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Kerry Abrams became the James B. Duke and Benjamin N. Duke Dean of the School of Law and professor of law on July 1, 2018. A scholar of immigration, citizenship, family, and constitutional law, Dean Abrams is well-known for her scholarly writing on family-based migration, the legal regulation of immigrant families, and the history of immigration law.

Prior to her appointment at Duke Law, Dean Abrams served on the law faculty of the University of Virginia for thirteen years, and, more recently, as vice provost for faculty affairs. In 2011, she was named the Albert Clark Tate, Jr., Research Professor of Law, and in 2012, she received the McFarland Award for excellence in legal scholarship. As vice provost for faculty affairs, she was responsible university-wide for faculty recruitment and retention, faculty policies, the promotion and tenure process, and professional and leadership development programs for faculty.

Dean Abrams is a graduate of Swarthmore College, where she earned a B.A. in English literature with highest honors. She graduated with distinction from Stanford Law School, where she was president of the Moot Court Board and the co-chair of Women of Stanford Law. After law school, she clerked for Judge Stanwood R. Duval Jr. of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana and practiced as a commercial litigator for several years at the New York City law firm of Patterson, Belknap, Webb & Tyler LLP. She also served as acting assistant professor of lawyering at New York University School of Law, where she taught lawyering skills, including legal research, writing, oral advocacy, mediation, negotiation, and client counseling. She is a member of the New York State Bar and the United States Supreme Court Bar.

Kerry Abrams became the James B. Duke and Benjamin N. Duke Dean of the School of Law and professor of law on July 1, 2018. A scholar of immigration, citizenship, family, and constitutional law, Dean Abrams is well-known for her scholarly writing on family-based migration, the legal regulation of immigrant families, and the history of immigration law.

Prior to her appointment at Duke Law, Dean Abrams served on the law faculty of the University of Virginia for thirteen years, and, more recently, as vice provost for faculty affairs. In 2011, she was named the Albert Clark Tate, Jr., Research Professor of Law, and in 2012, she received the McFarland Award for excellence in legal scholarship. As vice provost for faculty affairs, she was responsible university-wide for faculty recruitment and retention, faculty policies, the promotion and tenure process, and professional and leadership development programs for faculty.

Dean Abrams is a graduate of Swarthmore College, where she earned a B.A. in English literature with highest honors. She graduated with distinction from Stanford Law School, where she was president of the Moot Court Board and the co-chair of Women of Stanford Law. After law school, she clerked for Judge Stanwood R. Duval Jr. of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana and practiced as a commercial litigator for several years at the New York City law firm of Patterson, Belknap, Webb & Tyler LLP. She also served as acting assistant professor of lawyering at New York University School of Law, where she taught lawyering skills, including legal research, writing, oral advocacy, mediation, negotiation, and client counseling. She is a member of the New York State Bar and the United States Supreme Court Bar.

Matthew D. Adler is the Richard A. Horvitz Professor of Law and Professor of Economics, Philosophy and Public Policy at Duke University, and is the founding director of the Duke Center for Law, Economics and Public Policy. His scholarship is interdisciplinary, drawing from welfare economics, normative ethics, and legal theory.  Adler’s current research agenda focuses on “prioritarianism”—a refinement to utilitarianism that gives extra weight (“priority”) to the worse off. He writes about the theoretical foundations of prioritarianism; its implementation as a policy analysis methodology, in the form of a “social welfare function” or cost-benefit analysis with distributional weights; and its application to a variety of policy domains, including climate change, risk regulation, and health policy.   

Adler is the author of numerous articles and several monographs, including New Foundations of Cost-Benefit Analysis (Harvard, 2006; co-authored with Eric Posner); Well-Being and Fair Distribution: Beyond Cost-Benefit Analysis, which systematically discusses how to integrate considerations of fair distribution into policy analysis (Oxford, 2012); and Measuring Social Welfare: An Introduction (Oxford, 2019), an overview of the social-welfare function approach. With Marc Fleurbaey, he edited the Oxford Handbook of Well-Being and Public Policy (2016). Along with Ole Norheim, he is the co-founder of the Prioritarianism in Practice Research Network, whose work will appear in an edited volume, Prioritarianism in Practice (under contract, Cambridge University Press).

Adler was until 2017 an editor of the journal Legal Theory, and is now an editor of Economics and Philosophy.

Prior to joining the Duke Law faculty in 2012, Adler was the Leon Meltzer Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania School of Law. He has been a visiting professor at Bar-Ilan University, Columbia University, Duke, the University of Chicago, and the University of Virginia.   In addition to his Duke appointment, Adler currently holds a 3-year position as the Ludwig M. Lachmann Professorial Research Fellow at the London School of Economics.

Adler has a B.A. and J.D. from Yale University, where he was a member of the Yale Law Journal. He also received an M. Litt. in modern history from St. Antony’s College at Oxford University, where he was a Marshall Scholar. He clerked for Judge Harry Edwards of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in 1991-1992 and for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor during the 1992-1993 term. Adler practiced litigation at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison in New York prior to joining the University of Pennsylvania law faculty in 1995.