Pamela Foohey joined the UGA Law faculty as a full professor teaching Bankruptcy, Secured Transactions and a Bankruptcy Practice Seminar.

She comes to Athens from the Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University. She has also held law faculty positions at Indiana University and the University of Illinois. While at Indiana for seven years, she served as advisory board chair for the Center for Law, Society & Culture.

Foohey’s scholarship primarily involves empirical studies of bankruptcy and related parts of the legal system, combining quantitative and qualitative interview-based research. She presently serves as a co-investigator on the Consumer Bankruptcy Law Project, a long-term project studying persons who file bankruptcy. Her work in business bankruptcy focuses on nonprofit entities, with a particular emphasis on how religious organizations use bankruptcy. She currently has two books in progress – one on consumer bankruptcies and the other on business bankruptcies.

A co-author of Secured Transactions: A Systems Approach and Commercial Transactions: A Systems Approach, her scholarship has been published in the Virginia Law Review, the Southern California Law Review, the Boston College Law Review, the Notre Dame Law Review and Law & Contemporary Problems.

Prior to entering academia, Foohey served as a judicial clerk for Judge Thomas L. Ambro of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit and Judge Peter J. Walsh of the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware.

Foohey earned her B.S. summa cum laude from New York University’s undergraduate Stern School of Business and her J.D. cum laude from Harvard Law School.

Assistant Professor Assaf Harpaz is leading classes in federal income tax and business taxation.

His scholarly focus lies in international taxation, with an emphasis on the intersection of taxation and digitalization. Harpaz’s most recent article is “International Tax Reform: Who Gets a Seat at the Table?” published in the University of Pennsylvania Journal of International Law. His work has also appeared in Law & Contemporary Problems, the Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy, the Yale Journal of International Law and Tax Notes International.

Before joining UGA, Harpaz served as a visiting assistant professor at the Drexel University Kline School of Law teaching courses in federal income tax and enterprise tax.

Harpaz earned his S.J.D. from the Duke University School of Law. While at Duke, he was a Perilman Fellow at the Duke Center for Jewish Studies. He earned his LL.M. in International Taxation from the University of Florida Levin College of Law and his LL.B. from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem Faculty of Law.

Prior to entering legal academia, Harpaz clerked and practiced commercial and corporate law in Israel.

Specializing in international and labor law, Desirée LeClercq is an assistant professor. She will also serve as a Dean Rusk International Law Center faculty co-director.

She comes to UGA from Cornell University, where she was an assistant professor in the School of Industrial Labor Relations and an associate faculty member in the Law School for four years. She won the 2020 MacIntyre Award for Exemplary Teaching & Advising and the 2022 Women’s Leadership Initiative Leading Ladies Award.

LeClercq’s scholarship has been published in the Fordham Law Review, the Virginia Journal of International Law, the Journal of International Economic Law, the Administrative Law Review, the American University Law Review and the Berkeley Journal of International Law. Notably, her Columbia Journal of Transnational Law article titled “A Worker-Centered Trade Policy” won the ComplianceNet Outstanding Junior Publication Award.

Previously she served as a director of labor affairs in the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative from 2016 to 2020. LeClercq also worked for nearly a decade as a legal officer at the International Labor Organization in Geneva, Switzerland, and served as staff counsel for the chairman of the National Labor Relations Board.

She earned her B.A. with high honors from Indiana University and her J.D. with high honors from the University of Texas, where she was the articles and notes editor for the Texas International Law Journal.

Meighan Parker joined the law school faculty as an assistant professor teaching Torts and The Law of American Health Care.

Previously, she was a Bigelow Teaching Fellow and Lecturer in Law at the University of Chicago Law School, where she taught Legal Research & Writing.

Before entering the teaching academy, Parker served as a managing associate at Sidley Austin and an associate at Ropes & Gray. Her practice primarily focused on a wide range of regulatory and compliance issues encountered by pharmaceutical and medical device companies regulated under the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act and related laws.

Parker’s research focuses on health law and policy, with an emphasis on the legal implications of novel telehealth and digital health technologies designed to democratize healthcare. Her scholarship includes an article in the Columbia Science and Technology Law Review titled “Come As You Are?: Democratizing Healthcare Through Black Church-Telehealth Initiatives.”

Parker earned her B.S. cum laude from Spelman College, her Master of Theological Studies from the Harvard Divinity School and her J.D. cum laude from the University of Alabama.