TALLAHASSEE–Three new permanent faculty members will begin teaching at Florida State University College in fall 2004. They will teach courses in business and commercial law. They include:

• Professor Amitai Aviram, an established scholar with practice experience in corporate, antitrust and securities law who is currently a visiting assistant professor teaching corporations and antitrust at George Mason University. He has a J.S.D and an LL.M. from the University of Chicago Law School and an LL.B. from Tel Aviv University
• Professor Curtis Bridgeman, a commercial law scholar currently clerking for the Honorable Gilbert Merritt of the Sixth Circuit, U.S. Court of Appeals in Nashville, Tenn. He has a J.D. and a Ph.D. in philosophy from Vanderbilt University and a bachelor’s of science degree from the University of Alabama in Huntsville
• Professor Jonathan Klick, a law and economics scholar, who currently is associate director of the Liability Project at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C. He holds a J.D. and a Ph.D. in economics from George Mason University, as well as a bachelor’s of science degree from Villanova University

“This is an energetic young team, with impressive credentials, experiences, and approaches that draw on legal doctrine as well as cognate fields,” says Dean Don Weidner. “With these new professors, FSU College of Law will be able to offer its students a curriculum in business law that rivals the excellence we have achieved in the public law area, where our environmental and administrative law program is regularly recognized as one of the nation’s best.” 

Other FSU College of Law faculty in the general area of business law include Professors Frederick Abbott (international trade and intellectual property), Barbara Banoff (securities law), Joseph Dodge (general taxation), Charlene Luke (business taxation), and Dean Don Weidner (agency and partnership law). 

Professor Brian Leiter of the University of Texas, a leading commentator on law faculty quality, describes the Florida State University College of Law as one of the most impressive among U.S. law schools in terms of faculty hiring during the 1990s.1 Since 1998, 14 new tenure-track faculty members have joined the ranks of the law school, including lateral hires from the University of Texas at Austin, the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, University of California-Hastings, Arizona State University, Michigan State University, Albany Law School, Southern Illinois University, and Chicago-Kent College of Law-Illinois Institute of Technology. FSU College of Law’s faculty ranks among the top 15 public law schools, in terms of the frequency of publication of articles in the leading law journals.2 Its administrative and environmental law faculty also ranks among the top 25 of all law schools, according to Professor Leiter’s recent survey of leading faculty.

Full bios and a list of publications for the new law faculty follow are available on FSU College of Law’s website at www.law.fsu.edu.