UVA Lawyer Spring 2015

SPRING 2015

The UniversiTy of virginia school of law

The Citizen-Lawyer

“[I have] an ardent zeal to see this government (the idol of my soul) continue in good hands.” —Thomas Jefferson, 1808

September 8 Charlottesville Reception

Law School’s Caplin Pavilion

September 17 Norfolk/Virginia Beach Reception

Towne Point Club

September 30 Los Angeles Luncheon

Jonathan Club

September 30 Los Angeles Reception

Craft

October 1 San Francisco Reception

Villa Taverna

October 20 New York City Reception

Midtown Executive Club

October 21 Wilmington Luncheon

Hotel Dupont

October 21 Baltimore Reception

Woodberry Kitchen

December 9 Washington, D.C. Holiday Reception

Metropolitan Club

UPcomING AlUmNI EvENtS

FoR lAtESt oN AlUmNI EvENtS: www.law.virginia.edu/alumni

Lawyers are heavily represented in public life. Partly this is because lawyers are trained to persuade,

which is an essential skill in the policy arena. But it is also because lawyers are by inclination and training dedicated to public service. We take great pride in being the first law school explicitly founded on that principle.

The remarkably high representation of UVA Law graduates in national, state, and local elected and appointed office is also a reminder that effective public service depends critically on leadership ability. Our graduates have always become leaders within their organizations, both in the private and public sectors,

at rates disproportionate to their numbers. Their ability to work with others—to listen, to understand, to build consensus, and to inspire—make them naturals in the public arena.

In this issue of the UVA Lawyer, we focus on graduates who hold or have held important posts in state and local government. As of 2012, there were 90,056 state and local government units, including 38,910 general-purpose governments such as cities and towns, in the United States. They collectively employed 14.7 million full-time workers, compared to 2.6 million at the federal level. While federal policies obviously have outsized impact, a majority of all government decisions and actions take place at a local level. In that sense, it really is true that all politics is local. We asked several graduates who have served in state and local government, including some who can contrast it with their federal government service, to give us their insights. I particularly enjoyed hearing their descriptions of interactions with constituents and related comments about the differences between campaigning and governing.

Law and lawyers played a central role in the civil rights movement, which celebrates an important anniversary this year. On August 6, 1965, President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which contained provisions designed to make effective the right to vote as guaranteed by the 15th Amendment. We asked three faculty members whose teaching and scholarship touch on civil rights and in particular on voting rights, Risa Goluboff, Dan Ortiz, and George Rutherglen, to reflect on the Voting Rights Act and the recent Supreme Court decision in the Shelby County case finding a portion of the act unconstitutional.

These pages contain a wealth of interesting observations on issues that should be of interest to every citizen as well as every graduate of the Law School. I hope you enjoy reading them.

By Inclination and Training

from the dean Paul G. Mahoney …

on the cover: Inside the dome of the California State Capitol in Sacramento.

facing page: the U.S. Capitol dome presently under renovation is expected to be completed by 2017.

SprIng 2015 Vol. 39, no. 1 | edItor Cullen CouCh aSSoCIate edItor Denise Forster ContrIbUtIng WrIter rebeCCa barns deSIgn roseberries photography tom Cogill, Warren CragheaD, Kimberly reiCh, eriC Williamson, mary WooD

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From the DeanBy Inclination and Training

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laW sChool neWs

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FaCulty neWs & brieFs

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Class notes

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in memoriam

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in Print

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oPinionThe Voting Rights Act

The UniversiTy of virginia school of law

FeAtuRe StORieS

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The Citizen-Lawyer: Leadership in State and Local Government

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Karl Racine ’89: New Role, New Goal

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Meet Donald Lemons ’76: Virginia’s Chief Justice

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Remarks on Race by Mississippi Judge Carlton Reeves ’89 Reaches National Audience

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Five Alumni, Five Former Supreme Court Clerks, One Firm

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“This is a Global T e l * L i n k

prepaid call from …Adnan Syed … an inmate at a Maryland correctional facility.”

That sound bite launched each eagerly awaited episode of Serial, the hit podcast that teamed up with the Law School’s Innocence Project to investigate and track down new leads in a 1999 murder case. The 12-week series, downloaded by millions of listeners, ended in December. In April it garnered a Peabody Award—the first ever awarded to a podcast, and in May it received a Silver Gavel Award from the American Bar Association.

The podcast closed with the promise that the Innocence Project would seek DNA testing and investigate further. The school’s for-credit clinic and a related pro bono clinic give students who participate the chance to investigate, and potentially to litigate, wrongful convictions that may lead to exoneration.

Whatever the final results of that investigation turn out to be, the students involved in the effort say it was a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

“We feel like we’re making a difference in something that the whole nation’s looking at,” said Katie Clifford ’15, who was featured on the podcast.

The Case

Adnan Syed was a 17-year-old Baltimore high school student when his ex-girlfriend, Hae Min Lee, was found strangled to death in a park. Despite apparently lacking a strong motive, Syed was sentenced to life in prison for her murder. Syed has maintained his innocence.

Produced by the makers of This American Life, the serialized re-examination of the murder case became an international sensation, with Apple reporting that the podcast became the fastest to reach 5 million downloads and streams in iTunes history. But members of the Virginia team said they never predicted how popular or expansive the reporting would turn out to be.

“Zero idea,” said Innocence Project Director Deirdre Enright ’92, with her stu-dents echoing agreement.

“We thought maybe it was going to be one episode of This American Life,” Clifford said.

Enright said the level of interest was a surprise in light of the traditional lack of funding for post-conviction relief.

“If you would have told me last year that 5 million people would want to know what we do every day, I would say they clearly don’t care what we do every day, because there aren’t funds for representing people post-conviction,” Enright said. “No one even pays people to do that. So, this level of interest feels really hopeful

to me, like maybe we’re underestimating people’s interest in the system.”

The clinic’s efforts to investigate questionable convictions have made news in the past. Syed read in prison about Justin Wolfe, a Virginia death row inmate who had a defense team that included the Innocence Project, and saw similarities to his own case. This led Serial co-creator and narrator Sarah Koenig to interview Enright about those similarities and to hash out with her some of the unusual aspects of the Syed case. Their conversations form the bulk of Episode 7, titled “The Opposite of the Prosecution.”

During the episode, Enright makes Koenig an offer to help track down some of the unanswered questions.

“It’s a lot of leg work, [but] if we had a team of five students we could get those things done with people who are being supervised, so think about that,” Enright tells her. “I’m totally hooked.”

A flabbergasted Koenig accepts.Katie Clifford ’15 (left), deirdre enright ’92, and mario peia ’15 discuss their participation in the Serial podcast.

Hit pODCASt | Eric Williamson and Mary Wood

Serial Brings to Light Work of Innocence Project

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In fact, Enright added eight students to the case—five from the project’s for-credit clinic and three from the pro bono clinic. Pro bono students began work on the project in early March 2014.

Also in Episode 7, team leader Mario Peia ’15 and pro bono clinic presi-dent Clifford, who had read through all of

the files, tell Koenig that, like Enright, they have doubts about Syed’s guilt.

“One of the things I found odd when I first started reading this case was how precisely [Syed] was convicted under this amount of material,” says Peia, an aspiring prosecutor now clerking in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.

Clifford notes during the interview that forensics reports were missing from Syed’s file for some physical evidence that was collected.

“We are curious about the results we don’t have,” she says.

The Investigation

In addition to reviewing the material Koenig and her colleagues collected, the students investigated new leads of their own. Peia said the team worked by trying to answer questions they had about Syed and others closely linked to the victim, then widening their circle. Enright suggested that they try to answer the question: If not Syed, then who?

“It sounded to us like the piece that wasn’t being addressed at all is, who were the alternate suspects?” Enright said.

Now, “We’ve got these alternate sus-pects—very legitimate alternate suspects,” Enright said.

Early last fall, members of the team visited the Baltimore Police Department’s Homicide Cold Case Unit, and drafted a motion for forensic testing of crime scene evidence that could potentially implicate one of the alternate suspects, and exonerate Syed.

“Really, this is how the investigation should have started. From the forensics, and go from there,” Enright said.

The crime scene—including Lee’s body—appears to have contained multiple sources of forensic information that were not pursued by either the defense or the prosecution, Enright said. Hairs

not belonging to Lee were recovered from her body, and her fingernails were clipped and preserved, as was

a rope found next to her partially buried remains. The evidence was not presented in court, Enright said, nor was it submitted to CODIS, the FBI’s DNA database through which law enforcement checks for hits on potential perpetrators.

The tests could exclude Syed as the killer—or they could suggest his guilt.

“And of course, there’s always the third possibility—that the testing neither inculpates nor exculpates Adnan,” Enright said. “Many years have passed, and evidence can deteriorate and degrade.”

Alternate Paths

The drive to test the evidence has been on hold for now, as Syed’s attorneys pursue an alternate route. In January 2014, a Baltimore circuit court decision denied his petition for post-conviction relief on the grounds that his attorney, Cristina Gutierrez, had been ineffective. But in May, a Maryland Court of Special Appeals remanded the case to the Baltimore circuit court to consider a new affidavit by a witness offering a potential alibi. The remand reopens the previously concluded post-conviction proceeding.

Gutierrez, who suffered from multiple sclerosis, was disbarred in 2001 after sev-eral complaints from her clients. She died in 2004.

“What’s a little bit different in this case [compared to a typical Innocence Project case] is that the defense attorney did a lot,” Enright said. “She didn’t always do the things that we wish she would have done, like test the physical evidence, but I

don’t know if she’d be ineffective under the standards that we have.”

Enright said that even if forensic testing doesn’t happen, the Innocence Project will continue their investigation of the case and determine if there is enough new evidence to file a writ of actual innocence based on non-biological evidence.

“The combined efforts of Sarah Koenig and Syed’s team of supporters have already revealed many significant new facts that were never presented to the jury, and our investigation is far from complete,” she said.

A Unique Experience

As the story unfolded on Serial, Enright and the students saw their research turned into a compelling story in a unique new format.

“What ends up being on the show is about an eighth of what we all learned and know,” Enright said. For example, the show highlighted one possible alternate suspect, whereas Enright believes there are many. The Law School team also had to work with Serial on the timing of when certain pieces of information would be revealed, to allow space for the investigation to happen.

“We had many discussions about their goals in telling a story and our goals in exonerating someone,” Enright said. “Often we were on the same page, but sometimes we came right up against each other and we would say, ‘We would never do what you are about to do,’ and they would say ‘We cannot do what you want to do.’ And it was okay, it worked. But it was a challenge.”

Members of the team said the experience they’ve gained on the case, and the exposure they’ve received, can only help their careers. Most anticipate working for law firms, and said employers are always interested in attorneys with practical experience.

Other students hope to work specifically in criminal defense or, in Peia’s case, prosecution.

“The Innocence Project has been fantastic for learning prosecutorial ethics. By seeing what happens when things go very wrong in the criminal justice process, one can learn how to avoid these problems before they come to fruition,” Peia said.

“Really, this is how the investigation should have started. From the forensics, and go from there.”

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uVA LAW At tHe SupReme COuRt | Mary Wood

Laycock Wins Religious Liberty Case

The Supreme Court ruled unanimously in January that an Arkansas inmate

could wear a beard according to his reli-gious beliefs, in a case argued by Professor Douglas Laycock.

“This is a clear and unanimous statement from the Supreme Court,” Laycock said of the decision. “Prison officials, and courts, must take seriously the obligation to protect the religious practices of prisoners.”

Holt v. Hobbs, which Laycock argued in October, involved an Arkansas correctional facility that refused to let Gregory Holt wear a half-inch beard, though hair longer

than a half-inch was allowed, and beards a quarter-inch or shorter were permitted for medical conditions. Holt brought the peti-tion against corrections director Ray Hobbs and related parties under the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act.

Holt, aka Abdul Maalik Muhammad, is serving a life sentence for burglary and domestic battery. He said the prison policy infringed upon his ability to practice his Muslim faith.

“This is not just a win for one Muslim prisoner in Arkansas—it is a win for prisoners of all faiths,” Laycock said. More at: www.bit.ly/s15holtruling.


Clinic Gains Unanimous

Win With Henderson

The Supreme Court delivered a unani-mous decision on May 18 in favor of

a Florida man represented by the Supreme Court Litigation Clinic.

Henderson v. United States involves the “felon-in-possession” statute, which bans felons from possessing firearms. In the case, former U.S. Border Patrol Agent Tony Henderson had provided his 19 guns for safekeeping to the FBI in 2006, during his prosecution for felony drug offenses. After serving six months in prison, he tried to arrange to transfer the guns to someone who would pay him for them.

“The government refused, saying that to do so would somehow attach constructive possession of the guns to our client,” said Professor Daniel Ortiz, director of the clinic.

Henderson v. United States is the twelfth case the clinic has taken to Washington, and

pictured above from left, professor douglas laycock at the Supreme Court when he argued Holt v. Hobbs, pictured with Sarah rafie ’16, Jennifer Carl ’16, Caitlin Shea ’16, andrew mandelbaum ’16, Jad Khazem ’16, Katie barber ’15, Courtney miller ’16, James nelson ‘09, Sean Johnson ’16, and professor micah Schwartzman ’05.

“This is a clear and unanimous statement from the Supreme Court.”

UVA Law at the Supreme Court

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the fourth case Ortiz has argued before the Court. The clinic offers students the chance to handle actual cases, from the seeking of Supreme Court review to briefing on the merits.

Ortiz, who argued the case at the Supreme Court on February 24, said he wasn’t surprised at the unanimous decision.

“After the argument, we couldn’t count a single justice who was clearly on the government’s side,” he said. “It’s a wonderfully clear, concise, direct opinion. It repudiates the government’s odd view of what counts as possession pretty clearly—it doesn’t have any difficulties in getting to that point. It’s a great example of Justice [Elena] Kagan’s clear, direct style.”

Ortiz said the Supreme Court’s decision will have a broad impact.

“There are over a million people convicted of felonies in this country every year, and in many cases the value of the firearms can be quite high,” he said.

Find CBS News coverage of the clinic, and more, at: www.bit.ly/s15henderson.

from left, Joel Johnson ’15, Jennifer maloney ’15, anna mcdanal ’15, professor dan ortiz, clinic instructor david goldberg, Samuel Strongin ’15, peter benson ’15, and professor toby heytens ’00 pause for a photo after the Henderson argument.


Supreme Court Litigation

Clinic Wins Facebook

Threat Case

The Supreme Court handed another victory to the Supreme Court Litiga-

tion Clinic June 1. In Elonis v. United States, justices sided 7–2 with the clinic’s client, Anthony Elonis, who was appealing his conviction for making threats against his estranged wife and others on Facebook.

Elonis argued his comments, styled as rap lyrics, were made in jest to blow off steam.

Without addressing the First Amendment issue in the case, Chief Justice John Roberts said in the majority opinion it was not enough for prosecutors to show that Elonis’ comments would make a reasonable person feel threatened.

Clinic Director and Professor Daniel Ortiz said the decision throws out Elonis’ conviction, though it doesn’t clear up a murky area of free speech law.

“It’s a very strong win and a clear opinion that leaves to another day a few

big questions—if negligence isn’t enough, what’s the correct level of mens rea required and what role the First Amendment might play in the issue—that the lower courts will consider over the next few years,” he said.

The clinic, which has argued 12 cases in Washington since its inception in 2006, offers students the chance to handle actual cases, from the seeking of Supreme Court review to briefing on the merits.

At issue in Elonis was whether the comments constituted a “true threat.” Clinic Instructor John Elwood, a partner at Vinson & Elkins in Washington, D.C., argued on behalf of Elonis and the clinic on December 1.

“This case is particularly relevant in an age when we increasingly communicate electronically with people we have never met in person,” Elwood said. “People who know me well may know when I’m kidding, but people who are just reading something on Twitter or Facebook may not know that this is something that [is meant] facetiously.”

Elonis was 27 when, in the span of a few weeks, his wife of seven years left him and he lost his job.

“He put up some posts on Facebook, although they were typically posted with

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all sorts of disclaimers all over them—that they were basically written for cathartic purposes and weren’t meant to be taken seriously,” Elwood said.

In his posts, Elonis included links to the Wikipedia “Freedom of speech” page and made references to other First Amendment cases. In the meantime, his wife obtained a “protection from abuse” order against him.

“[Elonis] got an unhappy visit from the FBI and of course he put out a post on that one too. The FBI was not amused, and they charged him with making an interstate threat,” Elwood said.

Elonis was convicted of five of six charges, and served 44 months before his

above, a mix of counsel, professors, and students on the steps of the Supreme Court after arguing the Elonis case in december. from left, ronald levine, Julie Wolf ’15, abraham rein, lide paterno ’15, John elwood, peter benson ’15, toby heytens ’00, dan ortiz, nick reaves ’15, trevor lovell ’15, and mark Stancil ’99.

“This case is particularly relevant in an age when we increasingly communicate electronically with people we have never met in person.”

below, andrew Kilberg ’14, a former articles development editor for the Virginia Law Review and Supreme Court litigation Clinic participant, will be the fourth alumnus to clerk at the Supreme Court for the 2015–16 term.

release in February 2014. After his release, he was still subject to supervised release for three years and to traditional obstacles from being labeled a felon.

Genevieve Hoffman ’15, a clinic participant who worked on the case, said she was not surprised by the decision.

“It’s consistent with the Court’s precedents dealing with mens rea standards in federal statutes, which I think definitely worked in our favor,” she said. “It was great to see that our work paid off—many of those precedents that we had researched and discussed showed up in the opinion.”

Lide Paterno ’15 also helped with the case. “I loved working on this case because it brought together so many areas of law I had studied throughout my time at UVA, from the basics of criminal law to more advanced First Amendment and statutory interpretation issues,” Paterno said.

Four Alumni to Clerk at

the Supreme Court

With the news that Andrew Kilberg ’14 will clerk for Justice Anthony

Kennedy during the 2015–16 term, the Law School can claim four graduates serving as clerks at the Supreme Court, which ties a school record from the 2009–10 term.

Kilberg joins Ben Tyson ’14, Galen Bascom ’13, and Jonathan Urick ’13, who will clerk for Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Stephen Breyer and Antonin Scalia, respectively. Virginia is fourth in contributing the most clerks to the U.S. Supreme Court from 2005–14, after Harvard, Stanford, and Yale. (The nine justices hire 36 clerks each year.)

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ANNuAL ANtHOLOgY | Mary Wood

Intellectual Property Article Named Among Best of the Year

An article by Professor Dotan Oliar, K. Ross Powell ’15, and UVA

economics Ph.D. student Nathanial Pattison was selected for inclusion in the 2015 edition of Intellectual Property Law Review, an anthology of the best IP law scholarship.

Articles selected for the Thomson Reuters (West) annual anthology represent “the best law review articles related to intellectual property published within the last year,” according to the publisher.

The paper, “Copyright Registrations: Who, What, When, Where, and Why,” is the first to study the contents of individual copyright registration records, and is intended to help lay down an empirical basis for evidence-based copyright lawmaking.

“We want to lay the foundation for subsequent work, by ourselves and hopefully by others too,” Oliar said. Looking at 2.3 million registrations from 2008 to 2012, Oliar and his co-authors discovered patterns in how businesses and people of different ages register their creative work.

“Firm authors tend to be geographically concentrated, and to register published works, computer software, periodicals, and movies,” Oliar said. “Individual authors tend to be geographically dispersed, and to register unpublished works, music, text, and drama.”

Most registered music works are by authors in their 20s, whereas a majority of computer software authors are in their mid-40s, and authors of literature are mostly in their late 50s.

“We find that older authors tend to register published works, whereas younger authors tend to register unpublished works,” he said. “This phenomenon may suggest that older, more experienced authors know their way in the market better than younger, less-experienced authors.”

Powell, who gained experience with registration records working on a previous paper co-authored by Oliar, said he learned much about the process of drafting an article for publication.

“Seeing the process play out was instructive,” Powell said. “It was proof of the lesson stressed so often by professors: It is critical to write, evaluate, rewrite, evaluate more, rewrite again.”

Powell, who graduated in May, plans to clerk for U.S. Judge Robert Doumar ’53 of the Eastern District of Virginia. He said he had to understand copyright regulations to know what the data from the records represented.

“One important contribution of our paper is that it suggests ways that improved access and understanding of the copyright records could help build upon these prior studies,” Powell said.

Oliar is continuing to expand his work on copyright registrations. He and George Washington University law professor Robert Brauneis are working together with the U.S. Copyright Office to make available to the public and analyze the office’s records dating back to 1978.

dotan oliar, center, K. ross powell ’15, left, and economics ph.d. student nathanial pattison’s paper is the first to study the contents of individual copyright registration records.

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tHe WORLD OF tHe CORpORAte LAWYeR | Kimberly Reich

Alums Take Students Through Company Life Cycle

Several alumni taught a new short course about the role of corporate lawyers

in business transactions and how that role evolves throughout the life cycle of a company.

The Role of Counsel in Business Transactions, a one-credit course offered through the John W. Glynn, Jr. Law & Business Program, was taught by Hogan Lovells corporate lawyers Bill Curtin ’96, Warren Gorrell ’79, and Michael Williams ’84 during the spring semester.

The three also brought fellow alums and Hogan Lovells colleagues to guest-lecture, including Kevin Clayton ’98, Carine Stoick ’99, John Osborn ’83, and Richard Parrino ’78. In all, the group spans three decades on grounds at UVA Law.

The course offers students perspective on what it’s like to practice corporate law.

“We hope to give students some of the same training we give our own associates in our in-house program,” Williams said.

Students examine actual contracts and corporate documents, Williams said, and learn how to look at the long-range implications of various decisions made in the early stages of a company’s development.

The course “makes it much easier for our students to hit the ground running when they have their first opportunities to work on transactions themselves, and hopefully will enable them to make better contributions and good first impressions,” Gorrell said.

Williams and Clayton covered the first part of the class: a company’s early stages, when the focus is on organizing, financing, and getting the company to market through strategic agreements.

In the next phase of the course, Gorrell and Parrino covered the choices companies face as they consider whether to become a listed company with public stakeholders. They discussed the client’s need for advice and guidance when considering the added responsibilities and disclosure that confront a public company.

The final part of the class, which addressed mergers and acquisitions, joint ventures, and other alliances, was taught by Curtin, Stoick, and Osborn.

“My Hogan Lovells partners and I have been looking for an opportunity to offer a course through which we could share with students an appreciation for the corporate law continuum that companies experience in the markets where they do business,” Curtin said. “As graduates of the Law School, we’ve always wanted to do this at Virginia because we have a personal appreciation for the way that the Law School makes learning and teaching such a shared and constructive experience.”

Carine Stoick ’99 and bill Curtin ’96 discuss mergers and acquisitions, joint ventures and other alliances.

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COuRtROOmS ACROSS tHe COuNtRY | Eric Williamson

Clinic Students Travel U.S. to Argue Appeals in Federal Courts

Through the expanded reach of the Appellate Litigation Clinic, third-

years are gaining experience preparing and arguing appellate cases in courtrooms across the country.

The clinic handled appeals beyond its home circuit this year, including two recent First Amendment cases argued in Ohio, and an upcoming argument for a high-profile prisoner in Arkansas.

“Last year, we initiated an effort to expand the geographic reach of the Appellate Litigation Clinic beyond the Fourth Circuit in Richmond,” clinic director Stephen Braga said. “This year that effort bore fruit. By summer, I expect that we will have had seven students argue in four different circuits.”

The year-long clinic allows 12 third-year students to engage in the hands-on practice of appellate litigation through actual cases before federal circuit courts of appeals. Essentially acting as a small law firm, the students work in teams to help each other prepare cases, with one student having primary responsibility for each case.

The team of Jack Zugay, David Martin, and Cory Ward traveled to Cincinnati in April to argue two First Amendment cases before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit.

On April 29, Zugay argued in the case Abdurahman Haji v. Columbus City Schools, which centered on whether their client, a former middle school teaching assistant,

was fired by the Columbus School System for exercising his First Amendment rights. Haji had made a video of a sermon he delivered at his local mosque. During the sermon, he criticized the manner in which the language arts class he helped conduct taught Greek mythology.

“He believed it had crossed the line into religious instruction, rather than remaining solely historical instruction,” Zugay said.

The school system claimed the reason for the firing was that Haji left early from work on Friday afternoons, in violation of the collective bargaining agreement. But even if that were real reason, Zugay said, an existing agreement had been in place to allow his client to leave early to conduct Friday worship.

Zugay said arguing the federal appeal was a rare honor.

“Arguing the case was a tremendous op-portunity,” he said. “It is rather unique for a young lawyer to get to argue a federal appeal—let alone a law student. All of the preparation

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we went through—the numerous moots, the countless discussions we had about the case—really helped prepare me to think on my feet and respond to the judges’ questions.”

Ward helped the team on the Haji case by mooting as the state’s counsel throughout the preparations. He said it was gratifying to see their client’s reaction following the actual oral arguments.

“The most rewarding part of the appeal was meeting Mr. Haji after the argument,” Ward said. “His appreciation was palpable, and the moment made me realize what an amazing skill we have acquired over the past three years, and the positive impact we can make moving forward.”

On April 30, Martin argued in the case Ohio Council 8 v. Secretary of State. The students challenged Ohio’s system for judicial elections, which prohibits judicial candidates from being identified with their political parties on the general election ballot. Their clients—a coalition of Ohio voters, judicial candidates, and

the Democratic Party of Ohio—contended that this system deprived them of their First Amendment rights to association and freedom of expression.

“The law mandates partisan primaries for Democrats and Republicans, and then strips that party label from the general elec-tion ballot,” Martin said. “We argued that the immense voter drop-off experienced in these elections is at least in part caused by the burden on First Amendment freedoms, and that constitutional burden is too great for the state to justify the poorly tailored law.”

Martin called the experience “the capstone” of an enjoyable three years at UVA Law, despite having felt some stress during the argument. Aware of the relatively brief time he was slotted, Martin said he had to work to pace his replies.

“The biggest challenge was slowing down, to make sure my answers were responsive, thorough, and persuasive,” Martin said. “That was especially difficult given the time crunch; 12 minutes at the podium goes especially quickly when challenging a 160-year-old state law in a federal court.”

But he said he felt prepared because of the supportive efforts of Professor Michael Gilbert, who judged Martin’s final moot before he left for Cincinnati, and Braga and classmates.

The Sixth Circuit has not yet issued its decision on either of the two appeals.

Another team of now-former clinic students, Katie Clifford and Mario Peia, will soon argue before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit in Holt v. Howard, although the date has yet to be finalized. Holt and Professor Douglas Laycock made news earlier this year at the U.S. Supreme Court when they brought, and won, Holt’s religious liberty complaint against the Arkansas prison system for not allowing Holt to wear a beard, per his religious convictions as a Muslim.

Holt is now asking an appeals court to help him obtain documents under the state’s Freedom of Information Act that he was previously denied, but may demonstrate his actual innocence. The act prohibits inmates without counsel from accessing state records under the state’s FOIA law, but allows inmates with counsel to do so. Clifford and Peia assert that this statutory distinction violated Holt’s rights to equal protection under the law and to access the courts.

“Our client seeks reports stating that the main witness in his conviction lied and/or had a habit of lying in cases similar to his,” Peia said. “This information and documentation is absolutely critical towards Mr. Holt’s attack on his conviction; indeed, he cannot challenge his conviction without this information.”

Students this year also argued federal appeals in the Fourth and D.C. Circuits, filed an amicus brief in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, filed a petition for a writ of certiorari in the U.S. Supreme Court, and filed an opening brief on behalf of a new clinic client in the Sixth Circuit.

Braga said students learned how rules vary in the different federal circuit courts, how the logistics of travel can impact preparation, and how the geographic backdrop for the courts and the judges sitting on those courts can affect their receptiveness to certain arguments.

He said gaining this kind of experience may provide the future lawyers an edge.

“Because of their talents, UVA Law graduates will most likely wind up working in a national law practice, so being exposed to actually litigating real cases around the country while still in law school will provide an enormous practical advantage to the students,” Braga said.

appellate litigation Clinic client abdurahman haji, second from left, stands with student legal team Cory Ward ’15, Jack Zugay ’15, and david martin ’15.

“12 minutes at the podium goes especially quickly when challenging a 160-year-old state law.”

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tHe WORLD COuRt | Mary Wood

International Court of Justice Represents Unique Blend of Legal Systems

The International Court of Justice operates through a unique blend of the

legal traditions of the nations represented on the court, Judge Joan E. Donoghue told an audience at the Law School in April.

Donoghue, this year’s recipient of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation Medal in Law, is the first American woman to serve on the court, also called the World Court. She was elected to the bench in 2010 after a long career at the State Department that culminated in her role as principal deputy legal adviser from 2007–10.

Established by the U.N. Charter in 1945 following World War II, the World Court renders advisory opinions to the United

Nations and considers issues among states involving violations of international law or treaties, including a “steady diet of land and maritime boundary cases,” Donoghue said in remarks that painted a picture of how the court operated.

“When you hear the expression ‘border skirmish,’ it sounds like something small, but it’s probably not small if you’re one of the people being shot at in that disputed border territory,” she said.

Only six of the 15 judges, including Donoghue, come from a nation based on common law principles—meaning courts operate under an adversarial system in which judges serve as referees, jury trials are common, witnesses testify in court and rulings set precedent. The United States, England, and Australia hew to a common law system, while much of continental

Europe and many international courts operate under a tradition heavily influenced by the French civil law system.

“There is something of a mix there, but I would say [the World Court’s] tendency over time [is] to operate and communicate in a manner that’s a bit closer to a common law court than a civil law court,” she said.

The civil law system emphasizes statutes over case precedent and concentrates power in judges’ hands. Rulings are typically short and refer to the related statute rather than expounding on the reasons behind the decision.

“I think the most important respon-sibility of any judge in any court and certainly our court is to bring an element of self-awareness to our jobs,” Donoghue said. “We are all creatures of our history. I am American-trained, and I am a U.S. national, and when I have an immediate instinct to a question of law, to a question of fact, to a question of procedure, I have always to ask myself, why do I have that reaction? Why does my colleague from Uganda, or my colleague from Mexico have a different reaction? And sometimes when you scratch the surface, it turns out that one of the rea-sons is this difference in training on the civil law and common law side.”

The World Court offers a stage for nations (or states, in court parlance) to have their argument heard, Donoghue said. While 20 percent of the court’s work is advising the U.N., the remainder is devoted to deciding such “contentious cases.”

“Those look a little bit like a civil case in our system, in the sense that you have one state bringing a case against another state,” she said.

Though the United States no longer con-sents to ICJ jurisdiction across the board, the U.S. has appeared before the court in more contentious cases than any other state, and also in more advisory opinion proceed-ings than any other state, she said.

The court is developing a body of international law through the cases it considers, Donoghue said.

“If you think about it, it’s impossible to do otherwise,” she said. “Treaties and international law, like any legal instrument, don’t answer all questions as nicely as we might sometimes like within the four

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this year’s thomas Jefferson foundation medal in law recipient, Judge Joan donoghue, is the first american woman on the International Court of Justice.

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puBLiC iNteReSt LAW ASSOCiAtiON | Kimberly Reich

Students Working in Public Service Summer

Jobs to Receive $357,900 in Grants

The Law School and the student-run Public Interest Law Association are

funding 84 students who will work in public service this summer through grants totaling $357,900. For the second year in a row, every student who applied and qualified for the funding is receiv-ing a grant.

