New faculty

Indiana Law welcomes seven new faculty in 2023

In one of its most productive hiring seasons in history, the Indiana University Maurer School of Law will have seven new faculty members beginning in fall 2023.

Valena Beety, Yvette Butler, Cindy Cho, Gabrielle Goodwin, Andrew Hammond, Jenn Oliva, and Cindy Williams comprise an impressive incoming class of highly regarded scholars and teachers.

“This incoming cohort is one of the most impressive we’ve ever brought to Bloomington and a clear sign that this Law School is committed to finding solutions to the most pressing challenges facing society,” said Indiana Law Dean Christiana Ochoa.

“The addition of Valena, Jenn, and Yvette will give us one of the strongest criminal law programs in the country. Andrew is one of the country’s best and brightest scholars in the area of poverty and administrative law. Cindy Cho and Gabe Goodwin are going to help improve our legal research and writing offerings, and Cindy Williams is considered one of the world’s leading authorities on corporate regulation and governance. To bring them all to Indiana University is a credit to the strength of our school and the hard work of our hiring committee.”

Hammond and Cindy Williams began their full-time roles with the school in January, while the other five will start in August.

This incoming cohort is one of the most impressive we’ve ever brought to Bloomington and a clear sign that this Law School is committed to finding solutions to the most pressing challenges facing society.
Christiana Ochoa, Dean

Valena Beety

Valena Beety will join Indiana Law from Arizona State University Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law, where she is a professor and the deputy director of the Academy for Justice, a criminal justice center connecting research with policy reform. Previously, Beety served as a law professor and the founding director of the West Virginia Innocence Project at the West Virginia University College of Law. Her experiences as a federal prosecutor in Washington, D.C., and as an innocence litigator in Mississippi and West Virginia, shape her research and writing on wrongful convictions, forensic evidence, the opioid crisis and incarceration. She is the co-editor of the Wrongful Convictions Reader and the Scientific Evidence Treatise, and author of the book Manifesting Justice: Wrongly Convicted Women Reclaim Their Rights (Kensington Books 2022).

Yvette Butler

Yvette Butler is currently an assistant professor of law at the University of Mississippi School of Law. Her scholarship examines how the law and theories underlying lawmaking protect or hinder the survival and resistance strategies of marginalized groups, particularly illustrated by people who engage in sex work. Her areas of focus are Constitutional Law, Jurisprudence and Theories of Collective Liberation (particularly Race and Gender), Criminal Law (particularly transformative justice and penal abolition), Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, and Work Law. She has engaged in state and federal civil litigation related to police misconduct, family law, criminal record expungement, and more.

Cindy Cho

Cindy Cho is a former Assistant U.S. Attorney with the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Indiana, where she investigated and prosecuted a wide range of federal criminal cases, including health care fraud, financial fraud, obstruction, and child exploitation. From 2022-23 Cho was on detail to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia, where she investigated and prosecuted defendants involved in the January 6, 2021 siege of the U.S. Capitol. A 2008 graduate of the Law School, Cho has led an impressive career in a short period of time. She clerked for the Hon. Danny C. Reeves of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky before earning a Fulbright Grant to Namibia from the U.S. Department of State.

Gabrielle Goodwin

Gabrielle Goodwin's research and teaching interests focus on legal writing, discourse analysis, and cultural heritage law. Professor Goodwin has a graduate degree in Linguistics, and she has completed PhD coursework in applied linguistics. As part of a USAID-funded and IU-directed program, Goodwin spent two years in the Republic of Macedonia, helping to establish a new tri-lingual university. While in law school, Professor Goodwin was a semifinalist in the inaugural National Cultural Heritage Law Moot Court Competition and was a student editor on the Seventh Circuit Review. She also completed internships at the EEOC, Chicago, and the Law Offices of Chicago-Kent, practicing employment discrimination and civil rights litigation. Goodwin was appointed director of the Law School's Graduate Legal Studies program in 2016 and is responsible for curriculum development, recruiting, and academic advising for the Law School's graduate studies programs.

Andrew Hammond

Andrew Hammond writes and teaches in the areas of administrative law, civil procedure, and poverty law. His scholarship focuses on how agencies, courts, and legislatures respond to poor people’s claims. His articles have appeared in or are forthcoming in the California Law Review, the Michigan Law Review, the Northwestern University Law Review, and the Yale Law Journal, as well as other publications. In 2021, one of his papers won the American Constitution Society’s Richard D. Cudahy Writing Prize for Regulatory and Administrative Law, and another won the Call for Papers Competition of the Southeastern Association of Law Schools (SEALS). He serves on the Executive Committee for both the Civil Procedure and the Poverty Law Sections of the Association of American Law Schools. He is an Affiliate Scholar of Georgetown Law’s Center on Poverty and Inequality (GCPI). Before joining Indiana Law, he was an assistant professor of law and then an associate professor of law at the University of Florida Levin College of Law. Hammond also previously taught in the College and the Law School at the University of Chicago.

Jenn Oliva

Jenn Oliva’s research and teaching interests include health law and policy, privacy law, evidence, torts, and complex litigation. She is a United States Army veteran who serves as Senior Scholar at Georgetown Law’s O’Neill Institute for National & Global Health Law and on the Science & Policy Advisory Council of the National Pain Advocacy Center. She is an honors graduate of Georgetown University Law Center, where she was a Public Interest Law Scholar and Executive Notes & Comments Editor of the Georgetown Law Journal. Prior to attending law school, Oliva earned her master’s degree from the University of Oxford and undergraduate degree from the United States Military Academy. While a cadet at West Point, she was selected for the Rhodes and Truman Scholarships. After law school, Oliva served as a federal appellate law clerk to the Honorable Stephanie K. Seymour on the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit and the Honorable Thomas L. Ambro on the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.

Cindy Williams

Cindy Williams writes in the areas of securities law, corporate law, corporate responsibility, comparative corporate governance and regulatory theory, often in interdisciplinary collaborations with professors in anthropology, economic sociology, and organizational psychology. Her book The Embedded Firm: Corporate Governance, Labor, And Finance Capitalism, co-edited with Osgoode Professor Peer Zumbansen, was published in 2011 by Cambridge University Press and was featured at the Society for Socio-Economics (SASE) Annual Conference in 2012 at MIT. Previously, she served the Osgoode Hall Law School as the Osler Chair in Business Law from 2013 to 2022, a position she also held from 2007 to 2009. Williams also engages in policy work through her board membership in the Network for Sustainable Financial Markets, a think-tank of academics and financial market participants; the Climate Bonds Initiative, an NGO established to create a new asset class, Climate Bonds, in order to finance the transition to a low-carbon economy; and as a member of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Environmental Finance Advisory Board.