Law School Welcomes Class of 2019
Dean Mark E. Brandon welcomed the Class of 2019 during First-Year Orientation.
The class has 133 students and was drawn from a pool of more than 1,600 applicants. Members of the class come from 20 states and two countries outside of the U.S., and they have studied at 64 colleges and universities. Forty-one percent of the class members are women, and 17 percent identify as members of a racial or ethnic minority. The members of the Class of 2019 have lived, worked or studied in 43 countries, and they read or speak 13 languages from around the world.
UA Law Ranks 13th in the Nation, 12th for Federal Clerkships
The University of Alabama School of Law is ranked 13th among the nation’s top law schools and third among public schools, according to Business Insider‘s The 50 Best Law Schools in America for 2016.
Using data from the American Bar Association, the Business Insider ranking focused on the percentage of graduates who land full-time, long-term, highly coveted jobs, which includes positions at big law firms that pay well – those with more than 251 employees – and federal clerkships.
The ranking also considered the percentage of graduates with full-time, long-term jobs that require passing the bar, the percentage that are unemployed but seeking employment, bar-passage rate, tuition, and median LSAT scores.
The magazine ranked UA Law 12th among the nation’s law schools for the percentage of graduates who land coveted federal clerkships, according to Business Insider. The Law School sent 8 percent of its graduates into federal clerkships. The position requires excellent legal research and writing skills, and it can provide the foundation for career success.
Law School Forms Diversity & Inclusion Office
The Law School welcomes Daiquiri Steele. She will serve as the new Director of Diversity & Inclusion and Assistant Professor of Law in Residence.
Professor Steele formerly practiced in Atlanta as a Civil Rights Attorney with the U.S. Department of Education, where she provided legal counsel relating to federal investigations of discrimination involving the nation’s school districts, colleges, universities, and state education agencies. She also mediated civil rights claims. She previously worked for the U.S. Department of Labor, where she assessed federal contractors’ compliance with employment discrimination laws.
Law Student Wins Pro Bono Law Student Award
Carly Calhoun won the Alabama State Bar’s Pro Bono Law Student Award.
She has been an active volunteer since her very first day of law school, working with the Long-Term Care Ombudsman Program, Veterans’ Legal Assistance Clinic, Prison Reentry Clinic, Habitat for Humanity Wills Clinic, Project Homeless Connect and Wills for Heroes.
“Calhoun has contributed more than 75 hours of community service and pro bono work during her first two years of law school,” said Glory McLaughlin, Assistant Dean For Public Interest Law. “Not only is she a consistent and reliable presence at the Public Interest Institute’s events and pro bono programs, she always shows up with a smile on her face and a willingness to do whatever is needed.”
Heather Fann: Serving the State
Heather Fann (’06) has served clients who might not otherwise find legal representation.
In 2013, Fann filed a lawsuit on behalf of V. L., a woman who sought visitation rights after separating from her lesbian partner. The Alabama Supreme Court issued an order in September 2015 refusing to recognize the Georgia adoption, and the case was appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which unanimously overturned the Alabama Supreme Court in March, saying it overstepped its authority.
“The case affirmed in some way the fact that it’s not just about the marriage,” Fann said. “It’s about the families, and these children are due the respect of the law regardless of whether their parents are of the same gender.”
Events
Season Opener Dallas Alumni Reception
Do you live in the Dallas area or will you be traveling to Texas for the Crimson Tide football season opener against USC? Join us at Ozona Grill and Bar (4615 Greenville Avenue, Dallas) for a special alumni reception with the dean on Friday, September 2nd from 5:00 p.m. until 7:00 p.m. R.S.V.P. required. To respond by Friday, August 26, please click here.
Attica Locke Wins 2016 Harper Lee Prize
The University of Alabama School of Law and the ABA Journal are pleased to announce Attica Locke, author of “Pleasantville,” will receive the 2016 Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction.
Locke is the sixth winner of the prize. The prize, authorized by Lee, is given annually to a book-length work of fiction that best illuminates the role of lawyers in society and their power to effect change.
Homecoming
Alabama’s 2016 homecoming football game is schedule for Saturday, Oct. 1, when the Crimson Tide will play host to the Kentucky Wildcats at Bryant-Denny Stadium.
