Emily Kadens, '04: "Expect the Unexpected" from Professor Kadens

Being in the same room with Professor Emily Kadens is not unlike hanging out with a friendly, informed tiger. Her interlocutors had best be at the top of their game to acquit themselves respectably in the face of the convivial yet inevitable intellectual pounce. When this pre-modern European legal history specialist, who has taught at Northwestern University School of Law since 2012, levels her keen focus on an issue, look out.

At Northwestern, Professor Kadens teaches Contracts, Advanced Contracts, and Legal History (notably, her Western Legal Tradition course). She creates her own materials for all the classes she teaches. She is experienced in researching in archives and special collections, and knows in detail the rare book collections of a number of the country’s most notable libraries. In her repertoire is an imaginatively-conceived and captivating presentation on the development of the law, told through the evolution of law books and the lawyers’ role in writing them, using either actual rare law books or a PowerPoint to illustrate her talk. One iteration of this presentation was “Law’s Story: The Development of Law and Lawyers as Revealed Through Early Law Books” delivered to a rapt audience in 2013 at GW Law.

Preparing for what has turned out to be “the best job in the world” (as she characterized law teaching and scholarship in a 2012 interview with the Library of Congress) included a broad-based education in the humanities and law, the pieces of which all support her current work. She inaugurated and finished her education at the University of Chicago, beginning with a B.A. and M.A. in General Studies in the Humanities, and ending with her J.D. with honors in 2004. In between, Professor Kadens garnered a Diplôme d’études mediévales from the Université Catholique de Louvain-la-Neuve (Belgium), and a M.A. and Ph.D. in history from Princeton. Before teaching law, she clerked for then-Chief Judge Danny J. Boggs of the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals after gaining practice experience as a summer associate with White & Case LLP. She joined the faculty at the University of Texas School of Law in 2005, becoming the Baker & Botts Professor in Law in 2010. In 2012, Professor Kadens moved to Northwestern as a visitor, and joined its faculty in 2013.

Her substantial body of writing demonstrates a longstanding focus on customary law. Among her recent writings on the subject are “Custom’s Past” (in Curtis Bradley’s Custom’s Future: International Law in a Changing World (Cambridge, 2016), “Introduction: Lessons from the History of Custom” (48 Texas International Law Journal 349 (2013)), “Custom’s Two Bodies” (in Center and Periphery: Studies on Power in the Medieval World in Honor of William Chester Jordan 239 (2013)), and “How Customary is Customary International Law?” (in 54 William & Mary Law Review 885 (2013), with Ernest A. Young), and “The Myth of the Customary Law Merchant” (in 90 Texas Law Review 1153 (2012)). Her current research involves the role of reputation in pre-modern commercial relationships and a study of the first hundred years of statutory English bankruptcy.

Professor Kadens has been the recipient of a number of honors and fellowships, including Outstanding First-Year Course Professor at Northwestern (2013), the Richard & Diane Cummins Legal History Research Grant for the use of Special Collections at the GW Law Library (2013), the Library of Congress Kluge Fellowship (2012), the Editors’ Prize (2011) awarded by the American Bankruptcy Law Journal for her article “The Pitkin Affair: A Study of Fraud in Early English Bankruptcy” (84 American Bankruptcy Law Journal 483 (2010)), and the Sutherland Prize (2010) for her article “The Puzzle of Judicial Education” (75 Brooklyn Law Review 143 (2009)). Her academic distinctions include election to Phi Beta Kappa, and honors awarded every step of the way, starting at the B.A. level.

Her impressive scholarship harmonizes with a love for teaching law students, and much of Professor Kadens’s substantial inventory of service to the university, such as her work as Judicial Clerkship Advisor, relates to students and student life at Northwestern Law.

And she is fluent in Dutch.

For more of the unexpected from Professor Emily Kadens, please continue to her thoughtful responses to our interview questions at http://alegalmiscellanea.com/expect-the-unexpected-from-professor-emily….