Professor Florey wins 2021 Distinguished Teaching Award
Professor Katherine Florey will receive UC Davis School of Law’s 2021 Distinguished Teaching Award. Made possible by the generosity of Bill and Sally Rutter, the award honors “law teachers who give stellar performances in the classroom.”
Florey will accept the award during the virtual Celebrating King Hall event on March 15.
A Martin Luther King Jr. Professor of Law, Florey teaches and researches in the areas of private international law, federal Indian law, civil procedure and public health law and policy. Within these fields, she is particularly interested in the extraterritorial application of law, theories of jurisdiction, and tribes' regulatory and adjudicative powers.
Florey’s scholarship has appeared in the Virginia Law Review, California Law Review and UCLA Law Review as well as the Notre Dame Law Review, in which she recently wrote about COVID-19 and domestic travel restrictions. She explored the same topic in a 2020 op-ed for CalMatters.
Before joining the UC Davis faculty in 2007, Florey served as a law clerk to the Honorable William Fletcher of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, and as an associate at the San Francisco law firm Keker & Van Nest LLP.
She received her J.D. from UC Berkeley School of Law, where she was articles editor of the law review and received the Thelen Marrin Award for graduating first in her class.
Florey holds a bachelor’s degree from Harvard College, where she graduated summa cum laude, and an M.F.A. in creative writing from Warren Wilson College. Before law school, she worked for several years as an editor, travel writer and theater critic.
Celebrating King Hall also will honor Monika Kalra Varma ’00, recipient of King Hall’s 2021 Distinguished Alumna Award, and Errol Dauis ’11, winner of the Rising Star Alumnus Award.
Varma, executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area, has dedicated her career to human rights and social justice work. Before leading the LCCRSF -- one of the oldest civil rights institutions on the West Coast -- Varma spent five years as executive director of the D.C. Bar Pro Bono Center, the largest provider of pro bono legal services in the District of Columbia. Before that, she directed the Center for Human Rights at the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights.
Dauis, an employment law attorney at Sacramento’s Boutin Jones law firm, has been honored as a California Super Lawyers Rising Star for Employment and Labor. A former King Hall adjunct professor, Dauis also has served as president of La Raza Centro Legal’s board of directors.