"Professor Halley has brought stunningly original analyses to the legality of the military's 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' policy, sexual harassment law and debates over gay rights and over gay marriage," she said.
Halley said her literary training deeply affected the kind of legal scholarship that she does. "I was trained as a 'new critic,' which means that I do extremely close readings of specific texts with great openness to the possibility that they involve paradoxical framings of the problem under consideration," she said.
At Harvard, she plans to open her seminars to graduate students in the humanities.
"At Stanford I have found that exchanges between law students and students in the humanities can be fruitful for both and there is great interest in having those exchanges," she said.
"Her appointment makes me optimistic for the ability of the Law School to remain current," Regan said. "Including Professor Halley's appointment, [HLS has] done a number of little things to respond to students' concerns about diversity."
Assistant Dean of HLS Allan S. Ray says that the main focus of four recent faculty appointments has been increasing the breadth of scholarship.
"The appointment of Janet Halley brings new depth and diversity to the faculty in the areas of family law and issues of sexual orientation and gender," he said. "In this appointment, as in the others, the law school has made this spring, we continue to expand our expertise and move into new areas of legal scholarship and teaching."
However, he is quick to note that the law school has also hired an additional female and an additional African-American faculty member in the past year. The two new female faculty members raise the number of full-time women faculty from 13 to 15, about 18 percent of the staff of 82.
By comparison, only 12 percent of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences are women.
But Halley wasn't chosen because of her gender, according to Charles Freid, the law school professor who
chaired Halley's faculty appointment committee.
"There certainly are curricular needs, in the areas of gender and sexual orientation," Freid said. "But we are not in the business of choosing faculty as representatives. We're not the United Nations."
Halley said that every top law school has improved with respect to the diversity of its faculty, but all face ongoing challenges.
"Stanford and Harvard don't seem to be to be different in that respect, and it was not a factor at all in my making this decision," she said.
Regan said she will take change however it comes. "Change at Harvard happens at a pretty glacial pace, but they are doing what they can to keep current," she says. "In general, change is good."