Reunification
For up-to-date information regarding the reunification of Penn State's two law schools, please click here.
Advocacy and Litigation Faculty
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Professor Mandee Baumer is an associate professor of legal writing at Penn State Law, where she also has served as a visiting assistant professor and as the writing specialist.
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Dean Nicole Chong is an active member of the Legal Writing Institute and the Association of Legal Writing Directors. Before joining the faculty, she was an associate with Klett Rooney Lieber & Schorling in Philadelphia. Most of her work was focused in the area of commercial litigation. Dean Chong was involved in a variety of matters, including representing a major international telecommunications carrier in collection matters, a local manufacturer and retailer of fashion accessories in patent infringement litigation, as well as local and national companies in contract and tort litigation. She also was a member of Klett Rooney’s Appellate Practice Section.
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Dean Keith Elkin is responsible for the overall leadership and administration of the Office for Academic Success (OAS). The main goal of the OAS is to develop and deliver programs to promote the academic success of J.D. students from matriculation, during law school, and as they prepare to enter the legal profession. This includes programming and support for students during orientation, the three years of law school, and for the bar exam.
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Jill C. Engle is a clinical professor of law at Penn State Law in University Park. Previously, she was director of Penn State Law's Family Law Clinic. Professor Engle’s scholarship examines gender-based violence, economic inequality, international human rights, racial justice, and best practices in legal education. Before teaching law, Dean Engle did public interest work, including with Head Start and the National League of Cities, worked in private law in State College and Washington, D.C., and taught media law at Penn State.
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Clinical Professor Jeffrey Erickson is director of the International Sustainable Development Projects Law Clinic. He is admitted to practice in Pennsylvania and before several state and federal administrative agencies.
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Michael Foreman focuses on appellate representation in civil rights issues and employment discrimination cases and directs Penn State Law's Civil Rights Appellate Clinic, which has served as counsel of record on numerous cases in United States Supreme Court and the federal appellate courts.
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Professor Ham joined Penn State Law in 2018 from the University of Oklahoma College of Law, where she served as research and instructional services librarian since 2015. At Oklahoma, she taught Legal Research, Writing, and Analysis I and II, provided research instruction in additional law courses, and supported law faculty research and curriculum.
Prior to joining Oklahoma, Professor Ham served as both the faculty research service assistant and the law library reference assistant at the University of Tennessee College of Law. She also served as a research assistant for a law professor in support of a trust and estate treatise where she researched statutes, cases, and regulations as well as reviewed new legislation and cases for relevance for inclusion in the treatise.
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Dean Steven Hinckley has been involved in law librarianship on national and regional levels. He has taught courses on lawyering skills, legal research, and computer law. He has been a frequent speaker at library, technology, and legal professional programs on the subjects of law and technology, digital copyright, digital information licensing, the Patriot Act, Internet filtering, and online legal research, and has published a number of articles on information access policies and computers in legal education.
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Rebecca Mattson is the Head of Faculty and Research Services and Professor of Legal Research at Penn State Law. As head of faculty and research services, Professor Mattson provides leadership within the H. Laddie Montague, Jr. Law Library in planning and implementing scholarly support and research services. She manages a robust pool of library research assistants and provides annual training for faculty research assistants. Professor Mattson manages the Penn State Law eLibrary, the law school’s faculty scholarship repository, as well as the Penn State Law Legal Research Paper Series, and provides enhanced support for faculty scholarship and research.
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Professor Ross Pifer’s research focuses on shale gas development and the interface between agricultural and residential development. He has been an attorney with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Office of General Counsel, and he has advised military personnel and commands in the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Great Britain, and Germany while on active duty with the U.S. Army JAG Corps at the Netherlands Law Center.
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Professor Scott has a wide range of teaching and scholarly interests, but his focus is in intellectual property and on the intersection of the worlds of artistic and scientific expression and the law. He has given particular attention to the protection of cultural properties in both Europe and Asia, to domestic and international entertainment issues with an emphasis on music, and to the representation of the individual professional athlete. He received a Fulbright Scholar award in 2004-2005 for his research in the protection of cultural and ethnographic properties in Asia, and he has been a visiting professor and scholar at the University of Delaware Graduate College of Marine Studies in the fields of biotechnology and intellectual property law.
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Professor Tom Sharbaugh brings more than 35 years of practice experience to the classroom. Before joining Penn State Law, Tom was the firm-wide managing partner of operations at the Morgan Lewis & Bockius LLP law firm, based in the firm’s Philadelphia office. In this position, which he held for 15 years, Tom was responsible for the day-to-day operations of the global law firm with more than 3,100 personnel. As a partner in the firm's Business & Finance Practice Group, he represented a wide variety of clients in transactional and corporate matters, including private equity funds in M&A and investment transactions.
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As Associate Director of the Law Library, Theresa K. Tarves is responsible for the management of day-to-day operations of the Law Library. She assists the associate dean and director of the Law Library with long-range planning and budget administration, as well as project identification and implementation. Additionally, Tarves teaches a section of the 1L Legal Research course and provides general reference and research support to library patrons.
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Prior to joining Penn State Law, Professor Vollmer has served as a senior counsel in the Division of Enforcement for the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. In 2006, she received an award from the Department of Justice for her work in assisting the Enron Task Force with its criminal prosecutions. She also represented the Commission in both litigation and appellate matters for the SEC’s Office of the General Counsel. Before joining the SEC, she was a partner in a law firm practicing commercial litigation.
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Professor Wadhia is the Samuel Weiss Faculty Scholar and Clinical Professor of Law at Penn State Law in University Park. Her research focuses on the role of prosecutorial discretion in immigration law and the intersections of race, national security, and immigration. She has published more than thirty law reviews articles, book chapters, and essays on immigration law, as well as two books. She is also the founding director of the Penn State Law Center for Immigrants' Rights Clinic.
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