Six legal scholars in fields including economics, philosophy, political science and history will be on campus in 2009-10 as fellows in the Program in Law and Public Affairs (LAPA).

Throughout the year, the work of the fellows will be featured in LAPA seminars, where graduate students and faculty members meet to discuss a draft of an academic paper. Fellows also meet with undergraduates who are involved with LAPA, and some of the fellows will teach undergraduate and graduate courses.

LAPA, which explores the role of law in constituting politics, society, the economy and culture, is funded by the University, the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and the University Center for Human Values.

The 2009-10 fellows, all of whom have both law degrees and Ph.D.s, are as follows:

Jeannine Bell will be the Crane Fellow. She is a professor of law and the Charles Whistler Faculty Fellow at the Maurer School of Law at Indiana University. A scholar of policing and hate crime, she is the author of “Policing Hatred: Law Enforcement, Civil Rights and Hate Crime” and “Police and Policing Law,” an edited collection that explores scholarship on the police. At Princeton, Bell will work on her forthcoming book “Hate Thy Neighbor,” which explores hate crime in integrating neighborhoods.

Susanna Blumenthal is an associate professor of law and history at the University of Minnesota, where she researches and teaches in the areas of American legal history, criminal law, and trusts and estates. Recently she has written about the historical relationship between law and the human sciences. During her year at Princeton, she will be writing a book about insanity trials in the United States in the 19th century.

Bernadette Meyler will be the inaugural Mellon/LAPA Fellow in Law and Humanities. She is an associate professor of law at Cornell University. Her scholarship focuses on the intersections between constitutional law and the common law, British and American legal history, law and literature, and law and religion. While at Princeton, Meyler will complete a book on common law originalism. 

Ralf Michaels is a professor of law at Duke University School of Law and director of its Center for International and Comparative Law. The author of a book on comparative private law, he researches and teaches comparative law, conflict of laws and legal theory. He currently is working on an analysis of the role of domestic courts, especially those in the United States, as world courts.

Eli Salzberger will hold the Microsoft/LAPA Fellowship. He is the dean of the faculty of law at the University of Haifa in Israel. His research and teaching areas are legal theory and philosophy, economic analysis of law, legal ethics, cyberspace and the Israeli Supreme Court. His latest book is “Law, Economics and Cyberspace,” co-written with Niva Elkin-Koren. At Princeton, he will be researching the role of the judiciary in the economic theory of the state and on the law and economics of intellectual property.

Jim Staihar is a law and philosophy fellow at the University of Chicago Law School. His main scholarly interests are in criminal law theory, ethics, jurisprudence and political philosophy. At Princeton, he will work on several projects involving the role that moral luck should play in criminal liability and permissible forms of punishment.