AL.com has named its 2016 Women Who Shape the State, a list of Alabama women who have changed their neighborhoods, cities and Alabama for the better.
The program evolved out of the Birmingham-based Women Who Make a Difference, which launched in 2013. Last year the list was expanded to honor women throughout Alabama. More than 100 women were nominated and 30 were selected.
UA Law School graduates on the list are:
For more, read “Meet AL.com’s 2016 Women Who Shape the State.”
Research conducted by Professor Fredrick Vars (along with Karen Cropsey and Richard Shelton of UAB and Cheryl McCullumsmith of Cincinnati) is featured in a Forbes story about how to reduce firearm-related suicides.
For more, read “A Clever, Low-Cost, Non-Inflammatory Strategy To Reduce Firearm-Related Suicides.”
The University of Alabama School of Law is ranked 2nd among 10 law schools where starting salaries exceed debt, according to U.S. News & World Report.
The magazine compiled a list of the 10 law schools where the salary-debt ratio was highest among 2014 graduates. Unranked law schools, which do not submit enough data for U.S. News to calculate a rank, were not considered for the list.
UA Law has kept tuition low, helping to ensure its graduates leave with less debt than they might at comparable law schools.
For more, read “10 Law Schools Where Starting Salaries Exceed Debt.”
Norman Singer, the Charles O. Stokes Professor Emeritus of Law and Anthropology, passed away Monday at Druid City Hospital. His family was with him, as was his friend and former student Anil Mujumdar.
Singer took his bachelor’s degree from the Wharton School (Penn) and his J.D. (summa) from Boston University Law School. After law school, he did a four-year stint in the Peace Corps. On returning to the States he took an S.J.D. from Harvard; his dissertation was on traditional legal systems in Ethiopia. He was a committed internationalist, having taught or worked in Ethiopia, Albania, Cambodia, Croatia, Egypt, Fiji, Iraq, Jamaica, Morocco, Rwanda, Sudan, Trinidad, Yugoslavia, and Zanzibar.
Among his many projects, he lent his legal expertise to restructuring land tenures in countries with poorly functioning (or non-existent) private land tenures. He was a prolific scholar, having authored 26 books/monographs, seven book chapters, 21 journal articles, 26 book reviews, and five published reports. Perhaps his best-known scholarly work was the treatise, Sutherland on Statutory Construction, which he co-authored with his eldest son, Shambie Singer. He is survived by a loving and supportive family, including his wife, Anna Jacobs Singer; sons, Shambie, Jeremy (Nicole) and Micah (Ali); stepdaughters, Joanna Jacobs and Stephanie Jacobs; and three grandchildren.
There will be a graveside service at Evergreen Cemetery on Wednesday, November 2, at 2:00 p.m.
For more, read The Tuscaloosa News obituary.
The University of Alabama School of Law and the Alabama Disabilities Advocacy Program are pleased to announce they have reunited.
ADAP was housed at the Law School for 28 years. In 2004, ADAP moved from the Law School to the Office of Academic Affairs, where the program’s director reported to the provost. Under the new agreement, ADAP offices will remain at Martha Parham West, and Director James A. Tucker will report to Dean Mark E. Brandon.
“We at the School of Law are pleased to be reuniting with the Alabama Disabilities Advocacy Program,” Brandon said. “ADAP’s mission – to provide advocacy and representation for Alabamians with disabilities – is consistent with law’s highest aspirations. Our students will benefit enormously from opportunities to work with the program.”
In August 2017, the Law School and ADAP plan to launch a law clinic for children with disabilities. The clinic will provide practical experience to law students under the supervision of licensed attorneys and will support the guarantee that every student at UA Law has the opportunity to gain clinical experience before graduating.
“We’re really looking forward to offering a clinical experience to students and to exposing a broad range of students to the issues that people with disability encounter in the legal system,” Tucker said. “I think law graduates will then be able to be well-positioned to serve persons with disabilities as they move forward with their practice and be attuned to disability issues throughout their careers.”
ADAP is a federally funded advocacy organization that provides legal services to Alabamians with disabilities. It has 20 full-time employees, including 10 lawyers and four advocates.
J. Cole Portis (’90), the 141st President of the Alabama State Bar, embraces the story of the good Samaritan and has crafted a plan to serve lawyers and the public as his neighbor.
