USC Gould School of Law recently celebrated four of its newest faculty members at an installation ceremony. Dean Franita Tolson formally welcomed professors Bernadette Atuahene, Jessica Clarke, Aya Gruber and Adam Zimmerman as holders of distinguished endowed chairs at the Sept. 16 ceremony at Town and Gown.
In her opening address, Tolson shared the importance of the installation of a faculty member in an endowed chair, both for the faculty member as well as for the university.
“We’re here because we have four colleagues who have set themselves apart as a result of their outstanding scholarly impact,” said Tolson, who is the Carl Mason Franklin Chair in Law. “They are award-winning educators, national and international thought leaders and renowned experts in their respective fields. We are fortunate to have them as colleagues and I am delighted to celebrate this moment with them.”
USC Provost Andrew Guzman, who noted that he was dean of USC Gould when the four faculty members joined the law school, emphasized that the awarding of professorships is an acknowledgement of the excellence of scholarship and teaching.
“This ceremony is a deserved recognition of the incredible work of the individuals being honored but it’s also a celebration of the collective pursuit we are all engaged in that drives the legal academy forward,” Guzman said. “Our honorees are first-rate exemplars of that pursuit of knowledge. They have served as mentors and guides to their students; they’ve inspired their colleagues; and of course they’ve advanced these frontiers of knowledge in each of their respective fields.”
Bernadette Atuahene
Atuahene, a leading property law scholar focusing on land stolen from people in the African Diaspora, was installed as the Frances R. and John J. Duggan Professor of Law. She told the audience about her background as a community organizer and how a National Science Foundation grant led to her current research on the property tax foreclosure crisis in Detroit and her upcoming book, Plundered: How
Racist Policies Undermine Black Homeownership in America (Little, Brown & Company, 2025).
“Academics are routinely not involved in changing things that they find under these really correct notions of neutrality,” she said. “I’m a different academic. Before I went to law school, I was an organizer right here in South Central L.A. … so (as a result of my research) we formed something called the Coalition for Property Tax Justice.”
The Coalition is working to end unconstitutional property tax assessments, stop the ongoing foreclosures, and provide compensation to the homeowners who were unlawfully foreclosed on because of the illegal assessments, Atuahene said. With her new book, she hopes to expand the work by changing perceptions about the homeowners away from the narrative that the victims don’t know how to budget or just don’t want to pay their taxes, she said, a misconception that is prevalent among vulnerable communities.
“Shifting from these narratives of personal irresponsibility to these narratives of structural injustice, now, the solutions look different,” she said. “The solutions look like stopping these illegally inflated property taxes.”
The Frances R. and John J. Duggan Professorship was established in October 1979 by the Duggans, Los Angeles-based entrepreneurs and developers and longtime supporters of the law school.
Jessica Clarke
Clarke was installed as the Robert C. and Nanette T. Packard Professor of Law. She is an award-winning scholar on antidiscrimination law, with a focus on sex, gender and sexuality. She discussed how her research interests stem from a childhood of being bullied and harassed, and how her hatred of enforced conformity led to her work in the law’s potential to address discrimination that compound systemic injustice.
“When people get assigned to play some particular role in life, often based on some arbitrary characteristics, they don’t get a meaningful chance to decide the path for themselves,” Clarke said. “As a scholar, I’m interested in the law’s potential to disrupt these types of
discrimination.”
Her work includes research on how the law can ensure transgender and non-binary youth can be treated as full members of the community, as well as discrimination in which victims are blamed, such as when people lose their jobs for their sexual orientation, health conditions or criminal record.
Clarke added that she is grateful to be at USC Gould, where the “unique strength of our faculty is its deep engagement with questions of inequality and discrimination,” she said.
“I’m proud to be at an institution that’s committed to inclusion in the way that it instructs its students, in the way that it puts together its curriculum, and in the way that it treats all members of our community.”
The Robert C. and Nanette T. Packard Professorship was established in November 1989 by Robert Packard, who graduated from the law school in 1947 and practiced law in Los Angeles for nearly 50 years.
Aya Gruber
Gruber, an expert on criminal law and procedure, violence against women, and critical theory, was installed as the Harold Medill Heimbaugh Professor of Law. She shared background on her parents’ childhoods, how her mother’s experience being incarcerated as a child in Heart Mountain, Wyoming with thousands of other people of Japanese descent, and her father’s experience as “the only Jewish kid in a deep Southern class,” shaped her journey to the law.
“I brought my parents’ stories with me to the practice of law,” she said, “the complexity of race and gender, the immigrant experience, and the deep conviction that there are no mass detention success stories.”
Gruber also told the audience about the challenges she has faced as a biracial Asian woman in the legal profession, sharing stories of microaggressions from older lawyers who misidentified her and of being the first Asian female law professor at three different law schools. Though her path hasn’t been easy, she said, it has been worthwhile.
“What an immense privilege this job is,” Gruber said. “To write and opine on issues about which we care deeply, to have people listen to us, to help students develop not just skills and acumen in the law, but ethical sentiments, and to be engaged, all of us together, in the mutual enterprise of producing knowledge. It is, for me, simply the best job in the world.”
The Harold Medill Heimbaugh Professorship was established in February 1982, honoring the legacy of public service and community impact of Heimbaugh, who was a long-serving California state attorney and former Kiwanis International president.
Adam Zimmerman
Zimmerman was installed as the Robert Kingsley Professor of Law. His scholarship explores how class action attorneys, regulatory agencies and criminal prosecutors provide justice to large groups of people through overlapping systems of tort law, administrative law and procedural law. He recounted his journey from being a middle school teacher in east San Francisco to law school and his clerkship with the Hon. Jack B. Weinstein, a judge known for his work in Brown v. Board of Education and his federal judicial service on several mass tort cases, such as for veterans affected by Agent Orange. Zimmerman remembered the last day of his clerkship, on Sept. 11, 2001, and how he was recommended to work with Kenneth Feinberg, who was the Special Master to oversee the Sept. 11 compensation fund. 
“It was these types of experiences in my early career that really animated what I started writing about,” Zimmerman said. “It occurred to me early on that there were many different institutions tasked with trying to serve large groups of people who otherwise needed help but couldn’t get it, because they lacked the creative procedures that were often used in court to try to serve large groups of people.”
He shared that his work most recently had an influence on veterans’ claims, where the Veterans Administration was systematically denying disability claims until August, when more than 3,000 veterans’ claims were reinstated as a result of his work arguing for veterans to be able to bring class actions against the VA.
The Robert Kingsley Professorship is named for Kingsley, who joined the USC Law faculty in 1928 and was a pillar in the community for almost 40 years, even serving as dean from 1952-1963 before being appointed to the California Board of Appeals in 1963.
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