The PILA grants—$3,500 for first-year students and $6,000 for second-years—offer qualifying students an opportunity to explore a wide range of public service careers, including with the government, nonprofits, legal aid organizations, and prosecutors’ and public defenders’ offices. The funding is “crucial” for students seeking experience in the public sector, said PILA President Reedy Swanson ’16.

“[The grants] provide support for stu-dents who have no other way to get by over the summer,” Swanson said. “There are very few paid public service legal internships available, especially for first-year students. First-year internships are important for students to give them the experience they need to make them attractive candidates for positions down the line.”

He added that the grants also encourage students to recognize the importance of giving back.

“Many people will have their first experience in a public interest position through a PILA grant,” Swanson said. “For

a lot of people, that can be a life-altering experience. Even if they go into private employment down the line, they will be more active pro bono partners or doing community service projects because they saw how rewarding the work they got to do on their PILA grant was.”

Find an in-depth look at where PILA grantee students will work this summer at: www.law.virginia.edu/html/news/2015_spr/pila.htm.

from left, Cherice l. lawson ’16, Kate perino ’16, alvin Williams ’17, elizabeth douglas ’17, and Justin Wilson ’16 are five of the 84 students receiving grants to work in public service this summer.

Every student who applied and qualified for the funding is receiving a grant.

corners of the instrument. They require interpretation, they require application, and when the court interprets those instruments as it does in every decision, we inevitably develop international law.”

Unlike in traditional common law courts, ICJ decisions do not serve as precedent and only bind the parties before the court, she said.

“But of course when lawyers look to figure out the content of international law generally, they give weight to what the International Court of Justice has said about international law, so states have to be concerned about the possibility that their conduct could be judged in our court.”

In offering decisions, Donoghue said it was important for the ICJ to equip leaders with reasons they can use in their own domestic political environment to explain why the court reached a particular decision, and what steps are needed to comply.

“The more we can lay out the reasons for our decision, the easier it is for the state to discern why we acted and therefore what the implications might be elsewhere.”

Offering an explanation of the judges’ reasoning also has an added benefit, she said.

“It’s very clear that this court is by no means a court of unquestioned legitimacy. The court has in fact been criticized for many of its decisions, especially from within the United States. And so the more we can do to lay out our reasons, the better off we are being in a position substantively to justify the results [of the decision].”

The Thomas Jefferson Foundation Medals are conferred each year during the University’s Founder’s Day celebrations, held around Jefferson’s April 13 birthday. Sponsored jointly by UVA and the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, the nonprofit organization that owns and operates Monticello, the medals are UVA’s highest external honors and recognize the achievements of those who embrace endeavors in which Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence and the third U.S. president, excelled and held in high regard, including law, architecture and leadership.

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Students on the GoStudents continue to travel throughout the United States, Asia, Africa, and Latin America to volunteer their time and skills in a wide variety of programs that defend human rights and provide legal and humanitarian aid. Here are some of this year’s highlights.

Human Rights in Myanmar

Students in the Human Rights Study Project traveled to Myanmar, a South-

east Asian country attempting to transition toward democracy, to research a range of human rights issues.

“Myanmar is a complicated place,” says David Ledet ’16. “The country’s startling beauty contrasts uneasily with its history of human rights violations and the myriad challenges before it. Despite the obstacles, the commitment and kindness of the residents and workers we met provide hope that positive changes will continue.”

Known as Cowan Fellows, student project members Ledet and Tanner Camp ’16, Tony Greene ’16, Tawnie Gulizia ’15, Sejal Jhaveri ’15, Monica Kim ’15, Reedy Swanson ’16, and George Zaras ’16 spent

15 days in the country studying issues ranging from the impact of foreign investment to health care and Myanmar’s constitution. More at: www.law.virginia.edu/html/news/2015_spr/hrsp.htm.

Monitoring Detainee Hearings in Guantanamo Bay

Five students traveled to the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba this year for a

week-long trip to monitor pretrial hearings for detainees facing charges related to terrorism.

The students, Maggie Cleary ’17, Nate Freeman ’17, Drew LaFountaine ’15, Andrew Lanius ’15, and Rhett Ricard ’15, volunteered to serve as nongovernmental observers with Judicial Watch, a nonprofit public interest organization. The role of

the observer is designed to help increase the transparency of the proceedings in Guantanamo Bay. More at: www.law.virginia.edu/html/news/2015_spr/guantanamo-bay-observers.htm.

BLSA Members Share Best Legal Practices in Uganda

Six members of the Black Law Students Association traveled to Uganda during

the winter break to help build a continuing education platform for judges, attorneys, and professionals who use the nation’s legal system.

The students in the nine-day January service trip worked on behalf of the International Law Institute’s African Centre for Legal Excellence, an organization contracted by Uganda to help restructure the judiciary.

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The institute’s larger mission is to improve law, governance, finance, and project management so that African nations can better compete globally. More at: www.law.virginia.edu/html/news/2015_spr/blsa-uganda.htm.

In the Desert and on the Docket

From helping poor defendants on crowded court dockets in New York and

Louisiana, to providing relief to migrants in the Arizona desert, students aided legal and humanitarian efforts as volunteers through an alternative spring break program.

The law students—29 in total—worked at seven locations across the country, donating more than 1,000 pro bono hours. Now in its seventh year, the Public Interest Law Association’s Alternative Spring Break Program allows students to learn about careers in public service while also helping a range of government and public-interest organizations. More at: www.law.virginia.edu/html/news/2015_spr/pilabreak.htm.

from top: Judicial Watch observers headed to guantanamo bay.

Students participated in this year’s blSa service trip to Uganda.

the human rights Study project’s Cowan fellows in myanmar.

opposite page: Students volunteered for the relief organization no more deaths during alternative Spring break. the arizona nonprofit was one of seven groups students helped.

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Magna Carta: 800 Years after runnYMedeProfessor A. E. Dick Howard ’61 speaks to

alumni on the importance of Magna Carta to

today’s legal traditions during the 2015 Law

Alumni Weekend.

WhY Civil ProCedure Matters Professor A. Benjamin Spencer discusses the

state of civil procedure and why it matters in

connection to access to the courts and the U.S.

justice system.

the four WoMen JustiCes Dahlia Lithwick, a senior editor at Slate who

covers the U.S. Supreme Court, speaks about

gender representation and the four women

who have been justices. Lithwick is writing a

book on the subject.

seC CoMMissioner on finanCial regulation Daniel M. Gallagher, a commissioner of the

U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission,

delivers the keynote address at “The 1940 Acts

at 75: Reflecting on the Past, Present and Future

Regulation of Investment Companies and

Investment Advisers.”

robert Pozen on CorPorate governanCeRobert Pozen, a former chairman of MFS

Investment Management, noted author, and

senior lecturer at Harvard Business School,

speaks on corporate governance at “The 1940

Acts at 75: Reflecting on the Past, Present and

Future Regulation of Investment Companies and

Investment Advisers.” Paul Schott Stevens ’78,

president and CEO of the Investment Company

Institute, offers introductory remarks.

Jean-PiCtet CoMPetition in international laW The Université Paris II Panthéon Assas, Geneva

Academy of International Humanitarian Law

and Human Rights, and National University of

Singapore teams compete in the final round

of the Jean-Pictet Competition, and Singapore

is later named the winner.

a fireside Chat With nflPa exeCutive direCtor NFL Players Association Executive Director

DeMaurice Smith ’89 speaks about his

experiences as chair of a white-collar crime

practice group at a D.C. law firm, serving as

counsel to then-Deputy Attorney General Eric

Holder and the 2011 NFL player lockout.

A SAmpLe OF tHe ViDeO AND mp3 OFFeRiNgS FOuND ONLiNe, ON YOutuBe, iN ituNeS, AND ON SOuNDCLOuD

Seen and Heard at www.law.virginia.edu/news

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“defending the Most-hated Man in aMeriCa: the searCh for the illusive truth” Stephen Jones, the lead public defense

attorney for Timothy McVeigh in the

Oklahoma City bombing case, has been

attached to high-profile cases involving

alleged acts of terrorism and disloyalty

stretching back to the Vietnam War.

“ColleCting it all: neW teChnologY and the future of PrivaCY”ACLU attorney Ben Wizner, a legal advisor to

Edward Snowden, speaks about protecting

privacy in an era in which government

organizations and businesses wish to gather

increasing amounts of information about

people’s everyday lives.

students Celebrate diversitY WeekMore than 500 law students signed this year’s

Student Bar Association Diversity Pledge. The

statement of respect and tolerance, now in its

ninth year, kicked off Diversity Week events,

which began the last week in March.

King v. Burwell and the future of obaMaCareProfessor Margaret Foster Riley and

Washington and Lee University School of

Law Professor Timothy Jost discuss Supreme

Court case King v. Burwell and the future of the

Affordable Care Act.

“nelson Mandela as a statesMan” Adjunct Professor Richard Goldstone

is the former chief prosecutor of the U.N.

international criminal tribunals for the former

Yugoslavia and Rwanda. He served as a judge

in South Africa for 23 years, the last nine as a

justice of the Constitutional Court.

vieWs froM the benChJudge Diarmuid O’Scannlain LL.M. ’92 of

the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit

discusses how the U.S. constitutional structure

affects the work of a federal judge.

fight for raCial JustiCeCivil rights pioneer Morris Dees, founder of

the Southern Poverty Law Center, discusses

the fight for racial and social justice in the

post-Jim Crow landscape of the South in the

1960s and ‘70s, as well as the challenges facing

the civil rights movement in the 21st century.

“the future of sentenCing” U.S. Judge Jed Rakoff speaks about

abolishing federal sentencing guidelines at a

symposium hosted by the Law School.

“giving College athletes their due”Sports marketing pioneer Sonny Vaccaro

headlined a symposium focusing on change

in the sports and entertainment industries.

“the laW of bodY Parts” During a lecture for a course, Dr. Kenneth

Brayman, division chief of transplant surgery

at the University of Virginia, discusses the

history of organ donation and current

issues affecting the market and health care

professionals.

The

at 75FRIDAY,

APRIL 10

Reflecting on the Past,

Present and Future

Regulation of Investment Companies

and Investment

Advisers

1940ACTS

8:00-8:45 A.M.

CONTINENTAL BREAKFAST 8:45-8:55 a.m.

WELCOME PAUL G. MAHONEY, Dean, David and Mary Harrison Distinguished Professor of Law and Arnold H. Leon Professor of Law, University of Virginia School of Law

8:55-9:15 a.m.

INTRODUCTORY REMARKS PAUL SCHOTT STEVENS ’78, President and CEO, Investment Company Institute

9:15-9:45 a.m.

MORNING ADDRESS ROBERT POZEN, Former Chairman, MFS Investment Management

9:50-10:55 a.m. PANEL I: MUTUAL FUND REGULATION AFTER THE FINANCIAL CRISIS. ARE FUND COMPLEXES SYSTEMICALLY IMPORTANT? LAURA MERIANOS, Principal, Vanguard SCOTT GOEBEL, Senior Vice President and General Counsel, Fidelity JOHN MORLEY, Associate Professor of Law, Yale Law SchoolMODERATOR: JOHN DUGAN, Partner, Covington & Burling

11:10 a.m.-12:15 p.m.

PANEL II: LARGER LESSONS FROM FUND GOVERNANCE PAULITA PIKE, Partner, K&L GatesJOHN COATES, John F. Cogan, Jr. Professor of Law and Economics; Research Director, Center on the Legal Profession, Harvard Law SchoolPAULA CHOLMONDELEY, Independent Director, Nationwide Funds BoardMODERATOR: JOHN E. BAUMGARNDNER JR., Partner, Sullivan & Cromwell

12:30-1:30 p.m.

LUNCH AND KEYNOTE ADDRESS DANIEL M. GALLAGHER, Commissioner, Securities and Exchange Commission

1:45-2:50 p.m.

PANEL III: THE FUTURE FOR INVESTMENT COMPANIES AND ADVISERSROBERT ZACK ’75, Counsel, DechertMARIANNE SMYTHE, Retired Partner, Wilmer, Cutler, Pickering, Hale & DorrSIMON LORNE, Vice Chairman and Chief Legal Officer, Millennium ManagementANDREW DONOHUE, Deputy General Counsel, Goldman Sachs Asset ManagementMODERATOR: DAVID BLASS, General Counsel, Investment Company Institute

3-3:30 p.m.

ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSIONQUINN CURTIS, Associate Professor of Law, University of Virginia School of LawPAUL SCHOTT STEVENS ’78, President and CEO, Investment Company InstituteDANIEL M. GALLAGHER, Commissioner, Securities and Exchange Commission

3:30-3:40 p.m.

CLOSING REMARKS

THE VIRGINIA LAW & BUSINESS REVIEW and the INVESTMENT COMPANY INSTITUTE Present:

Sponsored by the JOHN W. GLYNN, JR. LAW & BUSINESS PROGRAM

RSVP: http://ici.org/uva75

CAPLIN PAVILIONuniversity o f

VirginiaS C H O O L O F L AW

NEW TECHNOLOGY AND THE FUTURE OF PRIVACY

COLLECTINGIT ALL

COLLECTINGIT ALL

BEN WIZNERBEN WIZNER Director of the ACLU Speech, Privacy & Technology Project

Caplin Pavilion

Ben Wizner has litigated numerous cases involving post-9/11 civil liberties abuses, including challenges to airport security policies, terrorism watchlists, extraordinary rendition, targeted killings, and torture. He is a legal advisor to NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

with

MARCH 25, 5 P.M.MARCH 25, 5 P.M.RSVPbit.ly/1ABEYNd

Presented by the Virginia Journal of Criminal Law

Caplin Pavilion

with keynote address by

U.S. JUDGE JED RAKOFFSouthern District of New York

FRIDAY,FEB. 27

THE FUTURE OFSENTENCINGSCHEDULE 9:30-10 a.m. CHECK IN

10:15-10:30 a.m.INTRODUCTIONS

10:30-11:30 a.m.KEYNOTE SPEECHU.S. Judge Jed Rako� Southern District of New York

11:30 a.m.-12 p.m. QUESTIONS

12-1 p.m. LUNCH

1-2 p.m.PANEL ON VIRGINIA SENTENCING

John MonahanJohn S. Shannon Distinguished Professor of Law, Professor of Psychology and Psychiatric Medicine, University of Virginia

Meredith Farrar-OwensLegislative Director, Virginia Sentencing Commission

Linda BryantDeputy Attorney General, Virginia; Member, Virginia Sentencing Commission

Steven BenjaminSpecial Counsel to the Virginia Senate's Courts of Justice Committee; Past President, Virginia Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers


The Citizen-Lawyer:

Leadership in State and Local Government

by Cullen Couch

The University of Virginia, especially the Law School,

was conceived as a gift to a nation still finding faith in

its public institutions. Davison Douglas, in the Journal

of Legal Education (2001), noted that Thomas Jefferson

had “a sophisticated vision of the role of both lawyers and education in the

preservation of America’s republican form of government. He believed that

the new nation desperately needed virtuous leaders who would place the

public interest above their own private interest. Proper education could help

develop this needed virtue, Jefferson concluded, particularly among lawyers,

who by the nature of their work were well positioned to provide direction

and leadership to the new nation.”


“It’s the mission. It’s serving people other than

yourself. It’s why you get out of bed every day …”

best. They’re actively engaged and they’re having a huge

impact on what this community looks like.”

U.S. Senator Angus King ’69 (I-ME), was worried

about Maine’s economy when he was governor of

the state during the recession in the early 1990s. He

wanted to transfer his private sector experience to

government service.

“We were in real trouble,” says King, who was

governor for two terms. “Maine was at a tipping

point and it made sense to have somebody who had

a business background try their hand. I used to say

I was the only candidate for governor who shopped

for workers’ comp and went to the DEP for an

environmental permit.”

“Decisions are made by people in the room at the

time, so, if you want change, then you’ve got to get in

the room,” says David Toscano ’86, minority leader

in the Virginia House of Delegates and former mayor

of Charlottesville. “I have been fortunate to find my

way into many rooms at both the local and state level

where I have helped make decisions that have a positive

impact on people’s lives.”

Frank Buck ’71, Toscano’s law partner and himself

a past mayor of Charlottesville, spent many years

in Charlottesville civic affairs, hammering nails for

Habitat for Humanity, coaching soccer teams, providing

leadership to a camp for children with special needs.

“A fair number of people were asking me to run

for city council,” Buck says, “and I was a product of the

Kennedy years—the best and the brightest, and all that.

Part of the reason I went to law school was my interest

in public service. I enjoyed being involved. All those

clichés about getting back more in return for doing it

are really true.”

When the opportunity for public service presented

itself for former Virginia Governor Gerald Baliles ’67,

he seized it. “I gambled that I could win,” he says, “and

so I did six years in the legislature, four as attorney

Today, the Law School claims graduates in every

sphere of public service. Those in Congress, the White

House, and federal agencies are well known and

familiar. But the laws and policies they advance are

felt at the state and local level, where the work of the

people actually gets done. These alumni—governors,

mayors, county supervisors, public executives—answer

to constituents with closely held interests. They are

expected to share them, even when they conflict with

party politics or the national will. So why do they do it?

“It’s the mission,” says Janet Napolitano ’83, who

is now president of the University of California after a

long stint as secretary of the Department of Homeland

Security and two terms as governor of Arizona. “It’s

serving people other than yourself. It’s why you get out

of bed every day even if you’ve had, as I have just had,

two 15-hour days in a row—you get up and you get

ready to go again.”

For Nancy McFadden ’87, chief of staff to

California Governor Jerry Brown, it’s also about the

people. “I have worked with people I greatly respect

and whose fundamental values I share,” she says. “I

think that’s what ultimately draws people to public

service. Sometimes it’s ambition. Sometimes it’s just

luck. But I think shared values is something that brings

people into public service.”

The urge to serve

Ryan Coonerty ’01, a member of the Santa Cruz

County Board of Supervisors and former two-time

mayor of the California city, was in high school when the

Loma Prieta earthquake destroyed 70% of the downtown.

“My dad ran for city council to help rebuild the town and

what I saw really humanized the process,” he says. “It made

me realize that the people making these big decisions

about our community are regular people doing their


Janet Napolitano ’83:“I recognized it was important

to develop my own credibility,

to listen and learn, and then

say, ‘Okay, I think we ought

to be doing this and this,’ and

move forward.”


Luis Fortuño ’85:“Once I decided the right thing to

do, I would explain why, and then

move forward and not look back.”


general, four as governor, and I was out before I was 50.

Then I thought it was time to address the balance sheet

of my life.”

The move from campaigning to governing

The day former governor of Puerto Rico Luis Fortuño ’85

moved into the governor’s mansion, he thanked the

kitchen staff and asked them to leave the dishes on the

table so his family could clear them. “I wanted to make

a point for everyone, including my family, that this was

temporary—a great opportunity to serve and transform

the lives of many people, but you move on.” Fortuño is

now a partner at Steptoe & Johnson in Washington, D.C.

For Baliles, the one-term gubernatorial limit in

Virginia codified the meaning of “temporary.” “In

a democracy, the players are not on stage very long.

Whether it’s four years or eight years, it is a finite

period of time,” Baliles says. “[The term limit] helped

me focus on the importance of taking my plan and

recognizing that I had very little time to achieve it.”

Napolitano valued her second term. “I must say

having only a one-term governorship is problematic

in this day and age,” she says. “It makes it very difficult

to do things. It takes a while to get your arms around

the job of being a governor and to know how to move

things forward, what levers need to be pulled, and what

things you don’t really need to concern yourself with.”

Coonerty makes “temporary” the central point

of his approach. “One of the things I try not to

do is to think about a second term, because if I’m

worried about getting re-elected I may not make the

decisions I need to make that are in the best interest of

the community.”

Theories of leadership

For every decision that Fortuño had to make, he tried

to listen to everyone and be as fair as possible, but

then be decisive. “One thing I always did and always told

my cabinet members to do was once you have heard

everyone, act,” he says. “Once I decided the right thing

to do, I would explain why, and then move forward and

not look back. That’s what I told my cabinet members

all the time, ‘You will be criticized not for what you do,

but for what you don’t do.’”

King had a formative experience in his first several

months as governor when he had to decide where to site

a new bridge. Two communities were lobbying for it.

Frank Buck ’71:“Part of the reason I went

to law school was my

interest in public service.

I enjoyed being involved.”


“I remember having the insight that whatever

I decided, I was going to make somebody really angry,”

he says. “So why not just try to do the right thing that

makes the most sense for Maine? That guided my

decision-making. If you can explain what you’re doing

and why, the politics generally take care of themselves.

People often come up to me on the street and say,

‘I don’t agree with everything you do, but you always

tell me why you did it.’”

Baliles has found that introducing major programs

works best when you provide context. Once you have

that, he says, you have a case to bring people along.

“Bill Parcells, who coached two different Super Bowl

teams, used to say that the better prepared he felt, the

better his players played,” says Baliles. “But you can’t

persuade if you’re not prepared. You can’t prepare

unless you understand the context. That’s the way

I approached everything.”

Baliles also used what he calls the “3P audience”:

the press, the public, and the politicians. “You think

about who’s the audience,” he says. “They all respond

to some of the same stimuli but sometimes you have to

change the order in which you do that. If you can’t get

the political leaders to move, then you go to the press.

You go to the press, you get your stories out. Political

leaders pay attention. The public gets informed. They

create the climate for activity, for action, for success.

All of those factors come into play whether one is

campaigning or governing.”

Baliles likens governing to focusing a camera’s lens.

“If it’s a close-up, you can find a lot of reason to be

concerned. But if you pull the camera back, you see life

and human nature and government action somewhat

differently. And I tend to be an optimist. I think

this country has met adversity with determination,

complexity with innovation, and I think we’ll do it

again. I always put things in perspective.”

Napolitano strives to avoid the “tyranny of the org

chart.” Instead, she thinks about how different people

should be working together and how to persuade them

to buy into the same vision. She adopted this approach

after she was appointed by President Clinton to be the

U.S. Attorney in Arizona.

“The first thing I’ve always done is listen,” she

says. “I learned this lesson when I suddenly came in

as the presidential appointee in charge of more than a

hundred professionals in the U.S. Attorney’s office. Of

course, the initial reaction is going to be, ‘Who is she,

what does she know?’ I recognized it was important to

develop my own credibility, to listen and learn, and then

David Toscano ’86:“Decisions are made by people

in the room at the time, so, if

you want change, then you’ve

got to get in the room.”


Angus King ’69:“If you can explain what

you’re doing and why,

the politics generally

take care of themselves.”


Gerald Baliles ’67:“You can’t persuade without

educating and you can’t educate

without your preparation.”


say, ‘Okay, I think we ought to be doing this and this,’

and move forward. That’s probably the smallest office

I’ve run, but it’s really been the same methodology that

I have perfected the longer I’ve done it.”

Napolitano also learned quickly that one has to

walk away periodically from the demands of public

office and recharge. “You have to develop the ability

to compartmentalize, to make sure that you live your

life even as you’re running this large entity, and those

are lessons I’ve learned over time. I don’t think I took

a day off my first three months as governor. Finally,

somebody said, ‘We’ve got to make sure that we protect

time for you so you can rest and regenerate.’ They

actually built that into the schedule. I’ve realized that’s

a very important thing to do.”

Coonerty found that trying to sell a “fully baked”

idea without letting others contribute and build

on it doesn’t work. “You can’t be so rigid with your

vision that you don’t leave room for other people to

contribute. You have to listen. In the campaign, you

spend a lot of time talking. In governing, you spend

most of your time listening. You have to make a

conscious transition.”

Best laid plans …

A prison riot, a shooting, a natural disaster; the world

disrupts every schedule and agenda. Everyone

wants a decision, now. But one of the arts of governing

is timing—knowing when to intervene, when to do

something, and when to refrain. Sometimes entering

the fray too quickly makes things worse.

Coonerty recalls a Santa Cruz gang killing. As

mayor, he received information from the police that

the victim had picked a fight with gang members. The

local newspaper called him and asked whether he felt if

it was too dangerous to go downtown. Coonerty wishes

he had answered differently.

“My answer was no,” he recalls, “because it was safe

to be downtown. But the community was rightfully

focused on the fact that this young man had just died.

They didn’t know the back story and they were scared.

Their criticism was vicious and immediate; that I didn’t

care about this child’s life or his family. What I needed

to do better was understand that not everyone has all

the information that I had and that you have to start

from a place of sympathy. Eventually the full story

came out, and that helped put my initial comments

in context.”


Nancy McFadden ’87:“Sometimes the situation

really demands a statement

or intervention, but history is

replete with examples where

people were too slow or

jumped in too quickly.”


“Make sure that you’re talking to a lot of different

people. That’s very important and something that we

do here a lot,” says McFadden, who was complimented

by the Los Angeles Times “for her finesse and shrewd

political instincts” as Governor Brown’s top aide. Her

reputation is supported by experience. “Sometimes the

situation really demands a statement or intervention,”

says McFadden. “But history is replete with examples

where people were too slow or jumped in too quickly.

You see leaders all the time reacting off the cuff to

something without full information and regretting a

statement they made. We’re pretty cautious about that.”

Baliles remembers the G8 Summit being held in

Scotland when the London subway bombing occurred.

Within minutes, all the G8 leaders were assembled

responding to press questions about what happened.

“They probably knew less than the press at that point,”

he says. “Sometimes we’re under too much pressure to

react to something instead of anticipating it or reflecting

upon what’s happened before speaking. But you can’t

persuade without educating and you can’t educate

without your preparation. You need time to reflect, which

is part of our problem today. We are in a world of 24/7

press coverage. People don’t have time to pause.”

Fortuño also took care to wait and see. “In the

private sector, the quicker you can address something,

the better,” he says. “But in public service, the passing

of days or weeks will often offer you the correct

answer to a situation. It’s like cooking a stew. You can’t

just throw everything in and serve it. You have to let

it simmer.”

Balancing conflicting constituencies

A chief executive can’t say yes to everybody or

everything. That means disappointing someone.

“It you want to get things through a legislature,

you usually have to compromise,” says Napolitano.

“That can disappoint your supporters. You have to talk

with them and explain why and what the constraints

were. About 80% or 90% are pretty reasonable about

it, but there will always be 10% who are permanently

unhappy. You have to be strong enough to understand

that and be willing to absorb that disappointment.”

Within two months of Coonerty being elected to

the Santa Cruz City Council for the first time at 29,

one of his most powerful backers told Coonerty that

Ryan Coonerty ’01:“In the campaign, you spend a lot of

time talking. In governing, you spend

most of your time listening. You have

to make a conscious transition.”


he didn’t vote for him to do what Coonerty wanted, he

voted for Coonerty to do what he wanted.

“I said, ‘No, I’m going to make my own decisions

and try to balance your and everyone else’s opinion.’

Once that happened, it was really freeing to realize that

at the end of the day, you’re not just a rubber stamp.

You have to balance all these different interests and

complexities. It was an early and valuable lesson, and

the job became a lot more fun.”

Though young, Coonerty learned an important

lesson. “I once heard that the job of a leader is to

disappoint your supporters at a rate they can tolerate, so

you always want to be on the boundary pushing policies

and pushing your constituents to get to a better place.”

Government by the people …

Civil servants have jobs to do just like private sector

employees. But they are sometimes judged differently

because of the nature of their work.

“I understand why the general public has a low

opinion of public service and politicians, and even

government workers,” says McFadden. “Some of

it is deserved. Government sometimes is not as

customer service oriented as it should be. And there

are the headline mistakes that people ascribe to all

of government. That’s somewhat human nature, but

I think for the most part people who go into public

service do it because there’s something about the

purpose that drives them.”

Having worked in both government and the private

sector, McFadden thinks she is better at both for the

experience. “It has enabled me to call people on things,”

she says. “People in the private sector often love to talk

about how terrible government is and how much better

it is in corporate America. I don’t think the lines are

so clear.”

King, of Maine, agrees. “I was 50 years old when

I came to be governor, and I had a kind of conventional

view that many people have about bureaucrats,” he

says. “Totally changed. These are great people—young,

idealistic, passionate, patriotic, smart people who could

be making a lot more money in the private sector.

There is too much negative stuff about the bureaucrats.

These are good people trying to do the right thing and

we don’t treat them very well.”

Baliles, who was governor of Virginia from 1986 to

1990, makes a similar point. “It’s not easy to govern,” he

says. “There are no simple solutions to most problems.

It’s messy. It’s imperfect. It’s fraught with risk.”

The reward of service

The payback is seeing your work brought to life in the

place you live or in the betterment of institutions that

deliver services to people you know.

“The part I like best is the evident real impact,

especially in local government,” says Coonerty. “You

drive down the street and see a park. Chances are you

created it or maintain it, so you get to see the fruit of

your work every day.”

“You can change the lives of so many people,”

Fortuño says. “In the private sector, I can help people,

but it’s not the same. In public service, you can truly

transform their lives.”

“I met this old guy when I was in my 20s,” says

King, “and he said when you get to be my age, you’re

going to regret things about your life. See that you

regret the things you did, and not the things you didn’t

do. That’s the single most profound piece of advice I’ve

had in my whole life. It’s guided me in a number of

turning points to err on the side of action.”

Toscano enjoys reaching out to people as much as

he can, attending events, doing surveys, sending letters,

anything to seek feedback “about what my bosses want

me to do. I have a pretty good read about what people

think in my district, but it’s always changing. People

are coming and going, so that contact is critically

important for me to do my job. And that’s what I

love to do.”

Baliles has always been interested in American

culture and how it is organized. “I have a certain

intellectual curiosity about things—why is that, how

does it work, could it be better? Public life offers the

opportunity to change some of those policies, and that

appealed to me.”

For McFadden, it’s exciting to know the morning

headlines could drive the day’s events. “I love that

there’s a purpose bigger than the job, as well as those

little moments where you’re able to do something for

someone that but for you might not have happened.”


impregnable. And it was impregnable, and was also the storage place for the prison pharmacy and the armory.

We spent two weeks. We had an FBI negotiating team, and we had our own hostage team. The prisoners were already lifers and they started off wanting a plane and a bunch of money. We didn’t do that. We didn’t negotiate on their convictions. We didn’t negotiate on their sentences.

We were using a robot to deliver food to the tower. But one time we delivered the wrong kind of ham-burger. We had audio and one of the hostage takers went nuts and he took Lois’s hand and he put it down and with a piece of rebar started sawing off her finger. She was screaming and we’re telling them to stop, we’ll get you the right hamburger, which we did. Thankfully, they didn’t saw off her finger.

Something like a prison hostage crisis, not only is it serious in and of itself, but it can destroy a governor-ship and a career, and there was a lot of pressure on me just to send in the troops and storm the tower, which would’ve meant our officers, the ones who were being held, would’ve been dead in a nanosecond. These guys were so well armed that there likely would’ve been seri-ous injury or a fatality to anyone storming the tower. And so my position was as long as there’s some thread of negotiation going on, we will not storm the tower.

After the first week, they let out the man. They didn’t let out the woman until Super Bowl Sunday. I’ll always remember this because in the end, we resolved this crisis by delivering a tray with steak dinner and a 6-pack of beer and the guys watched the Super Bowl. After the game, they came out of the tower.

They immediately put the female guard on a gurney and air lifted her to Maricopa County Hospital. The director of corrections, Doris Schriro, and myself met her on the roof as the helicopter landed and she grabbed Doris’s hand and said, ‘Thank you for not storming the tower. They would’ve killed me.’

