Samuel Bray to join Notre Dame Law School faculty

Notre Dame Law School is proud to announce that Samuel Bray—one of the nation’s leading experts in remedies and equity—will join the faculty as a full-time professor. Bray is a tenured faculty member at the UCLA School of Law. He is teaching this year at Notre Dame Law School as a visiting professor, and he will join the faculty in the fall 2018 semester.

“I’m thrilled to be at Notre Dame,” Bray said. “The Law School has an incredibly strong faculty. There’s this tremendous sense of both intellectual inquiry and camaraderie. And it’s so clear that the professors care deeply about the education and welfare of the students.”

“And something else is special about Notre Dame,” Bray added. “I love that I don’t have to draw a sharp line between my faith and my vocation as a scholar and teacher.”

Nell Jessup Newton, Joseph A. Matson Dean of Notre Dame Law School and Professor of Law, said, “Professor Bray arrived at Notre Dame this fall as a visiting professor with a national reputation for cutting-edge scholarship. Since then, his teaching skills, collegiality, and shared sense of mission have won him the admiration and respect of students and faculty alike.”

Bray’s primary expertise is in remedies and equity. A “remedy” is what you get if you sue and win. One of Bray’s recent articles is about the national injunction—a remedy that has been in the news lately whenever a single federal judge orders the entire national government not to enforce a statute, rule, or executive order. Bray’s article was published in the Harvard Law Review, and it has been discussed in a congressional hearing, in numerous legal sources, and in an article in the New York Times.

In addition to Remedies, Bray teaches Civil Procedure, Constitutional Law, and Property. He is one of the authors of a constitutional law textbook and of a remedies textbook. His legal scholarship often draws on other fields, including economics, translation studies, and literary analysis. In addition to his legal scholarship, Bray is one author of Genesis 1–11: A New Old Translation for Readers, Scholars, and Translators.

Bray is a graduate of the University of Chicago Law School. After clerking for Judge Michael W. McConnell on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit, he practiced law in Washington, D.C. In addition to his faculty appointment at UCLA, Bray has had fellowships at Columbia Law School and Stanford Law School, a visiting scholar appointment at Haifa University, and a Harrington Faculty Fellowship at the University of Texas, Austin.