This fall, the School of Law welcomes two new scholars to the faculty: Dan Danielsen and Daniel R. Williams.

Associate Professor Dan Danielsen comes to the Northeastern faculty with 13 years of experience as an international business lawyer and legal scholar. "For me joining the Northeastern faculty is at once a new adventure and like finally coming home," says Danielsen, who began teaching at Northeastern as adjunct faculty member in 1992.

While many graduates may remember Danielsen as their teacher in Torts and Corporations, he has spent most of his career practicing international business law. Following a stint working in the Commission of the European Union in Brussels, and a federal appeals court clerkship, Danielsen joined Foley, Hoag & Eliot in Boston. As an associate and a partner, Danielsen represented US and European public and privately held businesses in corporate finance, mergers and acquisitions, strategic partnerships and joint ventures, media and technology licensing and corporate strategy.

In 1999, Danielsen accepted a position as executive vice president and general counsel of Europe Online Networks S.A., in Luxembourg. Europe Online was pioneer in the provision of broadband Internet, digital television and interactive media services to consumers in 27 countries across Europe.

"Acting as general counsel and executive vice president in charge of product development was at once the most exciting and the most challenging thing I have done to date," said Danielsen. "It gave me a whole new perspective on international business practice, seeing the world through the eyes of an aggressive cutting edge technology company seeking to navigate the complexities of the multilayered and overlapping legal regimes that shape the international economic space."

In 2002, Danielsen joined the Northeastern faculty as a visiting professor teaching International Law, International Business Regulation, Corporations and Conflict of Laws. "When I returned from Luxembourg, I hoped to have the opportunity to explore legal academia as a full-time career. As if by a miracle, Northeastern had teaching needs in my fields of interest and the rest, as they say, is history," he explained.

Danielsen's research interests include corporate law and governance, the role of transnational corporations in the international regulatory system, international trade and law and economic development. "Globalization and the regulation of transnational economic activity seem to me amongst the most dynamic and important areas of study for students seeking to prepare for legal practice in the future," said Danielsen. "I can think of no more important way to deploy my skills and experience than helping our students to navigate legal practice in this increasingly complex and interdependent world."

In addition to Northeastern, Professor Danielsen has taught at Harvard Law School. He has written a number of articles and is co-author of After Identity: A Reader in Law and Culture (Routledge 1994).

Associate Professor Dan Williams comes to Northeastern on the heels of a dynamic career as a trial and appellate litigator, where he made his mark in the areas of wrongful convictions for child sexual abuse and the death penalty.

Williams stumbled onto criminal trial work after graduating from Harvard Law School and clerking on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. "It happened by accident," he said. "I hope to convey to students that you ought not adhere too rigidly to a script for your life. Magic happens when you open yourself to unplanned experiences."

Discovering his talent for courtroom advocacy, Williams left the San Francisco firm of Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe and moved to New York City to become a criminal trial and appellate lawyer. Initially specializing in representing political activists, Williams soon expanded his work to include high-profile clients in criminal and civil cases; his clients ranged from death row inmate Mumia Abu Jamal to Dick Cavett to the government of Cuba. His representation of Margaret Kelly Michaels, wrongly convicted of mass child sexualabuse in a New Jersey daycare center, led to a landmark ruling by the New Jersey Supreme Court, that paved the way for rectifying countless other wrongful convictions. In New York, the death penalty was recently struck down as unconstitutional in People v. LaValle, a case in which Williams was lead counsel on the appeal.

He is also no stranger to the Boston courts.

Williams was lead counsel in the post-conviction litigation for the Amirault family, a highly charged case involving allegations of child sexualabuse in a Malden daycare center. For his work on behalf of the wrongly convicted, he was awarded in 1997 the Morton Stavis Memorial Justice Award. In 1999, he received the Thurgood Marshall Award litigating death penalty cases. Williams has been active in human rights work in Central America and has spoken widely in the United States and Europe on criminal-justice issues.

Williams has written two law-review articles dealing with legal theory, contributed entries in the Encyclopedia of Crime and Punishment and in other books, and published many articles on trial practice and evidence. He is the author of Executing Justice: An Inside Account of the Case of Mumia Abu Jamal (St. Martin's Press, 2001). He has taught and continues to teach trial practice at the Trial Lawyers College in Wyoming.

In announcing their hiring to the faculty, Dean Emily A. Spieler said, "these two enormously talented people made Northeastern their top choice. We agreed that they were our first choice as well."