About
Education and Current Work
B.A. (Yale), Ph.D., English (UC Berkeley), J.D. (Yale), member of the Washington, D.C. Bar. While in law school he was Editor-in-Chief of the Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities. After law school he clerked for Ronald M. Gould on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, practiced litigation at Shea & Gardner (now Goodwin Procter) in Washington, D.C., and then served as a Climenko Fellow and Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School.
Professor Stern teaches and researches in the areas of law and literature, legal history, law and sexuality, and criminal law. His research focuses on the evolution of legal doctrines and methods in relation to literary and intellectual history. Current research topics include the development of the "reasonable man" standard (and its precursors and analogues) since the eighteenth century, and the changing conception of legal fictions between the early modern period and the present. His research has been funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the Foundation for Legal Research, and the American Society for Legal History.
He is co-editor (with Robert Spoo) of the series Law and Literature, published by Oxford University Press. With colleagues at other universities in North America, Europe, and the UK, he convenes the Works in Progress series in Law and Literature, which provides a venue for new work in the field. He is also co-editor of Critical Analysis of Law, and a co-editor of the New Rambler Review.
In 2012, Professor Stern was the recipient of the SLS Partnership Award, bestowed by the U of T Students' Law Society in recognition of faculty members who have shown a commitment to student-friendly initiatives and student advocacy.
Ph.D and S.J.D Advising
Professor Stern supervises dissertation projects related to legal history, law and literature, eighteenth-century literature, criminal law, and law & sexuality. Recent and current projects include: Michael Donnelly, For All Peoples and All Nations: Anglophone Literature and the Imaginative Work of International Law (1884-2017); Daniel Kennedy, Legal and Literary Fictions at the Early Modern Inns of Court; Michael Reid, Gay Lives: Literature, Secrecy, and the Problem of Evidence in Eighteenth-Century England; Daniel Del Gobbo, Feminism Goes to College: The Law and Politics of Campus Sexual Violence.
Additional Information
Co-editor, Law and Literature series, Oxford UP
Editorial Board, Law and Literature (Taylor & Francis)
Organizing Committee, Association for the Study of Law, Culture, and the Humanities
Program Committee, American Society for Legal History
Senior Editor, Oxford Handbooks Online (law series)
Governing Board, International Society for the History and Theory of Intellectual Property
Director, Centre for Innovation Law and Policy
Steering Committee, Sexual Diversity Studies program
Director, Combined Degree Program in Law and English
Faculty advisor, Out in Law