Faculty

The Hague

Resident Director: William Janssen
Associate Professor of Law
Charleston School of Law

Professor Janssen will serve as resident director in The Hague. Professor Janssen joined the Charleston School of Law faculty in 2006 after a lengthy practice with the mid-Atlantic law firm of Saul Ewing LLP, where he was a litigation partner, chair of the firm's interdisciplinary Life Sciences Practice Group, and a member of the firm's seven-member governing executive committee. He concentrated his practice in pharmaceutical, medical device and mass torts defense, risk management, and counseling.

Janssen has been involved in several high-profile drug and device cases, including the national diet drug ("fen-phen") litigation, and his writings on drug and device law and civil procedure have appeared in numerous publications.

Janssen is one of three co-authors of several nationally distributed texts on federal practice and procedure published by West (Thomson/Reuters), the Federal Civil Rules Handbook (now in its 19th ed., 2012) and A Student's Guide to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (in its 14th ed., 2011). Janssen is also a co-author of Volume 12B of the national federal civil rules treatise, Professors Wright & Miller's, Federal Practice and Procedure and the author of Federal Civil Procedure LOGIC MAPS.

While a student at the American University's Washington College of Law, Janssen was the executive editor of the American University Law Review, a moot court board member, an interschool moot court competitor, and the first-year moot court champion. After law school, he served as a law clerk to a federal district court judge and to a federal court of appeals judge.

Before joining the Charleston School of Law faculty, Janssen served as an adjunct instructor at Temple University School of Law for five academic terms and as an adjunct teaching business law at Saint Joseph's University.

Judge Edward C. LaRose
Adjunct Professor of Law
Stetson University College of Law

Judge LaRose received his undergraduate degree, summa cum laude, in 1977 from Boston College. He received his J.D. degree, cum laude, from Cornell Law School in 1980.

He began his legal career with Howrey & Simon in Washington, D.C., where he practiced extensively in the area of antitrust law. He joined Trenam Kemker Scharf Barkin Frye O'Neill & Mullis as an associate in 1983 and became a shareholder in the firm in 1987. While at Trenam Kemker, he practiced in the areas of commercial litigation, antitrust, and employment law, and he headed the firm's employment law practice group.

Governor Jeb Bush appointed Judge LaRose to the Second District Court of Appeal, and he began serving as a member of the court in February 2005.

Judge LaRose is board certified in Antitrust and Trade Regulation Law by The Florida Bar Board of Legal Specialization and Education. He is certified as a circuit-civil mediator and served as an arbitrator for the American Arbitration Association and the National Association of Securities Dealers, has been AV rated by Martindale-Hubbell, and has been recognized in Chambers USA and Best Lawyers in America. He serves as an adjunct professor of law at Stetson University College of Law.

He is an active member of the Hillsborough County Bar Association and The Florida Bar. He served as the chair of the Unlicensed Practice of Law Committee (13th Judicial Circuit "A"). He was a member of The Florida Bar Antitrust & Trade Regulation Certification Committee. He has served on The Florida Bar Business Law Section Executive Committee and has been active on various Business Law Section committees.  He is a member of the Ferguson-White Inn of Court in Tampa. Judge LaRose has written and spoken frequently in the areas of appellate, antitrust, and employment law.

Judge LaRose served as a trustee for Catholic Charities of the Diocese of St. Petersburg, Inc., and he remains active as a Catholic Charities volunteer. He was a member of Leadership Tampa (1999) and Leadership Tampa Bay (2002). He is an advisory board member of the University of Tampa Center for Ethics, and a distinguished past president of the Kiwanis Club of Carrollwood. He is active in his church and is a member of the Knights of Columbus.

William G. Merkel
Associate Professor of Law
Charleston School of Law

Bill Merkel joined the Charleston School of Law faculty in 2012. Merkel graduated from Johns Hopkins University with a B.A. in history in 1988 and proceeded to work as a cook in Baltimore and then as an analyst with the Department of Transportation in Washington, D.C., before returning to graduate studies in history and law. He completed his J.D. at Columbia Law School in 1996 and then worked in appellate litigation with Wiley, Rein & Fielding in Washington, D.C. from 1997-1998. Merkel 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). He taught American history at Oxford University from 2001-2003 and Comparative Introduction to American Law to foreign trained LL.M. students at Columbia Law School from 2003-2005. From 2005-2011, Merkel was an Associate Professor of Law at Washburn Law School in Topeka, Kansas, where he was named Professor of the Year by the graduating class in 2008. At Washburn, Merkel taught Constitutional Law I & II, Comparative Constitutional Law, Public International Law, and International Criminal Law and the Law of War. He received a doctorate in history from Oxford University in 2007.

Merkel has held visiting positions at the University of North Dakota School of Law in 2009 and at the University of South Carolina School of Law in 2011-12. At the Charleston School of Law, Merkel continues to teach courses in Constitutional Law, International Law, Comparative Law, and Legal History. Merkel's article "Jefferson's Failed Anti-Slavery Proviso of 1784 and the Nascence of Free Soil Constitutionalism" was selected as the best submission in constitutional history by the Stanford/Yale Junior Faculty Forum in 2006. Merkel is in the process of revising his doctoral thesis "Race, Liberty, and Law: Thomas Jefferson and Slavery, 1770-1800" for publication as a book to be titled Ambiguous Beginnings: Thomas Jefferson, Slavery, and the Foundations of American Constitutionalism. Merkel has published numerous articles in journals including the Chicago-Kent Law Review, Lewis and Clark Law Review, Santa Clara Law Review, Seton Hall Law Review, Rutgers Law Review, and Law and History Review. His scholarship on the Second Amendment has been cited by many authors and jurists, including Justice Breyer in a dissenting opinion in McDonald v. City of Chicago.

Merkel is a member of the District of Columbia, New York, and United States Supreme Court Bars.

Lausanne

Resident Director : Ann M. Piccard
Professor of Legal Skills
Stetson University College of Law

The resident director for the Lausanne program is Ann Piccard. Her father was born in Lausanne, and she has spent time visiting family in the city throughout her life.  Professor Piccard graduated from Stetson University College of Law in 1985. While a student at Stetson Law, Piccard was a member of the law review staff, and served as a research assistant and a teaching assistant. Upon graduation, she received a Reginald Heber Smith Community Law Fellowship from the Legal Services Corporation for 1985-86.

From January 1987 to May 1995, Piccard was employed by Bay Area Legal Services in Tampa, where she coordinated the Bay Area Volunteer Lawyers Program and litigated in both state and federal courts. From 1995-98, she was an adjunct instructor of both applied ethics and American government at St. Petersburg Junior College. Piccard joined Stetson's faculty in August 1999. She has completed an LL.M. degree, with Distinction, from the University of London, concentrating in the area of international human rights law.

Paul Boudreaux
Professor of Law
Stetson University College of Law