Baliles: The Virginia Tech sports scandal was a story on the front pages and every little dispute got magnified [investigations into the

basketball and football programs led to NCAA sanctions

in 1987: ed.]. There were lawyers by the thousands and the question was what to do about it and when. I remembered that George Marshall, the

In their own words:

What was your most challenging moment in public service?

Fortuño: We had a major fire in an oil and gas facility in the bay early one Friday morning. It was next to an expressway which was

impassable. I mobilized the state national guard. We

brought water from many miles away from the ocean. I even went in with the firemen and women. These tanks could have exploded when we were there.

There were other instances when I was directly involved in breaking up drug cartels that were operat-ing in Puerto Rico. I didn’t mind going into very rough neighborhoods wearing a bulletproof vest. My staff, and of course my wife, were not pleased. But you cannot lead from behind. You have to lead from the front, and that’s my definition of leadership.

McFadden: In the early days of the Clinton administration, the entire time was challenging. That first year in particular I was at the Justice Department and we

didn’t have an Attorney General. The first nominee, Zoe

Baird, had to withdraw her name. Then Janet Reno was confirmed and we went from that to Waco to Vince Foster’s suicide to gays in the military. It was just one thing after another. I worked very closely with the White House and the White House Counsel’s office so that was a very challenging start. I learned a lot. I think it definitely made me somebody who’s good at dealing with crises.

Napolitano: When I was fairly new as a governor, we had two of our prison correction officers, a man and a woman, taken hostage at our maximum security

prison. They got them into a tower in the middle of the prison

yard that had been built to be


great army general and Secretary of State after World War II, used a Harvard commencement address to announce a major doctrine in this country about economic recovery in Europe, the Marshall Plan. I had a commencement invitation to speak at Virginia Tech, the very institution that was the subject of so much negative publicity. And after that commencement ceremony my remarks that drew a bright line between academic preeminence and athletic ambitions became known all across the country as ‘The Speech.’ It was a high risk occasion where it had to be done with a certain amount of focused attention, especially in that one place, with 30,000 people in Lane Stadium and all the press watching, because nothing had been said from the governor’s office to that point, even as pressure built. It was a moment of high risk and high drama, but it was the appropriate time and place.

Toscano: When I was mayor [of Charlottesville], we had this debate about whether we were going to open a street across the mall to

facilitate bringing in a couple of restaurants, a movie theater,

and an ice park to downtown. It was a huge issue and I was right in the middle of it because I was advocating for it. I had some of my best friends up there telling me I was crazy, it was a pedestrian mall and kids would walk across the street and be run over by cars. Now it’s been open for 20 years. Nothing’s happened and we got all this economic development as a result of opening that street. That was the most difficult thing I had to face when I was mayor.

Buck: Getting the Omni deal put together [the building that anchored the Downtown Mall project in Charlottesville in the 1980s: ed.] was

probably the most difficult thing. Under the Dillon Rule,

we were really pushing the envelope of what was legally permissible. We were involved in lawsuits and people were trying to shut it down. It got to the point where we had to pay a couple of million dollars or the contractors were going to walk off and probably never come back. The city manager and the treasurer and others were saying we can juggle

these things, and we’re not sure it’s 100% proper, but we’ll do it if you say go ahead. It’ll be your decision. We took the gamble, things turned out all right in court, and we moved forward with our project. It provided not just a building, but a place where activities could take place, giving a whole host of reasons for people to come to the downtown.

Coonerty: I had a couple of situations where terrible crimes happened, people were angry and scared. One of the things you realize is

that the people need a mayor. They just need somebody to

step forward in a crisis and say they’re in charge and this is the direction we’re going to go. That’s a really important role to play. At the end of the day, you’re the elected official, you need to rise to the occasion.

The second is that when people are angry and scared, part of your job is to absorb the abuse. They’re not mad at you, they’re mad at the institution, and they’re mad at their lack of power. You have to get to the place where you’re comfortable with the idea that people have to let loose and your job is to listen and take it. I think it’s hard for a lot of people, especially hard on families of politicians.

The events in Ferguson, Missouri, started a national conversation about the militarization of police forces around the country. How is that affecting community relations programs?

Napolitano: I don’t think it’s a choice between militarizing the police instead of building community relationships. If that happens, that’s a false dichotomy. You’ve got to properly train and have a protocol and know when it’s appropriate to bring out the hard stuff, and when it’s not. That ought to be rehearsed and exercised and be part of policing, while simultaneously thinking about the community that you’re protecting.

What was interesting to me is those communities that stayed calm after Ferguson, even communities with large minority populations—Los Angeles, for example. They tended to be communities where you had strong community policing strategies already in place, where you had a human connection between

In their own words


those wearing the badge and the people they are sworn to protect. They know each other, they understand the neighborhoods. They understand the stresses in a particular neighborhood. They understand who the local leaders are. It can be a minister, it can be the principal of a school. So, rather than a militarized police response, it’s really about that community integration before there’s an incident, because there will be incidents.

Fortuño: I was displeased with how the police handled some riots and I called friends who were also executives in the public arena whom I thought were doing a better job and I asked for help. They helped retrain our police force. Not everyone was happy, of course, but again you’ve got to do what you think is right. I would even meet with groups of policemen and tell them, ‘You are professionals. Any professional—a physician, a lawyer—has to be retrained on a constant basis because circumstances change, so you’re no different from a lawyer or a physician.

Coonerty: Policing is obviously one of the most difficult and complex jobs that exists. Overseeing police in a democracy is also difficult but critically impor-tant. The best results are when you have community policing that puts police officers out there problem solving with the community. If the job is just about the application of force, neither the community nor the officer on the street will be safe.

McFadden: It is an issue here and it’s one I think bears looking at in every jurisdiction. I know our attorney general is taking a lead on it. I know we’ve worked with our California Highway Patrol, which is the law enforcement group that’s under the governor’s control, on issues of use of force.

I remember in the Clinton administration one of the things that we created was the Office of Community Policing. It had not existed before and it was one of the things that Bill Clinton felt was very important. He wanted to bring 100,000 cops on the street, and he wanted them to be trained and schooled in community policing. In some places we have really lost that and we’re paying the price.

Toscano: Our chief of police—I’ll never forget when I first interviewed him—the first thing he said is, ‘I believe in the 4th Amendment and I believe in the Constitution and my role is to make sure that while I’m doing my job, I don’t violate constitutional rights.’ That’s a very different attitude than what you might expect from a police chief.

Militarization is an interesting issue because it brings together certain elements of the left and certain elements of the right. There are a lot of people who are very conservative who are worried about too much firepower in the hands of police. There are a lot of people on the left who are worried about that, too. This debate has not really found its way into the state legislature, but it could.

How hard is it to transition from campaigning to governing?

Toscano: The first time I ran I talked about giving a voice to the voiceless, those folks who were economically disadvantaged. But what I found out after I won was there were a lot of people in the city who didn’t feel like they had a voice. A lot of them were disadvantaged economically, but some of them weren’t. A lot of the business leadership didn’t feel like they had much of a voice in the decisions that were affecting their lives.

I realized that in order to have the resources to support social services and help people who are disadvantaged, we had to have an economic base and we had to strengthen that base. That’s why I reached out to folks in the business community to try to engage them in redeveloping the city.

Coonerty: When I came into office, there were about a dozen lawsuits between the city and the university, and tensions between the institutions that lasted almost 30 years. It was a poisoned relationship. The problems weren’t really getting solved. So, we had a new chancellor and I was a new mayor and we sat down to look at this problem in a different way, its impacts on the community and what we could do together to fix it. We came up with this comprehensive settlement agreement, got rid of all the lawsuits, created a good relationship between the city and the university. Now we’re seeing the fruits of that, both in better quality of life and also in partnerships around economic development and spinning research out of the university.

In their own words


Karl Racine ’89:

New Role, New Goal

From Washington Lawyer, February 2015. Excerpt reprinted by permission.

by DaViD o’boyle

Last fall Karl Racine ’89 became the first elected attorney general of the District of Columbia. A native of Haiti who was raised and educated in Washington, D.C., Racine has served as managing partner at Venable and also as associate White House counsel under President Clinton. Washington Lawyer sat down with Racine, who took office in January, to discuss his plans as he settles into his new role in the District of Columbia Office of the Attorney General (OAG).


How did you end up at the University of Virginia School of Law?

You could probably lump me in with many, many of my law

school graduate friends who didn’t really plan on attending law

school, but became interested as the work world appeared. I didn’t

know what I wanted to do with my life. I certainly knew that politics

and the law were extraordinarily important, and I was familiar with

history—civil rights, especially—and so I was attracted to law school.

Did you find law school interesting?

Well, in law school one of the activities that the university

provided was a whole slew of practical legal clinical courses,

which were very interesting. I gravitated to what was called the migrant

farmworkers law clinic. There were migrant farmworkers around

Albemarle County in Virginia who worked in the apple orchards and

did other farming work.

We focused on … making sure that farmworkers had their basic rights, were getting paid consistent with Virginia law, had the same rights to lodging and food that the law provided. I got a very clear indication of the power of the law and the impact it could have on real people’s lives.

I was interested in law, I went to law school, and certainly went to law school primarily to use the law to have a positive impact on the lives of real people with real needs.

Professionally, you have worked in both the public and private sectors. Tell us about your experiences in those two areas.

I think it’s just one of the magical opportunities that the District of

Columbia provides uniquely robust opportunities to work in both

the public and private sectors. That is highly encouraged. Not only was

it highly encouraged in law school, but certainly highly encouraged

at the firm that I began my legal career at, Venable.

I worked at Venable for the first three years of my professional career. I had a tremendous experience. I tried at least three cases. I had a chance to argue before two federal courts of appeal, and I had other excellent experiences because of lawyers who were selfless.

I was encouraged to apply to be either a prosecutor or a public defender. From my own personal sensibilities, and really focusing

on the work of providing legal services to the indigent community, it was an easy decision for me to accept the offer to join the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia.

That was my entrée into public service, government service. It was extraordinary. The Public Defender Service has an excellent reputation. It is the preeminent public defender service in the country. Sure enough, the training that all of the lawyers received was beyond my wildest dreams. I made tremendous friends and had great practical experience in the courtroom. That was an important experience in my life and career.

After that I returned to the private sector. I joined a good friend of mine, Gerry Treanor, who had started a firm with Plato Cacheris. That was an opportunity to continue my work in the criminal area, all the while expanding my work in a complex civil litigation area.

After that experience, through volunteering in the city I developed personal relationships with lawyers who were at the White House under President Bill Clinton. Sure enough, I got an offer to come and interview for a job as an associate White House counsel. Fortunately, they hired me. That was a return to public practice. Again, I thoroughly enjoyed it.

You might remember, those times were challenging, difficult, uncertain, and even unprecedented with regard to the impeachment of the president. There were numerous independent counsel investigations of the administration. I was part of a group of lawyers who defended the president, the first lady, and the White House staff regarding those investigations. It was an immense learning experience and an opportunity to develop lifelong relationships with friends.

What inspired you to run for attorney general for the District of Columbia?

I am a lifelong Washingtonian. As I have just recounted, I’ve had

an extraordinary set of circumstances and experiences with great

teachers, great coaches, great mentors, and great guides who were

lawyers, and I have a passion for public service. The opportunity

to serve in the D.C. government in my chosen vocation was what

attracted me to the position.

I also have a healthy respect for the institutions in the District, particularly the Office of the Attorney General and the hard work that it does on behalf of the citizens of the District.


How would you describe the campaign process?

Well, the campaign process was a wild ride. It was like getting

on a rollercoaster for the first time: It was exciting, there were

people all around, there were ups and downs, there were thrilling

moments, and there were moments where I just wanted to get off.

As someone who has never run for office before, it was an experience that, after a few bumps and bruises and stumbles, I took to. I enjoyed the process of campaigning, getting out there and meeting people, and trying as best as I could to explain what OAG does and how it’s relevant to their lives.

What was easily more important than my doing the talking was just listening to the concerns of the citizens of the District: Ward 1, Ward 8, Ward 3, Ward 7. I found that to be extraordinarily meaningful.

It was a privilege to work so hard with so many people. We had young people, folks who were in high school and college and law school, volunteering for our campaign. We had older folks, some were paid and most were not, who volunteered for the campaign. And then we had a group of inspiring seniors who were quite active. Being a part of that broad coalition for the good of the District was one of the most meaningful experiences that I’ve ever had in my life.

Running the campaign was extraordinarily enjoyable. The rollercoaster ride was, at the end of the day, full of joy.

This was the first time the District of Columbia had ever elected an attorney general. Was voter participation in the election what you expected?

I didn’t know what to expect, so I relied on the judgment and the

experience of the political people in our campaign. It was pretty

much the consensus view that the turnout would be low, and that the

interest in particular in this new office and the new attorney general

would also be low.

The folks who know politics estimated the turnout would be in a range of 50,000 to 70,000, but the final turnout for our election was about 165,000. So, as it turned out, folks were interested and engaged. They came out to vote in very high numbers. I think that’s

a credit to all of the candidates who all ran spirited campaigns. At times it was quite tough out there with such worthy opponents.

You fielded a transition team to coordinate your move. How did the transition go?

The transition went well. We were led by two transition co-chairs,

eminent lawyers and fantastic citizens of the District of Columbia:

Pauline Schneider, of counsel at Ballard Spahr and a former D.C. Bar

president; and Natalie O. Ludaway, managing member at Leftwich

& Ludaway.

In addition to focusing on the priorities of our administra-tion, we had tremendous assistance internally from our colleagues at OAG, the great lawyers and staff who are already here. They brought me up to speed on the work of the office, the challenges of certain areas, and where we might use more resources.

Former [mayor-appointed—ed.] attorney general Irvin Nathan has been invested in a smooth transition. Following Irv’s lead, the office has been extraordinarily welcoming.

How do you plan to improve engagement with D.C. citizens?

That’s another outgrowth of the office being independent [from

the mayor’s office —ed.]. Whereas before when the office was not

independent, I think the office did a good job of communicating what

it was doing and how it impacted the lives of the citizens of the District

of Columbia, but the office kind of reported through the mayor.

It was clear to us in the campaign that the citizens want to hear directly from the attorney general’s office as to its work and how [it] might have a positive impact on their lives.

Another initiative that we have is to ramp up our efforts in regards to community outreach. We’re going to establish an office of community outreach where we fulfill our very important function of not only serving as counsel to the agencies, but also serving the people’s needs. That’s going to be a major change of emphasis in this new world of the independent, elected attorney general.

I’ve had an extraordinary set of circumstances and

experiences with great teachers, great coaches,

great mentors, and great guides who were lawyers,

and I have a passion for public service.


AS A CIRCUIT COURT JUDGE FOR THE CITY OF

Richmond, Donald W. Lemons ’76 was looking for a better way

to handle nonviolent drug offenders, whose incarceration was costly

and, in his view, failed to address the root problem of addiction.

With no money for a new program and in the face of criticism that he would appear “soft on crime,” the former probation officer pulled together a novel alternative called a “drug court,” sentencing eligible convicts to probation-supervision including substance abuse treatment, mental health counseling, and job training. To get it off the ground, he persuaded the Department of Corrections to provide probation officers, teachers, and job counselors. “I just begged and borrowed resources from everywhere,” he recalls.

The new approach was not a fit for everyone: “There are people who got into the program and within two weeks said, ‘Please take me out of this program—just go ahead and send me to prison,’ because it was so hard,” Lemons says. “But the ones who persevered came out the other end with a new opportunity and a new way of coping with their own lives, and many became very productive people.”

Today, 16 years later, there are 38 drug courts in Virginia. And Lemons, who went on to ascend to the state’s Court of Appeals

and then to its highest court, in January became chief justice of the seven-member Supreme Court of Virginia.

Currently the most senior member with more than 14 years on the high court, Lemons, 66, was elected by his peers to a four-year term to replace (the retiring) Chief Justice Cynthia Kinser ’77. Kinser recently returned to private practice with Gentry Locke in Roanoke, serving as senior counsel and focusing on appeals, criminal matters, and government investigations. “For more than 17 years, I had the privilege to serve with outstanding jurists on the Supreme Court of Virginia. Like me, several of them UVA Law alumni. All my colleagues were not only dedicated public servants committed to the administration of justice, but also my friends.”

“The choice, to me, seemed natural,” says Justice Cleo E. Powell ’82. “In the few months he has been chief, it has been confirmed for me that it was the right choice. He has great ideas about moving things forward, he is very collaborative, [and] wants to get all of our opinions on how things should work. He brings

to us innovative ideas he might be considering, lays them out on the table, and gets everyone’s opinion. He’s

Meet Donald Lemons ’76: Virginia’s Chief Justiceby Michelle KoiDin Jaffee

UVa law alumni of the Supreme Court of Virginia, from left, Justice Cleo powell ’82, Chief Justice donald lemons ’76, and Justice bernard goodwyn ’86


just very thoughtful, very contemplative, and very inclusive, all of which make for a good leader.”

With Lemons, Powell, and Justice S. Bernard Goodwyn ’86, there are currently three Law School alumni on the high court; additionally, Senior Justices Charles S. Russell ’48 and Elizabeth B. Lacy LL.M. ’92 attended the Law School.

“I think for a lot of people who go to UVA Law School,” says Goodwyn, “there’s a certain sense of obligation to the community and to the law, and it’s that sense of obligation that encourages them to go into public service.”

Lemons takes over an extremely young court: In the last eight years, every seat except for his has turned over.

In some sense, it’s a new day for the court. “We’re still feeling our way, I think as far as an identity for the court overall, just because we haven’t been together that long,” Goodwyn says.

All three alumni bring experience from the circuit court level. “I think that having that experience in the trenches as busy and not terribly well-supported trial judges informs their error review and abuse-of-discretion review which appellate courts have to engage in,” says Professor Kent Sinclair, director of advocacy and lawyer training. “So they have a better appreciation of how the system operates on the ground than many appellate judges around the country might have without that trial court experience.”

Choosing Lemons as the new chief justice shows the justices’ confidence in his administrative abilities as well as his diplomatic skills in dealing with the General Assembly, Sinclair says.

From an early age, Lemons wanted to be a lawyer. He grew up in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C., where his dad worked

protection detail for President Truman as a Secret Service agent.

“My experience as a probation officer allowed me to

watch lawyers in private practice as they represented their clients and gave me a very interesting look at prosecution from the Commonwealth’s side,” he says. “It gave me the opportunity to see how judges operate.”

The experience inspired him to go to law school, where one day his friend and classmate G. Moffett Cochran ’76 rounded up students for a cocktail party to be hosted by his parents, Lee and George M. Cochran ’36, then a justice on the Supreme Court of Virginia and formerly a state legislator.

“It’s one thing to talk about the things that you’d like to do; it’s another thing to actually talk to someone who is doing it,” Lemons says. “That’s the sort of experience that allows people to visualize what their future might be.”

Not to say that he imagined reaching his current position.“I never in a million years thought I’d be on the Supreme

Court of Virginia—goodness, no,” he says. “That’s not the sort of thing you realistically anticipate when you’re a law student. But what you saw in George Cochran was an extraordinarily successful person who was engaged in public service and politics and the practice of law at the highest possible professional level. It was inspiring.” (Years later, Lemons had the chance to appear before the elder Cochran in court, and eventually even got to sit beside him when Cochran was called back to the bench after retirement.)

During law school, Lemons became a student assistant to Al Turnbull ’62, then assistant dean for admissions and career services. The experience helped propel Lemons straight from graduation onto the faculty, where he served as an assistant professor and assistant dean for two years.

“This is an amazing thing, that he would graduate and instantly become an assistant dean,” Turnbull says. “He’s rigorous, he’s firm, but he’s also compassionate and thoughtful. It was these qualities that led us to feel confident that he would do a great job.”

donald W. lemons ’76 is the new chief justice of the Supreme Court of Virginia. he was sworn in January 8.


Though Lemons left the University to go into private practice in 1978, he did not stop teaching. One of the themes at his chief justice investiture ceremony was his longstanding commitment to the education of lawyers; while serving as a judge at multiple levels, Lemons has continued to teach in law schools at the University of Richmond as well as Washington and Lee University.

During his years in private practice with Durrette, Irvin, Lemons & Bradshaw in Richmond, Lemons handled civil and criminal trial work, working juvenile-court cases pro bono on the side.

By the time he ascended to the bench of the circuit court in Richmond in 1995, he was mulling alternatives for handling drug defendants.

“If you’re a probation officer in Virginia, in juvenile or adult courts, you will quickly find out that addiction to substances—alcohol, prescription drugs, or other illegal narcotic drugs—is a major problem,” Lemons says. “If you have people who are not presenting a threat to the public safety but they have an addiction problem, it seems to me that it makes a lot of sense to try to deal with it differently than a one-size-fits-all, lock-’em-up mentality.”

Lemons’ drug court—a special docket within the existing court, not a separate court—was one of three being developed in Virginia at the time; the others were in Roanoke and Charlottesville. Today there are more than 2,800 such courts across the country.

“Justice Lemons was a pioneer in that process in the Richmond area,” Sinclair says. “The fact that it was handled so well and so successfully helped the Commonwealth to develop a broader version of that drug-court type program to divert appropriate candidates from the revolving door of the prison system.”

At a ceremony in 2013 marking the 15th official year of the Richmond Adult Drug Treatment Court, Lemons spoke openly about his own cousin, a nurse and honorably discharged service member, who weeks earlier had died of a heroin overdose.

“Addiction is no respecter of persons,” Lemons says. “It’s all races, all genders, all religious traditions—from the poorest to the most wealthy people.”

While some judges once warned him that becoming a so-called drug-court judge could derail his career—that legisla-tors would oppose it and decline to re-elect him—and though

the concept maintains detractors, Lemons considers it one of his greatest accomplishments.

“He is one of the leaders in America on the role of profes-sionalism and lawyer professional self-development,” Sinclair says. “He has devoted a tremendous amount of time to those projects as part of his judicial mission. If there’s anyone who would exemplify professionalism and thoughtful discharge of the lawyer’s and judge’s responsibilities, Justice Lemons would certainly be that person.”

Professionalism is among the values Lemons reiterates when swearing in lawyers as new members of the Virginia bar. Professionalism “is distinct from ethics,” says L. Steven Emmert ’82, a leading appellate litigator in Virginia who closely watches the court and publishes the website Virginia Appellate News & Analysis. “Ethics is the bare minimum that you have to do in order to ensure the bar doesn’t yank your license. But professionalism is far higher, far more aspirational. And you can expect him to emphasize that.”

When court is not in session, Lemons draws strength from the vistas surrounding his office in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Like the other justices, he maintains chambers in downtown Richmond as well as an office where he primarily lives. The Supreme Court of Virginia is unlike most appellate courts in that it hears oral arguments in six separate weeks of the year and releases its decisions on six specified days, rather than releasing opinions on a rolling basis as they get signed off on by members of the court.

When in Nellysford, his home of six years, Lemons works on opinions with his 11-year-old French Bulldog rescue, Kirby, asleep at his feet.

And in Richmond, he works beside an artificial lemon tree—a gift from a group of drug-court defendants who wrote notes of thanks on the lemons.

“It reminds me every day,” Lemons says, “that there are real people behind these cases.”

EXTRA ONLINE:

Find Donald Lemons’ remarks delivered at his investiture in January

at www.bit.ly/cjlemons

“If you have people who are not presenting a threat to the

public safety but they have an addiction problem, it seems to

me that it makes a lot of sense to try to deal with it differently

than a one-size-fits-all, lock-’em-up mentality.”

aP

iMa

ges


THROUGH THe YeARS

UVA Law Alumni on the Supreme Court of Virginia*

William Daniel Jr. 1829 ‡ 1847–1865

William Joseph Robertson 1842 1859–1865

Alexander Rives 1829 ‡ 1866–1869

Edward Calohill Burks 1842 1877–1882

Lunsford Lomax Lewis 1867 1882–1894

Thomas Turner Fauntleroy Jr. 1844 1883–1894

John Alexander Buchanan 1871 ‡ 1895–1915

George Moffett Harrison 1870 ‡ 1895–1917

James Keith 1860 ‡ 1895–1916

Stafford Gorman Whittle 1871 1901–1919

Joseph Luther Kelly 1889 1915–1924

Robert Riddick Prentis 1876 1916–1931

Martin Parks Burks 1872 1917–1928

Edward Watts Saunders 1882 ‡ 1920–1921

Jesse Felix West 1886 ‡ 1922–1929

Richard Henry Lee Chichester 1892 ‡ 1925–1930

Joseph Chinn 1890 ‡ 1931–1936

Claude Vernon Spratley 1906 1936–1967

Lemuel Franklin Smith ’16 1951–1956

Lawrence Warren I’Anson ’31 1958–1981

Thomas Christian Gordon Jr. ’38 1965–1972

Albertis Sydney Harrison Jr. ’28 1967–1981

George Moffett Cochran ’36 1969–1987

Richard Harding Poff ’48 1972–1988

William Carrington Thompson ’39 1980–1983

Charles Stevens Russell ’48 1982–1991

John Charles Thomas ’75 1983–1989

Henry Hudson Whiting ’49 1987–1995

Elizabeth Bermingham Lacy LL.M. ’92 1989–2007

Barbara Milano Keenan LL.M. ’92 1991–2010

Cynthia D. Kinser ’77 1997–2014

Donald W. Lemons ’76 2000–present

G. Steven Agee ’77 2003–2008

S. Bernard Goodwyn ’86 2007–present

Cleo E. Powell ’82 2011–present

* J.D. or LL.B. earned unless otherwise noted ‡ studied or read the law


In 2011 a gang of ten white teenagers killed James Craig Anderson, a

48-year-old black man in Jackson, Mississippi, a city called “Jafrica” by

the group. They cornered Anderson in a parking lot, beat him severely,

and then drove over his body with their truck, screaming “white power.”

In February three of them—Deryl Paul Dedmon, Dylan Wade Butler,

and John Aaron Rice—were convicted of a federal hate crime (they had

already been convicted in state court for various degrees of murder and

conspiracy).

At their sentencing hearing, U.S. District Judge Carlton Reeves ’89,

the second African-American appointed a federal judge in Mississippi,

offered remarks on the history of racism and lynching they were widely

picked up in the media. After many alumni alerted us to the remarks,

we asked Judge Reeves if we could share them. We have excerpted them

below (full text at www.bit.ly/judgereeves).

One of my former history professors, Dennis

Mitchell, recently released a history

book entitled, A New History of Mississippi.

“Mississippi,” he says, “is a place and a state

of mind. The name evokes strong reactions

from those who live here and from those who

do not, but who think they know something

about its people and their past.” Because of

its past, as described by Anthony Walton in

his book, Mississippi: An American Journey,

Mississippi “can be considered one of the

most prominent scars on the map” of these

United States.… Mississippi has expressed its

savagery in a number of ways throughout its

history—slavery being the cruelest example,

but a close second being Mississippi’s infatuation with lynchings.

Lynchings were prevalent, prominent and participatory. A lynching

was a public ritual—even carnival-like—within many states in our

great nation. While other States engaged in these atrocities, those in

the Deep South took a leadership role, especially that scar on the map

of America—those 82 counties between the Tennessee line and the

Gulf of Mexico and bordered by Louisiana, Arkansas, and Alabama.…

In Without Sanctuary, historian Leon Litwack writes that

between 1882 and 1968 an estimated 4,742 Blacks met their deaths

at the hands of lynch mobs. The impact this campaign of terror had

on black families is impossible to explain so many years later.…

Those who died at the hands of mobs, Litwack notes, some were

the victims of “legal” lynchings—having been accused of a crime,

subjected to a “speedy” trial and even speedier execution. Some were

victims of private white violence … murdered by a variety of means

in isolated rural sections and dumped into rivers and creeks.…

How could hate, fear, or whatever it was transform genteel, God-

fearing, God-loving Mississippians into mindless murderers and

sadistic torturers? I ask that same question about the events which

bring us together on this day. Those crimes of the past as well as

these have so damaged the psyche and reputation of this great State.

Mississippi soil has been stained with the blood of folk whose

names have become synonymous with the Civil Rights Movement

like Emmett Till, Willie McGee, James Cheney, Andrew Goodman,

Michael Schwerner, Vernon Dahmer, George W. Lee, Medgar Evers,

and Mack Charles Parker. But the blood of

the lesser-known people like Luther Holbert

and his wife,

Elmo Curl,

Lloyd Clay,

John

Hartfield, Nelse Patton,

Lamar Smith,

Clinton

Melton, Ben Chester White, Wharlest Jackson,

and countless others, saturates these 48,434

square miles of Mississippi soil. On June 26,

2011, four days short of his 49th birthday,

the blood of James Anderson was added to

Mississippi’s soil.

The common denominator of the deaths

of these individuals was not their race. It was

not that they all were engaged in freedom

fighting. It was not that they had been engaged

in criminal activity, trumped up or otherwise.

No, the common denominator was that the

last thing that each of these individuals saw

was the inhumanity of racism. The last thing that each felt was the

audacity and agony of hate; senseless hate: crippling, maiming them

and finally taking away their lives.

Mississippi has a tortured past, and it has struggled mightily to

reinvent itself and become a New Mississippi. New generations have

attempted to pull Mississippi from the abyss of moral depravity in

which it once so proudly floundered.

Despite much progress and the efforts of the new generations,

these three defendants are before me today. They and their co-

conspirators ripped off the scab of the healing scars of Mississippi …

causing her (our Mississippi) to bleed again.

Remarks on Race by Mississippi Judge Carlton Reeves ’89 Reaches National Audience


Hate comes in all shapes, sizes, colors, and from this case, we

know it comes in different sexes and ages. A toxic mix of alcohol,

foolishness, and unadulterated hatred caused these young people

to resurrect the nightmarish specter of lynchings and lynch mobs

from the Mississippi we long to forget. Like the marauders of ages

past, these young folk conspired, planned, and coordinated a plan of

attack on certain neighborhoods in the City of Jackson for the sole

purpose of harassing, terrorizing, physically assaulting, and causing

bodily injury to black folk. They punched and kicked them about

their bodies—their heads, their faces. They prowled. They came

ready to hurt. They used dangerous weapons; they targeted the weak;

they recruited and encouraged others to join in the coordinated

chaos; and they boasted about their shameful activity.

Though the media and the public attention of these crimes have

been focused almost exclusively on the early morning hours of June

26, 2011, the defendants’ terror campaign is not limited to this one

incident…. There are unknown victims like the John Doe at the

golf course who begged for his life and the John Doe at the service

station. Like a lynching, for these young folk going out to “Jafrica”

was like a carnival outing. It was funny to them—an excursion

which culminated in the death of innocent, African-American

James Craig Anderson.

But even after Anderson’s murder, the conspiracy continued.…

And, only because of a video, which told a different story from that

which had been concocted by these defendants, and the investigation

of law enforcement—state and federal law enforcement working

together—was the truth uncovered.

What is so disturbing … so shocking … so numbing … is that

these … hunts were perpetrated by our children … students who

live among us … educated in our public schools … in our private

academies … students who played football lined up on the same

side of the scrimmage line with black teammates … average students

and honor students. Kids who worked during school and in the

summers; kids who now had full-time jobs and some of whom were

even unemployed. Some were pursuing higher education and the

Court believes they each had dreams to pursue. These children were

from two-parent homes and some were the children of divorced

parents, and yes, some even raised by a single parent. No doubt, they

all had loving parents and loving families.…

I asked the question earlier, but what could transform these

young adults into the violent creatures their victims saw? It was

nothing the victims did … they were not championing any cause

… political … social … economic … nothing they did … not a

wolf whistle … not a supposed crime … nothing they did. There is

absolutely no doubt that in the view of the Court the victims were

targeted because of their race.

