Research

Alumni Giving Supports Students’ In-Depth Research with BU Law Faculty

The School of Law Fund and named funds directed to specific causes or in honor of cherished BU Law community members allow students to explore issues ranging from autonomous weapons to recent crackdowns on political protests.

In general, the tide has been going in the other direction. Since 2017, according to the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law’s US Protest Law Tracker, more than 20 states have enacted dozens of laws restricting people’s right to protest; so far in 2025, four such bills have been proposed at the federal level, including one that threatens the accreditation of colleges and universities based on their response to student protests. When Loor decided to take a closer look at the laws, she asked her research assistant, Lilibeth Chavez (’25), for help. Chavez was more than ready for the challenge.

In addition to scouring legislative records and case law for examples of restrictions following Black Lives Matter, anti-pipeline, and pro-Palestinian protests, Chavez came up with a creative way to critique the rationale for many of the anti-protest laws. Some of the laws’ proponents argue that the protesters’ actions are unpatriotic, but Chavez points out that protest and dissent have long been defining features of US patriotism. “How can we honor the true meaning of patriotism?” Chavez asks. “With protests expressing dissent or with unbridled loyalty to the status quo?”

She and Loor are now coauthoring a piece for the Erasmus Law Review on the patriotism of protests, and they presented their ideas at a workshop in Spain in April.

Chavez’s work with Loor is paid, supported by alumni giving to the School of Law Fund. In fact, many opportunities for joint student-faculty research are made possible by charitable gifts to that fund and other funds supporting specific issues or created in honor of cherished members of the BU Law community. The Ernest M. Haddad Faculty Support Fund and the Reproductive Justice Program Fund, for instance, both facilitate student research.

Faculty and student beneficiaries alike say such resources are invaluable, expanding opportunities for academic research, opening doors for young scholars interested in exploring dynamic legal issues, and facilitating collaborative learning between professors and their students.

“Getting involved in the production of new knowledge is one of the most critical and self-affirming parts of a law student’s education. It helps them find their voice and see how they can directly shape the development of ideas, legal doctrine and legislation, and general change in our society,” says Angela Onwuachi-Willig, dean and Ryan Roth Gallo Professor of Law.

History is replete with examples of law student scholars whose ideas helped to reshape our nation. Onwuachi-Willig points to the example of Pauli Murray, whose third-year student paper from Howard University School of Law was used by Thurgood Marshall, Charles Hamilton Houston, and Spottswood Robinson to devise the legal strategy that led to the landmark Brown v. Board of Education opinion, which held that state-mandated racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. After graduating from law school, Murray, who taught civil rights at BU Law for a year, continued to have an impact on the law, including through their fight to have “sex” added as a protected category (alongside race, color, religion, and national origin) in the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

“Critical ideas come from everywhere, especially from students,” Onwuachi-Willig says. “Students have literally helped to change law and our society with ideas that have come out of their research or collaborations on research. It’s important that we continue to give students many opportunities to see themselves as thinkers who can influence the future of legal doctrine, the legal profession, and the entire globe.”

Seeking Guardrails in Autonomous Weapons

After Tyler Roderick (’26), a veteran of the United States Marine Corps, reached out to Professor Erika R. George about possible research opportunities, the pair decided to examine lethal autonomous weapons through a human-rights-based risk assessment framework. Their goal is to highlight potentially relevant existing regulations and norms that might govern the development and use of such technologies in the private sector and among state actors.

George has applied a human rights lens to other industries, including in her 2021 book, Incorporating Rights: Strategies to Advance Corporate Accountability. 

Lethal autonomous weapons are “largely unregulated,” she says. “Our main thesis is we need a values-based approach to these weapons. As a former Marine working in aviation ordnance, Tyler brings a unique and important lens to our analysis of this issue.”

George and Roderick plan to coauthor a piece on the topic and presented their ideas earlier this month at an invitation-only economic and human security roundtable in London, co-hosted by Washington and Lee University School of Law’s Frances Lewis Law Center and the Oxford University Centre for Corporate Reputation. Roderick’s travel was supported by the Ernest M. Haddad Faculty Support Fund, which was created last year to honor Haddad, a 1964 graduate, who, for more than six decades, has supported the BU Law community as an alum, staff member, teacher, mentor, and friend. The fund has already raised more than $300,000. George is the inaugural Haddad Faculty Scholar, and Roderick is the first student supported by the fund.

