News & Events

Three New Professors to Arrive in 2008-09

Steven D. Walt, Stephanie Hoffer, and Steven M. Davidoff to join Moritz Faculty

February 29, 2008

Contact: Barbara Peck, (614) 292-0283

Business law courses at The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law are being expanded each semester, and this fall will be no different. A new faculty member and two visiting faculty – each of whom will add diverse perspectives to the College’s business law, contracts, and tax curriculums – will be at Moritz next year.

“We continue to strive to increase and diversify our offerings in the area of business law,” said Dean Nancy H. Rogers. “It is wonderful news that we’ll be welcoming these three outstanding professors to our College next year.”

Professor Steven D. Walt of the University of Virginia Law School, who has visited at Moritz during the last two fall semesters, will teach fall semester. Walt said that he enjoys the collegiality of the Moritz faculty, and that Ohio State students have adapted well to his approach to teaching.

“My teaching style is by lecture punctuated by tearful pleas for questions or comments,” Walt said. “The courses I teach are fairly heavily statutory. While the lectures focus on statutory “nuts and bolts,” I discuss broader policy issues raised where relevant. So far the students in my courses at Moritz have saved me the tears: they are engaged and ask questions.”

He joined the faculty at Virginia after visiting for one year as a professor of law from the University of San Diego. He teaches contracts, sales/commercial paper, legal philosophy, bankruptcy, and secured transactions. A cum laude graduate of Kalamazoo College, Walt holds an M.A. and Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Chicago. He earned his law degree from Yale in 1988 and was an associate professor at the University of San Diego for three years.

Professor Stephanie Hoffer will join the Moritz faculty. She comes to the College from the Northwestern University School of Law, where she is an assistant visiting professor. Hoffer received her bachelor’s degree from Ohio State, her law degree from Case Western Reserve University School of Law, and an LL.M. degree from New York University. She is expected to teach contracts and in the area of taxation. Her research includes tax-exempt and governmental organizations, comparative taxation, and entity taxation, all of which include the area of law she most enjoys – tax.

“It's not boring,” said Hoffer, a native of Berlin Heights, Ohio. “Tax law is the perfect marriage of intricate detail to profound theoretical questions of political, economic, and social policy. It is an inexhaustible area that reaches subjects as divergent as the sale of bird seed and the subsidization of religion. What's not to love?”

Professor Steven M. Davidoff, of Wayne State University School of Law, will be a visiting assistant professor for the 2008-09 academic year.

Professor Davidoff has a law degree from Columbia University Law School, where he was a Stone Scholar, and a master’s degree in finance from the London Business School. Before entering law teaching in 2006, he practiced at Shearman & Sterling in New York and London and at Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer in London, focusing on mergers and acquisitions.

Davidoff is active in the legal community. The New York Bar Association has presented him with the Thurgood Marshall Award for his pro bono assistance in capital punishment cases, and he is the editor of the M&A Prof Law Blog. On a side note, he has also climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro.

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