Northwestern Pritzker Law Welcomes New Faculty Hires 

Northwestern Pritzker School of Law is pleased to welcome eight new faculty members as the 2025-2026 academic year begins: Professors Myriam Gilles, Jill Horwitz, Jonathan Manes, Andrew McKinley, Chika Okafor, Anna Zaret, Danielle Hamilton, and Joy Whitfield. They are each accomplished legal scholars who will enrich our students’ learning experience, and we are excited for them to join our community.

To learn more about our new faculty, read their profiles below:  

Myriam Gilles joins the faculty of Northwestern Pritzker Law as the Catharine Waugh McCulloch Professor of Law, after serving on the faculty of the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law since 1997, where she held the Paul R. Verkuil Research Chair in Public Law. Professor Gilles teaches and writes in the areas of civil procedure, complex litigation and torts, and is currently the fifth most-cited civil procedure scholar in the country. Her work has appeared in the nation’s leading law reviews, and she has testified before Congress multiple times as an expert on forced arbitration and consumer protection. Her scholarship has been supported by the Robert L. Habush Endowment Fund of the American Association for Justice, and she has received various honors, including the Pound Civil Justice Institute’s Award for Best Article (2018) and the Berkeley Civil Justice Research Initiative’s Best Publication Prize (2025). Professor Gilles has held visiting appointments at the University of Virginia School of Law and at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School and began her career as a litigation associate at Kirkland & Ellis. 

Danielle Hamilton joins Northwestern Pritzker Law as Clinical Assistant Professor of Law, Director of the Carter G. Phillips Center for Supreme Court & Appellate Advocacy. Prior to joining Northwestern Pritzker Law, she was a partner at Loevy & Loevy, a plaintiff’s civil rights law firm, where she represented clients in a wide range of cases including wrongful convictions, excessive force, sexual assault by law enforcement, and protestors of police brutality in June of 2020. Prior to that, Professor Hamilton was a law clerk to the Honorable Barrington D. Parker, Jr. on the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. She also litigated civil rights cases as a Johnnie L. Cochran Fellow at Neufeld Scheck & Brustin, LLP in New York City and worked on juvenile legal system reform at the Illinois Justice Project. 

Jill Horwitz joins Northwestern Pritzker Law as the Trobman Innovation Professor of Law with a joint appointment as a Professor of Emergency Medicine at the Feinberg School of Medicine, after serving as the Jack N. Pritzker Visiting Professor of Law at Northwestern Pritzker Law. Her research and teaching portfolio includes Health Law and Policy, Nonprofit Law, and Torts. She is a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and was the Reporter on the American Law Institute’s Restatement First of Charitable Nonprofit Organizations. She joined UCLA in 2012, where she was the David Sanders Professor in Law and Medicine, founded the Lowel Milken Center for Philanthropy and Nonprofits, and was Professor of Public Affairs (by courtesy) at the Luskin School of Public Affairs. She was previously Professor of Law at the University of Michigan. Horwitz was a law clerk to the Honorable Norman Stahl of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. She earned her JD, MPP, and PhD from Harvard University, and she earned her BA in History at Northwestern. 

Jonathan Manes joins Northwestern Pritzker Law as a Clinical Associate Professor of Law with the Roderick and Solange MacArthur Justice Center Civil Rights Litigation Clinic in the Bluhm Legal Clinic. He served as a Senior Counsel at the MacArthur Justice Center, where he led litigation on surveillance technologies, police misconduct, and unlawful detention. He was counsel in high-profile cases challenging Chicago’s use of ShotSpotter; a rarely-invoked immigrant detention provision of the PATRIOT Act; and a wrongful conviction arising from a coercive interrogation. He has also worked extensively on issues of government transparency, information law, freedom of speech, and voting rights. Manes has taught at Northwestern Pritzker Law as an Adjunct Professor for four years, co-teaching the Media Law & Government Transparency Practicum. He previously taught at the University at Buffalo School of Law, where he founded the Civil Liberties & Transparency Clinic, and at Yale Law School, where he was a clinical fellow in the Media Freedom & Information Clinic. His scholarship on surveillance, secrecy, and democratic accountability has appeared in the Georgetown Law Journal, Berkeley Technology Law Journal, and Yale Law Journal Forum. He clerked for Justice Morris J. Fish of the Supreme Court of Canada and holds degrees from Yale Law School, the London School of Economics, and Columbia University.

Andrew McKinley joins Northwestern Pritzker Law as Assistant Professor of Law, with a courtesy appointment at Northwestern Kellogg School of Management. He applies empirical methods to issues relating to corporate law, corporate finance, and energy. His work explores how market forces impact energy and environmental regulation. He received his PhD from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and his JD from Stanford Law School, before which he worked in finance. 

Chika O. Okafor joins Northwestern Pritzker Law as an Assistant Professor of Law, with courtesy appointments in the Economics Department in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences and in the Management & Organizations Department in the Kellogg School of Management. He will also serve as a Fellow in the Institute for Policy Research. As an economist and a lawyer, he uses the tools of economics, law, and public policy to explore foundational matters of justice. A former consultant with McKinsey & Company, he is also a former attorney in the London office of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP. As a public policy practitioner, he has led elements of local gun violence prevention efforts with the Chicago Public Schools, supported national economic and environmental policy with the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, and promoted international human rights with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Simon-Skjodt Center for the Prevention of Genocide. Okafor earned his PhD in economics from Harvard University, his JD from Yale Law School, and his BA from Stanford University. 

Joy Whitfield joins Northwestern Pritzker Law as the Access Services Librarian at the Pritzker Legal Research Center. In this role, she ensures students, faculty, and staff have access to the PLRC’s services and resources. Prior to coming to Northwestern, Joy worked as the Collection & Access Services Librarian at the North Carolina Central University School of Law Library, and as the Access Services Assistant and Student Manager at Duke University’s Perkins Library. Joy received her MLIS in 2019 from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She is a current member of the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) and a former member of the Southeastern Chapter of the American Association of Law Libraries (SEAALL), where she served on several committees.  

Anna Zaret joins Northwestern Pritzker Law as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Law for a two-year term. She is a PhD candidate (ABD) in Jurisprudence and Social Policy at Berkeley Law, and her research and teaching interests include evidence, criminal procedure, and health law. Before coming to Northwestern, she was a Fellow at both the Law, Economics, and Politics Center at Berkeley Law and the UCSF–UC Law Consortium on Law, Science, and Health Policy. She previously clerked for the Honorable Laurel Beeler on the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. Her recent work has appeared in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review and California Law Review. She earned her JD, magna cum laude, from UC Law San Francisco, where she served as the Senior Articles Editor of the UC Law Journal and received the Tobriner Social Justice Fellowship.