Arnold, McNeal named 2024 Faculty Scholars of the Year

Brandeis School of Law has announced its inaugural 2024 Faculty Scholars of the Year, Dr. Tony Arnold and Dr. Laura McNeal. 

Dr. Arnold was recognized for his piece, Environmental Justice, Resilience Justice, and Watershed Planning published in the William & Mary Environmental Law & Policy Review. Dr. McNeal was recognized for her article, Integrating the Marketplace of Ideas: A New Constitutional Theory of Protecting Students' Off-Campus Online Speech, published in the Stanford Law Review.

Dr. Arnold's article is a seminal piece that merges three streams of scholarship: environmental justice, watershed planning and governance for resilience, and resilience justice. It offers a new systematic, comprehensive approach to equitable planning in the context of an emerging and evolving concern nationwide for environmental justice and community resilience in watershed planning. Moreover, the work is innovative in its approach to integrating environmental and resilience justice into watershed planning.

Dr. Arnold’s work pioneers new frameworks for addressing systemic vulnerabilities in marginalized communities, specifically through his concept of “resilience justice.” By providing analytical tools and strategies for equitable watershed planning, this scholarship creates a novel legal framework for understanding the intersection of environmental justice and adaptive resilience.

Dr. McNeal's article offers a path toward safeguarding students' First Amendment rights to engage in expressive activities, political speech and symbolic speech off-campus through the adoption of a new constitutional standard, the Integrated Contextual Disruption Test (ICD). The proposed new standard strikes the necessary balance between a school's regulatory interest in maintaining an environment conducive to learning with the competing value of student free speech rights.

This seminal piece makes an important contribution to free speech jurisprudence by providing a clear constitutional analysis for regulating off-campus student speech. The IPD framework is accessible to scholars, policymakers, and school administrators.

Brandeis School of Law Dean Melanie Jacobs worked with the school's Dean's Advisory Committee to establish the faculty scholars program and select the first recipients.