Wake Forest Law Welcomes Three New Professors
Wake Forest Law is thrilled to welcome three new faculty members to our community: Assistant Professor Nia Johnson, Teaching Professor Wayne Logan, and Assistant Professor Abel Rodríguez.
Nia Johnson
Professor Nia Johnson, who will be teaching torts and bioethics in the law, is joining us from Duke Law, where she was a visiting assistant professor. Her scholarship lies at the intersection of health law, bioethics, and race and the law. Her work studies discrimination in healthcare delivery, public health infrastructure development, and political forces that disrupt public health initiatives. She accomplishes this by analyzing the impact of racial resentment in health policy lawmaking, highlighting that law has been a tool for achieving better healthcare allocation and where the law may undermine those goals.
Professor Johnson’s scholarship has been published or is forthcoming in the Michigan Journal of Race and Law, UC Law Journal, JAMA Health Forum, and the Hastings Center Report. She received the Wilhelmina M. Reuben-Cooke Culturally Responsive Pedagogy and Practices Fellowship from The Duke Endowment and Duke University’s Office of the Provost from 2023 to 2024 and the Duke Initiative for Science and Society Faculty and Staff Leadership Award in 2023.
Professor Johnson earned her JD from Boston University School of Law, where she served as the editor-in-chief of the American Journal of Law and Medicine from 2018 to 2019. She earned a PhD in health policy, with a concentration in political analysis, from Harvard University in 2023, and has a master of bioethics degree from the University of Pennsylvania and a bachelor of arts in international studies from Oakwood University.
Wayne Logan
Professor Wayne Logan comes to us by way of Florida State University, where he was the Steven M. Goldstein Professor. As a teaching professor and university research professor, he will primarily teach criminal law and criminal procedure. Professor Logan is the author or co-author of several books, including most recently, The Ex Post Facto Clause: Its History and Role in a Punitive Society (Oxford University Press, 2023). He is also the author of many book chapters and law review articles, with work appearing in such publications as the Georgetown Law Journal, Michigan Law Review, Notre Dame Law Review, Pennsylvania Law Review, and Vanderbilt Law Review. His scholarship has been cited by the US Supreme Court on two occasions, as well as in more than 100 state and lower federal court decisions. He is also commonly quoted in national media outlets, including the ABA Journal, National Public Radio, The New York Times, USA Today, and The Wall Street Journal.
Professor Logan is an elected member of the American Law Institute and a past chair of the Criminal Justice Section of the Association of American Law Schools. He has taught for over two decades. Prior to entering academia, Professor Logan clerked for the North Carolina Supreme Court and the US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia and practiced law in Raleigh. He earned his JD from the University of Wisconsin, and also holds a master of arts in criminology from State University of New York at Albany and a bachelor of arts from Wesleyan University.
Abel Rodríguez
Professor Abel Rodríguez will be coming to Wake Forest Law from St. John’s University School of Law. His research focuses on race, migration, and the intersection of criminal and immigration law. His scholarship has appeared in Cornell Law Review and the Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review. He is also co-editor of a book on the sanctuary movement, The Road to Sanctuary: Building Power and Community in Philadelphia (2022).
Prior to St. John’s, Professor Rodríguez served as the director of Villanova Law School’s asylum clinic. He also served as the inaugural director of the Center on Immigration at Cabrini University. Before entering academia, Professor Rodríguez was the immigration specialist at the Defender Association and a staff attorney at Nationalities Service Center in Philadelphia, where he specialized in deportation defense for the formerly convicted. He began his legal career as a Langer, Grogan, and Diver Social Justice Fellow at Esperanza Immigration Legal Services in North Philadelphia.
Professor Rodríguez earned his JD from University of Pennsylvania Law School, where he was a Toll Public Interest Scholar. He also holds a master of arts in Latin American Studies from Stanford University and a master of theological studies from Harvard University.
The son of immigrants, Professor Rodríguez is from a working-class community near Philadelphia. He is a first-generation high school, college, and law school graduate, and he is a firm believer in the power of education to transform people’s lives.
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