1. Faculty Profile: Shannon Fyfe

Faculty Profile: Shannon Fyfe Shannon Fyfe is an assistant professor with a focus of international law and philosophy.

By Law Communications
October 4, 2024

W&L Law welcomed eight new faculty members this fall. Among them is Shannon Fyfe, an assistant professor with a focus of international law and philosophy. She joined W&L from George Mason, where she was an Assistant Professor of Philosophy, the Director of Graduate Studies in Philosophy, and a Fellow in the Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy. She received both her J.D. and her Ph.D. in Philosophy from Vanderbilt University.

Fyfe's academic and professional journey is both conventional and unconventional, in respects. Even before going to college, she knew law school was in her future. As a senior in high school in North Carolina, she worked with lawyers while working on a political campaign and felt like her brain worked like theirs did. "I thought going to law school would give me the tools I needed to help vulnerable people, which was what I was interested in doing."

Perhaps knowing it was not her last stop in academia, Fyfe felt free to chart a slightly different path as an undergraduate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she double majored in music and political science. "I knew I wanted to go to law school, but I was lucky to find a voice teacher who knew I didn't want to be a singer and would let me study Vocal Performance anyway," she said. "Those majors seemed like an opportunity to enjoy and benefit from the breadth of subjects you can study in undergrad, especially when you know that it is not the end of your educational journey."

Fyfe's direction toward law school came more into focus when she studied abroad in east Africa, where she learned about conflicts in Rwanda and Uganda and especially the use of gender-based violence. However, she originally thought her legal career would focus more on domestic legal issues. "When I was applying to law school, I thought I was more interested in a domestic context-maybe being the executive director of a rape crisis center," Fyfe recalled. But this changed when she began law school, where she connected with an international criminal law professor who would help redefine her trajectory.

Fyfe's first summer internship at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) was a pivotal moment. "I was kind of hooked on international criminal law after that," she says. Her experience at the ICTR not only solidified her interest in the field but also exposed her to the shortcomings of international legal institutions, which would later become a significant focus of her academic research. "My experience there was seeing a lot of things that are wrong with international criminal law, at least in practice," she said.

As her legal education progressed, Fyfe found herself increasingly drawn to the philosophical underpinnings of law. During her last semester at Vanderbilt, while pursuing a graduate certificate in gender studies, she took a class on the philosophy of international law that profoundly influenced her thinking. "It was this accidental culmination," Fyfe explained. "Philosophy just gave me this whole new way of not only thinking about the challenges of international law but also seeing how I could contribute something unique to the field."

Fyfe practiced law in Richmond for three years before deciding to return to Vanderbilt to pursue a Ph.D. in philosophy, with a focus on international law. "I didn't study philosophy at all as an undergrad, so once I started studying it, I thought, 'I don't know how we let people go to law school without this kind of logic and critical thinking framework'," Fyfe said, noting that philosophy became a way for her to analyze complex legal issues. "What philosophy can help you do first is identify the problems, to parse out what they are very carefully before trying to fix them."

While earning her Ph.D., Fyfe co-authored a book titled "International Criminal Tribunals: A Normative Defense," which explored critiques of tribunals from various philosophical angles. "We took eight different critiques of criminal tribunals based on conceptual ways of criticizing them-fairness, political bias, concerns about evidence, etc.-and we looked at whether these were empirical problems or normative problems," she said. Her work concluded that while there are many concerns with the functioning of international courts, they are not structurally irredeemable.

After completing her Ph.D., Fyfe took a position as a philosophy professor at George Mason University, where she taught for six years. There, she advised many pre-law students and helped them navigate their own academic journeys. "A lot of my students were first-generation college students or first-generation U.S. residents, or both, and they really needed help figuring out what steps to take to achieve their goals," she said. For these students, Fyfe emphasized the importance of standing out. "There are going to be a lot of people who apply to law school who studied political science, but if you have a different set of interests, your application can really shine. Law schools are building communities, and they want to create cohorts of students with wide-ranging experiences and interests."

At W&L Law, Fyfe is currently teaching a seminar on mass atrocities and will teach courses on transnational law and professional responsibility in the spring semester. She brings a philosophical lens to her legal instruction. "My seminars are taught like a philosophy class," she said, explaining how she encourages students to engage with big-picture questions rather than focusing solely on technical legal details. Her approach is Socratic, pushing students to think critically about the relationship between legal institutions, states, and individuals, emphasizing the importance of understanding not just the letter of the law but the broader social, political, and ethical contexts in which it operates.

Fyfe's initial impressions of her new role have been overwhelmingly positive. "This is a really special environment to be in, in such a small community, to be able to really focus on what you are doing," she said of W&L Law. "The students here have a really beautiful and supportive community, and that's incredibly important because law school is hard."

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