The simple fact is that what turned these children into criminal

defendants was their joint decision to act on racial hatred. In the eyes

of these defendants (and their co- conspirators) the victims were

doomed at birth … their genetic make-up made them targets.…

In the Mississippi we have tried to bury, when there was a jury

verdict for those who perpetrated crimes and committed lynchings

in the name of White Power … that verdict typically said that the

victim died at the hands of persons unknown. The legal and criminal

justice system operated with ruthless efficiency in upholding what

these defendants would call White Power.

Today, though, the criminal justice system (state and federal) has

proceeded methodically, patiently, and deliberately seeking justice.

Today we learned the identities of the persons unknown … they

stand here publicly today.

The sadness of this day also has an element of irony to it: each

defendant was escorted into court by agents of an African-American

United States Marshal; having been prosecuted by a team of lawyers

which includes an African-American AUSA from an office headed

by an African-American U.S. Attorney—all under the direction of

an African-American Attorney General, for sentencing before a

judge who is African-American, whose final act will be to turn over

the care and custody of these individuals to the BOP—an agency

headed by an African-American.

Today we take another step away from Mississippi’s tortured

past … we move farther away from the abyss. Indeed, Mississippi is

a place and a state of mind. And those who think they know about

her people and her past will also understand that her story has not

been completely written. Mississippi has a present and a future. That

present and future has promise. As demonstrated by the work of the

officers within these state and federal agencies—black and white,

male and female, in this Mississippi, they work together to advance

the rule of law.

Having learned from Mississippi’s inglorious past, these officials

know that in advancing the rule of law, the criminal justice system

must operate without regard to race, creed, or color. This is the

strongest way Mississippi can reject those notions—those ideas

which brought us here today.

At their guilty plea hearings, Deryl Paul Dedmon, Dylan Wade

Butler, and John Aaron Rice told the world exactly what their roles

were … it is ugly … it is painful … it is sad … it is criminal.…

These sentences will not bring back James Craig Anderson nor

will they restore the lives they enjoyed prior to 2011. The Court

knows that James Anderson’s mother, who is now 89 years old,

lived through the horrors of the Old Mississippi, and the Court

hopes that she and her family can find peace in knowing that

with these sentences, in the New Mississippi, Justice is truly blind.

Justice, however, will not be complete unless these defendants use

the remainder of their lives to learn from this experience and fully

commit to making a positive difference in the New Mississippi. And,

finally, the Court wishes that the defendants also can find peace.

[ed. Note: Reeves sentenced Dedmon to 50 years, Rice 18.5 years, and Butler seven years.]


Five Alumni Five Former Supreme Court Clerks

One Firm

by Michelle KoiDin Jaffee

For Brian Schmalzbach ’10, Rebecca Gantt ’11, and Katherine

Mims Crocker ’12, serving on the Virginia Law Review was

only the start of their intersecting career paths.

After graduating, each went on to clerk at the Supreme Court

of the United States—and now all three have returned to Virginia

to practice with McGuireWoods.

It’s a recruitment win for the Richmond-based firm, bringing

to five the number of former U.S. Supreme Court clerks among

its ranks—all UVA Law alumni. The Law School is fourth in

contributing the most clerks to the Supreme Court from 2005

through 2014, after Harvard, Stanford, and Yale. In the fall, four

Law School graduates will clerk for the Court, tying a school

record from the 2009–10 term.

“The culture of UVA produces lawyers who are well rounded,”

says John D. Adams ’03, who serves as the firm’s hiring partner.

“They know how to work hard. They’re obviously smart. But they

also know how to treat people.”

McGuireWoods, with its growing appellate practice, is

intentionally focused on pursuing recruits of the Supreme Court

level, says Adams, a former clerk for

Justice Clarence Thomas.

“There’s something about the

young people who make it all the way

to the Court—they really love the law,”

he says. “They attack assignments with intensity because of their

passion for the law.”

The three new hires have joined the appellate practice, with

Schmalzbach and Crocker based in Richmond and Gantt in Norfolk.

“There’s been a lot of conventional wisdom in the past that you

had to go to a big D.C. firm in order to get the most sophisticated

work and have good opportunities moving forward in your career,

but that’s really not necessarily true,” says Matt Fitzgerald ’08, who

came to McGuireWoods following a clerkship for Justice Thomas.

“McGuireWoods is a good example of a firm with a major national

presence [that’s] every bit as sophisticated as many of the big D.C.

firms, and so the clerks realize that.”

In recent interviews with UVA Lawyer, the three new associates

elaborated on the experiences that shaped them, their roads to the

Supreme Court, and their new roles.

Katherine Mims Crocker ’12

For Crocker, a Harvard grad and native of Sterling, Va., one

formative Law School experience was A. E. Dick Howard’s seminar

on the Supreme Court; she later led a team of research assistants for

the professor in a project involving the Court.

“At the time I didn’t know I might have the opportunity to clerk

there, but it really taught me a lot about the Court and built my

interest in it,” says Crocker, who clerked for Justice Antonin Scalia.

above from left , Katherine mims Crocker ’12, rebecca gantt ’11, brian Schmalzbach ’10, John adams ’03, matt fitzgerald ’08.


Crocker, 29, also points to Michael Collins’ classes in federal

courts and civil rights litigation: “Those classes are both very

focused on jurisdictional issues, and I would often rely on what I

learned during both of my clerkships.”

Serving as an articles development editor of the Law Review

was a key experience for Crocker. “Being able to work in a small

group of people, discuss big and exciting ideas, and challenge each

other prepared me for working collaboratively with my co-clerks,

both at the Fourth Circuit and the Supreme Court,” she says.

Crocker clerked for Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III ’72 of the

U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, as did Schmalzbach

before her. “We were both really fortunate to be able to clerk for

him for many reasons. Plus he has such a great track record of

sending clerks on to the Supreme Court,” Crocker says. “I know

that experience helped prepare us for clerking there.”

Crocker enjoyed the collaboration among the clerks. “It’s an

amazing concentration of young legal talent that you get to be part

of for a year,” she says. “I learned a lot of things just from hearing

how people approach problems from different perspectives. And

I’m not referring to ideological differences—people just think

through things differently, and getting to see that process in action

was really amazing.”

McGuireWoods offered an opportunity to work with Adams

and Fitzgerald. “Especially being at the very start of my career,

having strong mentors with appellate experience means a lot to

me,” Crocker says.

And the move to Richmond has brought her closer to family:

Crocker’s father is Justice William C. Mims of the Supreme Court

of Virginia.

“He has influenced me in so many positive ways, since long

before he was a Supreme Court justice,” she says. “It’s been really

inspiring to see him give so much of his life to public service.”

Rebecca Gantt ’11

Gantt, who grew up on a cattle farm in Nelson County, Va., and

went to Harvard on a U.S. Navy ROTC scholarship, served as a

Surface Warfare Officer for five years before coming to the Law School.

“We had really, really excellent professors who were willing to

spend time with you and cared about teaching,” she says.

One class that was especially useful for Gantt was Rachel

Harmon’s criminal investigation class. “I used that class the

most during my clerkships,” Gantt says. “It was thorough and

comprehensive.”

Gantt completed three clerkships, including one for Justice

Stephen G. Breyer. She notes that strong relationships between

students and professors pave the way toward clerkships. “For me,

Micah Schwartzman was incredibly helpful and is really an asset to

the school,” she says.

A former lieutenant in the Navy who twice deployed on

a destroyer to the Persian Gulf during the wars in Iraq and

Afghanistan, Gantt, 33, continues to draw on the skills she

developed during her military service.

“The military gives young people generally an incredible

amount of responsibility at a really young age, which initially

terrified me, but eventually I became accustomed to it and found

out how rewarding it could be,” says Gantt, who received a Navy

Commendation Medal and two Navy Achievement Medals.

“I think that was part of my decision to come to a firm like

McGuireWoods rather than a bigger firm—I felt I could get some

of that autonomy and responsibility.”

Brian Schmalzbach ’10

In both private practice and in his clerkships for Judge Wilkinson

and Justice Thomas, Schmalzbach says he could hear the words of

his UVA Law professors echoing in his mind.

“I think Caleb Nelson’s legislation class should be required for

everyone, but certainly anyone who’s going to clerk in the Court of

Appeals or the Supreme Court,” Schmalzbach says. “I think about

that class just about every day in my practice but certainly during

the clerkships.”

A native of Arlington, Va., Schmalzbach is a Double Hoo, an

Echols Scholar with a bachelor’s focusing on classics and religious

studies. “One thing that strikes me when I hear other people

describe their experiences at other law schools is the ideological

slant you sometimes get in classes,” Schmalzbach says. “I really

can’t come up with a time when that happened at UVA.”

In private practice in Washington, D.C., he worked on a Fourth

Amendment case that went to the Supreme Court. “I remember

hearing the facts of the case and immediately Professor [Anne]

Coughlin’s criminal investigation class came flooding into my

mind. Almost by the time I had finished hearing about the facts of

the case, I knew exactly what the arguments were going to have to

be, and which cases we were going to cite. It struck me at the time

that Professor Coughlin had done a wonderful job preparing us for

something like that.”

Coming out of clerkship, Schmalzbach wanted to join a firm

that had the infrastructure for an appellate practice already in

place, but away from D.C.

“McGuireWoods recognized that it could attract really good

talent to places outside of D.C. that are in some ways more livable,”

says Schmalzbach, 29. “I wanted to do great appellate work of the

sort I had been doing in D.C., but I just didn’t want to live in D.C.

So when McGuireWoods made me an offer to come to Richmond,

it seemed like a great opportunity to do the work I wanted to do,

but also to live the lifestyle I wanted to live, and that’s why I ended

up here.”

FacuLty NewS & BrieFS


In May Bonnie, Anne Coughlin, John Jeffries ’73, and Peter Low ’63 published the 4th edition of their popular Criminal Law casebook. Bonnie and Ruth Gaare Bernheim ’80, current chair of the Department of Public Health Sciences at UVA’s School of Medicine, published a path-breaking casebook, Public Health Law, Ethics and Policy, after more than a decade of co-teaching a course for Law students as well as students in the public health master’s degree program.

Bonnie also published compan-ion articles in the January issue of the journal Psychiatric Services on a four-year effort to implement provisions of Virginia’s Health Care Decisions Act empowering persons with mental illness to execute advance directions to govern their care in a psychiatric crisis if their decisional capac-ity is impaired. These statutory innovations, adopted in 2009 and 2010, were a key component of the reform plan recommended by the Commission on Mental Health Law Reform chaired by Bonnie from 2006–11. He also spoke about these activities at the annual meeting of the Psychiatric Society of Virginia in Richmond in March.

In February Bonnie pre-sented a lecture entitled “The Sudden Collapse of Marijuana Prohibition: What Next?” at the UVA Medical Center Hour and in April at the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics. He also presented a keynote address on the history of drug policy in the United States at Emory Law School in March and spoke at the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association in Toronto in May

KEnnETh AbRAhAm published Insurance Law and Regulation (6th ed. 2015; co-authored with Daniel Schwarcz); “Prosser and His Influence” in the Journal of Tort Law 1 (co-authored with G. Edward White); and “Review of Merkin & Steele, Insurance and the Law of Obligations” in the Journal of European Tort Law.

In February he presented a paper, “The Liability Insurer’s Duty to Settle Uncertain and Mixed Claims,” to the Rutgers-Camden Law School Conference on the Restatement of the Law of Liability Insurance.

to the Convention on Biological Diversity, Woodrow Wilson Center Side Event, Pyeongchang, South Korea.

In February she presented “Of Indigenous Group ‘Straws’ and Developed Country ‘Camels’: Patents, Innovation, and the Disclosure of Origin Requirement” at the Works-in-Progress Intellectual Property (WIPIP) Workshop, U.S. Patent & Trademark Office; and “Towering Wave or Tempest in a Teapot? Synthetic Biology, Access & Benefit Sharing, and Economic Development” at the New Zealand Centre of International Economic Law Workshop on “Intellectual Property and Regulation of the Internet: The Nexus with Human and Economic Development” in Wellington.

In March Bagley pre-sented “Is an International Law of Intellectual Property a Good Thing?” at the symposium “The Promise and Perils of an International Law of Property” at the University of the Pacific McGeorge School of Law in Sacramento, Calif.

In February and March Bagley continued to provide expert technical assistance to the government of Mozambique in the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) Standing Committee on Trademarks 33rd Session and WIPO Intergovernmental Committee (IGC) on Intellectual Property and Genetic Resources, Traditional Knowledge, and Folklore related meetings in Geneva, Switzerland, and Wellington.

In March the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences released its report on the “Public Health Implications of Raising the Minimum Age of Legal Access to Tobacco Products.” The study, chaired by RiChARd bonniE ’69, was sought by the Food and Drug Administration in response to a congressional mandate in the 2009 Tobacco Control Act. According to the findings in the report, almost all adult smokers begin smoking and become addicted by their early 20s. If the minimum age of legal access were raised now to 21, there would be about three million fewer adult smokers in 2060. Reducing initiation of smoking would have a substantial long-term public health payoff. Over the lifespan of the cohort of children born in the first two decades of the 21st century, there would be approximately 10 percent fewer lifetime premature deaths, lung cancer deaths, and years of life lost from cigarette smoking. (Given the status quo projections, this translates to approximately 249,000 fewer premature deaths, 45,000 fewer deaths from lung cancer, and 4.2 million fewer years of life lost.)

In September mARgo bAglEy was a panelist on “Synthetic Biology Night” at UVA’s International Genetically Engineered Machines (iGEM) event in Charlottesville.

In October she presented “The Nagoya Protocol and Synthetic Biology: A Look at the Potential Impacts” at the First Meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Nagoya Protocol

Faculty News aNd BrieFs …


In the fall of 2014 miChAEl doRAn published “Tax Legislation in the Contemporary U.S. Congress” in Tax Law Review.

AlbERT Choi has published “Should Consumers Be Permitted to Waive Products Liability? Product Safety, Private Contracts, and Adverse Selection,” with Kathryn E. Spier at Harvard Law School, in the Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization, and “Contract’s Role in Relational Contract,” with Scott Baker at Washington University Law School, in the Virginia Law Review. Choi presented that paper at Tel Aviv University Law School and the University of Haifa Law School in June of 2014.

Also in 2014, Choi pre-sented “Facilitating Mergers and Acquisitions with Earnouts and Purchase Price Adjustments” at the National Business Law Scholars Conference at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, Calif., and at the Division of Research and Statistics at the Federal Reserve Board in Washington, D.C. He presented “Non-Profit Status and Relational Sanctions: Commitment to Quality through Repeat Interactions and Organizational Status” at the University of Toronto Law School, and will present it at the International Society for New Institutional Economics Conference at Harvard Law School this June.

JonAThAn CAnnon published Environment in the Balance: The Green Movement and the Supreme Court. The University’s Open Forum featured a discus-sion of the book on March 28 at the Law School, and in April Cannon made a presentation on the book to the faculty at UCLA. For an in-depth article and video about the book, visit www.bit.ly/environmentinbalance.

The Law School’s Environmen-tal and Land Use Law Program hosted a panel discussion in April with Mary Nichols, chairman of the California Air Resources Board. Nichols is leading the implementation of AB 32, California’s climate change law.

With colleagues in the Environmental Sciences Department and student research-ers, Cannon is working on a meta-study of nongovernmental conservation efforts. The goal is to isolate factors that are crucial to long-term success across a range of conservation programs.

In February gEoRgE CohEn par-ticipated in a symposium on the proposed Restatement of the Law of Liability Insurance. Cohen presented “Vicarious Liability of Insurers for Defense Counsel Malpractice.” The paper will be published by the Rutgers Law Review.

Choi participated in the Penn Corporate Roundtable at University of Pennsylvania Law School in December 2014; at the NYU/Penn Law and Finance Conference at NYU Law School in February 2015; and as a commen-tator at Weil, Gotshal & Manges Corporate Law Roundtable at Yale Law School in March.

AShlEy dEEKS wrote a chapter for a book on intelligence community oversight. The chapter analyzes ways in which one intelligence community can influence the legal compliance of peer intelligence services. She presented that chapter this spring at a University of Chicago international law workshop and at a workshop run by NYU Law School’s Center on Law and Security.

This spring Deeks spoke on foreign surveillance and international law at Washington and Lee’s Cybersurveillance Symposium, and spoke on the same topic in Tallinn, Estonia, this spring at NATO’s International Conference on Cyber Conflict.

In June she will present a paper on national security, technology, and the separation of powers at a University of Chicago Law School symposium.

She has also contributed a number of blog posts to Lawfare, including posts on issues related to the use of force by the United States, Jordan, and the United Kingdom in Iraq and Syria; the Sony hack; and the structure of U.S. intelligence statutes.

on the challenges being faced by medical emergency departments as a result of the shortage of acute care psychiatric services.



Over the past six months bRAndon gARRETT discussed his book, Too Big to Jail, at the Brennan Center in Washington, D.C., in a call with the Council of Institutional Investors; at a conference about the book at Lille University, France; a seminar at All Souls College at Oxford; the Bristol Festival of Ideas; a briefing to U.S. House of Representatives Finance Committee’s legislative aides; the Virginia Festival of the Book; the UVA Darden/McIntire Finance Seminar; in a lunchtime talk at the 92nd Street Y in New York; at Columbia Law School; and at the Cato Institute, which was also featured on C-SPAN’s Book TV.

In February Garrett presented his draft paper “Why Guilty Pleas Are Not Confessions” at William & Mary School of Law and at a plea bargaining symposium. He participated in a conference on corporate constitutional rights at University College London. He also helped to organize the Virginia Criminal Law Journal’s annual symposium, featuring a keynote talk by U.S. Judge Jed Rakoff and an afternoon panel on the Virginia sentencing guidelines, and helped to organize a career event on White-Collar Criminal Practice.

In March Garrett organized a roundtable works-in-progress conference at UVA on policing. He presented a draft titled “A Tactical Fourth Amendment,” a work in progress with Seth Stoughton. He gave a talk on recent developments in criminal procedure and practices to the Charlottesville Criminal Bar. He also helped organize and moderate a panel, Policing After Ferguson. He also discussed a newer article, “The Corporate Criminal as Scapegoat” at Pace Law School. He presented a new paper, “The Decline of the

In January KimbERly FERzAn was elected to the American Law Institute. She is currently an adviser on the ALI project that is revising the Model Penal Code’s sexual assault provisions, and she has joined the members consultative group for the Project on Sexual and Gender-Based Misconduct on Campus: Procedural Frameworks and Analysis.

Two of her accepted papers are to appear in print soon. Her paper “On Jeffrie Murphy’s ‘Involuntary Acts and Criminal Liability’” will be published by Ethics. Her essay, “Of Weevils and Witches: What Can We Learn from the Ghost of Responsibility Past?,” that comments on Niki Lacey’s contribution will appear In the Virginia Law Review’s Symposium on Jurisprudence and (Its) History.

In April Ferzan commented on Kit Wellman’s Berger Prize–win-ning article, “The Forfeiture Theory of Punishment,” at the American Philosophical Association, Pacific Division, Annual Meeting. She will also be taking part in a conference on the Ethics and Law of Omissions held by the University of San Diego’s Philosophy Department.

This summer Ferzan will be working on a paper on rape law reform for a symposium issue of the Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law.

Virginia (and American) Death Penalty,” at Cornell Law School.

Articles to be published later this year include “Constitutional Law and the Law of Evidence” in Cornell Law Review; “The Corporate Criminal as Scapegoat” and “Confession Contamination Revisited” in the Virginia Law Review; “Interrogation Policies” in the University of Richmond Law Review; and “Why Plea Bargains Are Not Confessions” in the William & Mary Law Review.

A book chapter to be published later this year is “Blinding Eyewitness Identifications,” a chapter in Blinding as a Solution to Bias in Biomedical Science and the Courts: A Multidisciplinary Approach, Kathi Hanna, Chris Robertson, and Aaron Kesselheim, eds., forthcoming 2015, Elsevier Press. A short piece, “Rehabilitating Corporations,” published last fall in the Florida Law Review Online.

Garrett was appointed to be an associate reporter on an American Law Institute project, Principles of the Law, Police Investigations, and he continues to advise law enforcement in Virginia on matters related to lineups and interrogation policies, as well as a potential “Justice Commission.” He advises policy-makers concerning approaches to corporate crime.

Garrett received a grant from Proteus Action League to conduct

research on Virginia capital trials. Also, the National Academy of Sciences published its report to which he contributed as a committee member: National Research Council, “Identifying the Culprit: Assessing Eyewitness Identification” (2014).

His recent op-eds include “A Time Out for the Death Penalty” in Jurist; “The Corporate Criminal as Scapegoat” in CLS Blue Sky Blog; “Prosecutors Must Hold Corporate Offenders Accountable” in The New York Times; “Too Big to Jail” in ACS Blog and CLS Blue Sky Blog; “The Department of Justice Must Get Serious on ‘Too Big to Jail,’” in The Conversation; and “Delusion and Execution” in ACS Blog.

“DNA and Distrust,” by Garrett and Kerry Abrams will be published in an upcoming issue of Notre Dame Law Review.

Between April and June Garrett is a visiting fellow at All Souls College, Oxford.

miChAEl gilbERT’s paper titled “The Problem of Voter Fraud” was published in the Columbia Law Review in April. In November he presented a paper titled “Insincere Rules” at a faculty workshop at UVA and that paper will be published in the Virginia Law Review in 2016.

Gilbert presented a paper, co-authored with Brian Barnes ’16, titled “The Coordination Fallacy” at a symposium on voting rights at Florida State University; the



paper will be published in the Florida State University Law Review. He continues to work with Andrew Hayashi on an eco-nomic analysis of rules, standards, and enforcement, and is begin-ning work with Robert Cooter, a law professor at University of California–Berkeley, on a book on public law and economics.

In February RiSA goluboFF appeared on the radio show Backstory, speaking about protective legislation for women. In May she presented at the University of Pennsylvania Law School Legal History Workshop on her forthcoming book on vagrancy law and the 1960s.

douglAS lAyCoCK won a 9-0 decision in the Supreme Court in Holt v. Hobbs, protecting the right of a Muslim prisoner to grow a half-inch beard for religious reasons and giving full scope to the prisoner provisions of the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act. He filed an amicus brief in this year’s marriage cases (Obergefell v. Hodges and three companion cases) urging the Court to protect the right to same-sex marriage and then to protect the religious liberty of dissenters.

Laycock was the Dunn Scholar-in-Residence at the William & Mary Law School in March, gave the annual lecture of the Boston University Department of Religion (jointly sponsored this year by the Boston University Law School) in February, and gave the annual lecture commemorating Jefferson’s Statute for Religious Freedom at the University of Mary Washington in January. He

to produce that constitution. That’s a big deal. He’s worked with emerging democracies, something that goes far beyond his scholarship.… Dick did make a difference in the world.”

“Law should not be seen as a vocation,” says Howard in the article. “It’s a way of understand-ing much larger issues—life in America, life in the world.”

project, Principles of Law, Police Investigations, and she is serving on the Law Enforcement Course Advisory Committee for the Virginia Department of Criminal Justice Services.

She presented her paper “Federal Programs and the Real Costs of Policing” at a workshop at the University of Toronto Law School. That paper is forthcom-ing in the New York University Law Review.

Toby hEyTEnS’ article “Reassignment,” which appeared in the Stanford Law Review, was one of two long articles—and the only article published in a law review—selected for inclusion in the Green Bag’s 2014 Almanac and list of Exemplary Legal Writing.

AndREw hAyAShi’s paper “Determinants of Mortgage Default and Consumer Credit Use: The Effect of Foreclosure Laws and Foreclosure Delays,” co-authored with Sewin Chan at New York University and Wilbert Van der Klaauw and Andrew Haughwout of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, will shortly undergo a second review at a peer-reviewed finance journal.

He continues to work with Michael Gilbert on a paper analyzing the strategic behavior of government agencies and regu-lated parties when the costs of enforcing the law are uncertain.

Last fall Hayashi published “The Legal Salience of Taxation” in the University of Chicago Law Review and “Who Benefits from Property Assessment Caps: Evidence from New York City” in State Tax Notes.

In June he is helping to organize the Junior Tax Scholars Conference in Austin, Tex.

A. E. diCK howARd ’61 was featured in a March Richmond Times-Dispatch column by Jeff Schapiro titled “World is U.Va. law professor’s classroom.” The article notes that Howard is observing his 50th year at the Law School, “making him the longest serving member of its faculty. ‘Saying that retirement is not here yet’ the 81 year-old Howard is surpassing John B. Minor, an instructor from 1845 until his death in 1895.”

The article also quotes Hullie Moore ’68, a former state corporation commissioner whom Howard hired out of the Law School as assistant counsel to the Howard-directed revision of the Constitution of Virginia in 1971.

“He has done stuff,” says Moore. “He led the commission

In March RAChEl hARmon gave the annual Soll Lecture at the University of Arizona Law School. The title of the lecture was “Why Arrest?” She also presented a paper by the same name at the Virginia Policing Roundtable.

Harmon has been appointed associate reporter of the American Law Institute’s new



Martin arranged for a visit to the Law School in September by Brigadier General Mark Martins, the Chief Prosecutor, Office of Military Commissions, who spoke at a public session and also held a special meeting with the Law School’s Presidential Powers class. Martin and Martins had worked together on Guantanamo-related issues during Professor Martin’s latest government service in 2009–10.

Martin spoke in many settings over the past year on the ongoing controversy over executive actions using prosecu-torial discretion to permit certain undocumented aliens to avoid deportation and to obtain work authorization. He was inter-viewed and quoted by numerous journalists, including in The New York Times, in The Washington Post, and on Al Jazeera’s America Tonight television show. At the biennial conference of immigra-tion law professors, held in May 2014 at the University of California–Irvine, Martin was featured on a plenary session panel addressing “Administrative Alternatives to Comprehensive Immigration Reform.” He joined a roundtable of scholars, practitioners, and government officials at New York University Law School in October discussing

“The President and Immigration Reform,” which led to a collection of essays from roundtable partici-pants commenting on the actions announced by President Obama in November. The collection was published on the Balkinization blog. Martin and John Harrison participated in a panel pre-sentation at the Law School in February titled “Executive Amnesty?—Immigration and Executive Power,” cohosted by the Immigration Law Program and the Federalist Society.

Although snowed in by a rare early March snowstorm in Charlottesville, Livermore presented his paper “Rethinking Health-Based Environmental Standards” (New York University Law Review, with Richard Revesz) via videoconference as a panelist at the 20th Annual Stegner Symposium on Air Quality: Health, Energy, and Economics, at S. J. Quinney College of Law in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Livermore’s article “Interest Groups and Environmental Policy: Inconsistent Positions and Missed Opportunities” (with Richard Revesz) will appear in the journal Environmental Law this spring. He is currently editing his article “Political Parties and Presidential Oversight,” which he presented at Duke Law School in April.

In October the Journal of Law and Politics and UVA’s Immigration Law Program cosponsored a conference titled

“The Future of Immigration Enforcement: A Symposium in Honor of Professor david Martin,” in observance of his 35 years on the faculty and his impending retirement in 2016. The event featured several leading academics in the immigration field, along with four prominent former officials from U.S. immigration agencies. Former Commissioner of Immigration and Naturalization Doris Meissner, a long-time friend and colleague of Martin’s, gave the keynote address. Martin presented a brief version of his paper “Resolute Enforcement Is Not Just for Restrictionists: Building a Stable and Efficient Immigration Enforcement System.” The journal will publish the full essay in its symposium issue in 2015.

In 2014 Martin completed ten years of service (the term limit) as a member of the board of editors of the American Journal of International Law, and was then elected an honorary editor for the coming four years. In January 2015, Jeh Johnson, the Secretary of Homeland Security, named Martin to the 35-member Homeland Security Advisory Council, which is chaired by Judge William Webster, former director of the FBI.

Dean PAul mAhonEy’s new book, Wasting a Crisis: Why Securities Regulation Fails, questions the rush to regulate after the 2008 financial meltdown. Wasting a Crisis, published in March, is the dean’s first book and draws on his scholarship covering the history of securities regulation. For an in-depth article and video about the book, visit www.bit.ly/wastingacrisis.

In March the D.C. Circuit ruled in Center for Biological Diversity v. Jewell, a case argued by miChAEl livERmoRE that was based in part on his 2013 article, “Patience Is an Economic Virtue: Real Options, Natural Resources, and Offshore Oil,” in the University of Colorado Law Review. The court endorsed the legal theory advanced by Livermore that the Department of the Interior must account for the information value of delay (referred to as “options value”) when making offshore oil deci-sions. In its new draft offshore exploration plan released a month earlier, Interior also includes an extensive discussion of options value, tracking Livermore’s recommendations in Patience Is an Economic Virtue.

Livermore’s article “A Quantitative Analysis of Writing Style on the U.S. Supreme Court,” (with Keith Carlson and Daniel Rockmore) will be published by the Washington University Law Review next year. The piece uses advanced computational tools to examine how writing style has evolved on the Court over time.

spoke in each case on “Religious Liberty and the Culture Wars,” a constantly evolving look, regularly updated in response to rapid new developments, at the presumed conflict between rights to sexual autonomy and rights to religious liberty.



Martin was a featured debater in a series hosted by UVA’s Miller Center and telecast on PBS stations in October. He was part of a two-person team arguing the negative on this topic: “The number of undocu-mented immigrants must be dramatically reduced through greatly expanded enforcement.” Martin argued for enactment by statute of a well-crafted one-time legalization program covering current long-resident unauthor-ized immigrants, but emphasized how that step is the most effective way to empower resolute and consistent immigration enforce-ment in the future, using tools and capabilities not available at the time of the 1986 amnesty.

In November Martin presented a paper called “Why the Plenary Power Doctrine Endures” at a conference at Oklahoma Law School, held in observance of the 125th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s decision in Chae Chan Ping v. United States. That case, also known as the Chinese Exclusion Case, is widely consid-ered the source of doctrine giving Congress plenary power, with very limited judicial constraint, in the immigration field.

dAniEl oRTiz was counsel of record in Henderson v. United States and led the Supreme Court Litigation Clinic’s drafting of the opening and reply merits briefs in Henderson. He argued the case in February, and also spoke at Stanford University at a confer-ence called “The Supreme Court at Midterm.”

mildREd RobinSon published “‘Skin in the Tax Game’: Invisible Taxpayers? Invisible Citizens?” in the Villanova Law Review. The essay is a longer version of an address that she delivered in January of 2014 at the Villanova Law School as a part of their observance of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

This spring gEoRgE RuThERglEn attended a conference in Seattle on the Thirteenth Amendment and Labor. His article for this conference was “The Thirteenth Amendment and Slavery Overseas.” He also has related articles coming out on “Private Rights and Private Actions: The Legacy of Civil Rights Enforcement in Title VII” and “The Origins of Arguments Against Reverse Discrimination.”

Rutherglen is also work-ing on a book, International Civil Litigation: Principles and Prospects. A couple of

doTAn oliAR’s recent co-authored paper on copyright registrations was selected as one of the best IP law review articles of the year by Thomson Reuters (West) for inclusion in their 2015 Intellectual Property Law Review, an anthology. The article, “Copyright Registrations: Who, What, When, Where, and Why,” by Oliar, eco-nomics Ph.D. student Nathanial Pattison, and third-year law student K. Ross Powell is the first to study the contents of individual copyright registration records, and is intended to help lay down an empirical basis for evidence-based copyright lawmaking. (See Law School News.)

in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

In January Mitchell and Hunter Hughes ’70, an accom-plished lawyer and mediator, taught a new class, Law & Psychology of Dispute Resolution.

