DEBORA L THREEDY portrait
  • Co-Director Center for Innovation in Legal Education, College Of Law - Dean
  • Lee E. Teitelbaum Endowed Professor of Law, College Of Law - Dean
  • Professor Emerita, College Of Law
  • Professor Emerita, College Of Law - Dean

Biography

Professor Threedy holds a J.D. from Loyola University of Chicago and a B.A. in theater from Beloit College. Prior to joining the faculty in 1986, she clerked for U. S. District Court Judge Susan Getzendanner, Northern District of Illinois, and practiced with Mayer, Brown & Platt in Chicago, specializing in banking and commercial litigation.  In 2012, she was appointed the Co-Director of the Center for Innovation in Legal Education.  She served as Associated Dean for Academic Affairs from 2003 to 2006 and as Acting Dean in 2004. In the fall of 2002, she was a visiting professor at the James E. Rogers College of Law, University of Arizona.

Professor Threedy’s scholarship ranges across several substantive areas, but her focus is on issues of power and subordination in the context of gender, race and class. She advocates the use of “legal archaeology” case studies as a method for uncovering the embedded structures of power in the law; her legal archaeology case study of Alaska Packers Assoc. v. Domenico is quoted or cited in many first year Contracts casebooks.

Professor Threedy is a proponent of interdisciplinarity. She co-teaches a class on law and archaeology with Dr. Duncan Metcalf from Anthropology and she is planning a law and acting class with Dr. Robert Nelson from Theater. She is an award-winning playwright whose plays have been locally produced. In her plays, she examines the same issues of power and subordination that her scholarship addresses.

As Co-Director of the Center for Innovation in Legal Education, Professor Threedy has recently turned her attention to legal pedagogy. She is experimenting with flipped or hybrid legal education, and the series of online videos that she developed with colleagues for use with Contracts has drawn national attention.

Professor Threedy teaches Contracts, contract drafting, law and literature, and legal issues in archaeology. In 2000, she was a recipient of the University of Utah Distinguished Teaching Award.