Faculty and Administration Profiles

Karen Ann Widess

About

Karen Ann Widess teaches as an Adjunct Professor with Loyola University Chicago’s Rule of Law for Development LLM and MJ programs (PROLAW) in Rome, Italy.  At Loyola, she designed and taught courses in Program Design and Proposal Writing, and Rule of Law Project Management, and supervised theses and capstone projects for students from Africa, the former Soviet Union and the US.  Widess also teaches a PROLAW course on Comparative and Ethical Lawyering for the Rule of Law. She is a lecturer at UCLA School of Law where she teaches in the LL.M. Legal Analysis, Writing and Research Program and the MLS Research and Writing Program.

Her own research focusses on Rule of Law and Development and in Haitian and post-Soviet Studies.  She was a lecturer at Kent Law School at the University of Kent in Canterbury, England from 2016 to 2021, teaching courses in property law, legal and critical thinking, equity and trusts, and international administrative law. 

Prior to moving into academia, Widess worked for 25 years in the fields of international rule of law and legal reform, democracy promotion, civil society strengthening, economic development, and post-conflict stabilisation and reconstruction, in several regions including Central Asia, Haiti, the South Caucasus and Ukraine, among others.

Widess received her B.A.  at the University of California at Berkeley, her J.D.  at the University of Southern California, and a Post-graduate Diploma in International Law from the London School of Economics and Political Science.  She worked on a Ph.D in socio-legal studies at the University of Kent in the UK.  

Degrees

BA, Political Science, University of California, Berkeley
JD, University of Southern California Law School
Post-graduate Diploma in International Law, London School of Economics, UK

Courses Taught

Rule of Law Project Management
Rule of Law for Development Program
Comparative and Ethical Lawyering for the Rule of Law