In March Mitchell was a panel-ist in the Searle Center Roundtable on Women in the Workplace—Perspectives from the Academy and the Corporate World, which was held at the Northwestern University School of Law.

In March RobERT o’nEil pre-sented “Academic Freedom in the Age of Digital Media” to the Academic Freedom Forum of the Professional Staff Congress of the City University of New York, a union group.

gREg miTChEll and co-authors published the article “Predicting Ethnic and Racial Discrimination with the IAT: Small Effect Sizes of Unknown Societal Significance”



In December 2014, RiCh SChRAggER presented (with co-author Micah Schwartzman ’05) a paper entitled “Some Realism About Corporate Rights” at the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School, in a conference exploring the implications of the Supreme Court’s decision in the Hobby Lobby case.

In January he presented a draft chapter of his forthcoming book, City Power, at a faculty workshop at the George Washington University School of Law. Published by Oxford University Press, the book is expected to publish in 2016. Schragger gave a workshop on the same subject at Notre Dame Law School in April.

In February he gave a lecture entitled “On the Distinction between Speech and Action” at a conference on freedom of speech at the Emory University School of Law and at the Public Law Workshop at the University of California–Berkeley. He gave lectures on freedom of expression and on legal positivism to the Master Course in Legal Theory, University of Genoa, Italy.

Schauer also delivered the Nathaniel L. Nathanson Memorial Lecture at the University of San Diego, with the title “Is Law a Technical Language?”; and spoke on

“Plans, Instructions, Recipes, and the Freedom of Speech” at Dartmouth College in April.

barbara sPellMan will be publishing this summer (with Michael J. Saks), The Psychological Foundations of Evidence Law. The book is one of the first two in a series on psychology and law from New York University Press. The other is The Psychology of Tort Law.

Spellman also published two law-related papers with students: “Counterfactuals, Control, and Causation: Why Knowledgeable People Get Blamed More” in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin (with Elizabeth A. Gilbert, Elizabeth R. Tenney, Christopher Holland [in press]); and “Blame, Cause, and Counterfactuals: The Inextricable Link; Comment on ‘A Theory of Blame’” (with Gilbert [2014] in Psychological Inquiry).

In May she presented “Distributing Justice: What the Law Intends v. What the Law Delivers” at a symposium at the Association for Psychological Science in New York; and in March with Siny Tsang and Megan Clemency, “Shouldn’t the quality of expert testimony matter?” at the 2015 American Psychology-Law Society Conference in San Diego.

Spellman continues as editor-in-chief of the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science until the end of 2015.

Paul stePhan ’77 published a paper in the Capital Markets Law Journal, a British publication, on the relationship between the international law of investment protection and the domestic law of a host state. He also edited and contributed to the publica-tion, this past fall, of the papers presented at the 2013 Sokol Colloquium.

In March he spoke at a round-table hosted by Duke Law School on international corruption, and at a conference organized by the Federalist Society on U.S. treaty law.

In April he spoke at a confer-ence organized by Georgetown Law Center on current issues in foreign affairs law. In July he will speak at an international conference in Geneva, Switzerland, on foreign affairs law, organized by Duke Law School to include the International Law Commission. In August he will teach at Melbourne University and Sydney University in Australia, and in September at the Peking University School of Transnational Law in Shenzhen, China.

Stephan will spend the remainder of the fall at Paris I (Panthéon-Sorbonne, in France) teaching a course and conduct-ing research. He continues to work as coordinating reporter for the Restatement (Fourth) of the Foreign Relations Law of

In February FREd SChAuER’s book The Force of Law was published by the Harvard University Press. For more on the book, including a video interview, visit www.bit.ly/forceoflaw.

Schauer also published “Free Speech on Tuesdays” in Law and Philosophy and “Do People Obey the Law?” in a symposium issue of the San Diego Law Review. A 19-page interview with Schauer, done in English and translated into Spanish, was published in Doxa, the Spanish (Alicante, Spain) journal of legal philosophy.

He has had 26 of his articles on freedom of speech translated into Hungarian and published in Hungary as a book edited and translated by Koltay Andras, with the title A Demokracia es a Szolasszabadsag Hatarai.

Schauer has also given lectures on legal theory, with a particular focus on law and coercion, at the National University of Singapore in January, and again at the European University Institute, Florence, Italy, and Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey, in May.

related articles are “Reconceiving Personal Jurisdiction: Sovereignty, Authority, and Individual Rights” and “Rule 1 and the Conflicting Ambitions of Procedural Reform.”



Pierre-hugues verdier is working with Mila Versteeg on a large-scale empirical project on the reception of international law in national legal systems around the world. He presented a first paper based on this data at the University of Chicago Law School, where he visited last fall, and will present it this summer at a conference at Northwestern University. The paper investigates whether countries whose constitutional law imposes constraints on treaty-making by the executive and makes treaties directly applicable by courts are able to enhance the credibility of their promises, making them more desirable partners for bilateral investment treaties.

Verdier is also organiz-ing the 2015 edition of the Sokol Colloquium on Private International Law, which will continue to explore the theme of Comparative International Law—or how and why the interpretation, application, and understanding of seemingly uniform international law rules differ across legal systems. The contributions to the 2014 and

In the fall ethan Yale organized the 2014 UVA Invitational Tax Conference. The two-day conference included academics specializing in tax law and policy from leading law schools across the United States.

In May Yale made a presentation to the Tax Court Judicial Conference on statutory construction in cases before the Tax Court. Yale also wrote a forthcoming article entitled, “Anti-basis” in the North Carolina Law Review.

riP verkerke participated as a speaker on a showcase panel at the 2014 Federalist Society National Lawyers Convention. His remarks will be published in the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy this summer.

Last October he also participated as a panelist in a discussion at the Law School titled “The War on Women: What Are the Real Issues?” co-sponsored by the Federalist Society and Virginia Law Women. He was a commentator at the Disclosure Conference organized by Jason Johnston at the Law School. Verkerke also commented on Christopher Drahozal’s paper “Displacing Disclosure: Mandated Disclosure, Unconscionability, and Arbitration Clauses.” His article, “Legal Ignorance and Information-Forcing Rules,” appeared in the William & Mary Law Review in the March issue.

ted White’s article “The Origins of Civil Rights in America” was published early this year in Case Western Law Review. White also published this year, with Ken Abraham, “Prosser and His Influence” in the Journal of Tort Law.

In June he will present at a con-ference at Harvard Law School, “Contemporary Legal Thought: Origins and Consequences,” which will appear in the Cambridge Companion to Contemporary Legal Thought in 2016.

White has also published “The Lost Episode of Gong Lum v. Rice,” in volume 18 of the Green Bag 2d; “Intellectual History and Constitutional Decision Making,” in volume 101 of the Virginia Law Review; and “The Origins and Emergence of Tort Law,” in volume 11 of the St. Thomas Law Journal.

Volume 2 of White’s Law in American History book series, From Reconstruction Through the 1920s, is in production and expected to be published by Oxford University Press in the spring of 2016.

the United States. A meeting to discuss the preliminary draft with foreign advisers took place in April, and one with U.S. advisers is set for October.

2015 colloquia will be published in a collective volume by Oxford University Press, co-edited with Paul Stephan, Mila Versteeg, and Anthea Roberts of Columbia Law School. Verdier is also beginning work on a book-length project on international financial regulation after the financial crisis.


“I love LinkedIn because I love to see the success of the students I’ve taught. You can see—down here where it says their degree, that’s when we knew each other, and then the jobs get progressively more interesting. The longer they’ve been out of school, the more interesting their work gets. I’ve had several students become tax professors, which is great.”

“Everyone talks about UVA having such a collegial and friendly community, but this past semester, a tough semester, showed me that we genuinely treat each other like family.”

“I’m from Los Angeles, but I grew up spending my summers in the countryside in Lebanon. Charlottesville reminds me of that—a small city, everyone’s friendly, especially at the Law School. So even though it’s thousands of miles from L.A., I’m very comfortable here.”

based on the PoPular Humans of New York series on Facebook and Tumblr, the Law School’s Humans of UVA Law site showcases what makes the school special through personal portraits of people in the community, including students, faculty, staff, visitors, and alumni. See more at humansofuvalaw.tumblr.com.

When were you happiest in law school? “I enjoyed my time at UVA Law so much, but my happiest moment at the Law School took place on my graduation day—it was sharing a special moment with my grandfather, who was crying tears of joy because I had officially received not only one but two degrees from the University of Virginia, and that was a palpable reminder to him that everything he had fought for in the past had made a difference and the world was moving in a positive direction.”

How did you all become friends?“It’s a really funny story actually—”“Are we telling that story?”“Which story? About how we plotted to be your friends?”


“‘Don’t look back. Something might be gaining on you.’ That’s from Satchel Paige.”

“I was thinking about going into medicine and I wasn’t too sure about it. I spent two summers at Cornell Med in their stem cell lab and it actually confirmed that I didn’t want to be a doctor. So, instead of assuming you know what you want to do, get out there and try it before you commit to something. It would be pretty terrible to look back on your life and think, ‘I really just didn’t enjoy doing what I did.’”

“When I was young, people told me that I was ‘bossy.’ And what is bossy? We don’t call boys bossy. Bossy is a word we only use for girls and women who say what they want. Like, ‘Oh, you’re trying to act like a boss …’ Yeah! And that’s not a bad thing!”

“I’m painting all the light poles here. I painted 212 light poles over at John Paul Jones Arena. It takes a million people to keep things going here.”

Where are you from?“Australia.”What’s the hardest part of the Jean-Pictet Competition in International Humanitarian Law?“Probably facing your own weaknesses. The simulations are set up in a way that get you to explore your strengths and weaknesses. It’s a lot of stuff you don’t expect, and you can’t prepare for them, so when you confront them, that’s probably the hardest part—and it’s also the best part because it helps you learn a lot.”

Dad: “He might not remember his experiences here, but the people he has met will remember him. He’s already ahead of the game. People will remember him before they remember me.”

cLaSS NoteS

uVa laWyer / SPriNG 2015 59

1948

keMPer goffigon iii sends his greetings. He is now 95 years old. In between earning a B.A. from UVA in 1941 and returning for law school, he commanded three U.S. Navy ships dur-ing World War II. He was awarded the Navy Cross and Purple Heart for his service. Goffigon retired in 1986 as owner and CEO of the Goffigon Equipment Company, a farm equip-ment dealership near Cape Charles, VA.

bob nusbauM wrote to let us know of his upcoming plans. Instead of attend-ing his 70th reunion at Harvard, he’s headed to St. Barts. “Linda and I enjoy the French cuisine and the opportunity to refresh our conversational French language skills.”

frank Warren sWaCker’s e-book, Murder Trilogy:

Three Two-Act Plays, recently became available online from amazon and Barnes & Noble. The collec-tion includes plays based on his courtroom dramas: “Boardroom Conspiracy,”

We welcome submissions for inclusion in Class Notes. Online, submit them at www.law.virginia.edu/alumni; e-mail them to [email protected];

mail them to UVA Lawyer, University of Virginia School of Law, 580 Massie Road, Charlottesville, VA 22903; or fax them to 434/296-4838. Please send your submissions by September 15 for inclusion in the next issue.

“Who Murdered Mom,” and “Spreading Murder and Happiness.” (See In Print.)

1951

Charles b. reeves Jr. writes: “I continue to enjoy ‘riotous living,’ thanks to my ‘training’ at UVA Law School. And thanks always to God! Hoo-rah-ray! U-V-A!”

Former University of Virginia Board of Visitors member JaMes s. CreMins ’49 died on March 10 at the age of 93. He retired in 1986 as assistant general counsel with CSX, a 38-year career that combined his love of trains and the law. He served on the board of the American Judicature Society, was a life fellow of the American Bar Foundation, and chaired committees of the Norfolk, Richmond, and American Bar Associations.

Cremins served as a communications officer in the U.S. Navy in World War II. He was active in the Richmond Council of the Navy League and was a judge advocate. A descendant of an officer in the Revolutionary War, he joined the Sons of the American Revolution and was president of the Richmond and Virginia chapters and a trustee of the National Society.

In 1985 he received the Humanitarian Award from the Virginia Center for Inclusive Communities for decades of volunteer service. He was a trustee of Commonwealth

Catholic Charities and was deeply involved in volunteer work within the Catholic Diocese of Richmond and the Knights of Columbus. He served on the boards of the Maymont Foundation and the Boy Scouts of America’s Heart of Virginia Council.

Of Irish ancestry, Cremins was a charter member and president of the Ancient Order of Hibernians Major James Dooley Division and served on the Greater Richmond St. Patrick’s Day Parade Committee. He was the parade’s grand marshall in 2000.

edWard t. Caton ’56 died on November 18 at 86 years old. As an undergraduate at the School of Commerce ’51, he lived on the Lawn and was a member of Phi Kappa Sigma. He enrolled in the Law School and joined the International Legal Honor Society, Phi Delta Phi. Following graduation, he set up his practice in Virginia Beach. He renovated a beach cottage on Pacific Avenue in which he practiced law for more than 50 years.

Caton served in the U.S. Coast Guard and was active in the reserve for many years. As a member of the local city council he was involved in the merger of the City of Virginia Beach and Princess Anne County, which became the City of Virginia Beach as it is known today. He served in the Virginia House of Delegates from 1966 to 1968, in the Virginia Senate from 1968 to 1972, and on the local school board until the early 1980s. He was also a commissioner in the chancery for the Virginia Beach court system.

Class notes …


1957

John Corse and three friends are known as the “Fab Four” in the U.S. Masters swimming circuit. Last October they captured a lot of attention when they set world and USMS records in the 200-, 400-, and 800-meter

freestyle relays and the 200-meter medley relay at the Annual Rowdy Gaines Masters Classic, in Orlando, Fla. Corse broke the U.S. Masters swimming record in his age group in the 50-meter breaststroke.

Corse and his friends, whose average age is over 90 years, meet three times

a week to swim together. Their hard work, endur-ance, and good cheer earned them the Growing Bolder Inspiration Award at the Masters Classic. They were featured in an article in the January/February is-sue of Swimmer magazine entitled, “The Men Behind the Records.”

1958

george M. “ted” rogers passed away on March 31, and is survived by his wife, Patricia. Rogers was a resi-dent of Gulf Stream, Fla., at the time of his passing.

1959

In October robert g. sullivan was honored, along with three of his contemporaries, as a recipient of the inaugural Ross M. Pyle Career Achievement Award in recognition of his expertise, integrity, and

1958

By ted torranCe, Corresponding Secretary 1955 Windward Way, Vero Beach, FL 32963

Email: [email protected]

With presumably all of our surviving Class of

1958 members (currently totaling 70) now

well into their ninth decades, your scribe asked

them to share their thoughts on what has kept

them ticking for such an impressively long time.

No information as to professional honors or

accomplishments was solicited, although the

Class enjoys an abundance of both. What follows

is a distillation of a wide variety of responses to

my request.

A newsy, handwritten note from barbara CoPPeto, in Sarasota, Fla. (she still eschews a computer): extensive traveling in her earlier years, and researching and planning her trips, largely consumed her non-professional time, but that has now for the most part morphed into vicarious enjoyment of the New York Times travel section. But she continues to exercise her mind by doing pre-trial work on a weekly basis when she is in Connecticut over the summer months, having served for many years on the Connecticut Superior Court.

I caught up with george harris in his car as he was driving through Arizona on the way to a meeting at Arizona State University. George is heavily involved with a foundation whose ambitious goal is to ensure the education, largely, as I understand it, by charter schools, of every Arizona Latino child from kindergarten through twelfth grade. That project, along with the obvious attraction of dividing his life

between Palo Alto, Calif., and Wilson, Wyo. (near Jackson Hole), has kept his interests vitally alive over the years.

Jesse vogtle writes from Mountain Brook, Ala., that it is his wife who keeps him “hopping” with daily walks, but he also mentions in passing having eight grandchildren, who undoubtedly have had a salutary effect on his longevity. Readers may recall that Jesse was, and indeed may still be, in the running for being named the youngest member of our class, so “longevity” is a relative term.

From Boston’s North Shore (Manchester-by-the-Sea) comes word from fred goldstein; a fair conclusion is that it is Fred’s perpetually busy schedule that has kept him thriving over the years. For instance, his February response recited a calendar of “a few duty days in New Haven, two days in Charlottesville for the Tax Study Group, a few weeks in London, and a visit to New Orleans,” which he hoped would keep him out of trouble—and his mind functioning—for the next six months.

bill edWards’ e-mail to me from Corpus Christi, Texas, was straightforward: his secret to a long and happy life is, simply, continuing to work, and work hard, around 40 to 50 hours a week in his case, and to lecture occasionally. Much of his work centers on barratry and deceptive advertising, and even a cursory reading of his note demands the conclusion that his continuing professional activity works admirably for him.

At perhaps the other end of the occupational field is bruCe WilliaMs, who reported on the

extensive travels he has undertaken with his wife on his Grand Banks 36 (for landlubbers: a magnificent 36-foot recreational trawler), which he acquired in 1998. They have cruised from Maine to the Florida Keys, to the Bahamas and points in between, but Bruce says that from now on he expects to be cruising locally, on the Chesapeake Bay, “since I find it harder to climb in and out of the bilge.”

Also to the point was MiChael kaPlan, in New York City: “I’ve done two things to keep me “young.” I decided years ago that exercise shortens your life, so I’ve basically done none.” But what he did do was marry Harriet, a prominent dental practitioner and administrator, who “puts on my flea collar and drags me all over the western world.”

A possible convert to Michael Kaplan’s approach to exercise is hobart MCWhorter, who wrote that at the end of December, while working out on a treadmill, he suffered a coronary arrest and woke up a week later in a strange hospital. He is currently going through cardiac rehabilitation, and, in light of his experience, he says he is not inclined to boast about longevity. To the contrary, he notes that, for him, “every day is a lagniappe,” and cautions that we should not make the mistake of postponing our fishing trips. Well said.

bill griesar writes from Dobbs Ferry, N.Y. that he has always been a bit of a hobbyist and do-it-yourselfer, with woodworking, woodcarving, and clay sculpting filling his non-legal time, along with horology and the collection and repair of old clocks. Add a Maine waterfront cottage and fishing and boating to the picture

Class notes …


outstanding contributions to bankruptcy issues in the San Diego, Calif., area. He was unable to attend the event, and his three children accepted the award on his behalf.

1960

PhiliP v. MoYles was inducted into the alumni hall of fame at Mount St. Mary’s University in Emmitsburg, Md. The honor was bestowed for his loyalty and contributions to “The Mount,” his profes-sional achievements, and

his charitable work. Moyles practiced law

in New York, with a focus on maritime law, and participated as a delegate of the Commité Maritime Internationale in Montreal and Venice. He established the Margaret E. and William P. Moyles Award for Excellence in Pre-Law

Studies, given each year to a rising senior who ex-hibits academic excellence in the pre-law program at Mount St. Mary’s.

1961

robert l. Montague iii and his son, R. Latane

Montague IV ’97, teamed up on the weekend of October 3–5 to win first place in their class in the Turkey Shoot Sailing Regatta on the Rappahannock River. “I’m enjoying old boats, old cars, and old houses!”

and you can understand he has not been idle these many years. But in Bill’s words: “Best of all, a wife and four children to keep track of” are critical to his enjoyment of life.

With a creaky back sidelining his beloved golf game, John oraM has been studying the masters of English literature, taking courses at the Savannah (Ga.) Senior Center and, over five summers, in England at Cambridge University. “To see if I have learned anything from all this, I am also trying my hand as a writer of short stories. The Pulitzer Prize Committee has so far ignored these efforts, but if nothing else, I now have an even greater appreciation for the genius, both ancient and modern, that can be found on our library shelves.”

From Louisville, stuart “blue” JaY writes that he takes a little different approach to dealing with longevity, “by playing bridge about daily,” wagering on horses, and attending all University of Louisville basketball games.

From the Far West, bill o’Connor, now of Eugene, Ore., sent along a good and extensive summary of what keeps him alert and interested in the world: primarily a keen interest in work and study, for the pure enjoyment of both. Bill didn’t retire until 2011, when he converted four state bar memberships to inactive status, retaining, for nostalgic purposes, only his license in American Samoa, where he was chief justice in the late 1970’s. Since retiring he has finished writing a two-volume historical novel about the American Revolution, but from a British point of view. It is titled At War in America and is available on Kindle and the Web. Rounding out all this is

his continuing study of world mythology and generally keeping abreast of current events.

I suggest that Bill is representative of many of us who have found that keeping life meaningful and enjoyable at our ages calls for a real effort to keep engaged with the world at large and to pursue vigorously whatever interests happen to turn us on.

By the way, if you should meet up with Bill while out walking some evening, I suggest you give him a wide berth: he is often accompanied by his 185-pound Rottweiler, Thunder.

I was delighted to hear from MurraY falk after all these years. Murray immediately attributed his longevity to “lots of luck,” including meeting and marrying “Margie, my wonderful wife of 35 years and still going, and finding and acquir-ing Frosty, our Bichon Frise joy of 13 years and still going.”

A verbatim reply from henrY WilliaMs: “Some of my missing the reaper has been luck: a near miss in the Navy; another, 35 years ago on Main Street when a concrete cornice on a nearby building landed next to me; a close call with a bus; and the luck of having a very capable sailor with me in Newfoundland when I had a heart attack. He took the boat into an impossibly shallow fishing port. From there I was driven by truck to Gander and plane to St. John’s. Tennis since high school has helped. Skiing, hiking and exercise, too. Vitamins and supplements have been good.”

I need a little assistance with bob sMith’s response. His “keep on ticking” hobbies include cosmology and astronomy, and he is working on a cosmic calendar to supplement our

present Gregorian calendar. The Gregorian is, he notes, limited for recording and projecting past and future cosmic and evolutionary events and does not include spacetime, whereas Bob’s does. With a cosmic year equaling 250 million Earth years, we are now in Cosmic Year 56, dating from the Big Bang. “I am now about 10½ cosmic seconds old. I hope to reach 12½ cosmic seconds of age. I will let you know if I make it.” Help! I am out of my depths; even Hardy Dillard never prepared me for this.

Lastly, I know that karl velde is alive and well, for he recently took me on a tour of the lovely home he is refurbishing, not far from mine here in Vero Beach, Fla. And I have seen his name in the winners’ circle at our local golf club, so keeping athletic and domestic must be in large part his key to extending his later years.

What is a fair conclusion to be drawn from the

foregoing? I submit that it demonstrates that it

is not the particularity of the varying interests

captivating us that is critical in extending our

enjoyable years, but rather the intensity and

enthusiasm with which we pursue them—thereby

crowding out Old Man Time as a factor in our

lives. So, whatever your interests may be, keep

after them!

Many thanks to all those who contributed to

this column.

Class notes …


1962

g. Marshall MundY received the Roanoke Bar Association’s highest honor, the Frank W. “Bo” Rogers Jr. Lifetime Achievement Award. The award is given to an outstanding lawyer in southwest Virginia with the highest standards of personal and professional excellence. Mundy has served on the board of the Roanoke Bar Association and as its president, as well as on the board of governors of the Virginia State Bar senior law section, the Virginia State Bar criminal law section, and the Virginia State Bar litigation section.

He has taken on numerous roles over the years in support of his alma mater, Virginia Military Institute, and has established a scholarship for a worthy cadet in memory of his father and brother, who were also graduates. He and his wife, Monika, have also established a fund with the Foundation for Roanoke Valley to provide grants to worthy organizations.

Mundy is a founding partner of Mundy Rogers in Roanoke, where he focuses his practice on personal injury law.

WilliaM a. PuseY died on March 6. Pusey began his law career with McCutchen Doyle Brown & Enerson in San Francisco, Calif., and later served as a prosecutor in Alameda County. He moved east to join Hunton

& Williams in Richmond, Va., and later led business development for the firm in Fairfax, Va. and Washington, D.C. His prac-tice focused on acquisitions and mergers, securities law, natural resources, and international transactions. He was general counsel for the Wolf Trap Foundation and the American Horticultural Society and served on the boards of the Community Idea Stations, Richmond CenterStage, and family entities Velpar Investments, Inc., James River Investment Corporation, and the Paul H. Pusey Foundation.

1964

david bottoMs is executive managing director of Banyan Partners in Boston, where he manages a port-folio of over $100 million in assets.

david WhitteMore writes “since our fabulous 50th reunion we traveled to Normandy, where the people were wonderful, the museums were first class, and we even visited with a 92-year old veteran on Utah Beach where he had landed the day after D-Day.”

1965

Mike slive was named the Alabama Sports Hall of Fame Distinguished American Sportsman for 2015. Slive has helped shape college sports throughout his career. He has served

as commissioner of the Southeastern Conference since 2002, during which time the SEC won 75 national championships in 17 of its 21 sports. He presided over the addition of two institutions to the conference, led the adoption of a league-wide NCAA compliance initiative, and oversaw the launch of the highly successful SEC Network on cable last August. Slive will retire from his position in July and will serve as a consultant to the SEC for four years.

1967

gene dahMen was included in New England Super

Lawyers 2014 in family law. She is senior counsel with Verrill Dana in Boston, Mass.

1968

WilliaM norMan is a partner with Cooper, White & Cooper in San Francisco, Calif. He chairs the real estate solutions group and handles a full schedule of jury trials, primarily in partnership, real estate, and probate litigation.

robert d. Pannell published an article, “Legal Opinions in Business Transactions: The Modern Roots of a Professional Discipline” in the journal of the business law section of the American Bar Association (69 Bus. Law. 923, May 2014). He has been a member of the Working Group on Legal Opinions in New York, a forum on legal opinions to third parties in business transactions, since 2008. An adjunct professor of

law at Emory University Law School since 2009, Pannell teaches venture capital in the school’s “Doing Deals” business law clinical program.

1969

thoMas g. slater Jr. received the Richmond Bar Association’s Hunter W. Martin Professionalism Award in October. The award recognizes those who exemplify the highest standards of professional conduct. Slater is a partner with Hunton & Williams, where he focuses his practice on complex litigation matters with emphasis on antitrust, intellectual property, and unfair trade practices.

W. sCott street iii ’68 passed away on February 1, from a rare form of cancer. After graduating from the Law School, he practiced with several law firms in the Richmond area; for the last 34 years he was at Williams Mullen. His legal work focused on trial and appellate practice in civil and criminal matters, commercial real estate development, and the resolution of business disputes. He helped rebuild the financial structure of Liberty University, which has grown into the largest private university in Virginia. He chaired the Virginia State Bar section on education of lawyers, represented Virginia in the House of Delegates of the ABA, and was president of the Virginia State Bar for the 1999 to 2000 term. He was secretary-treasurer of the Virginia Board of Bar Examiners from 1972 until January 1 of this year.

An avid golfer, Street visited Scotland every summer from 1988 on and was a member of golf clubs in Scotland and Virginia. He was also a bluegrass musician and played the five-string banjo with different groups over the years. With JAMinc.org, a nonprofit organization, he played music that reached thousands of students and other music devotees in the Richmond area.

Since stepping down in 2000, Judge roland vaughan continues to enjoy retirement. Travel has been a priority, but he is also busy with volunteer work at St. Stephen’s United Methodist Church in Burke, Va., and at the Jewish Community Center of Northern Virginia, where he was recognized at a gala in December as a five-year trustee.

1971

ronald d. Castille, at far right, received the Bar Medal, the highest honor given by the Pennsylvania Bar Association. The medal is awarded to the PBA member whose work has made a significant improvement to the administration of justice or the legal profession or who has given outstanding service to the association, the legal profession, or the community.

Castille served as Philadelphia’s Assistant and Deputy District Attorney, and was twice elected District Attorney. He was elected to the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania in 1993 and became chief justice in 2008. He stepped down from the bench in December after turning 70, the mandatory retirement age for Pennsylvania judges.

At the awards ceremony in Harrisburg in November, Castille was honored for his leadership in better funding for legal aid and his work to increase pro bono service for low-income Pennsylvanians. He led in the creation of a loan repayment system that helps lawyers in public service manage their education debt so they can afford to stay in their chosen career. He has been a leader in improved legal services for juvenile offenders and started one of the state’s first diversionary programs for juvenile offenders. Castille is honorary chair of the Pennsylvania Civil Legal Justice Coalition, which addresses the need for civil legal services in the state.

The Pennsylvania Bar Foundation has created the Chief Justice Ronald D. Castille Judicial Pro Bono Service Award to recognize judicial officials who have made significant contributions in providing legal services to indigent citizens.

1973

benson everett legg retired in 2013 after spending 22 happy years on the federal bench with the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland. He is a mediator and arbitrator with Judicial Arbitration and Mediation Services, and writes that he enjoys his new career.

george Yates has established his firm, Yates Avocat, in Paris, where he specializes in mergers & acquisitions and dispute resolution, including sports arbitration.

Class notes …


kirk C. shaW has been rec-ognized as Lawyer of the Year in Best Lawyers 2015 for litigation-labor and em-ployment in Mobile, Ala. He is also listed in employ-ment law-management; labor law-management; and litigation-labor and employment.

Shaw is a partner with Armbrecht Jackson.

The Hon. louis a. sherMan has retired from the circuit court of the City of Norfolk and continues to serve as a retired/recalled judge. He is married to Carol Sherman and they have

two sons, Eric and Scott, and three granddaughters: Elizabeth, Lily, and Ashley.

1972

george W. house was recognized as a member of the legal elite hall of fame in environmental law in Business North Carolina and is listed in North Carolina

Super Lawyers 2015 in envi-ronmental litigation. He is a partner with Brooks, Pierce, McLendon, Humphrey & Leonard in Greensboro.

J. MiChel MarCoux retired from law practice at the end of 2014. He was a partner with Bruder, Gentile & Marcoux in Washington, D.C., which became Schiff Hardin in 2013.

WilliaM g. ross Jr. has been named among the legal elite in environmen-tal law in Business North

Carolina. He is of counsel with Brooks, Pierce, McLendon, Humphrey & Leonard in Raleigh.

In March J. rutledge Young Jr. ’68 (left) and gordon d. sChreCk ’69 attended the 225th an-niversary celebration of the first convening of the U.S. District Court for the District of South Carolina on December 14, 1789.

Young, who practices with Duffy & Young in Charleston, and Schreck, an admiralty lawyer in the Charleston office of Womble Carlyle Sandridge & Rice, were invited by U.S. District Judge Richard M. Gergel to serve on the court’s organizing committee for the celebration and to make presentations during the program. Young gave a talk on his ancestor, John Rutledge, a Charlestonian and the second chief justice of the United States, while Schreck spoke on admiralty practice in the district court, the primary source of the early court’s business. In addition to being fellow grads of UVA Law and long-time friends, both Young and Schreck are past presidents of the Charleston Lawyers Club.

Class notes …


1974

Professor JiM o’reillY of the University of Cincinnati College of Law has signed the contract for his 50th textbook, “When Products Kill,” for the American Bar Association Press. This text will evaluate regulatory and liability responses to fatal accidents. His prior work on regulatory and li-ability law has been widely cited by courts and quoted by the U.S. Supreme Court.

frank e. riggs Jr. has been named Atlanta Lawyer of the Year in litigation-con-struction in Best Lawyers

2015. He is a partner with Troutman Sanders and member of the construc-tion practice group.

bruCe M. stanleY sr. has maintained Florida Bar board certification in civil trial law for 30 years. He is a stockholder with Henderson, Franklin, Starnes & Holt in Fort Myers, where he handles appellate work and practices civil litigation of all kinds, with a focus on medical malpractice, aviation, products liability defense, and eminent domain. He is listed in Best Lawyers 2015 in personal injury defense litigation and in Florida

Super Lawyers 2015 in personal injury-medical malpractice: defense; personal injury-general: defense; and personal injury-products: defense.

ross e. Wales is listed in Best Lawyers 2015 in international trade and finance law. He has also been honored by the magazine as the Cincinnati Lawyer of the Year in international trade and finance law. He is a partner with Taft Stettinius & Hollister.

