Business
- Health Law and Compliance
- Financial Institutions
- U.S. Securities Regulation
- Persuasive Communication
- Conducting Legal Research
How It Works
FACULTY
Mark Underberg practiced corporate law for 30 years, advising directors and officers in corporate governance and other aspects of corporate law. Until 2012, he was a partner in the New York City law firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison. He has a law degree from Cornell Law School.
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.
Celia Bigoness is a Clinical Professor of Law and founder of the Entrepreneurship Law Clinic, Cornell’s first transactional law clinic. In addition to teaching at the Entrepreneurship Law Clinic, Professor Bigoness teaches “Introduction to Transactional Lawyering” and organizes the annual Cornell Law School Transactional Lawyering Competition. Before joining Cornell, she spent seven years practicing corporate law at Sullivan & Cromwell LLP in New York, London, and Paris. Her experience includes project finance, leveraged finance, capital markets, and mergers and acquisitions. Professor Bigoness received her J.D. from Yale Law School, where she was editor-in-chief of the Yale Journal of International Law, and her A.B. from Harvard.
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.
Steve Yale-Loehr has practiced immigration law for over 35 years. He is co-author of Immigration Law and Procedure, a leading 21-volume treatise on U.S. immigration law. He also teaches immigration and asylum law at Cornell Law School as Professor of Immigration Law Practice and is of counsel at Miller Mayer in Ithaca, New York. He also founded and was the original executive director of Invest In the USA, a trade association of EB-5 immigrant investor regional centers. Professor Yale-Loehr received his B.A. degree from Cornell University in 1977 and his J.D. cum laude from Cornell Law School in 1981. He was editor-in-chief of the Cornell International Law Journal. After graduation, Professor Yale-Loehr clerked for the chief judge of the Northern District of New York.
From 1982 to 1986, Professor Yale-Loehr practiced international trade and immigration law at a large law firm in Washington, D.C. From 1986 to 1994 he was managing editor of Interpreter Releases and executive editor of Immigration Briefings, two leading immigration law publications.
Professor Yale-Loehr is the co-author or editor of many books, including Green Card Stories; America’s Challenge: Domestic Security, Civil Liberties and National Unity After September 11; Balancing Interests: Rethinking the Selection of Skilled Immigrants; Global Business Immigration Practice Guide; J Visa Guidebook; Understanding the Immigration Act of 1990; and Understanding the 1986 Immigration Law, as well as numerous law review articles.
Professor Yale-Loehr is a member of the New York Bar and the U.S. Supreme Court. He is a member of the asylum committee and the administrative litigation task force of the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA). He is also a founding member of the Alliance of Business Immigration Lawyers, a global consortium of top business immigration attorneys.
Professor Yale-Loehr is annually listed in Chambers Global, Chambers USA, and An International Who’s Who of Corporate Immigration Lawyers as one of the best immigration lawyers in the world. He is listed in Who’s Who in America. He is frequently quoted in the press on immigration issues and has often testified before Congress. He is the 2001 recipient of AILA’s Elmer Fried Award for excellence in teaching and the 2004 recipient of AILA’s Edith Lowenstein Award for excellence in advancing the practice of immigration law. He is also a Fellow of the American Bar Foundation and a non-resident fellow at the Migration Policy Institute.
Richard T. John is a general practice lawyer, consultant, and businessperson located in Ithaca, NY. Professor John is a member of the Tompkins County Legislature, chair of the Public Safety Committee, and chair of the T.C. Industrial Development Agency. He has taught as an adjunct professor at the Cornell Law School for the past several years, teaching “Functions of the General Counsel” and “Compliance Systems.” Professor John served nine years as the North American General Counsel and Vice President of Compliance at Intertek, a global product and commodity testing, inspection, and certification company.
Stephen Garvey has written and taught in the areas of capital punishment, criminal law, and the philosophy of criminal law. Following his graduation from Yale Law School, Professor Garvey clerked for the Hon. Wilfred Feinberg of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, then practiced in the Washington, D.C., firm of Covington & Burling. He joined the Cornell Law School faculty in 1994. Professor Garvey’s current scholarship focuses on substantive criminal 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.
Professor Sital Kalantry is a Clinical Professor of Law and the Director of Online Education at Cornell Law School, as well as the Faculty Director of the MSLS Program and the Cornell India Law Center. She is an expert in the fields of comparative law, international human rights law, and the study of judicial systems. She teaches contract law, business and human rights, and comparative constitutional law.
She has spent nearly two decades working to promote international human rights in the United States and abroad by filing and arguing cases in international courts and domestic courts in Colombia, India, and other countries, authoring impactful human rights reports on gender rights and immigrants’ rights, and developing training materials for judges on human rights.
She has published widely, including a book, dozens of articles, and many book chapters. Her works have appeared in the UCLA Law Review online, North Carolina Law Review, Stanford Journal of International Law, Georgetown Journal of International Affairs, Human Rights Quarterly, and a number of other peer-reviewed journals and university presses. Her opinion pieces have been published in the New York Times, Slate, the New York Daily News, and in other publications. She has been invited to deliver numerous talks and presentations around the world.
She received a Fulbright-Nehru Research Scholar grant to conduct research on the Indian Supreme Court as well as several other awards and grants for her work. She is a regular media commentator on reproductive rights, human rights, surrogacy, and immigration. She serves as referee for a human rights journal and an academic press. She is on the editorial board of several law journals in India.
Professor Kalantry received her A.B. from Cornell University in 1994, an MSc from the London School of Economics in 1995 and her J.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1998.
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.
Dan Awrey joined Cornell Law School as a Professor of Law in July 2019. His teaching and research interests reside in the area of financial regulation and, more specifically, the regulation of banks, investment funds, derivatives markets, and financial market infrastructure. Professor Awrey has undertaken research and provided advice at the request of organizations that include the Bank for International Settlements, HM Treasury, U.K. Financial Conduct Authority, Commonwealth Secretariat, and European Securities and Markets Authority. He is also a founding co-managing editor of the Journal of Financial Regulation, published by Oxford University Press.
Before entering academia, Professor Awrey served as legal counsel to a global investment management firm and, prior to that, as an associate practicing corporate finance and securities lawyer with a major Canadian law firm.
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.


Saule Omarova specializes in the regulation of financial institutions, banking law, international finance, and corporate finance. Before joining Cornell Law School in 2014, she was the George R. Ward Associate Professor of Law at the University of North Carolina School of Law.
Prior to joining academia, Professor Omarova practiced law in the Financial Institutions Group of Davis Polk & Wardwell, a premier New York law firm, where she specialized in a wide variety of corporate transactions and advisory work in the area of financial regulation. In 2006-2007, Professor Omarova served at the U.S. Department of the Treasury as a Special Advisor for Regulatory Policy to the Undersecretary for Domestic Finance.
Who Should Apply
- Business professionals: without legal training, who work closely with lawyers but do not want to become a lawyer, or who work in heavily-regulated industries such as healthcare, finance and banking, telecomm, transportation, and energy
- Professionals who need: to successfully navigate US legal and regulatory environments, to be proficient in the language and concepts of U.S. law, to anticipate where business decisions might also become legal issues, or to be informed and effective partners with their legal department