Sep. 17, 2024

Faculty Spotlight — Meet Eric Hintz

To poet John Donne, no man is an island. To Eric Hintz, one of Mizzou Law’s newest professors, no area of the law is, either. With an undergraduate degree in economics and a graduate degree in global security studies, Hintz has always enjoyed approaching academic questions from a trans-substantive perspective. “I really liked the interdisciplinary component of [the law], and the sort of aspect that you can be a generalist, and learn all sorts of different things,” Hintz said. “One of the meta points that I enjoyed about economics and global security studies was that you’re thinking about all…

Sep. 13, 2024

Faculty Spotlight — Meet Ryan Vacca

When Ryan Vacca, ‘04, gave his first guest lecture to students studying the entertainment business at St. Louis Community College, the then-attorney at Stinson LLP began considering going back to school — as a professor. “I could see the light bulb was going off [for students,]” Vacca recalled. “They understood it and were asking great questions. It was a lot of fun, and at that point, I started thinking maybe academia might be for me.” Becoming a law professor was a far cry from what Vacca originally planned to pursue as an undergraduate at Amherst College, where he entered as…

March 15, 2024

Faculty Spotlight — Meet David Gamage

It’s been said that nothing in this life is certain except death and taxes — but for Mizzou Law’s newest professor, the legal implications of taxation are a fascinating “puzzle” that bridges the gap between the government and the people. David Gamage has always been interested in the worlds of academia, law and economic policy. He began his academic career by earning a bachelor’s and master’s degree in just four years and then worked in management consulting before returning to law school. ‘It didn’t actually occur to me in undergrad that one could just be a law professor,” Gamage…

Oct. 17, 2023

Faculty Spotlight — Meet Professor Andrea Boyack

Skydiving, visiting all 50 states, running the New York City Marathon, and writing a law school casebook  — Floyd R. Gibson Endowed Professor Andrea Boyack has crossed off a number of her bucket list items in the last 20 years. Her professional experience is as varied as her bucket lists. After completing her undergraduate degree in Russian and international relations at Brigham Young University, Boyack initially had no intention of going to law school but took (and enjoyed!) the LSAT. She decided to go to law school when the Ford Foundation offered to pay for her master’s degree at…

Sep. 28, 2023

Faculty Spotlight — Meet Professor Alexander Gouzoules

Associate Professor Alexander Gouzoules has always considered himself an academic. After studying history as an undergraduate, he began to consider how law shapes society. “I was already studying questions that were adjacent to legal structures and legal systems,” Gouzoules said. “So I came to law that way.” Since joining the legal profession, Gouzoules has worked in various legal fields and capacities, from litigating constitutional cases related to religion and government to practicing commercial law as an associate focused on complex business disputes, bankruptcy litigation, and white-collar defense. Throughout those experiences, Gouzoules has enjoyed considering how private legal processes like…

June 15, 2023

Faculty Spotlight — Meet Dean Sandra Sperino

A first generation undergraduate and law student, Sandra Sperino applied to law school not quite sure of what her life would look like as a lawyer, or where her career in the legal field would take her. Though Sperino, now an associate dean and Elwood L. Thomas Missouri Endowed Professor at Mizzou Law, spent a brief period working in journalism and public relations after college, she was looking to take on something more intellectual. “I was looking for an academic challenge,” Sperino said. “I just knew that law school was hard and rigorous and a good course of study. So,…

Feb. 14, 2023

Three Mizzou Law Alumnae Now on Faculty

The University of Missouri School of Law has a 150-year history of producing top-notch lawyers and legal professionals. We can now add top-notch teachers and scholars to the list of impressive accomplishments our alumni have achieved. Even more, several Mizzou Law alumni are now on faculty at Mizzou Law, sharing knowledge and paying forward to future students the great legal education they received in their time at Mizzou. In the past year, Mizzou Law has hired three new faculty members who are Mizzou Law graduates. Here is a little bit about each of them and why they chose to return…

Feb. 8, 2023

Faculty Spotlight — Meet Haley Proctor

Some might find Columbia’s fall and winter weather to be a bit of an adjustment, but if you’ve lived in the Northeast before, you’d be familiar with cold, wet and windy weather. Haley Proctor joined Mizzou’s faculty this August as a joint faculty fellow at both Mizzou Law and the Kinder Institute for Constitutional Democracy and is settling in well. Originally hailing from Raleigh, North Carolina, Proctor is a two-time graduate of Yale University, where she received her bachelor’s as well as her law degree. “I’ve known since middle school that I wanted to be a lawyer,” said Proctor. “However,…

Dec. 6, 2022

Faculty Spotlight — Meet Yunsieg Kim

Yunsieg Kim was a self-proclaimed terrible law student. “I studied more coding and computer science than law. It’s a wonder I never failed my law courses,” Kim recalled of his time at Yale University, where he got his law degree. “The law seemed to be either outdated or just fundamentally incompatible with a lot of technological developments,” Kim said. “This was my impression going in, and that held up.” Having grown up in South Korea, Kim completed his bachelor’s degree at Dartmouth before collecting what he calls his “basket of graduate degrees” in fields ranging from a doctorate in…

Nov. 29, 2022

Legal Lion

By Marcus Wilkins At first, Zarifullah Darkhily assumed the explosions echoing through the halls of Kabul University were automobile backfire in the streets of Afghanistan’s capital city. In reality, terrorists had breached the building on Nov. 2, 2020. For the young professor and his contemporaries, it was their darkest day “I thought of my family and my friends,” said Darkhily, who was head of the institution’s public policy and administration department at the time. “I thought briefly of how I was at this university trying to be useful to my people. But mostly I thought about getting to safety.” Darkhily…