Northeastern Law Welcomes Outstanding Faculty
Left to right: Elettra Bietti, Aliza Hochman Bloom, Erin Islo, Katherine (Katie) Kraschel, Catherine Lizotte, Sharmila Murthy and David Simon.
06.25.23 — Northeastern University School of Law is pleased to welcome an exceptional group of new faculty to our community.
Elettra Bietti, an expert on market regulation, data and antitrust law as they play out in the digital economy, joins Northeastern as assistant professor of law and computer science within the School of Law and the Khoury College of Computer Sciences. Bietti was previously a joint fellow at the Information Law Institute at NYU and the Digital Life Initiative at Cornell Tech in New York. Bietti studies how platform companies such as Google or Twitter shape people’s political and consumption choices and defends conceptions of privacy, data protection and antitrust law that are sensitive to infrastructural and collective concerns in the digital economy.
Prior to joining academia, Bietti was an antitrust and intellectual property lawyer at Allen & Overy in London and Brussels. She holds an SJD and LLM from Harvard Law School, an LLB from University College London and a Postgraduate Diploma in IP Law and Practice from Oxford University. She is affiliated with the Berkman-Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University and the Information Society Project at Yale Law School.
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Aliza Hochman Bloom, who studies race in the Fourth Amendment and criminal sentencing reforms, joins the faculty as assistant professor of law. Hochman Bloom was previously a faculty fellow at New England Law | Boston, where she taught criminal law, criminal advocacy and legal ethics, and a visiting scholar at Boston University School of Law, supervising students in the criminal law clinic.
Prior to joining the legal academy, Hochman Bloom worked as an assistant federal public defender in the Middle District of Florida. A former clerk to Judge Charles R. Wilson of the US Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit and Judge Charlene Honeywell of the Middle District of Florida, Hochman Bloom was also a litigation associate at the law firm Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton. She earned her BA from Yale University and her JD from Columbia University School of Law.
Visit Faculty Page | View Announcement | @ahochmanbloom
Erin Islo, an expert on civil procedure, arbitration, algorithmic bias and economic justice, joins the faculty as assistant professor of law. Islo’s work utilizes philosophical, legal and empirical methods to explore the rights of consumers and workers and the civil and criminal regulation of the family. She researches the substantive impact of procedural mechanisms in the law and the normative basis and material consequences of family intervention and regulation. Islo is currently a doctoral candidate in philosophy at Princeton University, where she is completing a dissertation on the metaphysical foundations of ethical and political thought in early modern Europe.
Before pursuing her PhD, Islo clerked for Judge Barrington D. Parker, Jr. of the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. She is a recipient of the Watson Fellowship, one of several grants that have supported her transnational research on the structure and regulation of the family and the well-being of children in crisis. Islo received a bachelor’s degree from Haverford College, a master’s degree from KU Leuven and a JD from Yale Law School. During law school, she was elected president of First-Generation Professionals and was a member of the Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic.
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Katherine (Katie) Kraschel, an expert on the intersection of reproduction, gender, bioethics and health policy, with a particular concentration on fertility care and reproductive technologies, joins Northeastern community as assistant professor of law and health sciences. Kraschel was previously a lecturer in law and executive director of the Solomon Center for Health Law and Policy at Yale Law School, where she co-taught the Reproductive Rights and Justice Project Clinic. In June, she was appointed chair of the board of Planned Parenthood of Southern New England. Kraschel is the author of multiple book chapters on issues related to fertility care and assisted reproduction and is a co-editor of COVID-19 and the Law: Disruption, Impact, and Legacy (Cambridge University Press, 2023).
Prior to joining academia, Kraschel was associate counsel at Yale New Haven Health. She holds a bachelor’s degree in biochemistry from Mount Holyoke College and a law degree from Harvard Law School. In 2016, the National LGBT Bar Association named Kraschel one of the Best LGBT Lawyers Under 40, and in 2018 she was named one of the Top 40 Lawyers Under 40 by the American Bar Association.
Visit Faculty Page | View Announcement | @KatieKraschel
Catherine Lizotte joins the law school as associate teaching professor in the Legal Skills in Social Context program, bringing 10 years of experience teaching legal research and writing and over a dozen years of experience as a local government law practitioner. Most recently, she was a faculty member at Boston University School of Law, teaching in the first-year lawyering program.
Previously, Lizotte served as counsel to the City of Boston for 14 years, first as assistant corporation counsel in the Government Services Division of the City of Boston Law Department, representing the city in diverse cases including election law claims, land use disputes, First Amendment claims and constitutional challenges to city ordinances. She subsequently served as legal advisor to the Boston Public Schools, leading the district’s in-house legal office and advising the superintendent and school committee on district operations and policy.
Lizotte earned her BA in sociology from Saint Anselm College and her JD from Suffolk University Law School. After law school, she clerked for the justices of the Massachusetts Superior Court.
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Sharmila Murthy joins the university as professor of law and public policy within the School of Law and the College of Social Sciences. Initially, Murthy is on leave to serve as director for environmental justice at the White House Council on Environmental Quality, where she previously served as senior counsel. Her scholarship focuses on examining legal barriers to achieving environmental justice, improving access to water, and addressing climate change.
