LMU Loyola Law School welcomes two new faculty for the 2026-27 academic year, Mary Catherine Amerine and Asees Bhasin. Together, the new colleagues add expertise in trademark and copyright, race and the law, evidence, reproductive justice, and public health. Their demonstrated commitment to teaching and to socially embedded scholarship on pressing issues of law will greatly benefit students and the wider scholarly community. These latest additions follow eight exciting new hires from last year.
Mary Catherine Amerine comes to Loyola from George Washington University, where she was a visiting associate professor of law and Frank H. Marks Intellectual Property Law Fellow. Professor Amerine’s teaching and research focuses on intellectual property law, particularly copyright, trademark, and false advertising law. Her current research explores the ways in which public art, professional art forgers, and authenticators and the replication of style and genre by AI platforms illuminate core questions of copyright such as authorship, substantial similarity, look and feel, and derivative works. She is also interested in how the law responds to the circumstances under which work is created – specifically, the concepts of inspiration and collaboration and their intersection with copyright law. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in the Iowa Law Review, Temple Law Review, and Marquette Intellectual Property Law Review, among others.
She brings a wealth of litigation experience, having worked on federal false advertising cases in the pharmaceutical and medical devices industries, as well as copyright infringement cases in the entertainment, music, and comedy fields. Professor Amerine has won multiple writing awards and was a 2022-23 Edison Fellow at the Center for Intellectual Property x Innovation Law (C-IP2) at Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University. She is a graduate of William & Mary Law School.
Asees Bhasin comes to Loyola from the University of Maryland, where she was a visiting assistant professor of law and Donald Gaines Murray Fellow and taught in the first-year Lawyering Program. Previously, Professor Bhasin taught at Boston University, where her research focused on the rules of evidence and the use of expert witnesses to prove racism in criminal trials. Before that, she was a senior research fellow at the Solomon Center for Health Law and Policy at Yale University, where she researched and wrote on health law and racism. She began her legal career as a Georgetown Women’s Law and Public Policy Fellow at the National Partnership for Women & Families in Washington, D.C., where her advocacy was centered on reproductive rights, and maternal and infant health.
Her research focuses on critical evidence law, race and the law, reproductive justice, and the intersections between these fields. Her scholarship analyzes how seemingly neutral rules of procedure contribute to the marginalization of people and communities along race and gender lines. Professor Bhasin’s scholarship has appeared or is forthcoming in the California Law Review, Yale Law Journal, and the Indiana Health Law Review, among others. She received a joint J.D.-LL.B. degree from Georgetown University Law Center and King’s College London. She was born and raised in New Delhi, India.