LeClercq elevated to associate professor
Desirée LeClercq, who joined UGA Law in 2024, has been promoted to associate professor with tenure.
Teaching Contracts, International Trade and Workers Rights, International Labor Law, Public International Law, and U.S. Labor Law, she also serves as a faculty co-director of the Dean Rusk International Law Center and as the faculty adviser for the Georgia Journal of International and Comparative Law, the Labor and Employment Law (Student) Association, and the International Law (Student) Society.
Over the past year, LeClercq organized a transnational conference in Mexico exploring the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement. She delivered a keynote address in Taiwan at the International Conference on Corporate Sustainability Regulations and Governance on Labor Rights in Global Supply Chains. Additionally, she shared her research with audiences at the University of Texas; the University of California, Berkeley; Washington University in St. Louis and the Association of American Law Schools Annual Meeting.
Most recently, she published “Resisting Federal Preemption” in the Alabama Law Review and “Modern Slavery Thriving in the Shadows of West Africa: Why Coubaly v. Cargill Furthers Legal Barriers to Labor Rights Accountability” in International Labor Rights Case Law (with third-year student N’guessan C. Kouame).
She also secured a 2025 UGA Teaming for Interdisciplinary Research Pre-Seed Grant to explore “Trade and the Future of Transnational Work,” a project on which she serves as the team leader.
Heywood appointed to full clinical professor
Jessica L. Heywood (J.D.’97) has been promoted to full clinical professor. Based in Washington, D.C., she has been a member of the law school faculty since 2012, when she was hired to develop the D.C. Semester in Practice program – the law school’s first full-time externship. Since then, hundreds of UGA Law students have externed in Washington with federal agencies, the White House, national nonprofits, the judiciary and on Capitol Hill.
Heywood’s role has expanded to include managing and teaching the Capital Assistance Project, the law school’s capital defense externship program launched in 1998. In close partnership with the Dean Rusk International Law Center, she also oversees and teaches students externing abroad.
Earlier this year, Heywood received the law school’s Lanier Award for Excellence in Clinical Education. She has served for several years as co-chair of the Association of American Law Schools Clinical Section’s Teaching Methodologies Subcommittee and published “Survey of Capital Cases in Georgia” in the Mercer Law Review in 2024.
McNiff becomes clinical associate professor
Rob McNiff (J.D.’02), who teaches the Mediation Clinic, the Mediation Practicum and Negotiation, has been promoted to the rank of clinical associate professor.
The Mediation Practicum provides general civil mediation training that leads to students becoming registered as neutrals with the Georgia Office of Dispute Resolution and mediating court-referred cases, while the students in the Mediation Clinic mediate on-site and online for the Athens-Clarke County State and Magistrate Courts, The Mediation Center of Savannah and UGA Housing.
McNiff recently published “Being There: Perils of Disembodied Mediation” in the Pepperdine Dispute Resolution Law Journal.
He is also a registered neutral and approved trainer with the Georgia Office of Dispute Resolution. He has successfully mediated hundreds of cases in many areas of law. Additionally, he provides dispute resolution and mediation skills training to judges, lawyers and mediators.
McNiff, who joined the School of Law in 2017, received the 2025 Lanier Award for Excellence in Clinical Education.
Hines named lecturer
Sherrie L. Hines, who joined the School of Law in the spring of 2025, has been named lecturer.
She came to UGA after working for more than seven years in the Athens-Clarke County Attorney’s Office, having served as a deputy chief attorney. From 2009 to 2015, Hines served as an assistant public defender in the Western Judicial Circuit Public Defender Office. She also worked for two years at the Institute for Continuing Legal Education.
While at the Athens-Clarke County Attorney’s Office, she prosecuted all of the animal services ordinance violations and worked with the School of Law’s Practicum in Animal Welfare Skills program to overhaul the government’s animal services ordinances, which were adopted in 2022. Her work also involved a wide range of local government law topics including employment law, elections law, housing and community development, ordinance and policy drafting, ethics, First Amendment litigation, contract drafting, and compliance with the Open Records and Open Meetings Acts.
She earned her bachelor’s degree summa cum laude and her law degree cum laude from the University of Georgia.
May becomes lecturer
Caitlin May (J.D.’20), who joined UGA Law in the fall of 2025, was appointed lecturer. She teaches legal writing.
Before coming to UGA, she served as a voting rights staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union of Georgia for three years. In this role, May litigated voting rights complaints in federal and state trial and appellate courts, and she evaluated legislation and litigated complaints under the Voting Rights Act, the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Equal Protection Clause and other state and federal legislation.
From 2020 to 2022, May was a staff attorney for Superior Court Judge Bonnie Chessher Oliver of the Northeastern Circuit of Georgia.
She earned two bachelor’s degrees in Arabic and international affairs magna cum laude and her law degree cum laude from UGA. During law school, she served as the executive notes editor of the Georgia Journal of International and Comparative Law and was a Justice John Paul Stevens Public Interest Fellow.
