Georgetown University Law Center Professor Vicki Jackson was recently appointed as Georgetown’s first associate dean for transnational legal studies.

In speaking of the inspiration behind creating this new office, Law Center Dean T. Alexander Aleinikoff said that it’s time for the Law Center to increase its global efforts.

“The Law Center is strong in international law, and has taken major steps in improving the curriculum in the last few years,” Aleinikoff said. “We wanted to take that effort to the next level.”

Jackson added that the creation of this position will only improve Georgetown’s renown as a top international law school.

“Georgetown has been a leader in promoting the study of international, transnational and comparative law,” she said. “With the growing importance of transnational law, and the law school’s many other serious commitments in the area – including Week One, an intensive, one-week program for first year students that focuses on a transnational legal problem, and the Center for Transnational Legal Studies in London – and the increasing opportunities for scholarly and educational collaborations across the globe, the dean thought it appropriate to create an associate deanship to help facilitate and coordinate some of these developments.”

In addition to serving as a professor on constitutional law, comparative constitutional law, federal courts, the Supreme Court and government immunities, Jackson has co-authored a coursebook on comparative constitutional law with Mark Tushnet, a professor at the Law Center.

A graduate of Yale Law School, Jackson has written articles on federalism, sovereign immunity and gender-bias subjects that have been published in the Harvard Law Review, the Yale Law Journal and the Georgetown Law Journal. She is also an articles editor for the International Journal of Constitutional Law and serves on the Board of the International Association of Constitutional Law. She said the latter gave her the unique opportunity to become familiar with the work of constitutional law scholars in many other countries. Aleinikoff described her as “one of the leading comparative constitutional law scholars in the country and around the world.”

Jackson said that as associate dean, she aims to bring a more global perspective to Georgetown’s Law Center.

“[I want] to encourage and facilitate scholarship across national lines or on subjects that concern international, transnational or comparative legal developments; to help identify and bring to the Law Center community interesting foreign scholars, and to help the dean in his many initiatives for Georgetown as a leading law school for scholars and students from around the world,” she said.

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