John f. WYMer iii left Paul Hastings in 2013 to open the Atlanta office of Sherman & Howard, which had been a regional firm in the Rocky Mountains. It’s now the only Denver-based law firm with an Atlanta, Ga., office. Wymer focuses his practice on la-bor and employment law.

1975

W. stuart dornette is listed in Best Lawyers 2015

in bet-the-company litigation, commercial litigation, litigation-mergers & acquisitions, litigation-municipal, and and litigation-securities. He is a partner with Taft Stettinius & Hollister in Cincinatti, Ohio.

John eCkstein was named one of the top five securi-ties lawyers in the Denver metropolitan area in 5280 magazine and is listed in Super Lawyers 2015 in corporate finance. He is a shareholder with Fairfield and Woods.

niCholas a. lotito was listed in Super Lawyers

2014 in white-collar criminal defense and as a legal elite in Georgia Trend magazine for 2014. He is a partner with Nick Lotito & Seth Kirschenbaum in Atlanta.

1976

WilliaM P.h. CarY was recognized in Super

Lawyers Business Edition

2014 in employment & labor and is listed in North

Carolina Super Lawyers

2015 in employment law. He is a partner with Brooks, Pierce, McLendon, Humphrey & Leonard in Greensboro.

daniel J. hoffheiMer has been elected to the board of directors of Linton Music, one of the nation’s premier chamber music organizations under the artistic leadership of internationally acclaimed musicians Jaime Laredo and Sharon Robinson.

Hoffheimer is a partner with Taft Stettinius & Hollister in Cincinnati.

He was selected for inclusion in Best Lawyers

2015 in trusts and estates and Ohio Super Lawyers

2015 in estate planning and probate.

PeggY o’neal has been named among Australia’s top 100 Women of Influence by The Australian

Financial Review. She was also named in the Australian Women’s Weekly power list, as one of 50 women who are making an impact in Australia—in the workplace, in boardrooms, and everyday lives. She is the first female president of the Richmond Football Club in Melbourne.

O’Neal has lived in Australia for 25 years. She has been recognized in the Australian Financial Review as one of the best lawyers in Australia from 2010–14 and in 2013 was named Best Superannuation Lawyer in Melbourne. She is currently a consultant with Lander & Rogers.

albert W. PatriCk iii has been reappointed by the Virginia General Assembly to the 8th Judicial District in Hampton.

f. bradford stillMan retired in 2012 from the bench of the Eastern District of Virginia, where he served for 12 years as a U.S. magistrate judge. He is a mediator certified by the Virginia Supreme Court and works with the McCammon Group in Richmond.

John a. vering iii was named as Best Lawyers

2015 Lawyer of the Year in labor and employment law for the Kansas City metropolitan area and was recognized as one of

the top 100 attorneys in Missouri and Kansas for 2014 by Super Lawyers. He is a partner with Armstrong Teasdale in Kansas City, where he leads the employment and labor law practice group.

1977

barrY r. kogut has been recognized in Chambers

USA 2015 and Best Lawyers

2015 in environmental law. He is a member with Bond, Schoeneck & King in Syracuse, N.Y., where his practice in environmental law includes federal and state regulatory compli-ance and enforcement matters.

MiChael g. kushner joined Blank Rome as of counsel in the corporate, mergers & acquisitions, and securi-ties group in New York City. He was previously with Locke Lord.

1978

ChristoPher sCott d’angelo was a featured speaker for the program “Ethical Challenges Facing In-House Counsel” at the annual meeting of the Product Liability Advisory Council in Chicago, Ill. He discussed conflicts of laws

roliff Purrington ’77 (back row, center, above) returned in April from a stint as a visiting professor at the University of Basrah in Basrah, Iraq. While in Iraq , he also visited Kut, Amara, and Qurna, Iraq, and then Dubai and Addis Ababa for a few days in transit to Houston where he resides. Roliff serves on the U.S. Secretary of Commerce’s U.S.–Iraq Business Dialogue and the mayor of Houston’s International Trade and Development Council for the Middle East and North Africa.

Class notes …


The former chief justice of the Supreme Court of Virginia, CYnthia d. kinser ’77, joined Gentry Locke in Roanoke as senior counsel in May. “I am excited about working on appellate, criminal, and government investigation matters and once again serving clients. With this new step in my professional career, I also hope to serve my community and the legal profession, and to provide pro bono legal services,” Kinser said.

As Virginia’s first woman chief justice, Kinser spent 17 years on the court, with more than three as chief justice. Previously she worked in private practice in southwest Virginia, served a term as the Commonwealth’s Attorney of Lee County, served as bankruptcy trustee, and was a magistrate judge for the

Western District of Virginia.Kinser is the recipient of several notable awards, among them

the Virginia Bar Association’s Gerald L. Baliles Distinguished Service Award in 2015, and the Thomas Jefferson Foundation

Medal in Law in 2011. The Baliles award is the Virginia Bar Association’s highest honor. It recognizes exceptional service and contributions to the bar and public at large. Thomas Jefferson Foundation Medals are the highest

external honors bestowed by the Thomas Jefferson Foundation at Monticello, along with the University of Virginia, which grants no honorary degrees. The award

recognizes the achievements of those who embrace endeavors in which Jefferson excelled and held in high

regard, namely, architecture, law, and citizen leadership.

laWrenCe foust ’78 ll.M. ’80 is the executive vice president and chief legal officer of the Children’s Health System of Texas, located in Dallas. He was formerly general counsel of Children’s Hospital Los Angeles.

Jon sallet is general counsel of the Federal Communications Commission. He has previously served as chief policy counsel for MCI Telecommunications (later MCI WorldCom), as director of the office of policy and strategic planning for the Department of Commerce, and a partner with O’Melveny & Myers.

Paul s. stevens was elected chairman of the International Investment Funds Association in October. IIFA is an association of organiza-tions representing funds and asset managers in 40 countries worldwide. In June of 2014 he marked his tenth anniversary as president and CEO of Investment Company Institute.

andY Wright launched Wright Strategies, a government relations firm based inside the capital beltway, in December (see

pertaining to attorney-client privilege and the issue of waiver of the attorney-client privilege in internal corporate investi-gations. Most recently he was invited to speak at the 2015 National Conference on Class Actions: Recent Developments in Quebec, in Canada, and the United States. His talk focused on what the EU is doing with collective redress or class actions.

D’Angelo is a partner and co-chair of the product liability, toxic torts & risk management practice and chair of the international practice with Montgomery McCracken Walker & Rhoads based in Philadelphia, Pa., and New York City.

Class notes …


http://wrightstrategies.

us). His focus is on energy, the environment, natural resources, chemicals, financial services, transportation, and tele-communications issues. He was most recently a shareholder with Polsinelli.

1979

John b. harris Jr. was appointed to the board of directors of the University of Virginia Investment Management Company by the rector and visitors of UVA. UVIMCO manages the University’s endow-ment fund, which ranks among the 20 largest of all colleges and universities in the U.S.

anne kleindienst is included in Best Lawyers

2015 in corporate and franchise law. She is a shareholder with Polsinelli in Phoenix, Ariz.

1980

John f. brenner was named vice president for litigation of C.R. Bard, Inc., a manufacturer of medical, surgical, diagnostic, and patient care devices headquartered in Murray Hill, N.J.

sPenCe Chubb has opened the Law Office of T. Spence Chubb in Washington, D.C., specializing in intellectual property litigation before the U.S. International Trade Commission and the federal courts.

riChard J. PoCker has been appointed to serve on Nevada Attorney General Adam Paul Laxalt’s advisory committee for the Office of Military Legal Assistance. He is the administrative partner for the Nevada

office of New York–based Boies, Schiller & Flexner.

1981

donald a. baer was appointed chair of the board of directors of PBS in October. He has been a member of the board since 2011. He has also been elected to the board of directors of the Meredith Corporation for a three-year term. Baer is worldwide chair and CEO of global public relations and communications for Burson-Marsteller, based in Washington, D.C.

lindsaY r. barnes Jr. is completing his seventh year as headmaster of Hawaii Preparatory Academy, following nine years as headmaster at the Miller School of Albemarle. He practiced law in Charlottesville from 1981–99 and served on the Charlottesville City Council.

JaMes e. dorseY received the American Civil Liberties Union of Minnesota Earl Larson Award in November for his commitment to preserving civil liberties. Throughout his career he has represented indigent clients in a wide range of matters including landlord/tenant disputes, juvenile protection, debtor/creditor issues, family law, and contract disputes. He has worked on cases for the ACLU, the ACLU-MN, and

Merriann Panarella serves as an independent arbitrator, mediator, and consultant in Boston and New York City, focusing on complex commercial and intellectual property disputes. Formerly a partner at Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr, for over 27 years she served as trial counsel and advised clients on all aspects of the litigation process.

ronald l. saxton joined Schwabe, Williamson & Wyatt as a shareholder in Portland, Ore. He was previously executive vice president and global chief administration officer at JELD-WEN, a global door and window manufacturer.

lYdia C. stefanoWiCz joined Greenbaum, Rowe, Smith & Davis in Woodbridge, N.J., as a partner in the real estate department and member of the interdisci-plinary banking, business financing, and creditors’ rights practice group. She was previously a partner with Edwards Wildman.

PatriCia hatler ’80, at far right, executive vice president and chief legal and governance officer at Nationwide, was honored with the Anastasia D. Kelly Award. The honor is one of the 2014 Transformative Leadership Awards from InsideCounsel magazine and reflects Hatler’s steadfast commitment to positively impacting the careers of women in the legal profession. The awards program honors general counsel and law firm partners who have demonstrated a commitment to advancing the economic empowerment of women in law departments and firms.

Hatler “help[s] the women who work with her [and] strives to create a work culture that empowers women to construct the lives they really want. Lives that are personally fulfilling, which contribute to society, that touch others, and have professional accomplishment as defined by each individual,” say her colleagues. In her role at Nationwide, Hatler oversees the legal, government relations, ethics, compliance and corporate citizenship functions for the corporation.

Class notes …


1983

Mark a. bradleY was awarded the 2015 George Pendleton Prize by the Society for History in the Federal Government for his book, A Very Principled

Boy: The Life of Duncan Lee,

Red Spy and Cold Warrior. The award is given for an outstanding major publication on the federal government’s history, produced by or for a federal history program. Bradley, a former CIA intelligence officer, is an attorney with the U.S. Department of Justice.

JaMes M. CaMPbell was elected as a fellow of the International Society of Barristers. He is a share-holder and president of Campbell Campbell Edwards & Conroy in Boston, Mass., where he focuses his practice on civil litigation and the defense of catastrophic product liability, toxic tort, medical device, pharmaceutical, professional liability, and negligence matters.

Mark davidson was rec-ognized in the 2014 Super

Lawyers (business edition) for business and corporate law. He is a partner with Brooks, Pierce, McLendon, Humphrey & Leonard in Greensboro, N.C., and focuses his practice on corporate, tax, and trusts and estates.

Janet a. naPolitano currently serves as the 20th (and first female) president of the University of California, the nation’s largest public research university. “It’s a privilege to lead it,” she writes. She was previously Secretary of Homeland Security.

JeffreY e. oleYnik was recognized in the 2014

Super Lawyers (business edition) for bankruptcy and business law, in North

Carolina Super Lawyers

2015 in bankruptcy law, and listed as one of the legal elite in bankruptcy law and antitrust law in 2015 by Business North

Carolina magazine. Oleynik is a partner with Brooks, Pierce, McLendon, Humphrey & Leonard in Greensboro.

irWin M. shur was appointed by U.S. Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker to a two-year term on the U.S. Manufacturing Council. The council serves as the principal private sector advisory body to the Secretary of Commerce on matters relating to the U.S. manufacturing industry. Shur is vice president, general counsel and secretary for Snap-on Incorporated, an S&P 500 company.

robert siMMons was appointed executive director of the Council for Children’s Rights, one of the largest and most comprehensive advocacy and legal service programs for children

in the Southeast. The organization, located in Charlotte, N.C., serves approximately 2,500 at-risk children each year.

Simmons began his pro bono work in Charlotte as a volunteer with the Children’s Law Center in 1987, working mainly on cases involving school discipline and special education. He joined the board in 1994 and later served as president. In 2002 he moved to the board of the Council for Children and was president of that organization when it merged with the Children’s Law Center to form the Council for Children’s Rights. During this time he was also a co-founder, president, and general counsel of the Children and Family Services Center, served as a member of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg County Board of Education, and volunteered in education-related work with the Mecklenburg County Bar.

Simmons is leaving McGuireWoods, where he has been a partner. In taking on his new position he sets aside a 32-year career in commercial real estate. “I am dedicated to improving the lives of children in our community, and the council plays a key role in standing up to protect our most vulnerable children and in speaking up to improve the systems that serve all children,” Simmons said.

the NAACP, and death penalty cases, voting rights cases, and a Guantanamo Bay detainee case.

He is a founding member of Advocates for Human Rights (originally called the International Human Rights Committee) and has worked on human rights issues in China, Uganda, El Salvador, South Africa, Liberia, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Guatemala. He currently serves as conference director for Minnesota 2015: De-mocracy in a Sustainable Future, which will host nearly 100 democratically elected former heads of state with the goal of working together to solve sustainability challenges.

Dorsey is a shareholder with Fredrikson & Byron in Minneapolis, where he handles a broad range of commercial litigation cases, particularly closely held business disputes.

JaMes P. rutherfurd has joined Pine Brook, an investment firm specializ-ing in energy and financial services with offices in Houston, Tex., and New York City. As a managing director, Rutherfurd will lead investor relations and communications efforts and will serve on the investment committee. He was previously a partner with 3i Group.

1982

WilliaM b. baker is a partner with the Potomac Law Group, a virtual law firm based in Washington, D.C., and will continue his practice in the areas of postal and privacy law. He was previously with Wiley Rein.

C. allen gibson Jr. was elected president of the American College of Construction Lawyers for a one-year term. He served as president-elect in 2014–15. He is construction practice group leader for Womble Carlyle Sandridge & Rice in Charleston, S.C., and represents owners, developers, design professionals, general contractors, subcontractors, suppliers, and sureties.

edMond M. ianni chaired and presented at the American Bar Association’s webinar on enterprise risk management and insurance last summer. He was joined on the panel by, among others, Dianne P. Salter, executive vice president, insurance for the Jefferson Health System.

Class notes …


McAdams is the Bernard D. Meltzer Professor of Law and Aaron Director Research Scholar at the University of Chicago Law School and teaches mainly in the areas of criminal law and procedure.

JiM MCderMott was elected chairman of Ball Janik, where he has been a partner for the past 20 years. He heads the litigation and insurance recovery practice groups in Portland, Ore.

1986

Judge Peter h. beer ll.M. is featured in the cover story, “Beer v. United States: The Case of Article III Judges and the Compensation Clause,” in the April/May issue of the Louisiana Bar Journal. In the case, Beer, who serves the Eastern District of Louisiana, and five other federal judges challenged Congress’s denial of cost-of-living adjustment raises to the judiciary. As a result, all Article III judges, bank-ruptcy judges, and U.S. magistrates will receive adjustments promised to them by Congress over 25 years ago.

WilliaM eigner was named to the San Diego Business

Journal Best of the Bar list for 2014. Chosen by his peers for this honor, he was referred to as the “go-to” guy for mergers & acquisitions and corporate business. He is a partner with Procopio.

JosePh M. leCCese was featured in The American

Lawyer cover story “Surge in Sports Megadeals a Boon to Proskauer, Others” in March. Leccese is chairman of Proskauer and co-head of its sports law group. In recent years, with multibillion-dollar deals for national and global media rights making sports law increasingly lucrative, competition for the opportunity to work on new deals has become more intense. “Of all the lawyers laying claim to a piece of the global sports universe,” notes the article, “Proskauer’s Leccese is the top dealmaker.”

riChard h. MCadaMs published his first book, The Expressive Powers of

Law, with Harvard University Press (see In

Print). His work explains how law creates compli-ance through its ability to affect our behavior and inform our beliefs.

1987

nanette beaird is a partner with Gardere in Austin, Tex. Beaird is a government affairs attorney representing national and international clients in all regulated industries before state agencies throughout Texas and beyond. She has extensive experience drafting legislation on behalf of clients.

david l. dallas Jr. and his wife, Susan, celebrated their 30th wedding anniversary last summer with a trip to Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, and the Gros Morne National Park in Newfoundland. “Cape Breton,” he writes, “is similar in beauty to northeastern Maine, while the west coast of Newfoundland reminded us of Alaska. Both are wonderful vacation destinations!”

Calvin W. “WoodY” foWler Jr. was elected president and CEO of Williams Mullen in Richmond, Va. He has served for two years as the practice group chair and 11 years as head of the litigation section, one of the firm’s two largest practice groups. Fowler will continue as a practicing litigator.

Jesse J. riChardson Jr. is an associate professor and the lead land use attorney for the Land Use and Sustainable Development Law Clinic at the West Virginia University College of Law in Morgantown. In addition to clinical teaching duties, he teaches doctrinal courses in land use and resilience law, and water law. He also conducts research on land use law, water law, and agricultural law. Richardson was previously an associate professor in the urban af-fairs and planning program at Virginia Tech.

robert W. saunders was named chair of the Chapel Hill-Carrboro Chamber of Commerce Board of Directors for 2015. Saunders is a partner with Brooks, Pierce, McLendon, Humphrey & Leonard in Greensboro and Raleigh, N.C., where he has a general corporate and tax practice with a particular focus on tax-exempt organizations, tax-exempt financing, and state and local tax planning.

riChard C. sullivan Jr. joined Bean, Kinney & Korman as a shareholder in Arlington, Va., where he focuses on commercial litigation. Sullivan was re-cently elected to represent Virginia’s 48th District in the House of Delegates. He was selected for inclusion in Virginia Super Lawyers

2015.

1984

Mark Wiggs was appointed liaison for religious liberty at the United Nations by the Baptist World Alliance. In that role he will be the primary Baptist presence at the UN. Wiggs is a noted advocate for religious freedom. He is an attorney in Jackson, Miss., and former chair of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty in Washington, D.C.

1985

J. keith ausbrook joined Guidepost Solutions, a leading security, investiga-tions, and compliance firm in Washington, D.C., as senior managing director. He focuses on the firm’s high-profile monitoring and compliance engage-ments and business development efforts. He was previously general counsel and senior vice president at Civil Defense Solutions.

laWrenCe J. braCken ii will receive the Southern Center for Human Rights’ 2015 Justice Ally of the Year award in recognition of his commitment to pro bono counsel. He is a partner with Hunton & Williams in Atlanta and New York City, where he focuses his practice on litigation and class action, technology, insurance, environmental, and com-mercial matters.

Class notes …


bart goossens ll.M. ’87 and Christel vergauWen ll.M. ’87 hosted 31 UVA Law alumni and guests who gathered in Ghent, Belgium, for the European alumni reunion last July. A day trip to Ieper enabled everyone to see the area of Flanders, which played a key role in World War I. The reunion also featured a walking tour of Ghent, a formal dinner, and a cruise around the city. The guest speaker for the academic session was Professor Dr. Koen Geens, the federal minister of finance and professor of company law at the KU Leuven.

The 2016 reunion is scheduled to take place in Poland. Email lawal-

[email protected] for more information.

ben Webster writes, “Twins finally made it to college.” Grant is a freshman at Chapman University in Orange and Ethan is a freshman at U.S.C. in Los Angeles, both in California. “Son number three, Keith, is a junior in high school.” Ben maintains his practice at Littler Mendelson in Sacramento.

1988

WilliaM berlin has joined Hall, Render, Killian, Heath & Lyman as a shareholder in Washington, D.C. He counsels and defends hospitals, health systems, physicians, and other health care providers in federal and state antitrust enforcement agency investigations and litigates in a range of health care matters. He was previously in private practice and

has also served as a senior trial attorney for the U.S. Department of Justice Antitrust Division.

John CooPer has been recognized on the Best Attorneys of America List, and is among only 100 Virginia attorneys to be so honored. Cooper has been re-elected as a district governor from the Virginia Beach/Norfolk area to the Virginia Trial Lawyers Association’s Board of Governors, a position he’s

held since 2012. At the VTLA’s recent convention, Cooper was also ap-pointed as co-chair of the fundraising committee. The Virginia Trial Lawyers Association is a trial bar group which boasts thousands of members from across the Commonwealth.

Cooper is a founding partner of Cooper Hurley Injury Lawyers based in Norfolk, Va. He and his wife, Monica, are proud parents of Matthew, a first-year at UVA. John writes that he enjoys his torts-only practice and has regular flashbacks to Professor Ken Abraham’s torts class.

harrY M. Johnson iii was installed as the 127th president of the Virginia Bar Association at the annual bar meeting in Williamsburg in January.

He is a partner with Hunton & Williams in Richmond, where he focuses his practice on environmental litigation and trial work. He has been recognized in Virginia Super Lawyers

2015 in environmental litigation and is listed in Chambers USA 2015 in environmental law.

Jonathan loWY is listed in Lawdragon magazine as one of its 500 Leading Lawyers in America for 2014-15. He is director of the Brady Center’s Legal Action Project, and for the past 17 years has been the main voice for the nation’s only law group fighting in the courts to prevent gun violence. Lowy leads a team that works to reform prac-tices in the gun industry, defend “common sense”

gun laws, and challenge laws backed by the gun lobby that are threats to citizen safety. He recently established Lawyers for a Safer America, a national team of lawyers and law firms dedicated to working toward a nation free from gun violence.

WesleY g. Marshall was inducted as a fellow of the College of Workers’ Compensation Lawyers in March in Naples, Fla., following the organization’s seminar and conference. He was also appointed to the Virginia Workers’ Compensation Commission by the Virginia General Assembly in 2012.

Jennifer MCCaMMon of Bean, Kinney & Korman in Arlington, Va., was named as a Virginia Rising Star in Super Lawyers, in the area of family law.

Class notes …


russell s. thoMas has joined the board of direc-tors of Connecture, Inc., a provider of Web-based information systems used to create health insurance marketplaces. He also serves on the board of the eHealth Initiative, a nonprofit based in Washington, D.C., that works to improve the qual-ity, safety, and efficiency of care through the use of information technology. Since 2012 Thomas has served as CEO of Availity, a health care informa-tion network based in Jacksonville, Fla.

JaMes WilliaMs received the American Civil Liberties Union’s Civil Libertarian Award in November for his trial team’s dedication, advocacy, and “superb pro bono work” as coop-erating counsel in the groundbreaking Wilbur

v. City of Mount Vernon. The suit challenged the public defense system in the cities of Burlington and Mount Vernon in Washington State, where attorneys were taking on 650–1,000 cases each year on a part-time basis.

In 2013 the U.S. District Court in Seattle found that public defense in the two cities was so inadequate it was a “meet and plead” system. The cities are now required to hire a supervisor to make sure that the public defense system meets constitutional standards. The U.S. Department of Justice filed a statement in the case that endorsed

workload limits for public defenders—the first time such a statement has ever been filed by the DOJ in a public defense case.

Williams’ work on Wilbur also earned him the 2013 Perkins Coie Annual Pro Bono Leadership Award; the 2014 President’s Award from the Washington Defender Association; the 2014 Champion for Justice Award by the Washington Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers; and the 2014 Loren Miller Bar Association Social Justice Award.

Williams is listed in Best

Lawyers 2015 in com-mercial litigation. He is a partner in the litigation practice with Perkins Coie in Seattle.

1989

deborah Platt MaJoras, chief legal officer and secretary of Procter & Gamble, was honored with the Mary Ann Hynes Pioneer Award in 2014. The honor is one of the Transformative Leadership Awards from InsideCounsel magazine and is presented to a woman general counsel who has transformed being the “first” into being a catalyst for change. She indelibly raises the bar for attorneys and corporations by consistently demonstrating her dynamic expertise, core values, and ideals that drive unprecedented collaboration, innovation, and achievement to deliver sustainable results.

stePhen h. PriCe joined Burr & Forman as a partner in Nashville, Tenn., where his practice focuses on complex and commercial litigation, employment law, and intellectual property litigation. He was listed in Best Lawyers 2015 in employment law-management, labor, and employment.

1990

JaMes h. barker iii prac-tices communications law and serves as the deputy office managing partner with Latham & Watkins in Washington, D.C. He and his wife live in Alexandria, Va., and have six children: Vivian (14), Eliza (12), James (10), Bridget (9), Sam (7), and Meredith (3).

theodore h. davis Jr. received the 2014 Volunteer Service Award for the advancement of trademark law at the International Trademark Association leadership meeting in November. Davis is a partner with Kilpatrick Townsend & Stockton in Atlanta, Ga., where he focuses his practice on trademark, copyright, false advertis-ing, and unfair competition law.

terri diaz ellenburg will celebrate 20 years with Sodexo in June. After serving as assistant general counsel, she created Sodexo’s office of employment rights, and is now vice president of employee relations. She lives in Bethesda, Md., with her husband, Matt, and their golden retriever, Lindy.

brett g. kaPPel joined Akerman in Washington, D.C., where he is a partner in the government affairs & public policy practice group. He focuses on political law, including federal, state, and local laws and regulations gov-erning campaign finance, lobbying, and government ethics. His clients include corporations, trade associations, members of Congress, political candi-dates, and political action committees. He is listed in Washington, D.C. Super

Lawyers 2015 for legislative and governmental affairs and administrative law.

russell s. saYre is listed in Best Lawyers 2015 in appellate practice, commercial litigation, and litigation-banking & finance. He has also been named as Cincinnati’s Best

Lawyers appellate practice Lawyer of the Year for

2015. He is a partner with Taft Stettinius & Hollister and co-chair of the litigation group.

Mark trank writes that after practicing law and working for local govern-ment and private law firms owned by others he has established his own law firm, the Law Office of Mark A. Trank, P.A., in Fort Myers, Fla. He practices labor and employment law, business/real estate law, education law, local government law, “and anything else that comes through the door that looks interesting!”

1991

Carl hahn was named vice president and chief compliance officer of Northrop Grumman Corporation in Falls Church, Va. Previously he was associate general counsel and trust and compliance officer with IBM.

tiMothY J. heaPhY joined Hunton & Williams as a partner and chair of the white-collar defense and internal investigations practice. He will split his time between Hunton’s Washington, D.C., and Richmond offices. He previously served as U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Virginia and during his tenure served on the U.S. Attorney General’s Advisory Committee,

Class notes …


founded. He has served as senior vice president and general counsel for Syracuse University and as senior legal counsel at Tufts University.

lisa reisMan published her memoir, 5 Months 10 Years

2 Hours, an account of her ordeal: after deciding to leave the practice of law, she didn’t expect to “wake up in a hospital room with a malignant brain tumor and a prognosis of one year to live. Or that ten years later, [she’d] be competing in a grueling triathlon as a cancer patient and survivor.” (See In Print.)

Reisman studied Ancient Greek and Latin at Oxford and Yale before getting her JD. She prac-ticed law in New York for four years. A dean’s fellow at Columbia University’s School of the Arts, she also has been supported by fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Ucross Foundation, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and Wesleyan University. Currently she is a freelance reporter and manages a local band.

1994

aMelia a. fogleMan was named Best Lawyers 2015 Lawyer of the Year in antitrust litigation in Tulsa, Okla. She is a shareholder with GableGotwals, where she focuses her practice on litigation in the areas of appellate law, complex commercial litigation, antitrust law, and oil & gas.

robert C. grohoWski has joined the Investment Advisor Association as general counsel in Washington, D.C. He was previously associate general counsel for the Investment Company Institute.

Craig M. kline is the managing partner for Troutman Sanders’ new office in San Francisco. The new office will serve as a gateway for cross-border transactions with China. Kline, who relocated from the firm’s New York office, serves on the firm’s executive committee and heads the renewable energy practice.

CarY d. Pugh was nominated by President Obama to a 15-year term on the U.S. Tax Court and was confirmed by the U.S. Senate in November. She took the oath of office on December 16. She was previously with Skadden.

alex e. sadler has written a new book, Legal Guide

to the Research Credit, that reviews the legal principles and authorities that govern the research and development tax credit provided by section 41 of the Internal Revenue code (see In

Print). He is a partner with Ivins, Phillips & Barker in Washington, D.C., where he focuses on representing taxpayers in litigation and administrative controversies with the IRS, the U.S. Department of Justice, and state tax authorities.

a global leader in flash memory storage solu-tions headquartered in Milpitas, Calif. He focuses on intellectual property, licensing, and other matters, including M&A transactions, litigation, commercial agreements, corporate securities law, and governance. Previously Brazeal was with Broadcom, where he was senior vice president and senior deputy counsel.

MoniCa derbes gibson returned to her hometown of New Orleans, La., where she practices environmen-tal and administrative law with Liskaw & Lewis. She was previously with Venable in Washington, D.C. She is engaged to be married, “proving,” she notes, “that optimism trumps experience.”

diCkens “deke” Mathieu ’93 has been appointed general counsel at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn. He was previously with Mathieu Consulting, a higher education consulting firm he

1992

JeffreY W. shaW was elected by the Virginia General Assembly to an eight-year term as a judge of the Ninth Judicial Circuit. He is the presiding circuit court judge in Gloucester, Mathews, and Middlesex counties. He was sworn in by his father, William H. Shaw III ’71, who retired from the same position in 2009. Jeffrey and his wife, Barbara, live in Locust Hill.

1993

david t. andreWs is an attorney in the labor and employment litigation practice groups with Day Ketterer in Hudson, Ohio. He works with employers to address discipline and discharge matters, including compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act, Family and Medical Leave Act, and equal employment opportunity laws. Andrews was a founding member of Andrews & Wyatt, a labor, employment, and worker’s compensation firm that merged with Day Ketterer on January 1.

Mark brazeal has been appointed senior vice president and chief legal officer with SanDisk Corporation,

advising the Attorney General on emerging policy issues. Heaphy also served as chairman of the AGAC’s subcommittee on enforcement coordination, victims issues, and community outreach, and was a member of the subcommittees on criminal practice, violent and organized crime, and civil rights. He has testified before Congressional committees several times on issues ranging from guns to synthetic drugs to sentencing reform.

ken Paxton was elected as Attorney General of Texas, garnering nearly 60 percent of the votes cast statewide during the 2014 general election. He was first elected to the Texas House of Representatives in 2002, representing House District 70. In 2012 he was elected to the Texas State Senate, representing Senate District 8.

tiM sPong is executive director of safety, security, and risk for Chipotle Mexican Grill, Inc., and oversees liability and worker’s comp litigation, customer service, restaurant cash-handling audits, and insurance. Tim and Leslie have five children: Virginia (19), Mason (17), William (14), David (11), and John (9). “Virginia is considering law school!”

Class notes …


1995

Chris akin and his col-leagues at Lynn Tillotson Pinker & Cox represented a plaintiff in a high-profile trial that lasted almost six weeks and resulted in a verdict awarding more than $1 billion to their client, including pre-judgment interest. The verdict has been reported as the largest ever in Dallas County, the largest verdict in the State of Texas in 2014, and the third largest verdict in the nation in 2014. Chris is a partner with the high-stakes litiga-tion firm, and trey Cox is one of the name partners.

