Visiting Faculty

Cody Corliss

Criminal Law and Domestic & International Terrorism
cody.corliss@richmond.edu
Temporary Room: Study room next to 310

Cody Corliss is an Associate Professor at the West Virginia University College of Law, where he teaches and writes on topics related to criminal law and international law. Prior to joining the faculty, Professor Corliss served as a Legal Officer in the Office of the Prosecutor at the United Nations International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals in The Hague, the Netherlands, having first joined the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in 2015.

As a war crimes prosecutor, Professor Corliss has been involved in multiple facets of the practice of international criminal law, including investigation, indictment confirmation, trial, and appeal. Among his notable work, he was part of the trial team that secured the conviction of Bosnian Serb General Ratko Mladić on charges of genocide, crimes against humanity, and violations of the laws and customs of war. He was also part of the appellate team that upheld the conviction and secured a life sentence of Radovan Karadžić, former President of the Republika Srpska, on charges of genocide, crimes against humanity, and violations of the laws and customs of war.

Susan Dudley

Applied Linguistics Specialist
sdudley2@richmond.edu
Room: 255

Susan D. Dudley has worked to educate international students for over two decades. Dr. Dudley earned her Ph.D. from Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) in the field of Education with a concentration in Curriculum, Culture, and Change. She obtained her M.A. in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages and her B.A. in Mathematics and Economics from West Virginia University. She has worked closely with international students as an English language expert at several universities. As the Applied Linguistics Specialist at the University of Richmond School of Law, Dr. Dudley works with international law students to enhance their written and oral English language skills. While working in the School of Law, Dr. Dudley has co-developed and co-taught academic law courses for the international students. She has worked with law faculty to develop and co-teach curricular modules in Legal English in addition to providing feedback on students’ written and oral assignments for their law courses. Dr. Dudley also provides one-on-one and small group tutorial sessions for the international law students.

David Johnson

Trial Advocacy
djohnso7@richmond.edu 
Room: 229

Shortly after graduating from the University of Richmond School of Law in 1983, Dave Johnson began a career as a Public Defender that lasted nearly 37 years. He joined the newly formed Richmond Public Defender Office as an Assistant PD in 1986 and was named the Chief Public Defender 3 years later. In 2005, he was the named the Executive Director of the Virginia Indigent Defense Commission where he oversaw Virginia’s 28 Public Defender offices until his retirement in August of 2022. A past president of the Richmond Criminal Bar Association and recipient of the Association’s Craig S. Cooley Award, Johnson was named by Virginia Lawyers weekly as one of their Leaders in the Law in their inaugural class of 2006. He has served on the Department of Criminal Justice Services Board, the Board of Governors for the Virginia Trial Lawyers Association, the Curriculum Committee of the National Association for Public Defense, as Co-Chair of the Virginia Criminal Justice Conference, as a member of the Commonwealth’s Evidence Based Decision Making State Policy Team, as a Governor’s appointee to the Advisory Committee on Juvenile Justice and Prevention, and on the Virginia State Bar’s Criminal Discovery Reform Task Force. In 2021, Dave was inducted into the Virginia Lawyers Hall of Fame.

Anne Toomey McKenna

Evidence
amckenna@richmond.edu
Room: 223

Anne Toomey McKenna, formerly Penn State Dickinson Law’s Distinguished Scholar of Cyber Law & Policy and co-hire with Penn State’s Institute for Computational & Data Sciences (ICDS), moved to Richmond this past year from Maryland, and joins us as a Visiting Faculty Member. Professor McKenna remains Affiliated Faculty with ICDS. At Penn State’s Law Schools, she taught Civil Procedure, Evidence, Information Privacy Law, and Cyberlaw in Practice (a course she developed). Professor McKenna is also a trial attorney with two-plus decades of complex civil litigation experience in federal and state courts in Maryland and the District of Columbia. Her work includes representing, advising, consulting, and educating government agencies, courts, businesses, educational institutions, and individuals about these increasingly intersecting subject matter areas: emerging technologies and the law, including artificial intelligence, autonomous systems, and biometric systems; electronic surveillance; data laws and data practices (including health, financial, and PII privacy compliance and handling breaches); school and workplace privacy; website practices and terms; geolocation tracking and geodata; social media and online content/speech/tort issues, including mis- and disinformation and national security; statutory claims, including ECPA and CFAA; and electronic evidence.

Karl Okamoto

Business Organizations and Mergers & Acquisitions
karl.okamoto@richmond.edu
Temporary Room: Study room next to 310

An expert in business law and finance, Karl Okamoto uses sophisticated empirical methods to investigate the most difficult problems in contemporary corporate law. He is also a nationally recognized expert in transactional skills training.

Okamoto is a pioneer in legal education, having launched the LawMeets® competitions, the premier "moot court" experience for students interested in a transactional practice. LawMeets® was recently profiled in The Wall Street Journal. He also founded Apprennet (now known as Practice.xyz), a start-up that provides a video-based online learning platform for delivering simulations. The platform is used by various universities and businesses to provide hands-on learning to students and workers at scale. Okamoto was awarded a patent for the platform and its underlying teaching methodology.

Richard Peterson

ADR Law & Policy and Mediation
richard.peterson@richmond.edu
Room: 207

Richard Peterson comes to the Richmond School of Law from Southern California where he has been serving as director of the USC Gould School of Law Center for Dispute Resolution since 2018, and previously as the Senior Director for Experiential Education. He was the 2021 recipient of the prestigious L. Randolph Lowery Award of the Southern California Mediation Association for his contribution to dispute resolution education. 

Before USC, Peterson was on the faculty of the Pepperdine University School of Law, where he taught for 15 years, including as a member of the faculty of the Straus Institute for Dispute Resolution. While at Pepperdine, Peterson was the founding director of the Pepperdine Law Special Education Advocacy Clinic and as director of externships. In addition to his law degree, Peterson holds MDR and LLM degrees in Dispute Resolution from Pepperdine.

Peterson has served as chair of the Disability Law Section and the Law and Mental Disability Section of the Association of American Law Schools (AALS) as well as a member of the Board of Directors of non-profit organizations including the Regional Center of Orange County, Down Syndrome Association of Orange County, and as a member of the Professional Advisory Board of the Epilepsy Alliance of Orange County. His scholarly publications include articles on the topic of Therapeutic Jurisprudence.

Before beginning his legal teaching career in 2002, Peterson worked as a consultant to school districts across the nation, teaching dispute resolution and anger management curriculum to K-12 teachers, administrators, and probation officers as part of gang violence prevention programs. He began practicing law in 1979 and has served as a private mediator and arbitrator for more than 35 years. Peterson has an AV rating with Martindale Hubbell.