Murthy’s academic positions including serving as professor of law and director of faculty scholarship and research at Suffolk University Law School and as a visiting scholar and fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, where she co-founded the Human Rights to Water and Sanitation Program at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy. She began her legal career with a Skadden Fellow and also served as an associate with Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein.
Murthy has received many scholarship and teaching awards and has served numerous nonprofit boards. She received her JD from Harvard Law School, her MPA from Harvard Kennedy School of Government and her BS in natural resources from Cornell University.
Visit Faculty Page | View Announcement | @sharmila_murthy
David Simon, an expert on intellectual property, healthcare law, data and privacy joins the faculty as associate professor of law. Simon was previously a lecturer on law and a research fellow at the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School, where he taught a course on drug and device innovation and led a three-year initiative dubbed Diagnosing in the Home: The Ethical, Legal, and Regulatory Challenges and Opportunities of Digital Home Health. He was previously the Frank H. Marks Intellectual Property Law Fellow at George Washington University School of Law and a visiting assistant professor at the University of Kansas School of Law, where he taught a variety of courses. He also taught Tort Law at Northeastern in 2021.
Simon earned his BA from the University of Michigan, JD from Chicago-Kent College of Law, LLM from Harvard Law School, PhD from the University of Cambridge, where he was a Cambridge International Scholar and member of Trinity College.
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We are also pleased to welcome two visitors and a fellow to our faculty this year:
Hayat Bearat joins as a visiting associate professor and interim director of the Domestic Violence Institute. Prior to joining Northeastern, Bearat was a visiting professor and director of the Family Violence Litigation Clinic at Albany Law School. Her scholarship focuses on child marriages in the United States and the obstacles immigrant survivors of domestic violence face in family court. Her most recent article, “Caged by a Marriage, How the United States’ Immigration System Encourages Child Marriages,” is forthcoming in Drake Law Review. Prior to becoming a clinical professor, Hayat practiced in New York city for seven years, and spent five years in the Domestic Violence Law Unit at the New York Legal Assistance Group. Prior to joining NYLAG, Bearat was a staff attorney at the Legal Aid Society, where she represented tenants in their housing court proceedings in the Bronx. Hayat received her JD from New England Law | Boston in 2014, where she was on the Philip C. Jessup International Law Moot Court and did research at the Harvard Kennedy School Carr Center for Human Rights on violence against women and girls in the MENA region and focusing specifically on early and forced marriages.
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Sarah Lee Day joins the Legal Skills in Social Context program as a visiting assistant teaching professor. Sarah Lee was previously a justice catalyst fellow at Reproductive Equity Now, where she performed legal policy work on abortion and bodily autonomy in a post-Dobbs America, drafted continuing education courses in support of contraceptive access and consulted with the Massachusetts Department of Public Health and the White House Gender Policy Council. Day earned her JD from Northeastern University School of Law, where her co-ops included human rights legal advocacy with the Due Diligence Project, reproductive rights impact litigation with the Lawyering Project and reproductive rights policy work with NARAL Pro-Choice Massachusetts. Prior to law school, Day obtained a BFA from Cornish College of the Arts, a BS in psychology from Arizona State University and an MA in social justice and human rights from Arizona State University. Day also teaches at Tufts University Experimental College, where her courses focus on the right to abortion, the law as social control and the transformative powers of law.
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Naomi Oberman-Breindel joins the Legal Skills in Social Context program as a social justice teaching fellow. Oberman-Breindel previously served for eight years as a public defender in New York City criminal courts. For the past two years, she has worked in the Criminal Defense Practice at the Neighborhood Defender Service (NDS) of Harlem; before joining NDS, she spent six years with the Criminal Defense Practice at the Bronx Defenders. As a public defender, Oberman-Breindel has represented hundreds of individuals in misdemeanor and felony cases from arrest to resolution. In this capacity she has extensively litigated various Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Amendment issues in addition to trying numerous cases to verdict. Oberman-Breindel received her JD from New York University School of Law, where she was a member of the NYU Defender Collective, the Coalition on Law and Representation and a publication editor for Review of Law and Social Change. While in law school, Oberman-Breindel represented children facing criminal charges in delinquency proceedings through the Juvenile Defender Clinic and students facing suspension and expulsion from New York City public schools through the Suspension Representation Project. Prior to law school, Oberman-Breindel taught academic enrichment and conflict resolution to elementary school students in Brooklyn through the Morningside Center for Teaching Social Responsibility. (more)
About Northeastern University School of Law
The nation’s leader in experiential legal education since 1968, Northeastern University School of Law offers the longest-running, most extensive experience-based legal education program in the country. Northeastern guarantees its students unparalleled practical legal work experiences through its signature Cooperative Legal Education Program. More than 1,000 employers worldwide in a wide range of legal, government, nonprofit and business organizations participate in the program. With a focus on social justice and innovation, Northeastern University School of Law blends theory and practice, providing students with a unique set of skills and experiences to successfully practice law.
For more information, contact d.feldman@northeastern.edu.