Chris lives in Dallas with his wife, Marjorie, and their two children, Graham (8) and Amelia (5).

shanti ariker is global general counsel of the Salesforce Foundation in San Francisco, Calif.

ChristoPher l. bennett has joined Eckert Seamans Cherin & Mellott in Washington, D.C., as a member. He is a general corporate attorney with particular focus on the hospitality and gaming industries. He was previ-ously chief administrative officer and general counsel with Interstate Hotels & Resorts, Inc.

eriC C. broYles has co-authored, with a police officer/lifelong friend, a timely book, Encounters

With Police: A Black Man’s

Guide to Survival. (See

In Print.) Broyles was interviewed in January on ION TV’s Metro Magazine

with Bonnie McDaniel and in April gave a talk at the University of Cincinnati Blue Ash College entitled, “Started from the Bottom: From Struggling High School Student to CEO.” He spoke at the Law School in March at an event sponsored by the Black Law Students Association.

Broyles is chief executive officer with ExpertConnect, a company that helps attorneys find the most knowledge-able experts to serve as witnesses.

JeffreY W. Cottle is a part-ner in Steptoe & Johnson’s London office, where he practices in the area of international regulatory compliance with an em-phasis on export controls, anti-corruption, and trade sanctions compliance.

treY Cox was listed as a leader in his field by Chambers USA 2014 in gen-eral commercial litigation. He is a founding partner with Lynn Tillotson Pinker & Cox in Dallas, Tex., where he focuses his practice on business litigation, intellectual property litiga-tion, and appellate law. His firm represented SCA Promotions in a recent ruling that has ordered Lance Armstrong to pay $10 million for lying under oath about doping.

norMan s. fletCher ll.M. received the Southern Center for Human Rights’ Gideon’s Promise Award on May 12, for his leadership as chief justice in the cre-ation of a public defender system in Georgia. He was appointed to the Georgia Supreme Court in 1989 and served as chief justice from 2001–05. He is of counsel with Brinson, Askew, Berry, Seigler, Richardson & Davis in Rome, Ga.

Peter s. vinCent joined Thomson Reuters Special Services in Washington, D.C., as general counsel. He provides legal counsel and advice on matters related to intelligence collection; cybersecu-rity; counterintelligence; threat finance; identity determination; insider threat; political, social, and military issues; continuous monitoring and evaluation of cleared personnel; targeting and networks; risk management; and law enforcement investigations.

For nearly six years Vincent served as a political appointee with the Obama administration as principal legal advisor, senior counselor for international policy, and acting director of the Of-fice of International Affairs with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

hill b. Wellford was elected to the governing council of the ABA antitrust section. He is with Morgan, Lewis & Bockius in Washington, D.C., as the result of that firm’s merger with his former firm, Bingham McCutchen, at the end of 2014. He lives in Arlington, Va., with his wife, Michelle Boardman, who is a law professor at George Mason University, and their three boys.

1996

gavin e. hill has joined Bracewell & Giuliani as a partner in the litigation practice group in Dallas, Tex., where he advises energy, technology, telecommunications, and other companies about risks and liabilities and represents clients in complex commercial litigation.

Claudia Jaques joined TTR Sotheby’s International Realty in McLean, Va., as a real estate professional. She has nearly 20 years of corporate legal experience and four years of international banking experience.

Mark knueve is listed in Ohio Super Lawyers 2015 in employment and labor law. He represents employ-ers in matters involving complex litigation such as wage and hour class actions and collective ac-tions. Knueve is a partner with Vorys, Sater, Seymour and Pease in Columbus.

1997

brian W. bYrd was listed in the 2014 Super Lawyers

business edition in real estate and recognized in Chambers USA 2014 as a leader in North Carolina real estate. He is listed in Best Lawyers 2015 in real estate and land use & zoning law and recognized in Business North Carolina

2015 as a legal elite in real estate law. He is with Smith Moore Leatherwood in Greensboro.

JeffreY b. hubbard and his wife, Laura, established Elysian Ridge Farms and Apiary (see www.

elysianridgefarms.com). They are registered breed-ers of purebred Berkshire pigs and Nigerian dwarf goats and purveyors of raw organic honey from their mountaintop home in Bedford County, Va.

andrea sullivan gould recently argued the case of Sheppard v. Junes (287 Va. 397 (2014) before the Virginia Supreme Court. The court analyzed intestacy succession in Virginia and held that a “half-blood” uncle was entitled to one half of a decedent’s estate, rather than one quarter. Andrea was with Troutman Sanders in Richmond for 12 years before joining Andrew Mauck in 2013 [now Mauck & Brooke], where she practices business litigation and trusts and estates litigation with classmate Melissa Roberts Tannery and Andy Mauck ’91.

Class notes …


raChel sPears was named as one of Atlanta maga-zine’s “Women Making a Mark” for 2015. Spears has been the executive direc-tor of Pro Bono Partnership of Atlanta since the organization’s founding in 2005. The organization connects a network of volunteer attorneys from Atlanta-based corpora-tions and law firms with nonprofits in need of legal services. These partner-ships improve the lives of the homeless, domestic violence survivors, at-risk youth, senior citizens, in-dividuals with disabilities, and others in need. Prior to joining the partnership, Spears was an associate in the public finance depart-ment at King & Spalding, also in Atlanta.

Spears also serves as chair of the State Bar of Georgia nonprofit law sec-tion and is a member of the public interest executive roundtable of the Atlanta Bar Association. She has been recognized as one of Georgia Trend magazine’s Legal Elite and the Daily

Report’s On the Rise attor-neys. In 2014, she received the EPIC Inspiration Award: Unsung Devotion to Those Most in Need awarded by Emory University.

1998

ChristoPher brearton joined Latham & Watkins as a partner in the entertainment, sports, and media practice in Century City, in the heart of Los Angeles, Calif. He is also deputy office managing partner. He advises motion picture studios, indepen-dent producers, financial institutions, investment funds, television networks, and sports organizations, and his high-powered work in sports law was highlighted in the cover story for the March issue of The American Lawyer.

Yared getaCheW is working as an American legal adviser in the international law department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Federal Democratic

Republic of Ethiopia, located in Addis Ababa.

neale t. Johnson was included among Business

North Carolina’s legal elite in construction in 2014. He was also listed in the 2014 Super Lawyers business edition and in North Carolina Super

Lawyers 2015 in real estate. Johnson is with Smith Moore Leatherwood in Greensboro, where his practice focuses on commercial litigation, including construction, contract, real estate, title insurance, and landlord-tenant matters.

stan MCCoY has been named president of the Motion Picture Association of America’s Europe/Middle East/Africa region headquartered in Brussels, Belgium. He was previ-ously senior vice president and regional policy director for the region.

robert MCglarrY was named president of Major League Baseball Network,

where he has oversight of all day-to-day operations. He has been with the network since its launch in 2009, first as senior vice president of programming and business affairs, and most recently as executive vice president for content. Prior to that McGlarry worked for Major League Baseball from 2003–08 and was vice president of broadcasting business affairs.

1999

klint alexander has been named dean of the University of Wyoming’s College of Law and will begin his new position on July 1. He has had teaching and leadership roles at several institutions, including Yale, Vanderbilt, and the University of London. Since 2013 he has been a member of the global business team at Baker, Donelson, Bearman, Caldwell and Berkowitz.

Jan brunner has been named senior energy policy advisor to U.S. Senator Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia. A native of Bluefield, Brunner previously served as senior counsel for fossil energy on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee and as senior energy advisor for U.S. Senator Joe Manchin of W. Va.

tiM freiliCh is the new executive director of the University of Virginia’s Madison House. He was a Madison House volunteer and program director while an undergraduate at UVA and has been honored (in 2005) as Alumni of the Year by the organization’s alumni council. Most recently Freilich was the legal direc-tor of the Legal Aid Justice Center’s immigrant advocacy program.

thoMas g. funke ll.M. leads the antitrust practice at European law firm Osborne Clarke, which is shortlisted for “competi-tion law firm of the year” in Germany. The nomina-tion recognizes Funke’s successes before the European Court of Justice and the German Supreme Court in the areas of cartel damages litigation and automotive matters. Funke spoke on the EU frame-work for online retailing at the ABA Antitrust meeting last spring in Washington, D.C. He lives with his wife, Alexa, and their two sons in Cologne.

JeffreY bartos ’97 (right), and Yuri horWitz ’06 attended the EY Entrepreneur of the Year Strategic Growth Forum in Palm Springs, Calif., where they were honored as regional winners of the Entrepreneur of the Year program. Horwitz, the winner for an emerging company, is CEO of Sol Systems in Washington, D.C., and Bartos, who was the cleantech winner, is CEO of Mark Group, Inc.’s North American division headquartered in Philadelphia, Pa. Both are involved in renewable energy and home energy efficiency.

sCott sPenCe ’99 was appointed programme director for national implementation by the board of trustees of the London-based VERTIC. Spence oversees the strategic vision and technical delivery of the programme, which works with interested governments on comprehensive national implementation of UN Security Council Resolution 1540 on the non-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, the Biological and Chemical Weapons Conventions, and certain international legal instruments to secure nuclear and other radioactive material. This

includes awareness-raising activities, promoting universal membership in several treaties, and legislative assistance.

Spence developed the “National Legislation Implementation Kit on Nuclear Security,” which was presented by the vice president of Indonesia to the Nuclear Security Summit in The Hague

in March 2014. He also wrote VERTIC’s “Legislative Guide to National Implementation of UN Se-curity Council Resolution 1540,” which was presented to the Security Council in October

2014 by the permanent representatives of Canada and the United Kingdom to the UN in New York. He and his partner, Pere, who works for UNAIDS, live in Geneva.

thoMas J. Mattei Jr. has been appointed general counsel and executive officer with Farmer Bros. Co., headquartered in Torrance, Calif. He joined the company in January 2013 as vice president and corporate counsel. His main areas of responsibility include corporate governance, SEC compliance, mergers & acquisitions, and litigation management. He also oversees the risk manage-ment and real estate departments.

Joanna M. silverstein is now a shareholder with Littler in Seattle, Wash., where she advises and represents employers in a wide range of employment law matters involving state and federal law.

aMY todd-gher has joined Littler as a shareholder in San Diego, Calif. She focuses her practice on employment law, including discrimination and harassment, complex litigation and jury trials, hiring and performance management, and compe-tition and trade secret law. She was previously with Valdez Todd & Doyle.

robert t. traMMell Jr. was elected to the Georgia House of Representatives, District 132, in November. He practices law with The Trammell Firm in Luthersville.

2000

Chris Converse has been recognized as a rising star in business/corporate law for 2015 by Texas Super

Lawyers. He is a partner with Gardere Wynne Sewell in Dallas, where he is chair of the securities and corporate governance team and a member of the private equity industry team. He focuses his practice on mergers & acquisitions, recapitaliza-tions, financing, and public and private offerings of debt and equity.

niCole M. lindsaY, a rec-ognized expert in career development and diversity in graduate management education, spoke at the Ferguson Library in Stamford, Conn., in

November on how women can succeed in business school and beyond. A former MBA admissions officer and corporate MBA recruiter, she is currently director of leadership de-velopment for the ZOOM Foundation in Fairfield. Her recent book, The MBA

Slingshot for Women: Using

Business School to Catapult

Your Career, explains how women can make the most of graduate school experience and their professional careers.

After more than a dozen years in and around New York City, MarC and aMY strauss relocated to Dallas, Tex. Marc is currently a member with LStar Capital, a middle market lending platform. Amy continues to work in labor and employment law as a consultant.

2001

andreW s. boutros is a prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney’s office in

Chicago, where he focuses on white-collar crime prosecutions. As a federal prosecutor, he has con-ducted some of the office’s largest and most complex multi-district, international fraud investigations and prosecutions of business organizations and corpo-rate executives. In 2014 he was selected by the American Bar Association as its recipient of the criminal justice section’s Norm Maleng Minister of Justice Award. That award, which is conferred upon one federal, state, or local prosecutor in the United States each year, is bestowed on a prosecu-tor who exemplifies the principle that the “duty of the prosecutor is to seek justice, not merely to convict.”

brendan Johnson has joined Robins Kaplan as a partner and will co-chair the government and internal investigations group and the American Indian law and policy group. He will open a new

office in Sioux Falls, S.D., for the Minneapolis-based firm and will focus his work on internal investigations, commercial litigation, and legal issues involving Native American tribes.

Johnson previously served as U.S. Attorney for the District of South Dakota for six years, a role in which he handled cases including public corruption, violent crime, financial and health care fraud, narcotics trafficking, child exploitation, and Indian Country and civil rights. Johnson helped develop a strategy that led to an increase in prosecutions by more than 90 percent on South Dakota’s largest reserva-tions. He received the 2014 Pathbreaker of the Year Award from Shared Hope International for his work against human trafficking and was recognized by the Washington Post as among the top 40 political rising stars under 40 for 2014.

Class notes …


thoMas g. saYlor ll.M. ’04 was sworn in as chief justice of Pennsylvania on January 6. He was elected to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court in 1997 and retained for an additional ten-year term in 2007. He served on the Pennsylvania Superior Court from 1993–97.

2002

Carter burWell is on detail to the U.S. Congress from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia. He serves as a counsel for Chairman Charles Grassley on the Senate Judiciary Committee, where he works on national security issues and surveillance reforms.

afi Johnson-Parris was elected to Business North

Carolina’s 2015 list of legal elite in family law, the third consecutive year she has been so recognized. She is with Ward Black Law in Greensboro, where she practices divorce and family law and veterans’ disability law.

WilliaM sinClair was named partner with Silverman, Thompson, Slutkin, and White in Baltimore, Md., where he focuses his practice on civil litigation.

brYan f. stroh ’02 is senior vice president, business affairs and general counsel

for the Pittsburgh Pirates. In addition to his active role in the club’s baseball operations department, his responsibilities include player salary negotiations and all legal matters for the club. He also manages strategic projects, including development efforts around PNC Park.

2003

brian M. feldMan has been elected partner with Harter Secrest & Emery in Rochester, N.Y. He focuses his litigation practice on government and internal investigations and trials and appeals in New York state and federal courts.

andreW P. Pontano has been promoted to partner at Dechert in New York City. He focuses his practice on asset-backed financing and securitization and advises clients regarding public and private securities offerings and other complex financial transactions involving a wide range of asset classes.

nathan taYlor was elected to partnership with Morrison & Foerster in Washington, D.C., where he is a member of the financial services and the privacy and data security practice groups. He focuses his practice on assisting companies navigate their way through complex privacy and data security issues.

2004

kellY a. deMarChis has been promoted to counsel at Venable in Washington, D.C. She advises and represents clients on issues related to privacy, data security, advertising and marketing, consumer protection, and e-commerce, concentrating on regulatory compliance and adversary actions in front of the Federal Trade Commission and state attorneys general.

andreW faleviCh has been promoted to special counsel in tax law with Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson in New York. He advises on domestic and international mergers & acquisitions and capital markets transactions, partnership taxation, state and local taxation, and real estate taxation.

dreW t. gardiner was promoted to counsel with Latham & Watkins in San Diego, Calif., where he is a member of the

environment, land, and resources department. His practice focuses on representing policyholders in complex insurance coverage and bad faith disputes. He also counsels clients in negotiation and placement of representation and warranty policies in M&A transactions.

Jason e. hazleWood has been promoted to partner at Reed Smith in Pittsburgh, Pa., where he is a member of the commercial litigation group. He focuses his practice on complex commercial and financial service litigation.

Class notes …


david Posner was elected to partnership with Willkie Farr & Gallagher in New York, where he practices in the private clients group.

Meng ru ll.M. has been elected partner at Akin Gump in New York. She is a member of the corporate practice and focuses her work on complex finance deals, including debt financings in connection with leveraged buyouts and distressed debt transactions.

MiChael signer is the author of a recent biography of James Madison, Becoming

Madison: The Extraordinary

Origins of the Least Likely

Founding Father, published by PublicAffairs (see In

Print). He is managing principal of Madison Law & Strategy Group in Charlottesville, where he practices corporate and regulatory law.

ben and JessiCa JaCkson angelette ’06 welcomed their fourth child, Bianca Elizabeth, on May 5, 2014. She joins older siblings Jackson Thomas (7), Graham Joseph (4), and Daphne Catherine (2) with their parents in St. Louis, Mo., where Ben is assistant general counsel at Energizer Holdings.

sean s. suder has expanded his commercial real estate, land use, and zoning practice to Kentucky and Tennessee to represent clients in an area of rapid growth along the I-65 corridor between Louisville and Nashville. He is a partner with Graydon Head in Cincinnati, Ohio.

brett r. tobin has been promoted to partner with Goodsill Anderson Quinn & Stifel in Honolulu, Hawaii, where he focuses his practice on business and commercial litigation.

2005

Christian t. beCker has been promoted to partner at Kasowitz Benson Torres & Friedman in New York, where he focuses his practice on white-collar criminal defense, internal investigations, and complex commercial litigation.

soYong Cho has been selected by K&L Gates as its representative to the 2015 Class of Leadership

Council on Legal Diversity fellows. She is a partner in Washington, D.C., where she concentrates her practice in commercial litigation, complex litigation and class actions, and government enforcement. She was selected as a rising star in business litigation by Washington, D.C. Super

Lawyers in 2014 and 2015.

raChel b. CoChran is associate general counsel at Navient Solutions, Inc., a company focused on loan management, servicing, and asset recovery in Reston, Va.

Jason d. Cruise has been promoted to partner with Latham & Watkins in Washington, D.C. He is a member in the litigation department, where he focuses on antitrust matters. He is also a member of the global merger control team and advises on regulatory reviews and investigation matters in foreign jurisdictions.

alison haddoCk hutton has been promoted to partnership with Duane Morris in Atlanta, Ga., where she focuses her practice on intellectual property law and patent litigation. She represents

clients in matters including wireless LAN, semiconduc-tor fabrication, and telecommunication systems and standards.

Joshua C. Johnson has co-founded Johnson, Rosen & O’Keeffe in Roanoke, Va., where his practice focuses on complex commercial litigation. He also currently serves as president of the Roanoke chapter of the Federal Bar Association.

shePard liu has been promoted to partner with Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy in Beijing, where he is a member of the project finance group and the firm’s chief representa-tive in China.

benJaMin P. MCCallen made partner in the litigation department with Willkie Farr & Gallagher in New York. He focuses his practice on complex

commercial litigation, including mergers & acquisitions, insurance, securities, bankruptcy, and media/First Amendment.

saM toWell was appointed Deputy Secretary of Agriculture and Forestry by Virginia Governor Terence McAuliffe in the fall. On January 6 he and his wife, Sarah, welcomed their first child, Eleanor Carol Towell.

2006

Jason r. brege was elected partner with Smith Anderson in Raleigh, N.C.

He advises technology companies in developing and commercializing

their intellectual property and technology assets through structuring and negotiation of research, development, licensing, and other strategic transactions.

Jonathan W. Cannon has been promoted to counsel with BuckleySandler in Los Angeles, Calif. He advises financial institutions, in-cluding financial services companies, mortgage companies, mortgage servicers, banks, securi-ties broker-dealers, and others on federal and state regulations.

katherine deluCa was promoted to partner with McGuireWoods in Richmond, Va., where she focuses her practice on matters involving compliance with federal securities laws, mergers & acquisitions, and corporate governance.

Class notes …


Class notes …


Three from Class of 2006 work “Towards Justice” in Denver

A dozen years and 1,500 miles from

their first meeting at UVA Law,

three members of Section A of the

Class of 2006 reunited to fight wage theft on

behalf of low-income workers. andY sChMidt,

nina disalvo, and Jason stavers all play an

integral role in Towards Justice, a nonprofit

organization in Denver, Colo.

Towards Justice represents low-income

workers—many of them immigrants—whose

employers are not paying them the wages they

have legally earned. Wage theft is a pervasive

problem in the United States, with many

employers improperly depriving workers of

state and federal minimum wage, time-and-

a-half for overtime hours, or even pay for all

hours worked.

Schmidt conceived of Towards Justice when

he was working as a solo practitioner, largely

representing Spanish-speaking immigrants.

The most pressing issue his clients faced was

wage theft.

Originally Schmidt and Alexander Hood,

now Towards Justice’s director of litigation,

represented individual workers who had not

been paid. But facing a “never-ending sea of

cases,” they realized they needed to find a

new approach.

The two formed a nonprofit, initially working

out of their basements, meeting clients at a

Chipotle restaurant, and holding firm meetings

at a local microbrewery to keep costs down.

As Towards Justice was developing, Schmidt

knew that his strengths came in areas such as

developing unique litigation strategies, not in

networking and building the organization.

“I had this vision that I knew could happen

if we had a great leader. I got lucky that Nina

[DiSalvo] wanted to move to Denver,” he said.

“Nina had all the skills that I was missing.”

DiSalvo had been working as special counsel

to the New York Secretary of State but wanted

to move to Denver with her fiancé, who had

grown up in Colorado. She was looking for a

job. Schmidt suggested that she take his.

DiSalvo took a leap of faith to work for the

start-up legal services organization in part

because of her strong interest in Latino issues.

She had lived in Puerto Rico as a child and had

worked on human rights issues in Argentina

during and after law school.

“Andy and Alex created a tremendous

organization, and having the opportunity to

expand its reach and draw attention to their

work is wonderful,” she said. “Meanwhile, I

get to make a real difference in the lives of

immigrant families.”

DiSalvo quickly worked to expand the

organization and bring about changes, such

as finding office space, hiring new staff, and

partnering with the local law school.

“Nina gets all the credit for coming in and

quickly raising money and building up the

institution,” Schmidt said.

DiSalvo also recruited a strong board of

directors. One of the first people she looked

to add as a board member was Stavers, an old

friend from Section A. Stavers is an associate

with Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher in Denver and

now serves as president of the board.

In an effort to help more people, the

organization shifted its focus from legal

services to impact litigation. For example,

Towards Justice and co-counsel represent a

class of civil detainees suing the Geo Group,

Inc., which operates an immigrant detention

center and pays detainees $1 a day or no wages

at all for their work.

In another case they represent a national

class of workers suing a large staffing company

and a luxury hotel, drawing attention to the

concern that employers rely on temp agencies

or other labor brokers to confuse workers about

who employs them and evade responsibility for

following wage and hour laws.

“We are prepared to push the law and to

remind us all what the American Dream is all

about,” DiSalvo said.

In 2014 Schmidt headed across the country

to start his own firm in Portland, Maine. He

continues to work with Towards Justice pro

bono. With a fourth attorney preparing to join

the group and a busy litigation docket, Towards

Justice has ambitious plans to empower

immigrant workers.

—rachel graVes

Class notes …


staCie b. fletCher was elected partner with Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher in Washington, D.C. She focuses her practice on environmental litigation and mass tort defense and represents companies that are facing enforcement actions that arise from alleged violations of environmental laws.

MiChael n. neMelka was named partner with Kellogg, Huber, Hansen, Todd, Evans & Figel in Washington, D.C., where he focuses his practice on complex commercial litigation.

JaMes M. Pinna is now partner with Hunton & Williams in Richmond, Va. He represents health care providers in transactional, corporate, regulatory and compliance matters.

WilliaM i. sanderson was promoted to partner with McGuireWoods in Washington, D.C., where he is a member of the fiduciary advisory services and private wealth ser-vices practice groups. He works with high net worth individuals and families in a range of complex estate and business planning matters.

katherine v. a. sMith was elected partner with Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher in Los Angeles, Calif. She represents employers in all aspects of labor and employment law and has extensive experience in single plaintiff and class action litigation at both the trial court and appel-late level.

audreY Wagner was recognized in the 2014 U.S. edition of Legal 500, which noted that she “garners high praise for her industry knowledge and ease with clients.” She is an associate with Dechert in Washington, D.C., where she focuses her practice on diverse investment management, derivative, and commodity matters.

randall Warden received the Young Lawyer of the Year award at the Bar Association of the District of Columbia presentation in December. He received recognition for his dedi-cated service to the D.C. Bar, including serving on the board and as chair of the young lawyers section. The award also recognizes his leadership in the bar’s Operation Crackdown pro bono program, which matches attorneys with community groups to use civil nuisance laws to pursue property owners who allow drug activity on their property. He is a trial attorney in the money laundering and bank integrity unit at the U.S. Department of Justice.

Class notes …


Matt Watson ’07 and Steve Glasgow ’07: Dressed for Success

One day in their third year of Law School, Matt Watson

and steve glasgoW took the afternoon off to play golf at

Birdwood and lamented the fact that they’d have to work

until they were 50 before they could have the lifestyle they

had that afternoon.

They’d been friends since being assigned to the same

section as 1Ls, and even before speaking they knew they had

something in common—a fun sense of style that favored the

preppy look—bright bow ties, seersucker, and madras that

made them standouts at social events.

After graduation, Glasgow practiced with Alston & Bird,

and Watson with Bryan Cave in the same office building in

Atlanta. They often met for lunch. “We weathered the layoffs

in 2010,” says Watson, “but the way things were going, we

were pretty sure we weren’t going to make it to the top of

the totem pole.” They were close to 30, both married and with

children, and couldn’t keep doing the work they were doing.

“We’d had experience in leadership roles, and we wanted to

get back to that,” says Glasgow. “After sitting in on meetings

as litigators with retail clients, we thought we could do that.”

They came up with a plan that seemed a natural for

them—an online business focused on preppy clothes. They

knew the brands, and wanted to be the first to offer all the

best ones on one website: High Cotton, Southern Proper,

Sperry Topsider, and Smathers & Branson among them.

“For us, in the beginning, being a UVA lawyer was helpful

in several ways,” says Watson. “We had to convince the top-

drawer brands to work with us, two guys who had no retail

background.” They were confident that if they could talk with

the person who could say yes to selling to them wholesale,

they could convince them to do it. And they did.

“I’ll thank UVA for that,” says Glasgow. “We might have been

smart enough and cocky enough to start a business after

college, but the Law School gave us the critical thinking skills

and the ability to pivot and adjust quickly in a business.” A

UVA Law degree had caché in this market, and that helped.

They knew their customers.

People over 40 might think of preppy style as kind of

stuffy—ironed khakis, a buttoned-down shirt, a navy blazer

with gold buttons. Preppy in the past had an elitist identity.

The “new preppy” is bright, fun, and irreverent. “In the ’90s

the preppy style had a kind of reawakening,” says Glasgow.

A younger audience emerged, especially in the South. At

weddings, horse races, and other social events the bright

outfits stood out. Events became opportunities to show off

your brights.

For the first 18 months they developed social media, hired

someone to design a website (the name Country Club Prep

conveniently pops up when someone Googles “preppy belt”

or “shirt”), took customer service calls, and handled shipping

and delivery while holding down their firm jobs.

“In the beginning,” says Watson, “we overestimated our

abilities and underestimated the challenges. We thought

things like contracts and purchase orders were all but-

toned up, but learned we’d have to roll with the punches.”

Sometimes they’d place an order, and instead of placing the

item on backorder, a company would send them something

similar and they’d have to deal with it. “In some ways,” Watson

says, “the Internet is like the Wild West.”

The new business started in Watson’s basement, and as it

grew it took over more rooms of his house. “When it moved

into the guest room my wife said, ‘It goes or you go.’” By that

point sales were skyrocketing and they were ready to make

the leap to running the company full time. Classmate Toby Mergler is also a partner, but he’s not involved in the day-to-

day operations.

Country Club Prep (www.countryclubprep.com) was

officially launched in 2012, and is headquartered in a

12,500-square-foot warehouse and shipping facility in

Atlanta. Glasgow and Watson put in more hours than when

they were practicing law, but they say it doesn’t really seem

like work. Imagine two good friends working side by side,

leaving room for breaks at the putting green they installed at

the warehouse.

“The most meaningful way I’d describe our success in

numbers is probably the fact that I don’t have to write down

my billable hours anymore,” says Watson. There’s also the fact

that in their second year they beat the profits they projected

for year four.

Their first bricks and mortar store opened on The Corner

in Charlottesville in 2014. They chose the location to return

to their roots and because there’s a proven market for their

goods here. The next opening was in Lexington, Ky., and

they have their sights set on other strong markets. The next

physical space will be a pop-up shop in Southampton, N.Y.,

scheduled to open a week before Memorial Day.

The clothes you can find at Country Club Prep bring to

mind breezy spring and summer days, but once you get

hooked on this style, you’re likely to find yourself breaking

all the old sartorial rules and wearing whites, brights, and

seersucker before the end of winter.

—rebecca barnsaUst

in h

olt

Class notes …


2007

Catherine s. bernard recently chaired a committee to educate residents of Brookhaven, a city in the northeastern suburbs of Atlanta, about the Redevelopment Powers Law Referendum and to get it defeated. The referendum was voted down, 60 percent to 40 percent, in November. Bernard encourages those interested to visit www.

brookhavenreferendum.

org. Bernard is a constitu-tional and criminal defense lawyer in private practice.

JaCqueline gharaPour Wernz was been named partner with Franczek Radelet in Chicago, Ill. She is a member of the education practice group and represents Illinois school districts, private schools, and higher education institutions. Wernz works on a range of education law issues, including policy and governance, business matters, labor and employment, student rights and responsibilities, and technology, and is the main author of the firm’s Education Law Insights blog (www.edlawinsights.

com).

david M. irvine has joined Allen, Allen, Allen & Allen as a trial attorney in Charlottesville. He focuses his practice on personal injury and medical malpractice.

JosePh a. Ponzi has been named a rising star in environmental litigation for 2015 by North Carolina Super

Lawyers. He is a partner with Brooks, Pierce, McLendon, Humphrey & Leonard in Greensboro, where he focuses his practice on business litigation, environmental law, construction law, and alternative dispute resolution.

CourtneY dredden ’07 married Kwame Carter on June 14, in Frederick, Md. Megan Callahan Orme ’08 was a bridesmaid, Tiffany Miller gave a reading, and Scott Kelly ’10, Jenise Smith, Kathy LaBarre, Laura Golden, and Jennifer

Jessie ’09 were all in attendance. Courtney is a consultant in Washington, D.C., and loves living close to so many of her Law School friends.

Members of the Class of 2007 returned to Charlottesville for a program around the 50th anniversary of the Law School’s annual giving program in fall of 2014. From left, tiffanY Miller, khang tran, laura golden, Kwame Carter, CourtneY dredden Carter, eli deJarnette, and Beth DeJarnette.

Class notes …


brYan starrett has been named to the 2015 Triad Business Journal 40 leaders under 40 list. He is an associate with Brooks, Pierce, McLendon, Humphrey & Leonard in Greensboro, N.C., where he focuses his practice on commercial litigation, special investigations/compliance, and labor and employment law.

2010

andY hoWlett practices tax law with Miller & Chevalier in Washington, D.C. He and Jessica Brown were married on January 4, 2014, and he reports that he continues to improve at softball.

serge MartYn joined Credit Agricole Corporate and Investment Bank as director of legal debt capital markets in London. He was previously an associate at Ropes & Gray in London.

Mike Menssen moved to Salt Lake City, Utah, and started a new job at Stoel Rives. He is an associate in their litigation and labor and employment practice groups. He previously practiced with Gibson Dunn & Crutcher in Los Angeles.

adaM b. sChWartz joined Paul Weiss in Washington, D.C., where his practice focuses on litigation and internal investigations. He previously served at the Department of Justice for six years.

kelu l. sullivan was elected partner with BakerHostetler in Washington, D.C. She is a member of the intellectual property group and represents clients in federal district and appellate court litigation, manages large international trademark and copyright portfolios, and counsels clients on intellectual policy, licenses, and agreements.

