The Robbins Collection and Berkeley Law welcomed Hannah Buxbaum as a Robbins Distinguished Visiting Professor in Spring 2024, where she taught an insightful course on Comparative Civil Litigation. “We focused on group litigation, and on the mechanisms (including the U.S.-style class action) that are used in different legal systems to achieve access to justice in areas from consumer protection to human rights to climate action Buxbaum explained. “It’s a great topic for exploring some of the core issues in comparative law, including the political and cultural determinants of law reform and the prospects for legal harmonization,” she said about the course. During her time at Berkeley Law, she also taught Contracts in the 1L curriculum as well as a Conflict of Laws course.
Buxbaum is a professor at the Indiana University Maurer School of Law and holds the John E. Schiller Chair in Legal Ethics. She was also appointed Indiana University’s Vice President for International Affairs in 2018. Over the course of her teaching career, she has held visiting appointments at universities including the London School of Economics, Humboldt University, and Université Paris II, Panthéon-Assas. She has also delivered courses for the Hague Academy of International Law in the Netherlands and in Buenos Aires. In 2019, she was appointed to the Curatorium of the Hague Academy of International Law. She serves on a number of advisory boards, including the U.S. State Department’s Advisory Committee on Private International Law, the Fulbright Scholar CIES Advisory Board, as the U.S. member of the Hague Academy of International Law’s academic governing council; and as Vice President and President-Elect of the American Society of Comparative Law. She has also held multiple leadership roles in the American Society of International Law, most recently as Vice President (2016-2018). She has published numerous books and articles, specializing in transnational business law, particularly extraterritorial economic regulation.
By bringing professors like Hannah Buxbaum and Lena Salaymeh to teach courses at Berkeley Law as Robbins Visiting Professors, the Robbins Collection and Research Center continues its mission of promoting further study in the fields of civil, comparative, and religious law through enriching the next generation of legal minds.