Public Interest Law Faculty

Jill Engle

Penn State Law’s public interest programming is directed by Professor Jill Engle, a longtime advocate for social justice and director of the Penn State Law Family Law Clinic. A recipient of the Pennsylvania Bar Association’s 2010 Pro Bono Advocate Award, Professor Engle has done public interest work for decades, including with Head Start and the National League of Cities.

Jeffrey Erickson

Jeffrey Erickson is professor of clinical law and director of the International Sustainable Development Projects Clinic and also works with Professor Ross Pifer supervising Penn State's Rural Economic Development Clinic. Prior to joining Penn State Law, Professor Erickson was active pro bono counsel with the Colorado Lawyers' Committee's Legal Night Task Force at Mi Casa Resource Center for Women and Centro San Juan Diego. 

Michael Foreman

Professor 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 on numerous cases in United States Supreme Court and the federal appellate courts and is involved in several cases currently pending. He argued Coleman v. Maryland Court of Appeals in 2012. In addition to other work, the clinic has served as counsel on amicus briefs filed with the United States Supreme Court in several of their recent employment cases.

A recipient of the Carnegie Medal for Outstanding Heroism, Professor Foreman has been honored by Shippensburg University with the Jesse S. Heiges Distinguished Alumnus Award. He was also selected by Harvard Law School as a Wasserstein Fellow, which recognizes dedicated service in the public interest. 

Lara B. Fowler

Professor Lara Fowler is an attorney and mediator who focuses on environmental, energy, and natural resource law, with a specific focus on water related issues. She has a joint appointment between Penn State Law and the Penn State Institutes of Energy and the Environment where she is working on questions related to water, the Chesapeake Bay, and energy. Prior to joining Penn State, she was an attorney at Gordon Thomas Honeywell LLP in Seattle, Washington, where she focused on mediation and dispute resolution of complex natural resource issues, as well as representing clients facing regulatory hurdles in the environmental and energy fields. She has worked on issues such as who is entitled to store groundwater in the greater Los Angeles area, flooding issues in the Chehalis Basin, Washington State’s second largest river basin, and energy issues in the Pacific Northwest. Before pursuing a legal career, she was a senior water resources coordinator with the Oregon Water Resources Department.

Kit Kinports

Professor Kinports is a leading scholar of feminist jurisprudence, criminal law and federalism and an award-winning classroom teacher. Professor Kinports is a former clerk for Judge Abner Mikva of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and Justice Harry Blackmun of the U.S. Supreme Court. Before entering the teaching profession, she practiced law with Ennis, Friedman, Bersoff & Ewing in Washington, D.C. for several years.

Tiyanjana Maluwa

Tiyanjana Maluwa  previously worked as the legal counsel of the OAU (now African Union) and, subsequently, as the legal adviser to the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. Prior to joining the AU, he was Professor of Law at the University of Cape Town, and Extraordinary Professor of Law at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. He has also taught, in full-time and visiting capacities, at other universities in Africa and North America and spent a year as a Visiting Research Fellow at the Max-Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law in Heidelberg, Germany.  Maluwa has written and edited a number of books, contributed chapters to books and is the author of numerous articles in academic journals and other publications in the fields of public international law, human rights and international organizations. In 1997, he was asked by the United Nations to serve as the Special Rapporteur for Human Rights in Nigeria following the execution of the famed poet-activist Ken Saro Wiwa. Most recently he served as a technical expert to the AU High-Level Panel on Darfur, chaired by former South African President Thabo Mbeki. He has also served as an expert consultant to the African Union, the United Nations and other organizations.

Ross Pifer

Professor Ross Pifer is the director of the Rural Economic Development Clinic, which is committed to the complementary goals of training talented lawyers while encouraging sustainable rural economic development by representing clients in agricultural, food, and energy sectors. His research focuses on the interface between agricultural and residential development. Pifer has been an attorney with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Office of General Counsel, and 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. He has presented widely throughout Pennsylvania, as well as nationally and internationally on agricultural law topics to audiences comprised of judges, attorneys, legislators, government officials, landowners, and the general public. 

Dara Purvis

Professor Dara E. Purvis is a scholar of family law, contracts, feminist legal theory, and sexuality and the law. She is particularly interested in the intersection between gender stereotypes and the law. Her most recent work examines gendered impacts of the law and proposes neutralizing reforms, most recently in the context of how the law defines parenthood.

Victor Romero

Victor Romero is the Maureen B. Cavanaugh Distinguished Faculty Scholar and associate dean of academic affairs at Penn State Law. His scholarship emphasizes the law's impact on marginalized groups, focusing on the intersection of immigration policy and individual rights. An elected member of the American Law Institute (ALI), Dean Romero has published numerous books, chapters, articles, and essays, including Alienated: Immigrant Rights, the Constitution, and Equality in America. A former advisory board member of Penn State's Africana Research Center, Professor Romero previously served as president of both the South Central Pennsylvania Chapter of the ACLU and the NAACP of the Greater Carlisle Area. He has also served as a visiting professor of law at Howard University and Rutgers-Camden. 

Geoffrey R. Scott

Professor Scott 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 is a Fellow with the the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies in London.

Richard G. Settgast

Professor Richard G. Settgast is an assistant public defender in Centre County, Pennsylvania, where he represents a wide range of clients from the date of initial charge through trial, sentencing, and appeal. Prior to joining the Public Defender's Office, he was a clerk to The Hon. Thomas K. Kistler at the Centre County Court of Common Pleas, where he supervised law school interns who were researching and writing opinions for the court.

He supervises the Indigent Criminal Justice Practicum.

Tom Sharbaugh

Professor Tom Sharbaugh brings more than 35 years of practice experience to the classroom. He has a particular interest in start-up and early stage businesses and their funding.  He has written a number of articles and delivered many presentations on crowd-funding and the securities laws applicable to capital raising through unregistered offerings. Professor Sharbaugh serves several educational and non-profit institutions. He is the chair of the Penn State Annual Giving Advisory Council, the chair of the President’s Club and a member of the External Advisory Board of the Schreyer Honors College. He is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Penn Medicine Health System in Philadelphia and volunteers with the Ben Franklin Technology Partners of Central and Northern Pennsylvania. 

Michele Vollmer

Shoba Sivaprasad Wadhia