This academic year, the law school is excited to welcome two new tenured faculty members. They are high-impact, experienced professors renowned for their teaching and scholarly rigor, with expertise in topics including civil rights, elections, and criminal justice.
I am incredibly excited for the deep expertise and innovative thinking they will bring to our community.
Dean Bobby Chesney
“I am thrilled to be able to announce the additions of Jamein Cunningham and Joshua Sellers to our faculty” says Dean Bobby Chesney. “They are both brilliant scholars and fantastic classroom teachers, and I am incredibly excited for the deep expertise and innovative thinking they will bring to our community.”
Adds Chesney, “Jamien’s economic analysis of laws and legal institutions gives him a unique and powerful perspective on matters relating to policing, civil rights, and race. Josh, for his part, is similarly impactful with his acclaimed work on pressing questions of election law.”
Cunningham and Sellers each arrived in Austin this summer.
Jamein P. Cunningham
Assistant Professor Jamein P. Cunningham studies the intersections of four themes: discrimination at the institutional level, access to justice, crime and criminal justice, and racial and economic inequality.
“I’m excited to join UT, and I’m most looking forward to meeting and working with faculty and students and starting new projects to examine the efficacy of oversight in the broader U.S. criminal legal system,” says Cunningham, who holds a joint appointment with the LBJ School.
Cunningham was a faculty member at Cornell University previously, and holds professional memberships in the American Economic Association, the Southern Economic Association, the American Law and Economics Association, the Racial Democracy, Crime, and Justice Network, and the National Economic Association.
His research has been published in journals including the American Economic Association Paper and Proceedings, Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, and the Review of Black Political Economy.
Cunningham is a recipient of the Rackham Merit Fellowship and the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute in Child Health and Development Fellowship. Before receiving a Ph.D. at the University of Michigan, Cunningham completed his undergraduate degree at Michigan State University and a master’s in economics at the University of North Texas.
Joshua Sellers
Professor Joshua Sellers teaches and writes in the areas of election law, constitutional law, race and the law, and American politics. He will be teaching Constitutional Law next spring.
“I’m absolutely thrilled to join Texas Law, which has an exceptional student body and an intellectually stellar faculty,” Sellers says. “And as a scholar of election law, I’m excited to be in Texas, given its enormous influence on American democracy.”
Sellers has published in leading journals, including the Stanford Law Review, Vanderbilt Law Review, University of Pennsylvania Law Review, and New York University Law Review. He won the Distinguished Scholarship Award in 2021 from the AALS Section on Election Law and in 2022 he was awarded the prestigious Berlin Prize by the American Academy in Berlin for representing the highest standards of excellence in his field.
Before entering academia, Sellers was a law clerk to Judge Rosemary Barkett of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, and a litigation associate at Jenner & Block LLP in Washington, D.C.
Sellers holds a J.D. and a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Chicago, where he served as an articles editor of the University of Chicago Law Review, and a B.A. from the University of Michigan.
These three new faculty members will bring their own unique intellectual gifts to Texas Law’s community.
“They have each demonstrated excellence in teaching and scholarship, a commitment to interdisciplinary collaboration, and passion for new ideas,” says Melissa Wasserman, the school’s associate dean for research. “We are delighted to welcome them to Texas Law.”