Class Notes
Jere L. Beasley (’62) received the 2016 American Association for Justice Tonahill Award. The award is presented in recognition of outstanding and dedicated service to and support of consumers and the trial bar.
Frank M. Caprio (’90) has been appointed managing partner of Bradley Arant Boult Cummings LLP in Huntsville.
Matthew Centeno (’14) has joined Burr & Forman as an associate in the Tort Trial and Insurance practice group.
Bryan Comer (’05) was elected Alabama Bar Commissioner representing the 13th Judicial Circuit.
Phyllis Craig-Taylor (’85) has been appointed to the President’s Board of Advisors on Historically Black Colleges and Universities.
Bruce Ely (’80) has been named to Who’s Who Legal: Corporate Tax 2016.
Kelli Carpenter Fleming (’06) has been named to the Birmingham Business Journal‘s Rising Stars of Health Care list for 2016.
Daniel Harris (’14) has joined Carr Allison as an associate. He will focus his practice on employment litigation.
Dean Martin Leigh Harrison (’29) was inducted posthumously into the Alabama Lawyers’ Hall of Fame.
Kasee Heisterhagen (’09) has been reappointed to serve on the Maritime Law Association’s Special Committee on Cybersecurity.
Austin Huffaker, Jr. (’99) has been appointed to the Alabama Securities Commission.
Scott E. Ludwig (’83) has been selected as the 2016 recipient of the American Bar Association LLCs, Partnerships and Unincorporated Entities Committee’s Martin I. Lubaroff Award.
Allen May (’83) has been appointed as a Tuscaloosa County Circuit Court Judge.
Terry McCarthy (’99) received the Judge Walter P. Gewin Award at the Alabama State Bar meeting in June. The award acknowledges significant contributions by lawyers in the development and presentation of CLE programs by CLE Alabama.
Bryan McCormick (’07) has been appointed as Senior Counsel at Siemens Corporation.
Scott Mitchell (’02) has been appointed to the Executive Committee of the National Conference of Appellate Court Clerks.
Rick Newton (’90) has launched Kyoto Yakitori in Birmingham and is grilling at various venues. The flagship restaurant is scheduled to open in 2017.
Andrew S. Nix (’03) has joined the Birmingham office of Bradley Arant Boult Cummings LLP as partner.
Nichelle Nix (’08) was featured in The Birmingham Times for being the first Director of the Governor’s Office of Minority Affairs.
George R. Parker (’98) has been elected to a second term on the Alabama State Bar Board of Bar Commissioners. He represents the 15th Judicial Circuit, Place 1.
John C. S. Pierce (’91) has been elected shareholder at Sirote & Permutt, P.C.
Charles A. Powell (’81) was cited as a noted practitioner in the 2016 edition of Chambers USA: America’s Leading Lawyers for Business.
Joe Powell (’97) has been appointed Regional National Agency Counsel for Fidelity National Title Group.
Andy Rotenstreich (’93) has been named managing shareholder for the Alabama offices of Baker Donelson.
Jessica Weathers Schaub (’13) has joined Malone & Nelson, LLC in Tuscaloosa.
Larry D. Smith (’84) received the G. Kirk Haas Humanitarian Award at the 2016 Annual Convention of The Florida Bar.
Rebecca Wilson (’01) delivered the commencement address at the Hamilton Holt School at Rollins College.
Paul Young (’79) has been elected President of the Alabama Criminal Defense Lawyers Association.
Gifts
Alabama Pattern Jury Instructions Committee Civil contributed $5,000 to the William C. Sullivan Scholarship.
Bradley Arant Boult Cummings LLP contributed $13,000 to the Bradley Arant Boult Cummings Endowed Scholarship.
Burr & Forman LLP pledged $50,000 to establish the Charlotte Pool Bennett Memorial Endowed Scholarship to honor the memory of their colleague, Charlotte Pool Bennett, a 2013 graduate of the Law School. Charlotte passed away September 19, 2015.
Maynard Cooper & Gale firm members contributed $8,925 to The Charlotte Pool Bennett Memorial Endowed Scholarship.
