Professor Monica Eppinger joined the SLU Law faculty in 2010. She teaches and writes in the areas of property, comparative and international law, national security, and anthropology of law. She holds a secondary appointment in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology.

Before entering academia, Professor Eppinger served in the United States diplomatic corps as a tenured Foreign Service Officer for nine years, with tours of duty or policy-making experience in Nigeria, Ukraine, Eastern Europe, Caspian energy, and West African security. She was awarded an individual Superior Honor Award, the State Department's highest civilian honor, in 1999. She earned her law degree from Yale Law School in 2006 and her Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of California Berkeley in 2010.

Professor Eppinger's work uses ethnographic tools to investigate law as a tool of social change at home and abroad. In 2011, the American Society of Comparative Law selected the working draft of her article on the institution of private property in Ukraine, "Unraveling the Illiberal Commons," as one of six papers discussed at its annual works-in-progress workshop held at Yale Law School. Her work on property was also selected for the 2011 Stanford-Yale Junior Faculty Forum. Her work in international law, on the law of war, was selected for the 2011 Childress Symposium, the 2013 Ewha Comfort Women Conference (Seoul, Korea), and the 2014 Cornell Law School Comfort Women Conference. Professor Eppinger has published ten articles or peer-reviewed essays in journals including the Hastings International and Comparative Law Review, the George Washington International Law Review, and Catholic University Law Review. She has been a featured expert on the law of war, Russia, and Ukraine on CNN, public radio, and in local print and broadcast news media.