2008

les s. boWers was promoted to partner with Gentry Locke in Roanoke, Va. He focuses his practice on personal injury, medical malpractice, and products liability.

daWn CroWell married Colin Murphy on May 25, 2014, in Annapolis, Md. Laura Holland and Kristina Yost were in attendance. The couple lives in the Washington, D.C., area, where Dawn is an associate in the nonprofit organizations practice at Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman and Colin works in global compensation at Marriott International.

Last year lauren J. king became an appellate court judge for the Northwest Intertribal Court System, a court system for various Indian tribes based in western Washington. King is of counsel with Foster Pepper in Seattle, where she is a member of the media, entertainment, and gaming practice.

Jennifer MCCaMMon joined Bean, Kinney & Korman as an associate in Arlington, Va. She represents individu-als in divorce and other family law matters and was recognized as a rising star in family law by Super

Lawyers in 2014 and 2015.

edWard a. Mullen was promoted to counsel in the global regulatory enforcement group at Reed Smith in Richmond, Va. Last year he was named a rising star by Virginia Super Lawyers for his administrative law practice and was recognized among the legal elite in legislative/regulatory/administrative law by Virginia Business magazine.

In 2014 rYan searfoorCe and his wife, Michaela, moved their five children to Houston, Tex., and Ryan moved his finance practice to Norton Rose Fulbright.

2009

eriC k. gerard joined the Texas-based team of trial lawyers at Abraham, Watkins, Nichols, Sorrels, Agosto & Friend in Houston, where he represents plaintiffs in cases involving catastrophic injury, industrial disasters, offshore accidents, and environmental litigation. His move to the plaintiff’s side comes after three years in the trial division of the Manhattan District Attorney’s office and a stint at the Houston office of Hogan Lovells.

Members of the Class of 2010 at the beach last year (left to right): Jordan MCkaY, CrYstal shin, JessiCa Childress, kYle brinkMan, anna ruth MYers, and adaM Jantzi.

Class notes …


niCk tiMMons and his wife welcomed a son, Bobby (Robert R. Timmons III), in January 2014. Nick is corporate counsel at H&R Block in Kansas City, Mo.

2011

Johnathan s. Perkins was recognized by the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation’s Delaware Valley Chapter as one of “Philadelphia’s Finest Young Professionals.” As associate with Montgomery McCracken, Perkins concentrates his practice on commercial litigation and higher education. He has experience representing various universities and corporations on a wide range of matters including employment decisions, contract disputes and product liability. Perkins serves as a mentor with Minds Matter Philadelphia, is involved as a volunteer reading coach with Philadelphia Reads, and serves as a pro bono attorney volunteer with the Homeless Advocacy Project.

2012

kate gilMan is founder and CEO of a Petal by Pedal, a floral delivery service that brings environmen-tally friendly bouquets to customers via bicycle mes-senger (www.petalbypedal.

com) throughout New York City. While most flowers sold in the U.S. come from Holland or South America; many of the flowers sold by Gilman’s company are grown on Brooklyn rooftops.

eMilY renzelli is included on the Forbes 30 under 30 list for 2015 in law and policy. She is an HIV/AIDS activist who worked on le-gal protection and privacy rights in South Africa and has taught criminal law at West Virginia University, her alma mater. She is a law clerk for the U.S. Court of Appeals, Fourth Circuit in Richmond, Va.

2013

MiChael Cirino joined Kilpatrick Townsend & Stockton in Atlanta, Ga., as an associate on the medical and mechanical devices team in the intellectual property department. Following graduation Cirino received a Robert F. Kennedy ’51 Public Service Fellowship to work as a patent at-torney at UVA Innovation, working directly with inventors and reviewing invention disclosures and patent applications.

MarY franCes ritten joined Winstead as an associate in the real estate finance practice group in Charlotte, N.C. She represents financial, investment, and other lending institutions in a range of commercial real estate and finance transactions.

sallY J. sullivan joined Caplin & Drysdale in Washington, D.C., as an associate in the complex litigation and creditors’ rights practice groups.

2014

logan b. Christenson joined Workman Nydegger as an associate in Salt Lake City, Utah, where he focuses his practice on U.S. and international patents. His work emphasizes preparing and prosecuting patent applications related to life sciences, chemical, and mechanical arts.

JaMes WesleY fisCher has joined Wyatt, Tarrant & Combs in Louisville, Ky., as a member of the corporate & securities team.

abbY kobrovskY is clerking for the Honorable David C. Norton and Richard M. Gergel of the U.S. District Court for the District of South Carolina from September 2014 to December 2015, and plans to join K&L Gates as an associate in January 2016.

kaYla Marshall joined Smith Anderson as an associate in Raleigh, N.C., where she focuses her practice on general, commercial, and employ-ment litigation. Prior to joining Smith Anderson, she completed an intern-ship with Judge James

Jones ’65 of the Western District of Virginia.

brian Mink joined McKenna Long & Aldridge as an associate in Atlanta, Ga., where he is a member of the real estate practice.

elYsse stolPe joined McKenna Long & Aldridge as an associate in Washington, D.C. She is a member of the litigation practice.

sarah a. vonderbrink joined Keating Muething & Klekamp as an associate in the litigation group in Cincinnati, Ohio. Previously, she was a co-mediator for the Family Alternative Dispute Clinic at the Mediation Center of Charlottesville.

iN MeMoriaM


Robert g. Harper ’41 Chevy Chase, md. January 6, 2015

Lew D. Brundage ’42 Yakima, Wash. march 7, 2015

A. Adgate Duer ’42 easton, md. march 7, 2015

Norborne g. Smith, Jr. ’47 Goldsboro, n.C. september 16, 2014

James S. Cremins, Sr. ’49 richmond, Va. march 10, 2015

Richard L. Jones ’49 Chester, Va. february 1, 2015

edwin F. Stetson ii ’49 Chevy Chase, md. January 5, 2015

C. thomas Wyche ’49 Greenville, s.C. January 23, 2015

N. Wescott Jacob ’50 onancock, Va. april 13, 2015

Samuel B. Sterrett ’50 Chevy Chase, md. september 8, 2013

Russell D. thomas ’51 sarasota, fla. December 21, 2013

Joseph H. Young ’51 Baltimore, md. march 15, 2015

Harry W. Colmery, Jr. ’52 santa Barbara, Calif. December 18, 2014

Robert D. mcilwaine iii ’52 Colonial heights, Va. february 21, 2015

Stanley J. magenheimer ’53 miami, fla. December 10, 2014

philip L. Avis ’55 henrico, n.C. november 28, 2014

James W. Franklin, Jr. ’55 Beverly hills, Calif. January 10, 2015

Russell Alton Wright ’55 henrico, Va. January 28, 2015

edward t. Caton ’56 Virginia Beach, Va. november 18, 2014

Stanley e. mcKinley ’56 Waxhaw, n.C. april 2, 2015

William L. Standish ’56 sewickley, Pa. January 1, 2015

thomas H. tullidge ’56 richmond, Va. December 27, 2014

e. Kemper uhler, Jr. ’56 ashburn, Va. January 23, 2015

Alan D. groseclose ’57 Pulaski, Va. november 13, 2014

John R. Helm ’57 montclair, n.J. november 29, 2014

Frank e. Specht ’57 atlanta, Ga. february 14, 2015

H. Foster pettit ’58 Lexington, Ky. november 22, 2014

george m. Rogers, Jr. ’58 Delray Beach, fla. march 31, 2015

m. Lauck Walton ’59 Woodstock, Va. february 8, 2015

martin A. purcell ’60 West Palm Beach, fla. february 12, 2015

J. Hume taylor, Jr. ’60 mc Dowell, Va. December 7, 2014

george V. Allen, Jr. ’62 Washington, D.C. December 11, 2014

edwin B. Brown ’62 staunton, Va. march 3, 2015

William R. Dorsey iii ’62 Baltimore, md. January 15, 2015

John e. mcDonald, Jr. ’62 Glen allen, Va. December 31, 2014

William A. pusey ’62 Boca Grande, fla. march 6, 2015

Jack p. Chambers ’63 Tazewell, Va. January 31, 2015

peter H. Ramm ’65 Winston-salem, n.C. December 21, 2014

michael F. Doyle ’67 Dublin, ohio november 12, 2014

William F. Roeder, Jr. ’67 Vienna, Va. January 6, 2015

Lawrence A. Dorsey, Jr. ’68 Woodsboro, md. march 16, 2015

p. Donald moses ’68 staunton, Va. January 1, 2015

W. Scott Street iii ’68 manakin sabot, Va. february 1, 2015

John p. Barnett ’69 Danville, Va. october 23, 2014

Sathitya Lengthaisong ’69 Bangken nonthabur, Thailand november 24, 2014

William H. Vincent ’69 Winchester, mass. november 29, 2014

thomas Aloysius twomey, Jr. ’70 new York, n.Y. november 16, 2014

Jean A. Bennett ’72 Coaldale, Pa. January 21, 2015

michael F. Blair ’72 Bristol, Va. January 3, 2015

ezra B. perry, Jr. ’72 Birmingham, ala. December 31, 2014

Julia t. Cannon ’74 hamilton, Va. october 16, 2014

John H. mossholder ’76 Charlottesville, Va. march 15, 2015

Richard e. Connor ’78 arlington, Va. november 25, 2014

Walter W. Simmers ’79 Vernon rockville, Conn. october 28, 2014

Kevin m. Smith ’79 Dedham, mass. october 27, 2014

Stanley e. Alderson, Jr. ’80 mountain City, Tenn. february 27, 2015

t. James Binder ’80 manassas, Va. January 9, 2015

Stephen Wade Adkins ’81 mc Gaheysville, Va. march 18, 2015

marshall B. martin ’81 norfolk, Va. february 20, 2015

Jacqueline m. gordon ’82 Vienna, Va. January 4, 2015

michael James Kelly ’82 saint Clair, mich. December 31, 2013

Joan L. markman ’83 Philadelphia, Pa. January 14, 2015

Roger D. Roberts ii ’83 roanoke, Va. January 4, 2015

Richard A. enslen ’86 richland, mich. february 17, 2015

Dale e. Fahrnbruch ’86 Lincoln, neb. June 1, 2005

Claire L. gregory ’87 alexandria, Va. January 21, 2015

glynn D. Key ’89 Philadelphia, Pa. november 20, 2014

Joan C. Woods ’93 Pasadena, Calif. february 14, 2014

Catherine A. Zanga ’98 Charlotte, n.C. november 21, 2014

thomas F. Daley ’04 Gretna, La. January 31, 2015

matthew Joseph Cooper ’05 stamford, Conn. november 30, 2014

John m. Cunningham Jr. ’14 Chicago, Ill.

iN PriNt

NON FICTION

Encounters with Police: A Black Man’s Guide to Survivaleric C. broyles ’95 and adrian o. Jackson

In Encounters with the Police: A Black Man’s Guide to Survival, Eric Broyles and his friend and colleague, a 25-year veteran of the Ohio police force, draw on their experience to give other black men and boys the basic information they need to survive encounters with police: Comply now, contest later.

They didn’t set out to solve the complex problems that underlie some racial interactions. They give examples of the kinds of words and actions to avoid—the kind that can quickly create charged situations in which violence is more likely to occur.

Bad police are out there, and they can be punished in the legal system. Broyles gives advice about that. But the

majority have good intentions and deserve respect. It’s important for anyone to see them as human beings who deal with tragic and dangerous events all the time and arrive on the scene on edge and expecting the possibility of danger.

The most important thing is to stay calm and show that you are not a threat to a police officer: stay in the car, turn on the overhead light, keep hands on the steering wheel, no sudden moves. Comply on the spot; you can contest later if you feel you’ve been treated unfairly. They don’t excuse police who abuse their jobs, but when police act outside the law, the victim’s self-control is crucial.

Broyles writes from a wide arc of experience. He grew up in poverty and was a juvenile delinquent who distrusted police. Today he’s a Washington, D.C.-based lawyer and entrepreneur with sharp memories of every time he’s been pulled over—with cause and without. He and his co-author present a cogent and balanced approach to

encounters between black and white. Additional content may be found at www.survivethepolice.com.

Talk of Many Things: Law, Sports, Politics, Naturegeorge W. gowen ’57Xlibris

George Gowen was born in Italy, the son of an American vice consul with the U.S. Foreign Service and an English mother. His memoir, Talk of Many Things, looks back on a remarkable life. It was certainly one of privilege—as a young boy he saw the Prince of Wales, glimpsed the exiled Emperor Haile Selassie, and played with Teddy Kennedy [’59] in the Court of St. James. But he recalls the danger in Europe then, too: buses blown up by the IRA, his father’s car being jostled by a jeering crowd on the streets of Rome, the wail of sirens in London on the first day of the war.

He recalls his mother delivering him to Princeton

at a time when he says having a reasonably good record in sports, leadership, and academics more or less assured acceptance into an elite school. Steeped in the traditions of the school, he reminisces about some of the interesting traditions that contribute to what he calls the tribal bonding of Princetonians.

Gowen headed south to UVA Law, but not before taking a summer job as a smokejumper in Montana. He wanted to see more of America, but also, he writes, he had a vague feeling that “like the spoiled boy in Kipling’s Captain Courageous, I would benefit by being knocked about a bit.” It wasn’t the first or last time he would challenge himself by getting out of his comfort zone.

One of the delights of this book is the author’s candor on every subject he recollects, including his work ethic, his reasons for changing political parties, the obvious skepticism of his prospective parents-in-law when he asked for their daughter’s hand in marriage. “At


an early age,” the author notes, “I learned man doesn’t control nature and not to panic in the face of challenges.’’

Gowen is a member of Dunnington Bartholow & Miller’s estate, trust, and private clients, corporate, and not-for-profit religious and charitable institutions practice areas in New York.

The Expressive Powers of Law: Theories and Limitsrichard h. mcadams ’85harvard university Press

Why do people obey the law? Legal scholars usually say for two reasons. Law deters crime by creating sanctions, and the law has legitimate authority in the eyes of society. In The Expressive Powers of Law: Theories and Limits, Richard McAdams explains another way the law encourages compliance: through its power to coordinate our behavior and inform our beliefs.

There are mutual benefits when people can expect

others to behave in certain ways because of laws. Traffic regulations are obvious examples that help keep order and keep us safe. In this book the author explores more complex areas, including constitutional and international law.

Legislation such as anti-smoking laws reflects both the public’s changing attitude toward smoking and lawmakers’ recognition of the health risks associated with smoking. Individuals are influenced by these trends and update both their beliefs and their behavior as a result.

McAdams gives examples of puzzling instances where entities with little power themselves, such as tribunals, are able to influence the resolution of a dispute. He shows how law can bring about compliance by what it says, not just what it sanctions.

The author is the Bernard D. Meltzer Professor of Law and Aaron Director Research Scholar at the University of Chicago Law School.

5 Months, 10 Years, 2 Hourslisa reisman ’93outpost 19

At first the words “Good job, Reisman” were enough to motivate her through all the late nights at her Manhattan law firm. But four years into her law career, despite the perks and feedback, on her 32nd birthday she announced her resignation.

Reisman had a plan to buy a convertible and drive across the country while she figured out the next stage of her life. But her life took her down a very different road. After going for her usual five-mile run, she fell asleep and woke up in a hospital to learn that she had a malignant brain tumor, the most aggressive type. No one had lived more than five years with her disease.

Five months after her diagnosis she underwent an MRI that showed that the cancer had not spread. Ten years after her diagnosis she competed in a triathlon.

Two hours is the length of

the grueling race during which she realizes she has everything she needs to live fully in the world. Her vivid description of each stage of the race propel her story forward.

Reisman’s account is unflinching and honest, a story of endurance and grit rather than heroism. Confronted with such a grim diagnosis, she learns a great deal about herself and her relationship to her family and everyone else around her. “There’s something exhilarating about being lost,” she writes. “But only in the memory of it. In knowing you eventually found your way.”

“Lisa Reisman’s account of her ordeal reads like a noir thriller—swift, merciless, unsparing,” writes one reviewer. “High-strung and brilliant, she navigates her terrifying passage with swagger and wit, never mind courage. I couldn’t put it down.”

Reisman is a freelance reporter. This is her first book.


Legal Guide to the Research Credit alex e. Sadler ’94thomson reuters

In this book Alex Sadler reviews the legal principles and authorities that govern the tax credit for research and development that is provided by section 41 of the Internal Revenue Code. This credit has broad application to U.S. businesses of all sizes. One of the most widely claimed federal income tax incentives for corporate America, it is also a source of controversy because of its complexity and the somewhat subjective nature of the qualification standards.

Legal Guide to the Research Credit is a comprehensive review and distillation of the subject, and will serve as an important reference for law firms, accounting firms, corporate tax departments, the IRS, policy makers, and academia. The volume includes applicable Code sections, regulations, legislative history, IRS guidance, and case law.

The author practices tax law as a partner with Ivins, Phillips & Barker in Washington, D.C.

Becoming Madison The Extraordinary Origins of the Least Likely Founding Fathermichael Signer ’04Publicaffairs

Michael Signer’s engaging and thoroughly researched study of James Madison’s early years,

Becoming Madison, reveals the depth of one of the most important, yet among the least known, American leaders.

Signer focuses on Madison’s life to the age of 36, by which time the determined patriot had introduced his plans for a strong central government, made his mark on the Constitution, and played a central role at Virginia’s convention to ratify the Constitution in 1788. Madison steered the course of the nation through the rough-and-tumble politics of his day, not for wealth or fame, but because he believed it was his duty as an American to fight for the common good. He was five feet four, weighed about 100 pounds, was exceedingly shy, and suffered terrible bouts of anxiety. And yet he carried on.

Madison’s coming of age is an inspiring story of a leader who fought for ideas rather than grandstanding or attacking his opponents. A statesman to his core, Madison is a role model for our times. Signer’s portrait goes a long way to bringing Madison out of the shadows of history and into the light.

“Becoming Madison is superb,” writes Anne-Marie Slaughter, former director of policy planning, U.S. State Department. “The history is lively and engaging. But Michael Signer’s greatest contribution is to turn a biography of Madison into a manual on leadership that is as relevant and valuable today as it was 200 years ago.”

Signer is a political theorist, lawyer, advocate, and author

who practices corporate and regulatory law with the Madison Law & Strategy Group in Charlottesville. He is the author of Demagogue: The Fight to Save Democracy from Its Worst Enemies.

FICTION

The Escapedavid baldacci ’86grand Central

In The Escape, David Baldacci spins another thriller with John Puller, the combat veteran and special agent. Puller is the go-to man to investigate the nation’s toughest cases, but all of his experience and skills may not be a match for bringing in the most elusive target he has ever pursued—his brother, Robert.

Robert, convicted of treason, has somehow managed to escape the U.S. Disciplinary Barracks in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, the most secure prison in the country, and he’s now the most wanted criminal in the nation. While his captors wonder how on earth he got out, he disguises himself, hacks into a national database, and heads out to clear himself of the charges against him. He’s brilliant and elusive, and Puller’s challenge is to bring him in alive.

There are others who want to see his brother dead. There are details about his brother’s conviction that warrant

investigation, and there’s at least one person who will do anything to prevent the truth coming out. Whatever the outcome, Puller will be tested to the limit to save his brother and himself. He reluctantly teams up with Capt. Veronica Knox whose motives he questions and whose allure he does not.

Baldacci’s novels have been translated into 45 languages and sold in more than 80 countries.

Finding Roda Annebert goolsby, ll.m. ’92rebecca J. Vickery Publishing

Deloris Meek is a fast-talking young man, a Southern lawyer with an unlikely name and unlikely office—a converted milk truck with a two-tone purple paint job. Meek draws quite a cast of characters for clients, including an auctioneer who hires him to draft his will. When the auctioneer dies, Meek has his hands full tracking down the missing heiress, Roda Anne, and fending off three unhappy claimants to the estate. The story, set in the mid-1960s, is Southern to the hilt. “I practice law in a place way down in the really Deep South where they say the only thing that separates its summer heat from the heat of Hell is a screen door,” Meek observes.

Dixie St. John, his friend’s legal secretary, accompanies him on his adventure. Meek wends his way in and out of two courtrooms, a honky-tonk, a tent revival, and a hospital before he ends up in front of


In prInt …

a probate judge who’s a font of baseball metaphors, if not jurisprudence.

Goolsby is a former chief deputy attorney general of South Carolina and criminal prosecutor.

Murder Trilogy: Three Two-Act Playsfrank W. Swacker ’49James a. rock & Co.

This collection of Frank Swacker’s two-act stage plays involve murder, mayhem, malfeasance, and hilarious corporate shenanigans. The plays included are “Spreading Murder & Happiness: A Two-Act Play,” “Arbitrating Murder: An Arbitration Drama in Two Acts,” and “Who Murdered the Chairman? A Comic Corporate Satire in Two Acts.” Two of the plays are based on previously published novels by the author.

Swacker wrote the story on which “Arbitrating Murder” is based to entertain students and encourage their interest in arbitration for dispute

resolution after teaching at Stetson University College of Law. Murder mysteries are the genre for Swacker’s plays and novels, in part because the public never seems to tire of the subject. He remembers, in fact, that the most exciting course he took in Law School was criminal law.

Swacker is a devotee of the theater, and he grants educational organizations a royalty-free license to produce the plays, which makes them ideal for small companies and theater groups with limited budgets. He includes a handy synopsis of each play at the front of the book.

A Southern GirlJohn C. Warley ’70university of south Carolina Press

At the outset of A Southern Girl, Coleman Carter is a successful trial lawyer with a happy marriage and two young sons. He grew up in the Old South, living a life of privilege guaranteed by his

family’s bloodlines. He barely questioned the subtle racism and practice of exclusion in the society around him. But his wife, Elizabeth, a transplant from the Midwest, lobbies hard to adopt a daughter from Korea, and Coleman reluctantly gives in.

From the moment they move forward in their plan to adopt, their cozy world turns upside down. Coleman’s parents and his peers were judgmental and severe in their reaction. “She will have doors slammed in her face,” his mother warns. Adoption was questioned in their society, to say nothing of adopting an Asian child. Coleman realizes that the insular world he grew up in, which had always been a comforting source of pride and security, now shuns the daughter he loves. The Carters have to confront Southern traditions as they pull together for their new family to find their true place in the town they had assumed would always be home.

“John Warley’s marvelous novel A Southern Girl is the

best book I’ve ever read about Charleston’s mysterious and glittering high society,” writes novelist Pat Conroy. “Its affirmation of the enduring power of parental love vying against that enigmatic realm is reverential and stunningly original, as stylish as a novel by John Irving and as tightly written as one by John Grisham. I wish I’d written this book.”

The author, a native South Carolinean, based A Southern Girl in part on his family’s adoption of a baby girl born in Seoul, Korea. He lives in Beaufort, S.C., and San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. This is his third book and is the first book in Pat Conroy’s Story River Books new Southern fiction imprint.

In prInt …


oPiNioN


The Voting Rights Act Turns 50

RISA GOLUBOFFJohn allan love Professor of law

Justice thurgood Marshall Distinguished Professor of lawProfessor of history

Anniversaries can, and

should, serve as moments

not only of celebration

but also of reflection and

reconsideration. This 50th

anniversary of the passage

of the Voting Rights Act of

1965 is no different. The

Act stands as a monument

to the power of ordinary

Americans to create dramatic

social, legal, and political change. The Act passed because ordinary

people were willing to put their livelihoods, their safety, and their

lives on the line in order to publicize not only the injustices they

faced but the certainty of their conviction that the United States

government could, indeed had to, do something about it. In turn,

this anniversary prompts celebration of the will of the federal

government to take on the systematic exclusion of millions of

Americans from meaningful citizenship and to devote prodigious

resources toward its eradication.

But this anniversary of the Voting Rights Act also calls forth

more sober reflections. The very enormity of the Act’s interven-

tions is a reminder that the complex of public law and private

custom that was Jim Crow systematically attempted to subordinate,

exclude, and exploit African Americans—not only in the South but

elsewhere as well.

Finally, reflecting on the anniversary of the Voting Rights Act

calls forth not a small amount of regret. There is the regret that

50 years of effort has brought substantial, but hardly complete,

eradication of racial inequality in American society. And there is

the regret that on the eve of this anniversary, the Supreme Court of

the United States prematurely deemed that project of transforma-

tion complete. The justices who struck down a key portion of

the Act misunderstood the nature of Jim Crow, downplayed the

monumental undertaking that was the civil rights movement, and

underestimated the tenacity of structural racism. Perhaps the most

appropriate commemoration of the original passage of the Voting

Rights Act, then, would be to see it as impetus for renewed federal

commitment to uprooting the different but still powerful racial

inequalities that persist today.

The Voting Rights Act

FiFty years ago Congress passed and President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law the Voting Rights Act.

Coming at a seminal moment in the civil rights movement, the Act ensured the right to vote as guaranteed in

the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution. Congress amended the Act reauthorizing

and extending its protections in 1970, 1975, 1982, 1992, and 2006. In the 2013 Shelby County decision, the

Supreme Court found unconstitutional one of the key enforcement provisions of the Act.

We asked three of our faculty who have expertise on voting and civil rights issues to give us their

analysis of what the Act means today.

oPiNioN …


From Selma to Shelby County in Three Generations

DANIEL R. ORTIZMichael J. and Jane r. horvitz Distinguished Professor of law

Director, supreme court litigation clinic


has developed in three

generations. The first began

with its enactment in 1965.

That generation focused on

immediate and direct burdens

on African-American voting,

outlawed practices like literacy

tests, and required many

jurisdictions in the South to

get approval from the U.S.

District Court in Washington, D.C., or the U.S. Department of

Justice before instituting any change in voting procedures. Everyone

understood who the practices’ victims were and most thought

these practices discriminatory and unjust. The Supreme Court

upheld the law from constitutional attack and it enjoyed bipartisan

support. Both the majority and minority leaders in the Senate, in

fact, sponsored it.

As those practices easiest to understand as racially discrimi-

natory fell, attention turned to less direct and obvious ways of

impairing minority groups’ voting power. During this second

generation, which stretched roughly from the early-1980s to the

late-2000s, voting rights litigation focused on practices that diluted

overall minority group voting strength while not barring individual

minority voter’s participation—practices like gerrymandering

and use of at-large, as opposed to single-member-district, voting

systems. These practices were less visibly discriminatory, more

difficult to evaluate, and could, in some cases at least, be thought to

promote good ends, like making every city council member respon-

sible to all of a city’s residents rather than just to those in a small

geographic area. Second-generation suits enjoyed less support in

the courts, particularly the Supreme Court, and engendered debate

in Congress about whether they led to a form of racial quotas. Still,

although opinion was more equivocal, the courts and Congress

approved wider application of the Voting Rights Act to reach many

practices and situations it did not before.

In 2009 the Supreme Court signaled the shift to the latest gen-

eration. In Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District No. 1 v. Holder,

a constitutional challenge to section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, one

of the Act’s two central sections, the Court noted that section 5 and

its closely related coverage provision “raise serious constitutional

questions” because they treat states differently based on 40-year-old

findings of past discrimination. And, although it ultimately held in

favor of the utility district on statutory grounds, the Court’s constitu-

tional rumblings sent a strong signal that unless Congress modified

the law, particularly its coverage formula, the Court would likely hold

it unconstitutional in the future. Many also saw the case as signal-

ing a broader change in how the Court would balance federalism

concerns against more diffuse burdens on group voting rights.

Congress did not revisit the law. The state-rights arguments

resonated with some more deeply than before and states were now

burdening individuals’ ability to vote in new ways that some argued

strengthened democracy. Increasingly, for example, jurisdictions are

enacting practices, like requiring certain forms of identification to

vote, and restricting early voting and voting registration windows,

that have disproportionate effects on different racial and political

groups for what the jurisdictions claim is good intent: preventing

voting fraud. One side argues that the disproportionate burdens

are the actual purpose and that little, if any fraud, is prevented. The

other side argues that any burdens are small and incidental and that

fraud is significantly reduced. The initial constitutional challenges

to these practices largely failed and hope turned to section 5.

Then in 2012 the Supreme Court revisited the constitutionality of

section 5 and its coverage provision. In Shelby County v. Holder, it

followed through on the warnings it had given three years before

and struck down section 5’s coverage provision on federalism

grounds. This effectively nullified one of the two central pillars

of the Voting Rights Act at a time when Congress is so politically

gridlocked that it would be unlikely to revisit the law.

The effective loss of section 5 will not lead states to reinstitute

their first-generation practices. They don’t need to. Those interested

have discovered other ways of achieving some of the same results

that can be more easily defended on both legal and democratic

grounds. The United States and others are now challenging some

of these practices in places like Texas and North Carolina through

section 2, the remaining pillar of the Voting Rights Act. But it is a

much more difficult path than section 5 was.

Will these challenges succeed? I’m not optimistic. That many

claim the new practices prevent voting fraud means the courts will

be less inclined to strike them down absent smoking-gun evidence

of invidious intent, which is always hard to find. And these new

laws’ partisan benefits to one side in our deadlocked political

system mean that Congress is unlikely to revise the Voting Rights

Act to address them.

oPiNioN …


The Voting Rights Act of 1965 in Historical Perspective

GEORGE RUTHERGLENJohn barbee Minor Distinguished Professor of law


of 1965 represented

the culmination of a long

struggle to make the right

to vote regardless of race

finally effective. The Fifteenth

Amendment guaranteed this

right upon its ratification

in 1870, but it took nearly a

century to provide adequate

means for enforcing it. Except

for a brief period in Reconstruction, the Fifteenth Amendment

had been observed more in the breach than in compliance. The

repeal of the federal statutes protecting voting rights, just as much

as Plessy v. Ferguson, marked the ascendancy of the regime of

Jim Crow.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was preceded by the Civil

Rights Act of 1957 and then the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The first

protected voting, but in a manner that was severely compromised

by leaving the burden of proof entirely on the government and

guaranteeing defendants a right to jury trial, which southern

officials could use to nullify the act. The 1964 Act stopped short

of protecting voting in any significant way, addressing mainly

discrimination in public accommodations, employment, and feder-

ally funded programs. The 1965 Act went far beyond these earlier

acts, essentially in switching the burden of proof to defendants,

in states that had historically denied the right to vote, to establish

that any change in their voting procedures did not result in further

discrimination. This “preclearance” evidence had to be presented

to the attorney general or the District Court for the District of

Columbia. This preclearance procedure was renewed repeatedly,

and the list of covered states and localities evolved, in a series of

extensions, the latest in 2006.

It was this last extension that was held invalid in Shelby

County v. Holder, a decision in which the Supreme Court found

that Congress had not done enough to update the evidence used to

identify covered jurisdictions subject to the preclearance require-

ment. Although this decision stopped short of invalidating the

preclearance procedure, it now requires Congress to re-examine

the evidence of persistent voting discrimination and re-enact the

provision identifying covered jurisdiction, a step that Congress is

not likely to take in the short term. For this reason, Shelby County

has been widely criticized, but the history of voting rights offers

two further reasons to be uneasy with the decision: first, the dif-

ficulty of enforcing voting rights without stringent procedures that

put the burden of compliance on potential violators; and second,

the need for congressional and judicial cooperation in putting

those procedures in place. The decision is a major step back from

recognizing what the historical record reveals and what the Voting

Rights Act of 1965 accomplished.

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