William B. Hairston (’83) and the late William B. Hairston, Jr. contributed $10,000 to the Thomas L. Jones Fund.
Thomas Heflin, Jr. contributed $5,000 to the Howell T. Heflin Fund.
The Albert G. Rives Charitable Trust contributed $13,088 to the Albert G. and Hester Rives Fund.
Frank P. Samford, III (’69) contributed $5,000 to the Thomas L. Jones Fund.
Thomas J. Scott, Jr. contributed $5,000 to the Judge Irene Feagin Scott Tax Library Collection.
Warren O. Wheeler contributed $10,134 to the Judge Robert Wheeler Scholarship.
University of Alabama Federal Tax Clinic contributed $30,000 to the Federal Tax Clinic Scholarship.
Faculty Notes
PROFESSOR BILL BREWBAKER spoke to the Christian Legal Society breakfast at the Alabama State Bar meeting in Sandestin, Florida, on June 25.
JUDGE JOSEPH COLQUITT attended the Annual Conference of the Uniform Law Commission in Stowe, Vermont, in July. At the Conference he participated in the presentation of two proposed uniform acts drafted over the past year. The Acts are the Uniform Unsworn Declarations Act and the Uniform Domestic Unsworn Declarations Act.
As Reporter, Judge Colquitt authored the proposed drafts which were reviewed and edited by both the Drafting and Style Committees. At the Conference, the Uniform Law Commissioners received the Drafting Committee report, reviewed and discussed the acts. Although the ULC process usually requires two years to review and approve draft acts, following the report on these acts, a motion was made and passed to permit final consideration of the acts at the 2016 Conference. Later in the Conference, the acts were brought before the Commissioners for final consideration and were approved by unanimous vote of all 50 states. Colquitt, as Reporter, will next receive a final review of the acts by the Style Committee. Upon receipt of the final Style report, he will conform the acts after which they will be submitted to the states for consideration.
Judge Colquitt previously served as Reporter for the Uniform Unsworn Foreign Declarations Act which was approved by the ULC in 2008. It has been enacted in over 20 states and the District of Columbia. It remains under consideration in other states. He also served as Associate Reporter on the Uniform Act for the Prevention of and Remedies for Human Trafficking which was approved by the Uniform Law Commission in 2013. That act has already been adopted in 7 states and is under consideration in several other states.
PROFESSOR RICHARD DELGADO‘s article, “Precious Knowledge: State Bans on Ethnic Studies, Book Traffickers (Librotraficantes), and a New Type of Race Trial,” was recently listed on SSRN’s Top Ten download list for: LIT: Post-Colonial Culture (Topic). As of 28 June 2016, his paper had been downloaded 239 times. And a second article, “Hate Speech in Cyberspace”, co-authored with Jean Stefancic, made another Top Ten download list, LSN: Remedies (Sub-Topic). As of 27 July 2016, the paper had been downloaded 353 times. Professor Delgado ranked second in Brian Leiter’s recent study of U.S. law faculty scholarship, between Harvard dean Martha Minow (#1) and Catharine MacKinnon (#3), in the field “critical theory.” The Top Twenty are here: http://leiterlawschool.typepad.com/leiter/2016/07/most-cited-critical-theory-law-faculty-2010-2014-inclusive.html
PROFESSOR SHAHAR DILLBARY presented his new scholarship on actual causation in cases involving multiple actors at the annual conference of the Society for Institutional & Organizational Economics (Paris) during the summer. He also attended the American Law and Economics Association Annual Conference (Harvard Law).
Professor Dillbary’s most recent theoretical and empirical research projects investigate the relationship between healthcare providers’ liability and suicide rates, causation cases involving multiple tortfeasors and cases where tort law and contract law interact. Professor Dillbary has been recently invited and is currently scheduled to present his scholarship at the Midwestern Law and Economic Association Annual Conference (Emory Law), the University of Chicago School of Law, the European Law and Economics (Bologna) and the Southern Economics Association (Washington D.C.).
PROFESSOR MIRIT EYAL-COHEN participated in the Columbia Law School- Hebrew University Law Faculty International Conference 2016 on Taxation and Public Policy. Leading scholars from U.S. law schools such as Columbia, University of Pennsylvania, Virginia, Texas and Cardozo participated and discussed issues in public policy, finance, taxation, and regulation.
