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"Jim Salzman, Jed Purdy and Neil Siegel are tremendous hires for Duke Law School," said Katharine T. Bartlett, Dean and A. Kenneth Pye Professor of Law. "Jim brings significant interdisciplinary strength to Duke's emerging excellence in the environmental law area, as well as important international expertise. Jed will strengthen the Duke faculty in both property and constitutional law, and he also intends to teach eventually in the environmental law area. Neil is a first-rate, emerging constitutional law scholar with broad interests in public choice theory, economic analysis, and federal courts."

These appointments are in addition to well-known constitutional law scholar Erwin Chemerinsky and labor law expert Catherine Fisk, who accepted offers to join the Duke faculty two weeks ago, and follow a spectacular hiring season last year with the high-profile appointments of Arti Rai, biotechnology scholar from Penn, Stuart Benjamin, telecommunications scholar from the University of Texas, and Larry Zelenak, tax scholar from Columbia. Several other highly competitive entry-level hires have also been made by Duke Law School in the last couple of years, including noted trade law specialist Joost Pauwelyn, comparative law scholar Ralf Michaels, and health law scholar Barak Richman.

Salzman is a professor of law at the Washington College of Law at The American University. Among his teaching and research interests are environmental law, natural resources law, international environmental law, property and contracts. He has taught at Stanford Law School and Harvard Law School, and is currently visiting at Yale, where he is a visiting lecturer at the Law School and visiting professor at the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. He is an honors graduate of Yale College and Harvard Law School, and also earned a master's degree in engineering sciences from Harvard.

"This is a dream job," said Salzman. "Thanks to the efforts of Jonathan Wiener and Chris Schroeder, Duke Law School has an outstanding environmental law program. With the enormous opportunities made possible by the recent Nicholas gift, we will have the potential to raise the program to the next level, making Duke the leading academic center for environmental law and policy in the world."

Purdy is the author of Being America: Liberty, Commerce, and Violence in an American World (Knopf 2003) and For Common Things: Irony, Trust, and Commitment in America Today (Knopf 1999), and many articles and essays. His work has appeared in Ethics and International Affairs , the New York Times opinion pages, the Atlantic Monthly , Prospect (UK) and Die Zeit , among many others. He has been a fellow at the New America Foundation and a law clerk for the Honorable Pierre N. Leval of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. He is currently a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, where his present work concerns the role of property regimes in shaping social and political life. He grew up in West Virginia and is an honors graduate of Harvard College and Yale Law School.

"I chose Duke because it has a commitment to teaching, a culture of ambitious, interdisciplinary scholarship, and an ethic of connecting that scholarship to the needs of the world," said Purdy. "I think legal scholars are uniquely positioned to teach, think, and write in ways that are both illuminating and useful, in a time when too much scholarship is neither. Duke recognizes that. People like Kate Bartlett, Chris Schroeder, Jeff Powell, and Jamie Boyle - among many others - are models of Duke's attitude."

Siegel was a top graduate of Duke University and the University of California, Berkeley, where he received a J.D. and a Ph.D. in jurisprudence and social policy, and numerous special honors. He clerked for Chief Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, and is currently clerking for Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the United States Supreme Court. His scholarship focuses on the normative meaning of democracy in the context of diversity. He will teach constitutional law and federal courts.

"Why did I choose Duke? Because Duke offers me the best opportunity to become the teacher, scholar, lawyer, and person I aspire to be," said Siegel, "and because it has the resources, will, and leadership to become the best law school it can be."

For additional information, contact:

Diana L. Nelson | phone: (919) 613-7034 | email: nelson@law.duke.edu