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In Brief

The Faculty Expands

BC Law hires largest number in recent history.

       

Boston College Law School hired eight new faculty for the 2024-2025 academic year, the largest single cohort in recent history. This year’s newcomers, together with five professors hired in 2022 and two in 2023, signify a dynamic period of scholarly growth for the Law School.


Jessica Berry

Berry joins BC Law as an associate clinical professor and director of a child and family justice clinic. She comes from the Children’s Law Center of Massachusetts, where she represented adolescents in child welfare, education, and mental health matters, and later became director of Child Welfare Advocacy. Berry has previously worked at BC Law, supervising students in the Juvenile Rights Advocacy Program.


Yan Fang

Fang, a sociologist of law, joins BC Law as an assistant professor. Her research sits at the intersection of law, technology, and society, and she is part of an interdisciplinary collaboration studying federal courts’ disposition of disability discrimination cases.


Mitchell Chervu Johnston

Johnston, on the heels of a fellowship with Harvard Law School’s Project on the Foundations of Private Law, joins BC Law as an assistant professor. The fellowship was an academic investigation of common law subjects such as property, contracts, torts, and related subjects. 


Andrea Olson

Olson, who specializes in civil procedure, remedies, federal courts, and structural constitutional law, taught at Harvard Law School before being named an assistant professor at BC Law. Her research is motivated by a belief that analyzing structural and remedial logic in the law is critical for promoting systemic integrity and fundamental fairness.


Ana Rivera ’95

Rivera previously made her mark at BC Law as a visiting clinical professor in the Civil Litigation Clinic. She assumes the new title of associate clinical professor and will focus on housing justice. Rivera was instrumental in the creation of BC Law’s Covid Relief Housing Clinic, which operated at the height of the pandemic to address growing housing uncertainty.


Shelly Simana

Simana is a widely published scholar whose research focuses on the intersection between bioethics and law, and addresses questions about genetics, reproductive technologies, and biotechnology. She joins BC Law as an assistant professor, bringing experience as a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford Law’s Center for Law and the Biosciences and a doctoral candidate at Harvard Law School.


Carlos Masashi Teuscher

Teuscher comes to BC Law as an associate clinical professor from Suffolk University Law School, where he founded that school’s transactional clinic, providing legal counsel to small businesses and nonprofits in low-income communities and communities of color in the Greater Boston area.


Adnan A. Zulfiqar

Zulfiqar, an interdisciplinary scholar in the fields of law, history, and religion whose research focuses on critically examining frameworks underlying legal discourses in both domestic and global contexts, assumes the role of associate professor at BC Law and a courtesy appointment in Boston College’s Theology Department. He comes from Rutgers Law School. He holds advanced degrees from several universities.


This article was updated on August 13, 2024.