Gillian Lester, a distinguished employment law expert, and Eric Talley, a leading scholar of corporations and law and economics, will join the faculty this summer as professors of law. Lester, a professor at UCLA School of Law, and Talley, a professor at the University of Southern California (USC) Law School, have been visiting professors at Boalt for the 2005-06 academic year.
In addition to their scholarly work, Lester and Talley bring substantial talent to the classroom. Lester teaches Employment Law and Contracts, while Talley teaches Contracts and Corporations.
Their appointments reflect Boalt’s continuing drive under Dean Christopher Edley to build the law school’s teaching and research portfolio by recruiting and retaining top legal scholars across multiple specialties.
Lester’s research, which focuses on the regulation of employment, involves such topics as trade secrets, paid family leave and the unemployment insurance system. Among her publications, Lester is the co-author of Jumping the Queue: An Inquiry into the Legal Treatment of Students with Learning Disabilities (Harvard Press, 1997). She will be joining as a co-author in the 4th edition of the leading casebook Employment Law: Cases and Materials (with Willborn, Schwab and Burton). Lester is an adviser to the American Law Institute Restatement of Employment Law. She holds an LL.B. from the University of Toronto and a J.S.D. from Stanford University, and has been a member of the UCLA faculty since 1994.
“In successfully recruiting Professor Gillian Lester, Boalt has landed one of the small handful of top scholars and teachers in the important, and expanding, field of employment law,” said Professor Philip Frickey, Alexander F. and May T. Morrison Professor of Law and chair of Boalt’s faculty appointments committee. “Her work is pathbreaking and agenda-setting; she is nationally recognized as an intellectual leader.”
Talley, who holds the Theodore and Ivadelle Johnson Chair in Law and Business at USC, focuses on corporate and commercial law, securities law, law and economics, corporate finance and empirical methods in the law. In addition to teaching, he will continue to serve as faculty co-director of Boalt’s Berkeley Center for Law and Business (BCLB). Talley also is a senior economist at the RAND Corporation. He earned both a Ph.D. in economics and a J.D. from Stanford University. His recent research has delved into the impact of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act on smaller companies and on liability issues involving acts of terrorism.
“Eric Talley is one of the brightest stars in the field of corporate law, one of the few academics who is able to combine doctrinal expertise with sophisticated empirical skills,” said Professor Jesse Fried, who also serves as BCLB’s faculty co-director. “His presence at Boalt will significantly strengthen our research capabilities and the business law curriculum.”
Lester and Talley assume their new positions on July 1. In coming years, Boalt plans to expand its core faculty of tenured and tenure-track professors by 40 percent. Last summer, the law school welcomed five new faculty members whose expertise encompassed such fields as administrative law, corporations, criminal law and procedure, cyber law and intellectual property, evidence, and immigration.