Albert H. Choi is a professor of law whose research and teaching interests include corporate law, contract law, corporate finance, mergers and acquisitions, and law and economics. Choi—who teaches Contracts, Corporations, and Mergers and Acquisitions—came to the Law School from the University of Virginia Law School. He was an assistant professor of economics at the University of Virginia; he then became an associate professor and later a tenured professor at the University of Virginia Law School. Choi earned his JD from Yale Law School and his PhD in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he was a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow.
Mira Edmonds, whose teaching and research interests include sentencing law and policy, prisoner reentry, and the collateral consequences of conviction, is a clinical assistant professor of law in the Pediatric Advocacy Clinic and the Civil-Criminal Litigation Clinic. Edmonds joins the Law School after living in Shanghai for four years, where she worked on environmental initiatives and taught at the East China University of Politics and Law. In addition to her criminal justice work, Edmonds focuses on the affordable housing crisis, tenants’ rights, and approaches to homelessness prevention and alleviation. She earned her JD from Harvard Law School and her BA, magna cum laude, from Brown University.
Jessica Lefort is a clinical assistant professor in the Legal Practice Program. Prior to joining the Law School, she was a deputy defender with the Federal Defender Office in Detroit, representing indigent criminal defendants in federal court in the Eastern District of Michigan and the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals. She previously was an honors trial attorney at the U.S. Department of Justice, Antitrust Division, in Washington, D.C., where she prosecuted national and international criminal conspiracies involving price-fixing and bid-rigging, as well as procurement fraud cases involving Iraq and Afghanistan war reconstruction contracts. Lefort received her BA in philosophy from Grand Valley State University and her JD, summa cum laude and Order of the Coif, from DePaul University College of Law.
Leah Litman, ’10, is an assistant professor of law. She previously taught at the University of California, Irvine, School of Law, where she was named the 2019 Professor of the Year. She teaches and writes on constitutional law, federal post-conviction review, and federal sentencing. Her current research focuses on structural arguments in constitutional law and federal post-conviction review. In addition, she is one of the co-hosts and creators of Strict Scrutiny, a podcast about the U.S. Supreme Court. Litman graduated summa cum laude from Michigan Law, where she was editor-in-chief of the Michigan Law Review and the winner of the Henry M. Bates Memorial Scholarship Award. She received her BA from Harvard University.
Tifani Sadek is a clinical assistant professor in the Entrepreneurship Clinic. She previously was an attorney at General Motors, where she served as lead counsel on the expansion of connected vehicles into South America, the Middle East, and Asia-Pacific. She also supported connected vehicle operations and negotiated transactions related to data sharing. Sadek earned her JD from the University of Virginia School of Law, where she was editor of the Virginia Journal of Law and Technology. She earned her ALM from Harvard University and BS from Texas A&M University.
Michael J. Steinberg, a professor from practice, was the legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan for 22 years, and oversaw all ACLU litigation in the state. He has litigated dozens of high-impact, high-profile cases on a wide range of civil liberties issues, including freedom of speech and expression, racial justice, LGBT rights, post 9/11 issues, police misconduct, women’s rights, reproductive freedom, and voting rights, among others. Six cases on which he worked have reached the U.S. Supreme Court. He earned a BA with honors from Wesleyan University and graduated cum laude and Order of the Coif from Wayne State Law School.
New Fellows
Three clinical fellows, a Michigan Faculty Fellow, and a Sunderland Fellow also joined the Law School for the 2019–2020 academic year.
The clinical fellows are Jason Cowin, who joined the Pediatric Advocacy Clinic; Allison Freedman (Civil-Criminal Litigation Clinic); and Andrea Van Hoven (Workers’ Rights Clinic). Michigan Law Clinical Fellowships are short-term positions (three years or less) that allow lawyers interested in becoming clinical law professors to gain teaching experience in their specific area of practice. Working closely with the faculty director in one of Michigan Law’s 16 legal clinics, clinical fellows teach and supervise student-attorneys enrolled in the clinic.
Legal historian Emily Prifogle, whose research focuses on the use and experience of law in rural areas, is the Law School’s first Michigan Faculty Fellow. The Michigan Faculty Fellowship is a two-year, in-residence program designed for highly promising scholars with an outstanding academic record who wish to develop their scholarship and teaching skills in preparation for the academic job market.
Rainer Forst, a professor of political theory and philosophy at Goethe University Frankfurt, joined the Law School as a Sunderland Fellow. The Sunderland Faculty Fellowship focuses on mid-career and senior scholars from a discipline other than law, whose work would strongly benefit from an extended visit to the Law School and who would, in turn, contribute substantially to the life of the School.
