Lisa Schultz Bressman has been appointed to the David Daniels Allen Distinguished Chair in Law. Bressman, who has served as the law school’s associate dean for academic affairs since summer 2010, is a renowned scholar of administrative law and statutory interpretation. She developed and teaches Vanderbilt’s required first-year course, The Regulatory State, and teaches Administrative Law and other courses in the area. She is also director of the Social Justice Program.
Bressman joined Vanderbilt’s law faculty as an assistant professor in 1998, was named a professor of law in 2002, and served as co-director of the Vanderbilt Regulatory Program from 2007-10. She was Vanderbilt’s FedEx Research Professor of Law in 2008-09, the Roscoe Pound Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School in fall 2008, and a visiting professor of law at Cornell in winter 2006. She served as faculty advisor to the Vanderbilt Law Review staff from 2002-10, and currently serves as faculty advisor to two student organizations, the Administrative Law Society and the Vanderbilt chapter of the American Constitution Society.
In 2010, Bressman began serving a two-year term as a Public Member of the Administrative Conference of the United States, and has served as chair of its Judicial Review Committee. She is a vice chair of the ABA’s administrative law section and has been a contributor to the OMB Watch Regulatory Reform Project.
Her works include numerous influential law review articles, including “Reclaiming the Legal Fiction of Congressional Delegation (97 Virginia Law Review, 2011), “Chevron’s Mistake” (58 Duke Law Journal, 2009) and “Procedures as Politics in Administrative Law (107 Columbia Law Review, 2007), which was awarded second place in the American Constitution Society’s 2008 Richard D. Cudahy Writing Competition for Regulatory and Administrative Law. She is the co-author, with Vanderbilt Law School colleagues Edward Rubin and Kevin Stack, of a textbook, The Regulatory State (Aspen, 2010).
Bressman earned her J.D. with honors at the University of Chicago, graduating Order of the Coif, and holds a B.A. magna cum laude in English and philosophy from Wellesley College.
Before joining the academy, Bressman clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer in 1994-95 and for Judge Jose A. Cabranes of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in 1993-94. After practicing law at Kellogg Huber Hansen Todd & Evans in Washington, D.C., she joined the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel as an attorney advisor, serving from 1996-98.
Bressman’s appointment to the David Daniels Allen Distinguished Chair in Law was announced by Vanderbilt Provost Richard McCarty at a university celebration at the Student Life Center March 26. Her extensive service to the law school and the university includes chairing the Dean Search Committee in 2009, chairing the Ad Hoc ABA Reaccreditation Committee in 2009-10, and five years of service, including as chair, on the Faculty Appointments Committee, among many other committee appointments.
“Lisa has been a tremendous asset to Vanderbilt Law School and to the university, and I’m extremely pleased to recognize her impressive career accomplishments with this appointment,” said Dean Chris Guthrie.
The David Daniels Allen Distinguished Chair in Law is one of three chairs honoring David Daniels Allen (BA’58), a founding partner of Reynolds Allen & Cook in Houston.
