Issue 73 - Stanford Lawyer - Stanford University

NEW FACULTY
31
STANFORD
LAWYER
As director of the clinic, Koski teaches a class on law and education policy, supervises students
representing clinic clients, and oversees complex school reform litigation. In addition, he and the students
influence education policy at the state and local level through research and advocacy: some of
the recommendations made by his clinic were incorporated into California’s Senate Bill 1895, which
provided for mental health services for disabled kids. It was passed in 2004.
“Schooling has such a deep and lasting impact on people,” Koski said. “Everyone deserves a firstrate
education.”—Mandy Erickson
Environmental Expert Margaret Caldwell ’85
Promoted to Senior Lecturer
Margaret “Meg” Caldwell ’85, who came of age with the ecology movement, was
forever imprinted with a lasting desire to fight for the environment. “I grew up in
the ’60s,” explained Caldwell, the director of the Environmental and Natural
Resources Law & Policy Program at Stanford Law School. “That was the awakening
of environmentalism. I decided in the sixth grade that I wanted to be an
environmental lawyer, and I never wavered in my goal.”
Not only did Caldwell become an environmental lawyer, but she now chairs one of the most powerful
land use agencies in the nation, the California Coastal Commission, which has broad powers to
regulate California’s coastline. This fall Caldwell was promoted to the position of senior lecturer at
Stanford Law School. Caldwell started her career with Bingham McCutchen LLP in San Francisco,
where she represented land owners in cleaning up superfund sites. She later joined the City of
Saratoga (California) Planning Commission. “That’s where I cut my teeth on land use issues,” she said.
Since joining the law school in 1994, Caldwell has spent much of her time compiling a collection
of business-school-style case studies of environmental and natural resources law. Teaching with case
studies, Caldwell said, is a more effective teaching tool: “It allows students to discover the law for
themselves and learn how to become problem solvers.”—Mandy Erickson
International Law Scholar Helen Stacy Promoted
To Senior Lecturer
In the late 1980s, Helen Stacy was a barrister in London, struggling to prosecute
defendants being carted from jail to jail. Initially sent from her native Australia to
extradite an alleged drug trafficker for trial, Stacy noted the differences between
standards in the Australian, British, and European legal systems.
Later, as a professor in the Faculty of Law at Queensland University of Technology
in Brisbane, she researched the differences between legal systems, receiving a scholarship to
study in Germany and teaching in Indonesia and South Africa. “It’s fascinating to watch the centripetal
pull on one country’s legal performance because of standards in neighboring countries,” she said.
Stacy has brought this fascination to Stanford, where she has taught international human rights
and international jurisprudence at the law school. Her promotion this year to senior lecturer at the
law school gives her a stronger platform from which to teach. Part of Stacy’s work is comparing the
efforts of Romania, Mexico, and Thailand in improving their court systems and their policing.
Stacy is also studying the problem of applying international standards to different cultures in a book
she is writing, Human Rights and Globalization (Stanford University Press, 2006). “I am making the
argument that regional courts like the European, Inter-American, and African systems, and hopefully
one day also, an Asian system are a linchpin to better human rights,” Stacy said.—Mandy Erickson