Portis, Principal and Section Head of the Product Liability/Personal Injury Section for Beasley Allen in Montgomery, is using his 13-month tenure as President of the bar to serve the profession and the state, initiating programs that will help lawyers become more effective, attract more lawyers to the profession and, ultimately, advise the state leaders on some of Alabama’s most pressing issues.
He is opening the lines of communication and visiting more than 60 local bar associations so that he and others can listen to what members want and need. He is inviting leaders of those associations to Montgomery for conversations about what’s happening within the bar. To supplement those meetings, he helped develop a portal that lawyers can access through alabar.org so that any member can offer suggestions about benefits and address other bar matters.
“Listen, this is your bar,’’ he told members at the Alabama State Bar Annual Meeting & Legal Expo in June. “We need to listen to you. We need to pay attention to you, and we need to serve you.”
Portis is familiar with service. He is the father of nine children ages 6 to 22. Portis and his wife, Joy, adopted six of their children and are strong advocates for adoption. They founded Love 100 Ministry, which assists Alabama families with adoption costs, and have fostered many children.
“I don’t know that everyone is called to be a foster parent, but I would say everyone is called to ensure that children in Alabama who are in our foster care system are taken care of,” he said. “I think we all have that responsibility.”
Portis’s calling to serve resonates throughout his practice. He represents those who have lost someone or have been injured. While he knows that legal professionals are often referred to as lawyers and attorneys, he said he feels like he is a “counselor of law,” someone who counsels individuals through their grief.
Portis and his staff have successfully handled more than 100 cases that were tried or resolved for more than $1 million, and he was nominated, along with his colleagues, for the 2014 Public Justice Trial Lawyer of the Year Award for leading the first lawsuit to go to trial against Toyota. That case linked sudden unintended acceleration to electronic throttle control problems.
“He’s a very successful lawyer at trial, but he’s also successful in managing an entire section with over 14 lawyers and approximately 30 support staff: the Product Liability/Personal Injury section,” said Thomas J. Methvin, principal and managing attorney at Beasley Allen. “That’s been the bread and butter section since we were founded in 1979.”
Helping others is also the common thread running through Portis’s Alabama State Bar agenda. While the Alabama Bar has the Alabama Lawyer Assistance Program, which provides help to lawyers, judges and law students who are addicted and have mental health disorders, Portis is starting a wellness initiative that will help lawyers take care of themselves before concerns become problems. The initiative will primarily deal with mind, body and spirit, and provide resources for stress, nutrition and faith.
He is focusing on the practice of law and is designing a program that will help lawyers tap into educational opportunities involved in the practice of law as well as new areas of law. With technology evolving on a daily basis, Portis wants to show lawyers what technology is available to help them in their practice and introduce them to emerging technology. He notes that lawyers do not go to school to learn how to run businesses, but law offices are businesses. To help lawyers become more efficient, he wants the Alabama State Bar to provide lawyers with the tools for running effective businesses, including foundational principles and marketing.
Portis asked Monet Gaines, Assistant Attorney General in the Opinions Division, to be his Vice President, and she didn’t hesitate to help him accomplish his goals.
Gaines has agreed to help Portis increase interest in the legal profession and boost minority participation in the bar. The bar has a successful program aimed at attracting high school students, and Portis would like to promote becoming a lawyer to college students, emphasizing there are several roads they can take that end at the same destination.
“He really seeks to make a difference in everything that he does, not just this,” Gaines said. “He really has a heart toward service. Listening to what he’s passionate about is just exciting to me.”
Under his leadership, the Alabama State Bar also will promote the legal profession by advocating for the public and volunteering to represent those who cannot afford legal representation, increase foster care among lawyers and issue a call to all lawyers to be engaged in public service, including the Alabama Legislature, because lawyers understand how to be analytical and solve problems.
Those who know Portis say he will accomplish all of his goals in 13 short months. Colleagues and friends describe him as someone who is calm, someone who lives what he believes.
“There’s no doubt in my mind that he’s going to do it,” said Cooper Shattuck, a State Bar Commissioner and General Counsel for The University of Alabama System.
“He won’t do it on his own. He will enlist help because he’s a magnet for people who want to be productive, people who want to accomplish things.”
