Issue 73 - Stanford Lawyer - Stanford University

30
FALL
2005
NEW FACULTY
Political Science Scholar Daniel Ho Brings
Empirical Expertise to Stanford
The day in 1989 that the Berlin Wall fell, Daniel Ho was a 10-year-old living in
Sandhausen, West Germany, with his parents. “There were celebrations all over
Germany,” he said. “It was very exciting. I remember being out on the street,
throwing firecrackers.”
That event, along with the experience of growing up in Germany during
the Cold War, sparked in Ho a fervid interest in politics. His interest took him to the University
of California, Berkeley, where he earned a bachelor’s in political science, then to Harvard and Yale,
where he earned, respectively, a PhD in political science and a JD.
Now it has taken him to Stanford Law School, where he will start as an assistant professor in the
fall of 2006. Ho is spending this year clerking for Judge Stephen F. Williams of the U.S. Court of
Appeals, District of Columbia Circuit.
Ho has made empirical research the focus of his studies. One product of his research was a
series of articles on how ballot format affects voting. He and Kosuke Imai, assistant professor in the
Department of Politics at Princeton, showed that roughly 3 percent of voters in California primary
elections chose candidates simply because the candidates were listed at the top of the ballot. “Over
10 percent of primary races are won by margins that are smaller than such ballot effects,” he noted.
Ho also examined UCLA School of Law professor Richard H. Sander’s recent claim that affirmative
action causes African-Americans to increasingly fail the bar. In the Yale Law Journal, Ho showed
that Sander’s analysis incorrectly controlled for law school grades. “The same student would generally
earn worse grades in a higher tier law school,” he said. For black students with similar qualifications
upon law school admission, says Ho, there’s no evidence that going to a higher tier law school
will hurt their chance of passing the bar.
Ho says he is thrilled to be moving back to the Bay Area. “I’m excited to start teaching and doing
research at Stanford. The university has an amazing faculty and student body.”—Mandy Erickson
William Koski (PhD ’03) Named School’s First
Clinical Professor
As an incoming University of Michigan freshman, William S. Koski (PhD ’03)
had never taken calculus, read the classics or even heard about AP classes. “These
things simply weren’t available at my high school” in Ishpeming, Michigan, a
small town in the Upper Peninsula, said Koski. “And I wanted to do something to
fix those inequalities.”
His college experience of tutoring students in a juvenile detention center, some of whom couldn’t
read, only enhanced his desire to level the educational playing field. “Education is a civil right,” he
said. “If we believe that schooling is our society’s mechanism for social mobility, we must recognize
the need for reform.” Koski, director of the Youth and Education Law Clinic, has promoted education
rights through the clinic, which helps low-income children in Bay Area school districts. And now he
has received his own promotion: this fall he became professor of law (teaching), making him the first
clinical professor at the law school.
Koski attended the University of Michigan Law School right out of college, always intending
to fight for the underdog. Following a stint with Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP, in San
Francisco, he earned a PhD at Stanford’s School of Education while volunteering at the East Palo
Alto Community Law Project. After teaching Stanford law students as a clinical instructor at the Law
Project, Koski was hired by the law school as an associate professor (teaching) to launch the Youth and
Education Law Clinic.