The Law School recently welcomed two new members to its academic faculty, Vincent Buccola, ’08, and Darrell A.H. Miller, whose appointments were effective July 1. In addition, William A. Birdthistle joined the faculty last April as a Professor from Practice. The three new faculty members bring a wealth of knowledge and experience in areas that include corporate law, constitutional law, civil rights law, business restructuring, and financial regulation.
Buccola, who most recently was Associate Professor of Legal Studies & Business Ethics at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, is a graduate of the Law School and a former Bigelow Fellow.
Miller joins the Law School from Duke Law, where taught for 11 years. Birdthistle recently served at the Securities and Exchange Commission and previously a faculty member of Chicago-Kent.
“These are three outstanding additions to our faculty,” said Thomas J. Miles, Dean, Clifton R. Musser Professor of Law and Economics. “They expand the scholarly insight and professional perspective in important fields of law in our intellectual life, and our students will benefit from these new colleagues’ splendid teaching.”
Professors of Law
Vincent Buccola, ’08
Vincent Buccola, '08, Professor of Law
Buccola’s scholarship focuses on corporate financial and managerial law, especially as it pertains to reorganization, distress, bankruptcy, and leveraged finance. After clerking for Judge Frank H. Easterbrook of the US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit and serving as a trial lawyer at Bartlit Beck, Buccola served for two years as a Bigelow Fellow to explore the possibility of an academic career.
“My time as a Bigelow was very formative and a great way to start, although it was quite startling at first to start calling all my former professors by their first names,” he said.
After the Fellowship, Buccola taught at The Wharton School, where he received several teaching and scholarship awards. In the fall of 2023, he taught business organizations at the Law School as a visiting professor.
“What I love about teaching is that the students provide an endless supply of enthusiasm for new discovery, something that’s harder to find as you get older,” Buccola said. “Witnessing students have those moments is gratifying but also inspiring to me as a researcher, who is always looking for those moments.”
Buccola has a keen interest in the relationship between the financing and management of organizations, and how each one informs the other. “There is an inevitable tension between people who put up money for some kind of project or enterprise—and people who manage that capital to run the project or enterprise,” he said. “How investors and managers of capital negotiate those two ideas is at the core of a lot of the work that I do.”
One of Buccola’s current research projects explores the terms that go into loan contracts and how those terms are selected. His goal is to understand how lenders and borrowers create terms that show up in real contracts.
Another working paper, which he is coauthoring with Greg Nini of Drexel University’s LeBow College of Business, concerns how loan contract terms changed after surprising and aggressive forms of restructuring transactions had taken place.
In their paper, Buccola and his coauthor found that the terms in contracts actually changed quite rapidly, at least in one of the instances, contrary to what many people in industry were saying. “I think we were able to prove that the loan market is much more capable of adjusting, more so than what the skeptics had realized,” he said. That paper, “The Loan Market Response to Dropdown and Uptier Transactions,” is forthcoming in the Law School’s Journal of Legal Studies.
Darrell A. H. Miller
Darrell A. H. Miller, Professor of Law
Miller served as the Melvin G. Shimm Professor of Law at Duke Law from 2013 to 2024. He is a distinguished scholar of civil rights, constitutional law, civil procedure, state and local government law, and legal history.
Miller's work on the Second and Thirteenth Amendments has been published in leading law reviews, including the Yale Law Journal, the University of Chicago Law Review, and the Columbia Law Review. His Second Amendment scholarship has garnered significant recognition, being cited by the US Supreme Court, US Courts of Appeals, US District Courts, as well as in congressional testimony and legal briefs. He is the coauthor of The Positive Second Amendment: Rights, Regulation, and the Future of Heller (Cambridge University Press, 2018), the first Second Amendment theory book to be written in the wake of the Supreme Court’s watershed decision in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008) and he is currently coauthoring a textbook on the Second Amendment to be published by Foundation Press.
"What keeps me writing on the Second Amendment is that it’s one of the few areas of constitutional law that’s really brand new, where every Supreme Court decision is potentially ground-breaking,” Miller said. “Second Amendment doctrine is being constructed from the ground up, in real time, in our generation."
Miller also cofounded Duke’s Center for Firearms Law, an academic center dedicated to producing reliable and non-partisan information about the Second Amendment and firearms law for various audiences, and to establishing firearms law as an intellectually rigorous and respected area of scholarly research.
Discussing his other scholarly work, Miller observed, “My Thirteenth Amendment scholarship has been about unpacking what the word ‘slavery’ means in the Constitution. The Thirteenth Amendment is remarkable because it’s the first—and the only time—the word slavery appears in the United States Constitution. And it appears there only to say that it shall not exist. … My future work on the Thirteenth Amendment is about using the tools of institutional analysis to understand better what antebellum Americans themselves described as the ‘peculiar institution.’”
Miller's academic career began at the University of Cincinnati College of Law, where he was honored twice with the Goldman Award for Excellence in Teaching. Before entering academia, he practiced complex and appellate litigation in Columbus, Ohio, and clerked for the Honorable R. Guy Cole, Jr. of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit.
A cum laude graduate of Harvard Law School, where he served as an editor of the Harvard Law Review, Miller also holds degrees from Oxford University, where he studied as a Marshall Scholar, and from Anderson University.
Professor from Practice
William Birdthistle
William Birdthistle, Professor from Practice
Birdthistle is an expert in investment funds, financial regulation, and corporate governance, with a special interest in securities law. He recently served as Director of the Division of Investment Management at the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), where he worked from 2021 to 2024.
That role, Birdthistle says, was “the best job he ever had” because of how closely it aligned with the kind of scholarship he’d been doing as a professor at Chicago-Kent College of Law for the 15 years prior. It was a role that also made him much more interested in government lawyering.
“I think a revolving door between academia and the government is probably a healthy thing,” he said. “A lot of my colleagues here do or have done similar things: Jennifer Nou in the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs and Eric Posner with the Department of Justice, for example. Now that I’m back here, I find it invigorating to be around extremely smart people who have served the country and are dedicated to thinking deeply and richly about problems.”
The SEC’s Division of Investment Management regulates around $130 trillion dollars and administers two securities acts that oversee funds and advisors. “We adopted approximately a dozen rules and proposed about fifteen, which is ambitious in just two and a half years,” said Birdthistle.
Birdthistle pours his governmental work experience into the classroom, incorporating real issues that regulators are grappling with right now into his investment funds course, issues such as artificial intelligence and cyber breaches and the rulemaking that’s happening in those areas.
“Understanding how money works is understanding how society works,” said Birdthistle. “By the time you’re done with a class on securities regulation or investment funds or business organizations, you’ll probably have a greater appreciation for how these institutions deal with things that you care about.”
Birdthistle himself is a student at the University. He is candidate for a Ph.D. in history with a focus on economic history and financial regulation in the late 20th century.
Birdthistle received his MA in history from UChicago and his JD from Harvard Law School, where he served as managing editor of the Harvard Law Review. Before his SEC work and his tenure at Chicago-Kent, he clerked for the Honorable Diarmuid O'Scannlain on the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and practiced law at Ropes & Gray in Boston for five years as an attorney in the firm’s investment management practice.
Original source can be found here.