Few understand the importance of supporting faculty and student research more than Haddad, who has left an impressive legacy at BU Law through the faculty and students he has mentored and supported over the years. After his first year at BU Law, he was “broke and in debt from college” and considered dropping out temporarily to work. Instead, his professor, the late Paul J. Liacos, hired him as an RA and convinced then-Dean Elwood Harrison Hettrick (’38) to increase his financial aid.

“That support gave me not only the financial resources to continue my legal education without interruption but also the opportunity to contribute to an excellent book, Evidence, and to develop a life-long friendship with a scholar-teacher who went on to become the chief justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court,” Haddad says.

When Haddad learned that a fund was to be created in his name, he asked that it be used to support faculty and student research in the field of human rights.

“My thought was, let’s get some help to the teachers but let it be focused on students at the same time—give them an opportunity to develop a closer mentor-mentee relationship with a faculty member, put some cash in their pockets,” he says.

George says support from the Haddad fund “makes collaborative learning possible.” “It enables us to nurture and fertilize the seed of an idea, and who knows where that will spread,” she says.

Assisting Reproductive Justice Advocates

Last summer, in a fellowship supported by the Reproductive Justice Program Fund, Chloe Buck (’26) helped prepare a white paper that has since been used by advocates seeking to debunk a centuries-old test used to determine whether a baby was born alive in criminal prosecutions against women whose pregnancies end in stillbirth or late miscarriage.

Buck’s work built on a 2020 paper by Professor Aziza Ahmed that examined use of the hydrostatic or floating lungs test. In the test, a forensic scientist places the infant’s lungs or pieces of the lungs in water; floating lungs are taken as proof that the baby took a breath and was born alive; sinking lungs are supposedly evidence that the baby died in utero.

Despite widespread doubts about validity of the test in the medical community, courts continue to rely on it. After the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, Ahmed anticipated that prosecutions of formerly pregnant women would be even more likely. She and a former colleague at Northeastern University School of Law, Daniel S. Medwed, decided to convene a working group of legal scholars, medical pathologists, and forensic scientists to try to discredit the floating lungs test once and for all.

The white paper Buck worked on has been circulated among groups who are actively litigating cases in which the test is being used. Buck was the first summer fellow supported by the Reproductive Justice Program Fund, which was initially created by Margaret (Peggy) Daley (’87) and Deborah E. Barnard (’87).

“None of this would have been possible without donor support,” Ahmed says.

Unparalleled Opportunities Offered through the Gifts of BU Law Alumni and Friends

For the students, the experience of working closely with subject matter experts is formative.

“It’s been an amazing opportunity that I would not have had if the school hadn’t been able to pay for it,” Roderick says.

Buck echoed that sentiment, saying she is “grateful” for how the generosity of BU Law donors allowed her the opportunity to work on research that she hopes “will have a real impact on the fight for reproductive justice” and enabled an experience that “significantly strengthened [her] legal research and writing skills.”

Chavez, a first-generation student from the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles County, also says that she would not have been able to conduct research and writing with Professor Loor if her position had not been supported by a fund. Chavez has been working as an RA for Loor since last year. Loor says that Chavez has been “incredibly diligent and thoughtful” in research, editing, and proofreading tasks but stresses that Chavez’s contributions to their forthcoming jointly authored paper are “a very different thing.”

“She’s not only contributing to the writing but also substantively contributing to the ideas,” Loor says. “It’s really exciting.”

Chavez is very proud of her work and impact and expresses deep gratitude for the gifts that opened up this opportunity to her.  “I’m very lucky to be where I am, but that doesn’t mean things are particularly easy,” she says. “This extra source of income has been very helpful.”

She says she never expected the kind of exposure she’s receiving because of her scholarly work with Loor.

The funds supporting their joint research, generously contributed by BU Law alumni and other community members, are “a commitment to inclusivity and the law,” Chavez says. “I’m just a kid from the Valley—I did not anticipate being where I am now; I’ve never traveled abroad or had my name on a paper. Overall, it just opens so many opportunities.”