Bridging Disciplines: Northwestern Pritzker Law JD-PhD Alumni Redefine the Intersection of Law and Academia

In May 2024, Ryan Whalen (JD-PhD ’16), director of the University of Hong Kong’s Center for Interdisciplinary Legal Studies, helped organize the school’s first “Law &…” conference on interdisciplinary legal research. “The goal was to get people from as many different places in as many different backgrounds who would talk about the benefits and the challenges interdisciplinarity brings to their research programs,” he says. Whalen quickly thought of two experts to invite: his fellow alumni from the Northwestern Pritzker Law JD-PhD program, Raff Donelson (JD-PhD ’17) and John Meixner (JD ’12; PhD ’13).

“John is a talented psychologist and does work that you don’t often see at law schools,” says Whalen. “Raff does law and philosophy. He’s interested in measurement and how we know things, and that’s super interesting from a methodological perspective.”

Northwestern Pritzker Law’s JD-PhD program, in collaboration with the Graduate School and Kellogg School of Management, is designed for students interested in careers where degrees in law, teaching, and research can enhance their background, such as academia or policy research. Alumni have pursued a variety of PhD degrees to accompany their JDs, including African-American studies; computer science engineering; economics and finance; media, technology, and society; political science; psychology; and religion. The integrated, accelerated program is designed to allow students to complete both degrees more effectively (typically six to seven years) than through consecutive programs (three years for a JD in addition to four to six years for a PhD).

Whalen, Donelson, and Meixner’s paths from Northwestern Pritzker Law to their careers in academia and law exemplify the variety of interdisciplinary opportunities available to students who embark on a JD-PhD at the Law School.

From the lab to the Law Review

Ryan Whalen was interested in policy and law, but his career goals focused more on research rather than practicing law. “I wanted to understand the law, but I wanted to do research,” he says.  He was drawn to Northwestern Pritzker Law’s integrated offerings as well as its funding: it is the country’s most financially generous JD-PhD program, typically providing full funding for seven academic years. “I’m from a working-class, first-gen college background, and so taking on law school debt to me, especially American law school debt, was a scary prospect,” says Whalen, who is from Nova Scotia.

Whalen concentrated his PhD research in a lab conducting computational social science, where his advisor, Noshir Contractor, encouraged him devise his own project (rather than assist on one of Contractor’s research grant projects). Whalen says this was a “very formative experience” that helped him to grow as an independent researcher while leveraging data access and skills training. Whalen wrote his dissertation using patent data to measure innovation. Today, his academic research focuses on a data-driven approach to understanding the law and legal systems, with a particular focus on intellectual property law and innovation policy. Whalen says his time in the lab “is absolutely essential to most of the work I do today.”

Another formative experience for Whalen was his time as the editor-in-chief of the Law School’s Law Review from 2014-2015, which he says showed him “how the sausage is made in the context of legal scholarship.” The role taught him diplomacy and working in a managerial team, which was especially welcome because “for the most part, grad school is very solitary.” At the Review, he assigned tasks and made collaborative decisions, giving him experience he uses in his current position, especially in his committee work.

Whalen joined the University of Hong Kong as an associate law professor in 2022. He says that he directly applies what he learned at Northwestern Pritzker Law—the value of interdisciplinarity—to his daily work. “When it comes to actually investing in programs and structuring institutions in ways that foster interdisciplinarity, many institutions don’t do a good job of that. But Northwestern does. It is something that attracted me to the program that I continue to use and is a core part of my academic identity.”

The legal theory student becomes the teacher

After earning his master’s degree in philosophy from the University of Chicago, Raff Donelson knew he wanted to be a researcher, and with academic experience in biomedical ethics, he knew he wanted to conduct research that crossed the border between philosophy and law. “To talk about the ethics of certain things, it helped to know about legal developments in those areas.” He wanted to remain in Chicago, and Northwestern Pritzker Law’s program funding made it an easy decision. “Given that I wanted to be a researcher and not, say, a corporate attorney, I was motivated to avoid the cost of law school.”

Donelson’s approach to the combined program was to begin in the philosophy PhD program and then transition so that he could take the GRE and the LSAT on his own timeline. As the Law School’s first JD-PhD in philosophy, Donelson cites Jim Lindgren’s Legal Scholarship Program, a course full of helpful guest speakers, as an especially useful entrée to his law education. “It was a nuts-and-bolts course on how legal scholarship is produced, how people actually get jobs as legal academics, and answering the question of ‘what does this all look like’?” As someone with expertise in another field, it quickly filled knowledge gaps he didn’t know he had. “How do you get a job and give a job talk, and what does that look like? It’s quite different in the legal field than in philosophy, as it turns out.”

