Faculty
Program Co-Director Aïda Alaka will be co-teaching Comparative U.S.-Dutch Legal Systems and Professions. Professor Alaka is an Associate Professor of Law at Washburn University School of Law. She teaches Legal Analysis, Research and Writing, as well as Employment Law. Under the auspices of Washburn's Center for Excellence in Advocacy, she has been a faculty member in its deposition and trial skills programs. During law school, Professor Alaka was editor-in-chief of the Loyola University Law Journal and a staff writer for the Loyola University Consumer Law Reporter. She is licensed to practice in Kansas and Illinois and has been admitted to the federal bar of the Northern and Central Districts of Illinois and the Eastern District of Wisconsin. Before teaching at Washburn, Professor Alaka practiced law in Chicago. She focused primarily on employment law litigation and counseling and became a partner in the international law firm of Winston & Strawn. See a list of Professor Alaka's publications.
Jonathan E. Soeharno will be co-teaching Comparative U.S.-Dutch Legal Systems and Professions. He holds a B.A. and M.A. in Religious Studies; a B.A and M.A. in Philosophy; and a LL.B. and LL.M. He has earned degrees at the universities of Utrecht (Netherlands), Nijmegen (Netherlands), Münster(Germany) and Cambridge (England). He is a lecturer in the Masters of Law (LL.M.) Program of the Utrecht University Faculty of Law. He has published several articles and currently is working on a Ph.D. project entitled, "The Integrity of the Judge and Institutional Safeguards of Judicial Integrity." He is editor at Ars Aequi Libri Publishers and member of the editorial board of the Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Rechtsfilosofie en Rechtstheorie. He also is a member of a "think tank" under the auspices of the Dutch Minister of Justice.
Program Co-Director Bill Merkel is co-teaching Comparative Judicial Enforcement of Constitutional and International Rights. Mr. Merkel completed his Juris Doctor degree in 1996 at Columbia Law School in New York City, concentrating on constitutional law and criminal law. He is currently completing a J.S.D. dissertation at Columbia focused on the role of the military and the militia in the U.S. constitutional system. He worked in appellate litigation with Wiley, Rein & Fielding in Washington, D.C. in 1997-98 before returning to post graduate studies at Oxford and Columbia Universities. He is the author, with the late Richard Uviller, of The Militia and the Right to Arms, Or, How the Second Amendment Fell Silent (Duke University Press, 2002), and numerous articles on U.S. constitutional history. In 2007, he completed his Oxford University D. Phil. thesis in modern history titled "Race, Liberty and Law: Thomas Jefferson and the Problem of Slavery, 1770-1800." He taught American history at Oxford from 2001-2003 and Comparative Constitutional Law for the Oxford University School of Continuing Education in 2003. From 2003-2005 Mr. Merkel was an associate-in-law at Columbia Univeristy, where he taught Comparative Introduction to American Law to non-U.S. trained LL.M. candidates from over thirty countries. Since joining the Washburn Law School faculty in 2005, Bill has taught U.S. constitutional law, comparative constitutional law, and international law. His current interests include international humanitarian law, international law respecting the use of force, and comparative U.S. / German constitutional and criminal law. Bill is fluent in German and serves as the faculty adviser to Washburn Law School's Jessup International Moot Court Competition team. See a list of Professor Merkel's publications.
Oda F. Essens (LL.B., LL.M. hons) will be co-teaching Comparative Judicial Enforcement of Constitutional and International Rights. She has an LL.M. in European Law and an LL.M. in Constitutional and Administrative Law, both with honors, from Utrecht University School of Law. She also holds a Minor Degree in History of International Relations from Utrecht University. For the past five years she has worked on her Ph.D. as a researcher at the Centre for Environmental Law and Policy, Utrecht University. Her Ph.D. topic is the enforcement of environmental law in England and Wales, Germany, and the Netherlands. As part of her Ph.D. research, she spent several months as a Visiting Scholar at Cambridge University in the U.K., and at the Universities of Trier and Münster in Germany. In addition, she has taught Comparative Constitutional Law and Enforcement Law to Dutch and foreign Bachelor and LL.M students at Utrecht University. Beginning October 2007, Ms. Essens was appointed as a University Lecturer, teaching European Economic Public Law at the Europa Institute of Utrecht University. Her interests include comparative constitutional and administrative law, methods of comparative research, implementation and enforcement of European economic law, and European human rights law.