Portis’s goals have been decades in the making. He has fond memories of law school because that is where he formed many relationships that mean so much to him. It has been those same relationships that have spurred him on in his practice. He vividly remembers attending UA Law during his first year and sitting in Professor Harry Cohen’s class. He remembers not being as prepared as he should have been and knowing Cohen would call on him to see what he knew about a case. He also remembers knowing he was “was going to completely flub it.”
“Going from an insecure student with very little knowledge and then to be able to practice at Beasley Allen and really have the opportunity to handle some landmark cases and to be in leadership positions is just — I guess this is a word — unfathomable,” he said. “It just doesn’t make any sense to me. God has blessed me richly.”
The Public Interest Institute has formed a new advisory board to inform the legal community and support public interest work at the University of Alabama School of Law
“As the Public Interest Institute has continued to grow, I felt it would be beneficial to our students to engage more external partners in our mission,” said Glory McLaughlin, Assistant Dean for Public Interest.
Public Interest Advisory Board members will provide additional perspectives on public interest and pro bono issues and needs. They will help promote the Law School to public interest employers, act as mentors to law students seeking careers in public interest law and assist with fundraising to promote the work of the Public Interest Institute.
The Advisory Board consists of 19 members from Tuscaloosa, Birmingham, Montgomery and Huntsville who work in public interest and government. Of the board’s 19 members, 17 are alumni of the Law School.
Advisory Board members are:
Tiffanie Agee, Of Counsel, Gespass and Johnson
Stephanie Blackburn, Managing Attorney, Legal Services Alabama
Leigh Byers, Partner, Nolan Byers
Jerome Dees, Deputy District Attorney, Jefferson County District Attorney’s Office
Mike Forton, Director of Advocacy, Legal Services Alabama
Kevin Garrison, Shareholder, Baker Donelson
Nicole Hampton, Associate, Rosen Harwood
Brad Hargett, Assistant Public Defender, Tuscaloosa County Office of Public Defender
Tiara Hudson, Lead Trial Attorney, Jefferson County Public Defender’s Office
Nicole Hughes, Attorney, Hardin & Hughes
Patrick Jones, Staff Attorney, Legal Services Alabama
Marcus Maples, Shareholder, Baker Donelson
Latasha McCrary, Staff Attorney, Southern Poverty Law Center
Paul Rand, Magistrate Judge Law Clerk, Northern District of Alabama
Steve Rygiel, Legal Director, Birmingham AIDS Outreach
Stephen Stetson, Policy Analyst, Arise Citizens’ Policy Project
Sarah Stokes, Staff Attorney, Southern Environmental Law Center
Jessica Vosburgh, Director, Adelante Alabama Worker Center
Liz Whipple, Director of Domestic Violence Clinic, University of Alabama School of Law
Professor John P. Gross prepared Representation in All Criminal Prosecutions: The Right to Counsel in State Courts, a report released this week by the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.
The report surveys the standards set by each of the 50 states to provide counsel in criminal cases to those who cannot afford to pay for a lawyer and examines how states have designed their public defense policies in light of Gideon v. Wainwright and other Supreme Court cases interpreting the Sixth Amendment’s mandate. This is the third report in NACDL’s series Gideon at 50: A Three-Part Examination of Public Defense in America.
“While previous reports have documented the lack of funding for public defense and the systemic denial of counsel based on unrealistic income eligibility guidelines, this report reveals that many state courts and legislatures have created the framework to fulfill Gideon‘s noble ideal, that no one charged with a crime should be without counsel,” Gross said. “The Supreme Court’s fear that extending the right to counsel to defendants charged with petty crimes would overwhelm the states has proven to be unfounded. In fact, many states have, at least in theory if not in practice, gone beyond the actual incarceration standard and require the appointment of counsel in all criminal cases. The decision to provide counsel in all criminal cases, even those that will not result in incarceration, appears to be rooted in the recognition that defense counsel is needed to ensure due process and that the collateral consequences of a conviction are just as significant, if not more so, than spending a day in jail.”
For more, read Part One, Rationing Justice: The Underfunding of Assigned Counsel Systems, and Part Two, Redefining Indigence: Financial Eligibility Guidelines for Assigned Counsel. All of the reports are available at www.nacdl.org/gideonat50.
U. S. Attorney Joyce Vance lectured today about the U.S. Justice Department’s role in protecting LGBTQ+ civil rights.
Vance acknowledged that the conversation about civil rights and civil rights protections for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer Americans can be combative at times, but she told students and faculty that the question cuts to the very core of the responsibility of lawyers.
