January 2025 – August 2025
Hila Keren (she/her) is the Paul E. Treusch Professor of Law at Southwestern Law School, Los Angeles. Keren served as the school’s Associate Dean for Research from 2019 to 2024. At Southwestern, Keren teaches in the areas of contracts and business law.
Before her appointment to Southwestern Law School in 2010, Keren completed two years of post-doctoral studies at the Center for the Study of Law and Society at Berkeley Law, where she later taught as a visiting professor.
Karen also studied, practiced, and taught law in Israel for more than two decades. At Hebrew University, her alma mater, she taught basic and advanced courses in contracts as an Assistant Professor of Law and earned the Outstanding Teaching Award. In 2006, Keren was elected by the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities to be a member of its Young Researchers’ Forum.
With a particular interest in the relationship between law and social change, Keren’s primary areas of scholarship are contract law, feminist jurisprudence, critical race theory, law and emotions, and LGBTQ+ rights. Her first book, Contract Law from a Feminist Perspective, was published in Hebrew by the Sacher Institute for Legislative Research and Comparative Law in 2005.
She is the author or coauthor of numerous articles which have appeared in reputable journals, including California Law Review, Harvard Law Review, Minnesota Law Review, Michigan Journal of Race and Law, University of Colorado Law Review, and Florida Law Review. Keren’s article “Separating Church and Market,” published by UC Irvine Law Review, won the Williams Institute’s Dukeminier award. Her article “Textual Harassment,” published by American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy, and Law, won the Polonsky Prize for Creativity and Originality in the Humanistic Disciplines.
Keren frequently publishes opinion pieces in leading national outlets, including the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, Slate, and Bloomberg Law. She is currently at work on a book which illuminates contract law’s narrowness and considers how this central field of law could be made more inclusive.