What Every Law Student Really Needs to Know: An Introduction to the Study of Law

Education

B.A. and B.S. Southern Methodist University

J.D. Stanford Law School

A professor of law and professor of political science at Vanderbilt University Law School, Tracey George brings a social science perspective to law and courts, examining how institutional design influences actions and outcomes with particular attention to federal appeals courts. Her research on the behavior of federal judges and courts has been published in the American Political Science Review, Judicature, North Carolina Law Review, Northwestern University Law Review, Supreme Court Economic Review and Vanderbilt Law Review among others. She also has published studies of legal education and legal scholarship and serves on the LSAC Grants Subcommittee and AALS Research Committee, which support work on legal education and the legal profession. She is presently engaged in a multi-year empirical study of the legal academic labor market. In addition to Civil Procedure and Commercial Law, Professor George teaches Contracts and has twice earned a first-year teaching prize for the course, once at Vanderbilt and once at Northwestern.

Before joining the Vanderbilt law faculty in 2004, Professor George served as Professor of Law at Northwestern University Law School, where she was also Faculty Associate at the Institute for Policy Research. After graduating from Stanford Law School, she clerked for Judge Francis D. Murnaghan Jr. on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit and then practiced law in Washington, D.C. with Miller Cassidy Larroca & Lewin. From 1996 through 2001, Professor George served as an Associate Professor of Law and Adjunct Professor of Political Science at the University of Missouri School of Law. She joined the Vanderbilt law faculty after serving as a Visiting Professor during the Spring 2004 semester.

Professor George's Vanderbilt page

Suzanna Sherry is the Herman O. Loewenstein Professor of Law at Vanderbilt University Law School. Her work focuses on constitutional law, federal courts, and civil procedure. She has earned national recognition for her constitutional scholarship, which includes two books (co-authored with Professor Daniel Farber) — Judgment Calls: Principle and Politics in Constitutional Law (2008) and Desperately Seeking Certainty: The Misguided Search for Constitutional Foundations (2002) — and numerous articles in law journals including the University of Chicago Law Review, the Duke Law Journal, the Stanford Law Review, and the Supreme Court Review.

Professor Sherry has co-authored three casebooks (in Civil Procedure, Federal Courts, and Constitutional History) as well as Civil Procedure Essentials for students. In addition to teaching Civil Procedure, for which she has won the first-year teaching prize, she also introduces incoming law students to the study of law during a one-week intensive course at the start of their first semester. She has taught a variety of other classes, both first-year and upper-level, and has presented lectures to federal and state judges, lawyers, law clerks, and state legislators.

After graduating from law school, Professor Sherry clerked for the Honorable John C. Godbold of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in Montgomery, Alabama, and then served as an associate with the law firm of Miller, Cassidy, Larroca & Lewin in Washington, D.C. She joined the Vanderbilt faculty in 2000 as the inaugural holder of the Cal Turner Chair, having previously served on the faculty of the University of Minnesota Law School faculty since 1982 where she was the Earl R. Larson Professor of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Law. She was named to the Herman O. Loewenstein Chair in Law in 2006. She is a member of the American Law Institute, the American Society for Legal History and Phi Beta Kappa.

Professor Sherry's Vanderbilt page
Professor Sherry's Vanderbilt authors page