“Our job as lawyers is to remove our personal beliefs and our preconceptions from the issue,” said Vance, the top-ranking federal law enforcement official in the Northern District of Alabama. “Our job as lawyers is to examine the facts, to examine the law, to look at the equation from all sides, to reach legal conclusions that we move forward on, legal conclusions that aren’t those that play into our preconceived notions and our beliefs but those that have integrity based on the facts and on the law.”
Daiquiri Steele, Director of Diversity & Inclusion and Assistant Professor of Law in Residence, said current Alabama Law students are matriculating during a time in which the Department of Justice’s role in LGBTQ+ legal issues is evolving. It is important, she said, to provide opportunities for students to learn from and discuss these issues with individuals who are at the forefront of this evolution.
In 2009, Vance said, the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr., Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2009 was established to help local and state officials investigate hate crimes. A year later, the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell Repeal Act of 2010 was authorized, allowing gays, lesbians, and bisexuals to serve openly in the U.S. Armed Forces. A year ago, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the Constitution guarantees a right to same-sex marriage.
Vance compared what’s happening today with civil rights for the LGBTQ+ community with what happened in the nation in 1963, the same year the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. was arrested and wrote the “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” and protesters participated in the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.
“It’s a better world,” she said. “It’s not perfect world.”
By Pat Graves
The recent induction of Martin Leigh Harrison into the Alabama Lawyers’ Hall of Fame jogged my memory. Somewhere in my law school memorabilia were classroom photographs of him. Forty four years ago during my senior year in law school, I sensed an opportunity to capture and preserve a moment of the history and tradition of the law school. Dean Harrison gave me permission to photograph him during a class.
I sat high on the back row of his large classroom in Farrah Hall which now houses the University’s Department of Geography. I used a telephoto lens and several rolls of fast film to eliminate a flash. I hoped to capture his classic movements and gestures. To those of you fortunate enough to have been schooled at the foot of the master, I hope these photographs will bring a smile.
On entering the Spartan classroom the Dean’s routine was to first remove his pocket watch which he laid lovingly on the desk. He always stood during his lectures, occasionally using a lectern. His hand gestures were classic. To emphasize a point during a lecture, he snapped his fingers on the upswing of his hand saying “clearly” (the “r” was soft) or “contract formed.” On occasion a faint whimsical smile crept over his face, generated by a student’s question or answer. A pencil was his pointer. His students lovingly called him “The Tiger” because of his passion for the law, or more frequently, “Dean.”
At the induction ceremony, Reggie Hamner gave an outstanding presentation of the man who served on the faculty of the University of Alabama Law School for 39 years, teaching several generations of lawyers. Born in Opelika in 1907, Leigh Harrison was the son of a highly respected superintendent of education. At the University he earned an AB and a Phi Beta Kappa Key in 1927 at 20 years of age and in 1929, an LL.B. After practicing law in Birmingham for six years as a distinguished appellate lawyer, he earned an LL.M at Harvard in 1935. Leigh Harrison taught law at Southern Methodist University two years before returning to Tuscaloosa.
As Dean from 1950 to 1966, Leigh Harrison strengthened admission requirements, supervised two expansions of Farrah Hall, tripled the library holdings, and hired the first lawyer librarian. Under his leadership the Alabama Law Review was established, promoting research and writing. His recognition that state support was not enough to elevate the quality of the law school and to attract gifted students led to the creation of the Law School Foundation, the Law School Alumni Association, and the Farrah Law Society.
In the early 70s, Leigh Harrison served as Staff Director of the Alabama Constitutional Revision Commission which generated a new judicial article to the constitution under which the highly regarded Unified Judicial System was created.
These photographs capture the essence of a professor, dean, and gentleman.
* * *
Patrick Howard Graves, Jr., is a retired partner in the Huntsville office of Bradley Arant Boult Cummings, LLP. He graduated from West Point in 1964, and served two tours in Vietnam as an infantry platoon leader and company commander and aide-de-camp. He graduated from the University of Alabama School of Law in 1972. In retirement he is writing family history and about adventures at West Point and in the Army.
Removing the watch.
Explaining the rights of third party beneficiaries.
Listening to a question.
“Clearly” or “Contract formed.”
Classic hand gestures.
Classic hand gestures.
The smile.
