U.S. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. was the keynote speaker during the University of Alabama School of Law and the UA Honors College celebration of the 50th anniversary of Harper Lee’s novel “To Kill a Mockingbird,” an event that saw the school also announce a new annual award, “The Harper Lee Prize for Legal Literature.”
Continue reading this Tuscaloosa News article at this link: “Holder See No Tension Between Security, Liberty.”
Skadden, Arps and The University of Alabama School of Law announced today that Larry Hammond, founder and chair of the Arizona Justice Project, has been awarded the 2010 Morris Dees Justice Award.
Legendary civil rights attorney Morris Dees, who is co-founder and chief trial counsel of the Southern Poverty Law Center, will present the award to Hammond, a partner in the Arizona law firm of Osborn Maledon, P.A., during a reception at Skadden, Arps’s offices in New York City on Thursday, November 18, 2010.
The Morris Dees Justice Award was created in 2006 by Skadden, Arps and The University of Alabama School of Law to honor Dees, an Alabama graduate, for his life-long devotion to public service. The award is given annually to a lawyer who has devoted his or her career to serving the public interest and pursuing justice, and whose work has brought about positive change in the community, state, or nation.
Hammond, the 2010 award recipient, has spent much of his career in public service, including stints clerking for U.S. Supreme Court Justices Hugo L. Black and Lewis F. Powell, Jr.; as an Assistant Special Prosecutor during Watergate; and as Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Office of Legal Counsel at the Department of Justice.
Hammond is the founder and chair of the Arizona Justice Project, and a member of the Board of the Arizona Capital Representation Project. He also serves as chair of the Criminal Justice Reform Committee of The American Judicature Society (AJS), an organization he served as president from 2003 to 2005.
Hammond is honored for his tireless work to correct systemic injustice in death penalty litigation in the United States, for his representation of defendants in capital cases and for leading efforts to create the AJS Institute for Forensic Science and Public Policy during his presidency of AJS.
A recipient of many local and national awards, Hammond was nominated by a distinguished group that included former U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno and former Dean of Yale Law School Harold Hongju Koh.
The first Morris Dees Justice Award recipient, in 2006, was U.S. District Judge William Wayne Justice, of the Eastern District of Texas. The 2007 winner was Arthur N. Read, general counsel for Friends of Farmworkers, Inc., based in Philadelphia. The 2008 award went to Cheryl Little, executive director of the Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center, which is located in Miami. Last year’s award recipient was presented to Gordon Bonnyman, Jr., executive director of the Tennessee Justice Center in Nashville.
A sculpture commemorating the award was created by Jillian Crochet, a graduate of The University of Alabama who won the design competition in 2006.
Members of the 2010 Morris Dees Justice Award Selection Committee, who were charged with choosing this year’s recipient, are:
Morris Dees, Honorary Chair
Kenneth C. Randall, Co-Chair (The University of Alabama School of Law)
Robert C. Sheehan, Co-Chair (Skadden, Arps)
Helaine M. Barnett, Past President, Legal Services Corporation
Judge Bernice B. Donald, Western District, Tennessee / Secretary, American Bar Association
Bryan Fair, Thomas E. Skinner Professor of Law, The University of Alabama School of Law
Cheryl I. Harris, Professor of Law, UCLA School of Law
Bradley S. Phillips, Co-Chair, Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law
Susan Butler Plum, Director, Skadden Fellowship Foundation
Steven R. Shapiro, Legal Director, ACLU
Jeffrey Toobin, Senior Analyst, CNN
Vaughn C. Williams, Partner, Skadden, Arps
Judith A. Winston, Former General Counsel & Undersecretary, U.S. Department of Education
Visit www.DeesJusticeAward.com for more information regarding the 2010 Morris Dees Justice Award.
The Council on Legal Education Opportunity (CLEO) named third-year Alabama Law student Kevin R. Johnson as its “Student of the Month.” Johnson currently serves as National Chair of the ABA Law Student Division.
ABA Journal features Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Sue Bell Cobb, a 1980 UA Law alumna, in its July 2010 cover article: “Tipping the Scales.”
The New York Times piece, “An Elite, Prolific Office of U.S. Public Defenders,” features Alabama law professor David Patton discussing his work as a trial attorney in the Manhattan federal defenders’ office. Patton currently serves as director of the Law School’s Criminal Defense Clinic.
The Law School welcomes a distinguished slate of visiting professors who will teach at Alabama during the fall 2010 semester. These include: the former president of Israel’s Supreme Court, the former vice president of Israel’s National Labor Court, a leading legal advocate of fair labor standards for migrant farmworkers, the current vice dean of the Buchmann Faculty of Law at Tel Aviv University, an Oxford University graduate who is an expert on Civil Procedure, and one of today’s preeminent voices on Biomedical Ethics and Health Care Law.
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Kevin Johnson, a member of the Class of 2011, was recently elected chairman of the American Bar Association’s (ABA) Law Student Division. Johnson, who took part in the ABA’s 2010 Business Law Section Spring Meeting last month, is also a 2010 CLEO Fellow Scholar. The scholarship is awarded by the Council on Legal Education Opportunity through the ABA’s Fund for Justice and Education.
The United States Golf Association (USGA) has appointed Alabama Law alumni Jim Noel ’79 as its chief legal officer. Noel joins the USGA from ESPN, where he served as associate general counsel and as a vice president in the network’s programming and digital media departments. His work included negotiations of media rights and distribution agreements, intellectual property licensing and new-media ventures. Read more
The University of Alabama School of Law has named Andrew P. Morriss, the prolific legal scholar, author, and media contributor, as its new Jones Chair of Law.
Morriss is the author or coauthor of more than 50 book chapters, scholarly articles, and books. He serves as a Research Fellow at the New York University Center for Labor and Employment Law, a Senior Fellow at the Property & Environment Research Center in Bozeman, Montana, and a Senior Scholar at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.
Morriss is also a Reporter for the Restatement of Employment Law by the American Law Institute, and a Senior Fellow for the Houston-based Institute for Energy Research. He taught the Law and Economics of the Financial Crisis as a Visiting Professor of Law at Alabama during fall 2009 semester.
Morriss earned an A.B. from Princeton University and a J.D., as well as an M.A. in Public Affairs, from the University of Texas at Austin. He received a Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. After law school, Morriss clerked for U.S. District Judge Harold Barefoot Sanders, Jr. in the Northern District of Texas and worked for two years at Texas Rural Legal Aid in Hereford and Plainview, Texas.
Morriss was formerly the inaugural H. Ross and Helen Workman Professor of Law & Professor of Business at the University of Illinois College of Law.
The recent National Law Journal article, “Get That Master of Laws Degree Online,” features Assistant Dean Dan Powell discussing Alabama’s online Tax LL.M. program. Alabama Law launched the nation’s first fully online and interactive Tax LL.M. program in 2008. The story is also posted on the TaxProf Blog.