Criminal theory was especially influential. “I went into law school knowing that I wanted to write about legal theory. But it is quite unusual, in the United States at least, to hire someone merely to teach legal theory. So, if you want to teach in a law school, the path I wanted to take, you have to be able to teach something else that’s a larger enrollment class.” Donelson’s course covered criminal procedure incidents like the police killing of Michael Brown, which at the time was not yet national news. “As a Black man and living in America, I had all sorts of thoughts about policing and justice in policing. Taking this course and actually learning how the law works [in the United States] was informative.”

Donelson currently teaches criminal procedure at Chicago-Kent College of Law, as well as criminal law and legal theory, a career that gives him much flexibility and autonomy to think about what he’d like to pursue. His supportive JD-PhD cohort helped him along his career path. Compared with people getting a single degree, “You have a different trajectory in terms of timeline, what you’re doing, what you’re thinking about, how you’re trying to get a job, who you’re trying to network with outside of the school. So, it draws you quite close together.” He says that both informal and formal community-building opportunities in the JD-PHD, such as weekly lunches, gave him and his classmates a chance to form a supportive connection over “opportunities to ask questions about things about this weird path that you were on,” he says.

There’s no glossing over the workload, coordination—and ensuing stress—that come with pursuing two advanced degrees at once, but, Donelson says, he did not feel alone. “There were various mentors that I had who were willing to talk to me about how to cope with various parts of this. Shari Diamond is one such person, and she was really wonderful,” he says. ““Northwestern Pritzker Law is a collaborative and cooperative place.””

A detour through the court

When John Meixner, a psychology major, was considering graduate school, he focused on neuroscience programs at institutions like Northwestern. He never considered law school until he learned that his main principal investigator, Peter Rosenfeld, worked on law-related neuroscience. “He researched the neural basis of deception and other areas with a strong connection to law,” says Meixner, now an assistant professor at the University of Georgia School of Law.

During a recruitment visit, Meixner learned about the JD-PhD program from student Destiny Peery (JD-PhD ’14), now managing director of the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race & Justice at Harvard Law School. “I was really interested in the intersection between law and psychology,” said Meixner, and so, like Donelson, he transitioned from PhD to the joint program after taking the LSAT.

Meixner was the first JD-PhD student to focus on neuroscience, which he was “was very fun. I got to think a lot about exactly what I wanted my dissertation [‘Neuroscience Applications in Court’] to look like, and there was no set path to follow.” Following graduation, he planned to go into academia after clerking for one year on the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in Baltimore. In the meantime, his wife applied to and was accepted into medical school. “I ended up following her career for a while and delaying my academic path, which I think turned out to be a real benefit for me because I got to learn a lot about the on-the-ground practice of law,” he says.

In Michigan while his wife attended medical school, Meixner held a second clerkship with a district judge in Detroit, worked in a private law firm in Ann Arbor, and worked in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Detroit. “I was a federal prosecutor for about five and a half years before becoming a professor at Georgia. I got to try cases and go to the grand jury and all these sorts of things that most academics rarely did. It’s been helpful for my long-term career.”

Meixner says he puts his skills from the JD-PhD program to use to this day, particularly those that draw on his methodological background. Currently he is researchinghow mitigating facts about defendants affect judges’ sentencing decisions.“I do a lot of hand coding of data sets: learning how to work with data was integral to everything I do now.” He also writes about neuro law and teaches a course called Law and the Mind. “A lot of being a lawyer is taking complicated topics and explaining them to other people in clear, straightforward ways. It’s very similar to conducting research.”

Meixner agrees with Donelson that the Law School fostered close relationships. When Meixner searched for jobs after his wife finished her residency, he reached out to professors Shari Diamond, who then directed the JD-PhD program, and Jay Koehler. “They spent a ton of time reading drafts, talking with me, and Shari set up a practice job talk. I was a student from 10 years ago that I’m sure not everyone remembered, and a bunch of people took the time to give me helpful feedback,” he says. “They didn’t have to do that, and it was very kind for them to do it. Northwestern is committed to interdisciplinary work and to the success of students.”

Months after the Hong Kong “Law & …” conference, Whalen deemed the event a success. “It brought together a diverse collection of interdisciplinary legal scholars from around the world to discuss legal interdisciplinarity per se in a way that doesn’t happen very often.” He reflected on how his fellow alumni’s varied backgrounds enhanced each other’s work. “Raff, John, and I are trained in quite different PhD fields. This means that we each approach scholarship, question formation, and research methods in distinct ways. It is my hope that learning about these differences can in turn help nurture more careful and intentional scholars.”