Professor Eyal-Cohen presented a paper titled, “The Hidden Price of Regulation” at the Third International Tax Roundtable on Taxation and Tax Policy held at Netania, Israel. Participants came from Israeli Law Schools as well as UC Irvine, University of Florida, Rutgers Law School, and Dom Helder Camara in Brazil. Professor Eyal-Cohen’s paper is the first to demonstrate that start-up firms that lack economies of scale, scope, and age are regulatorily disadvantaged. Moreover, regulatory exclusions do not solve the problem but create more harm by exacerbating the impact of the very regulation whose cost they seek to reduce. The Article makes the following three contributions to the current literature: First, it serves as a primer to the economics of regulation and establishes that the relationship between size and regulatory effects is non-exclusive but extends to scope and age. Second, it points out to discriminatory effects of regulations on start-up entities. Lastly, it provides mechanisms to alleviate latent externalities and attain greater efficiency in regulatory policymaking.
PROFESSOR SUSAN PACE HAMILL was quoted in Vanity Fair‘s “The Great Trump Tax Mysteries: Is He Hiding Loopholes, Errors, or Something More Serious?” She commented on whether Donald Trump has the qualities voters seek in a president.
LEGAL WRITING INSTRUCTOR ANITA KAY HEAD presented “Making Statutory Interpretation Accessible and Timely: An Exercise Using King v. Burwell” at the Biennial Conference of the Legal Writing Institute in Portland, Oregon.
PROFESSOR JULIE HILL provided an update on payment systems law at the biennial Teaching Consumer Law Conference in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She also presented her preliminary research on bank director and officer liability at the Law and Society Annual Meeting in New Orleans, Louisiana.
PROFESSOR RONALD KROTOSZYNSKI‘s latest book, “Privacy Revisited: A Global Perspective on the Right to Be Left Alone,” has been published by Oxford University Press.
On July 20, 2016, Professor Krotoszynski presented “Two Steps Forward, One Step Back: On the Decline of Expressive Freedoms Under the Roberts and Rehnquist Courts,” the first chapter of his next book project, “The Disappearing First Amendment: On the Decline of Freedom of Speech and the Growing Problem of Inequality Among Speakers” (forthcoming Yale University Press 2018), at a workshop hosted by the law faculty at the Seattle University School of Law. On May 24, 2016, he presented “Privacy and Dignity Through the Lens of Comparative Law” at a panel considering emerging challenges to privacy rights at the Irish Society of Comparative Law’s 2016 annual meeting, which was hosted by the National University of Ireland-Galway School of Law, in Galway, Ireland.
From May 15-19, 2016, Professor Krotoszynski participated as an elected member at the American Law Institute’s annual meeting, which took place in Washington, D.C. On April 22, 2016, he presented “The Disappearing First Amendment” at a faculty workshop hosted by the law faculty at the Ohio State University Moritz College of Law, in Columbus, Ohio.
PROFESSOR MICHAEL PARDO‘s edited book, Philosophical Foundations of Law and Neuroscience (Oxford University Press, co-edited with Dennis Patterson), was published this summer, as was the sixth edition of his casebook, An Analytical Approach to Evidence (Aspen/ Wolters Kluwer, with Ronald J. Allen et al). Professor Pardo served as a commentator at the “New Voices in Civil Justice Workshop” at Vanderbilt Law School, and he presented his recent scholarship on a panel titled, “How is Philosophy Relevant to Law?,” at the annual meeting of the Southeastern Association of Law Schools.
PROFESSOR ADAM STEINMAN‘s article, “The End of an Era: Federal Civil Procedure After the 2015 Amendments,” was accepted for publication in the Emory Law Journal (forthcoming September 2016). He spoke at the Civil Procedure Workshop at the University of Washington School of Law in Seattle July 14-15, 2016. Here’s a link: https://www.law.uw.edu/events/civil-procedure-workshop.
The views, opinions, and conclusions expressed by faculty in their publications or research activities are those of the author and not necessarily those of The University of Alabama or its officers and trustees. The content of faculty publications has not been approved by the University of Alabama, and the author is solely responsible for that content.