SLU LAW Adds Three Professors to the Faculty for the Fall

Kathryn Banks will join the Legal Clinics; Michael Duff will visit for the semester; and Dr. Afonso Seixas Nunes, S.J., will join the doctrinal faculty.

Saint Louis University School of Law is pleased to announce the appointment of two full-time professors and one visiting professor. Kathryn Banks, Michael Duff and Afonso Seixas Nunes, S.J., will join the faculty in the fall.

“The addition of these three outstanding faculty members to our law school community is an excellent development for SLU LAW,” said Dean William P. Johnson. “Each of them is a highly regarded teacher and scholar with an impressive track record and a national or international reputation. Our ability to recruit such remarkable talent to the SLU LAW community is a testament to the strong student body and an incredibly collegial faculty and staff. I could not be more pleased about their arrival and the positive impact they will have on this law school community.”

Kathryn Banks

Kathryn Banks joins SLU LAW having previously served as the director of the Children’s Rights Clinic at Washington University School of Law’s legal clinic. Her extensive work with children and youth advocacy includes time as the Legal Services Director for Voices for Children and an attorney in the Youth Advocacy Unit of the Missouri State Public Defender’s Office. She is an appointed member of the Missouri Supreme Court’s Committee on Practice & Procedures in Municipal Division Cases, having also been an appointed member of the Missouri Supreme Court’s Municipal Courts Working Group. She is also a board member of the National Association of Counsel for Children and the Clinical Legal Education Association. She received her J.D. from the University of Missouri-Columbia and an LL.M. from Loyola University Chicago.

“I am excited to begin my work at Saint Louis University School of Law in a community of students, faculty, and staff that I consider to be some of our greatest hometown heroes,” said Banks. “SLU LAW and the Jesuit commitment to service present new opportunities to expand my work on behalf of our area’s most vulnerable citizens, our children.”

Professor Banks will be directing a new a clinic addressing children's rights in the SLU LAW Legal Clinics.

Michael Duff

Professor Michael Duff is a visiting professor from University of Wyoming College of Law, where he has been tenured since 2012 and serves as Winston S. Howard Distinguished Professor of Law. He is a scholar-member of the Center for Progressive Reform and a member of the National Academy of Social Insurance. He is widely considered a national expert on workers’ compensation law and on the National Labor Relations Act. Professor Duff is the author of a workers’ compensation textbook and the co-author of a labor law textbook. Prior to academia, Professor Duff spent nearly a decade working as an attorney, adjudicative official and investigator in various National Labor Relations Board offices. He worked for two years as an associate attorney in a high-volume progressive law firm in Maine – McTeague, Higbee & MacAdam – where he represented injured workers and labor unions. He graduated in 1992 from Harvard Law School where he studied labor law. For 11 years prior to law school, Professor Duff was a Teamsters shop steward and blue-collar ramp service worker in the airline industry. 

“I am very excited to have the opportunity to visit SLU LAW and to work with established work law scholars in the highly regarded Wefel Center. I have followed the work of, in particular, Professors Miriam Cherry, Marcia McCormick and Matthew Bodie, for years. Furthermore, the work of Professor Ruqaiijah Yearby has become well known to me in recent months as she has become an important commentator during the pandemic, relentlessly highlighting the endemic racial disparities in the delivery of critical health care to workers and the general public. As the grandson of a Kentucky coal miner who died of black lung at the age of 52, I could not be more pleased to have the chance to work with this fine cohort of scholars within an institution explicitly guided by the deepest values in the Catholic Social Justice tradition.”

He will teach Torts and Workers’ Compensation in the fall.

Afonso Seixas Nunes, S.J.

Dr. Afonso Seixas Nunes, S.J., a Jesuit priest who was ordained in 2010, joins the faculty as a full-time professor from a recent appointment at Oxford Institute for Ethics, Laws and Armed Conflict (Oxford University). He is originally from Portugal and graduated in law from the Portuguese Catholic University (Porto Law School). He is also graduated in Philosophy (Braga) and Theology (Rome). He holds a Master’s degree from the London School of Economics, where he studied the U.S. involvement in Pakistan. He obtained his Ph.D. from University of Essex, where he researched the legitimacy and accountability for the development of autonomous weapons systems under international humanitarian law. He specializes in the use of force in international law and international humanitarian law and the challenges of new technologies of warfare for international law.

“When you want to pursue rigorous academic research, it is crucial to join a University and a department that thrives on excellence. I found that at SLU LAW,” Professor Seixas Nunes said of his reasons for joining the faculty. “Secondly, from all jobs interviews I went to, I felt the most welcomed by the faculty and students at SLU, and thirdly, 'emotional intuition,’ that is, you know that is the best place for you to share your research, to learn from others and to make a possible difference in the world of today.”

Seixas Nunes will teach International Law in the fall and both International Criminal Law and International Humanitarian Law in the spring.