The School of Law recently launched its Emerging Scholars initiative to bring accomplished practitioners to campus to hone their teaching and academic-writing skills during a two-year residency.

Alumna S. Jill Benton (J.D.’99) returned to Athens earlier this year to teach Criminal Procedure after working in the Federal Defender Program in Atlanta for almost 25 years. Most recently, she was the chief of the Capital Habeas Unit, where she led a team of attorneys, investigators, mitigation specialists, paralegals and support staff representing death-sentenced clients in habeas corpus and clemency proceedings. Prior to assuming the role of habeas unit chief, Benton practiced with the Federal Defender for more than 16 years.

Her career highlights include arguing before the en banc Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals on behalf of a client of 23 years and coauthoring the successful petition for writ of certiorari in Sears v. Upton and authoring the briefs in the ensuing federal habeas proceedings that resulted in her client’s death sentence being vacated.

Benton has served as an invited faculty member at the National Orientation Seminar for Assistant Federal Defenders from 2016 to 2023 and at the National Habeas Seminar on multiple occasions.

She earned her bachelor’s degree summa cum laude from Ohio University.

Shanée Brown became a member of the School of Law faculty earlier this year. She will teach the courses Evidence and Sex Crimes.

Before coming to the UGA campus, Brown served for six years as a staff attorney at The Bronx Defenders in New York where she managed a high-volume caseload representing indigent parents in abuse and neglect proceedings in the Bronx County Family Court. Previously, she worked as a fellow and staff attorney at the Safe Passage Project where she represented migrant children. She has also served as a pro bono trial attorney at The Children’s Law Center, representing juveniles in custody proceedings.

Brown’s academic teaching experience includes serving as a guest lecturer at the Columbia Law School and the Cardozo School of Law and as a teaching assistant at the Touro University Fuchsberg Law Center.

She writes in the areas of criminal law and procedure, family regulation law, abolition and constitutional law. Her scholarship has been published in the Public Interest Law Reporter and the Charlotte Law Review.

Brown earned her bachelor’s degree from Sarah Lawrence College and her law degree from Touro University.

Mary Yiyue Zhao joined the law school in the fall of 2023. Her teaching portfolio includes International Intellectual Property Law and International Business Transactions.

Previously, Zhao was an associate for approximately five years at Covington & Burling’s Palo Alto office, where she represented clients in commercial and intellectual property litigation. She served as a visitor at the Max Planck Institute Department of Ethics, Law and Politics during September 2018. She also has experience as a legal intern at the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law and as a research assistant at the International Law and Policy Institute.

Her scholarship includes: “Morals in Place of Markets: Courts’ Approach to Post-Sale Confusion” forthcoming in the Rutgers Law Review, “Investor-State Dispute Settlement Reform: Reconsidering the Multilateral Investment Court in the Context of Disputes Involving Intellectual Property” in the Columbia Journal of Law & the Arts and “Transparency in International Commercial Arbitration: Adopting a Balanced Approach” in the Virginia Journal of International Law.

She earned her bachelor’s degree with highest honors from Cornell University and both her law and master’s degrees from Stanford University.