Anthony Casey, ’02, did not have academia on his mind when he graduated from the Law School. About six years into practice, as a partner at Kirkland & Ellis focused on bankruptcy and corporate litigation, Casey began to consider his long-term career goals. It then dawned on him that what he loved most about his work was mentoring younger lawyers and thinking about new legal problems. 

“I often found myself thinking about legal issues from cases that I was not working,” he recalled. “The lure of being an academic was to have a much broader mentoring base and to be able to craft my own research agenda.” Casey sought out guidance from Douglas Baird, the Harry A. Bigelow Distinguished Service Professor of Law. Then in 2009, he left Kirkland & Ellis to become a Bigelow Fellow at the Law School. The two-year teaching fellowship allowed him to explore his research interests, work with mentors, and teach classes to first-year law students. He quickly realized that this was the path for him.

Today, Casey is the Donald M. Ephraim Professor of Law and Economics and the founding faculty director of the Law School’s Center on Law and Finance. A widely published scholar of business law, finance, and corporate bankruptcy, Casey has flourished in his academic career since his Bigelow Fellowship nearly 20 years ago. He joined the Law School faculty in 2011, climbing the ranks to a professorship and serving as a deputy deanship from 2020 to 2023. In a full-circle moment, Casey also served as a codirector of the Bigelow Program.

“The years running the program allowed me to work with great young scholars,” said Casey. “This was rewarding on a personal level, but it also exposed me to different approaches and areas of law that helped my own scholarship.”

Like Casey, many legal scholars of today found their launchpads into academia at UChicago Law, whether as students or Bigelow Fellows or both. The Law School’s faculty creates a culture of intense engagement that improves how students learn and how professors research. 

“For Bigelow Fellows, being a part of this environment allows them to experience what it means to be a legal scholar at a pivotal time in their career,” said Dean and Howard G. Krane Professor of Law Adam Chilton, who began his career at the Law School as a Bigelow Fellow himself. “We hope that exposure both helps jump-start their academic research and that they’ll take part of that culture and those values with them to wherever they end up teaching. Fellowships aren’t the only route toward becoming a law professor, added Jonathan Masur, the John P. Wilson Professor of Law, another scholar who got his start in the academy as a Bigelow. 

“Students can first obtain a PhD if they choose. More than anything, students who want to become legal scholars should be excited about digging deeply into complex legal questions that fascinate them,” he said. 

Masur teaches Canonical Ideas in American Legal Thought at the Law School, a class that aims to help people understand the biggest ideas in law. Many who take the class will become legal academics, many others practicing attorneys. The divide isn’t as sharp between those who practice and those who teach as one might think, Masur observed. “This is a useful class if you intend to become a practicing lawyer and want training in how to construct compelling legal arguments. But it’s also hard to find a better place to embark upon a path toward legal academia,” he said.

Casey's Advice to Aspiring Academics:

"The most important thing is to understand what an academic does and what the main challenges are. The day-to-day is very different from law firm life. Reach out to professors you knew in law school and try to find a mentor who can help guide you. The job is very rewarding for people who are passionate about thinking about new and hard problems in the law."

This story is part of a series about Law School alumni in academia. View the full series here.