A Good--and Busy!--Hiring Year for Alabama

I had been waiting to announce all of my law school's hires until all of them were in, all the press releases issued, and so forth. I think everything is now official. It's been a busy year here! 

I'm delighted to say that we have a new Dean: The University of Alabama School of Law will welcome as its dean Mark Brandon, currently Professor of Law at Vanderbilt. Mark is an accomplished scholar and teacher (coincidentally, Larry Solum today has a link to Linda McClain's glowing review of Mark's latest book); in addition to Vanderbilt, he has also taught at Princeton and Michigan. He is also, I note with pride, a graduate of and former teacher at the University of Alabama School of Law. We're delighted that he has gone so far and brought all those experiences home to us, and we look forward to working with him. He replaces Ken Randall, who served for dean as many years and was responsible for unprecedented innovations and advances in the law school. More recently, our colleague and friend Bill Brewbaker took on the fairly thankless job of interim dean, and did a wonderful job. I would be remiss if I failed to acknowledge the hard work done by everyone involved in the dean search, and the great results they achieved.

Mark joins a growing faculty. We will be joined next year by five new colleagues: Adam Steinman, one of the leading young figures in civil procedure and federal courts; Jenny Carroll, who has been doing terrific work on criminal procedure, among other areas; Mirit Eyal-Cohen, an important emerging figure in the area of tax law; Yuri Linetsky, who will be adding to our significant clinical programs; and John Gross, an accomplished and experienced criminal defense attorney who also will be contributing to our clinical offerings. I'm very excited about all of them, and about Alabama's continued growth and progress. Welcome, everyone!