Alumni Spotlight: Jeannette Cox ’05
Sure, she’s younger than some of her students. But just three years after finishing law school, Visiting Assistant Professor Jeannette Cox is happy to be back at Notre Dame, where she taught civil procedure and legislation this fall.
She’s qualified, too. Cox graduated summa cum laude from the Law School in 2005, receiving the Dean Joseph O’Meara Award for outstanding academic achievement and serving on the Notre Dame Law Review. Now an assistant professor of law at the University of Dayton, she was a judicial clerk in the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, working for the Honorable Diarmuid F. O’Scannlain.
“I’ve been teaching for two years now at the University of Dayton, and so coming back to Notre Dame gave me a fresh perspective on teaching. The classes are the same, but they have a different flavor with a different student body,” says Cox. “Notre Dame is a pretty special place. The students are really curious about the law and its implications for people’s lives, and I’ve really enjoyed the energy that first-year students, especially, bring to those types of questions.”
Interacting with her former professors as a faculty colleague has given Cox, 29, a unique window on academic life. “The three of us who are teaching civil procedure—Jay Tidmarsh, Joe Bauer and I—go to lunch every Wednesday. If we have a tricky question that comes up in class, we put our heads together. Jay and Joe are so seasoned in the field. They’ve been very welcoming, and it’s been great to collaborate with them.”
What’s next for someone who has already accomplished so much? When she returns to the University of Dayton next semester, Cox will focus her scholarship on two areas. The first is civil procedure and the role of courts versus litigants in shaping the U.S. court system.
The second area is disability law, which interests Cox both for personal and intellectual reasons. “My sister has Downs’ syndrome, so I’ve always thought about disability policy in a broad sense—how we think about people with disabilities in our culture and how the law affects that. I’m really interested in the Americans with Disabilities Act and its conception of disability as a civil rights category,” she says. “I want to be part of the conversation about the value of all types of people.”
