Top Faculty Member, Niki Kuckes, Awarded Tenure

Commencement 2009 was special for many reasons, high among them the announcement that one of our most talented faculty members, Niki Kuckes, was awarded tenure and promoted to Full Professor.

Prof. Kuckes has a remarkable record: an Honors undergraduate at Cornell, she attended Yale Law School, where she was a Coker Fellow and served as Senior Editor of the Yale Law Journal and an editor at both the Yale Law and Policy Review and the Yale Journal of International Law.  After graduating, she clerked for the Honorable Antonin Scalia on the United States Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit, then joining one of the top litigation firms in the country (D.C.’s Miller, Cassidy, Larocca & Lewin).  She rose to partner in its white collar crime practice, where she focused on grand jury work.

Since Prof. Kuckes came to RWU Law in the fall of 2003, she has continued her excellent work, emerging as a demanding but popular teacher of Civil Procedure and Professional Responsibility, while more recently adding Intellectual Property to her teaching repertoire.  Her articles have appeared in top journals and she recently contributed an essay to a book on grand juries.  (Click here for a link to an earlier blog on her grand jury work.) She also has time in her busy schedule to serve as the co-chair of the Ethics Committee of the American Bar Association’s Criminal Justice Section.

The dean of the RWU Civ Pro teachers, Bob Kent, pins a corsage on Prof. Kuckes’
gown, signifying a key professional achievement, the award of tenure.