“It is such an honor to work with our wonderful students, year after year, and my colleagues are world class,” said Arato. “Both make the Law School such an exciting place. It is a privilege to codirect the Block Center, which is its own special faculty and student community dedicated to transnational business regulation and international economic law.”
A prominent leader in his field, Arato also serves on the Executive Council of the American Society of International Law (ASIL), as co-chair for the ASIL International Economic Law Interest Group, and as a member of the Institute for Transnational Arbitration Academic Council. Since 2018, he has served as an observer delegate (on behalf of ASIL) to the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law Working Group III.
Before joining the Brooklyn Law School faculty in 2015, Professor Arato was an associate-in-law at Columbia Law School. He previously worked as an associate in the international arbitration group at Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer.
Arato received his J.S.D. from Columbia Law School, J.D. and LL.M. from NYU School of Law, M.Phil. from University of Cambridge, and B.A. from Columbia University.
“I’m grateful to Brooklyn Law School for the opportunity to work toward and achieve this milestone in my legal career,” said Brown. “The best part of my job is seeing my 1Ls evolve from novice legal writers into artful communicators. For an educator, there is nothing more fulfilling than watching students take intellectual risks, collaborate with one another, and experiment with amplifying their voices authentically.”
A prolific author and leader in the national movement to address law student and lawyer wellness, Brown recently published her sixth book, Untangling Fear in Lawyering: A Four-Step Journey Toward Powerful Advocacy (ABA Publishing, 2019). Her previous book, The Introverted Lawyer: A Seven-Step Journey Toward Authentically Empowered Advocacy (ABA Publishing, 2017), explored the positive role of introversion in effective lawyering and how law students and attorneys can harness that power.
Prior to joining the Law School in 2016, Brown was on the faculty at New York Law School and the Chapman University Dale E. Fowler School of Law in California. She has more than two decades of experience in law practice. She was of counsel with Moore & Lee, a litigation firm in Northern Virginia and New York City, where she handled all aspects of litigation and arbitration of complex construction contract and building development disputes. Before that, she was an associate at Thacher, Proffitt & Wood, and at Watt, Tieder, Hoffar & Fitzgerald, in Washington, D.C.
Brown received her bachelor’s degree in foreign affairs and French literature from the University of Virginia, and J.D. from the University of Virginia School of Law.
In particular, she studies bottom-up interventions in the criminal legal system, such as bail funds, copwatching, courtwatching, and participatory defense, asking how these real-life interventions should inform our conceptions of the design of criminal justice institutions, the discourse of constitutional rights, and the meaning of democratic justice. Simonson has penned op-eds and been quoted frequently in the media about recent efforts to roll back New York’s new bail reform law.
Her law review articles have appeared in the Harvard Law Review, Columbia Law Review, California Law Review, and Michigan Law Review. Simonson’s scholarship has been cited twice by the U.S. Supreme Court and was designated “Must Read” by the NACDL Getting Scholarship into Courts Project.
Her forthcoming article in the Yale Law Journal, Police Reform Through a Power Lens, examines the movement towards establishing new governance arrangements that shift power over policing to those who have been most harmed by mass criminalization and incarceration.
She founded and directs the Law School’s Pretrial Justice Fellowship, which offers students the opportunity to do pro bono work on issues of bail reform and advocacy for the Brooklyn Community Bail Fund.
Simonson was previously an Acting Assistant Professor of Lawyering at New York University School of Law and a public defender with the Bronx Defenders. She clerked for the Hon. Barrington D. Parker Jr., U.S. Court of Appeals, Second Circuit. Simonson holds a B.A. from Yale University and a J.D. from Harvard University.