Law School Updates
UA Little Rock
University of Arkansas
William H. Bowen School of Law
School of Law
Dean Beiner
The Bowen Law School community hopes you and your loved ones are safe and healthy. While our building is quiet, Bowen students, faculty, and staff remain busy. Our students and professors have migrated to online learning environments and, like many of you, our staff has transitioned to working from home. During these difficult times, we’re focusing less on what we don’t have and more on what we do. Three new professors will be joining Bowen in the fall. Professor Aaron Schwabach joins us to teach the classes previously taught by Professor Lynn Foster, who retired from Bowen in January after 33 years of service. Professor Christopher Trudeau will teach Research, