Professor Stanchi elected as a member of the American Law Institute (ALI)
Kathryn M. Stanchi recognized for building and expanding the discipline of rhetoric and legal writing
Professor Kathyrn M. Stanchi has been elected as a member of the American Law Institute (ALI). Professor Stanchi’s expertise is in persuasion, rhetoric, writing, and feminist theory, focusing on how those disciplines intersect. As a result of her work building and expanding the discipline of rhetoric and legal writing, she was the 2019 recipient of the Linda L. Berger Lifetime Achievement Award for Excellence in Legal Writing Scholarship.
“Professor Stanchi’s leadership and vast scholarship has had a wide and diverse impact,” said Leah Chan Grinvald, Dean of the William S. Boyd School of Law at UNLV, Richard J. Morgan Professor of Law, and a member of the ALI. “She is also a wonderful colleague and has enriched our Boyd Law community, from our intellectual life to our collegiality.”
The ALI is the leading independent organization in the United States producing scholarly work to clarify, modernize and improve the law. The ALI drafts, discusses, revises and publishes Restatements of the Law, Model Codes and Principles of Law that are enormously influential in the courts and legislatures, as well as in legal scholarship and education.
Professor Stanchi leads the United States Feminist Judgments Project (with Bridget Crawford), a feminist rhetorical project that rewrites landmark judicial opinions from a feminist perspective. As part of that project, she was co-editor of Feminist Judgments: Rewritten Opinions of the United States Supreme Court, published by Cambridge University Press, and is executive editor of the Cambridge Feminist Judgments Series, which includes volumes on tax law, family law, employment discrimination, corporate law, trusts and estates, health law, criminal law, immigration law, and reproductive justice, as well as new international volumes on Pakistani Law and the law of the International Criminal Court. Professor Stanchi also organizes the Feminist Judgments International Research Collaborative, which plans workshops and supports Feminist Judgments Projects worldwide, including projects on the laws of Brazil, Mexico, Pakistan, India, and new projects focusing on the law of Indigenous peoples, legislation, policy papers and constitutions.
Professor Stanchi is also the co-author of two leading books on writing and persuasion: Legal Persuasion: A Rhetorical Approach to the Science (with Linda Berger) and Legal Reasoning and Legal Writing (with Richard Neumann and Ellie Margolis). She is the author of numerous articles on rhetoric, persuasion, and feminist theory which have appeared in the Boston College Law Review, the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review, the Washington Law Review, the Texas Law Review Online and San Diego Law Review. Her book chapters have appeared in some of the leading scholarly compilations on rhetoric and persuasion. She has lectured nationally and internationally and served as a Fulbright Specialist at Keio University in Tokyo, Japan.
Before entering academia, Professor Stanchi worked in the litigation department of Debevoise & Plimpton and clerked for Justice Stewart G. Pollock of the New Jersey Supreme Court.
Professor Stanchi joins the 11 other Boyd Law faculty elected to the ALI: Christopher L. Blakesley (Emeritus), Ruben J. Garcia, Leslie C. Griffin, Leah Chan Grinvald, Francine J. Lipman, Thomas O. Main, Nancy B. Rapoport, Keith A. Rowley, Jeffrey W. Stempel, Marketa Trimble and John Valery White.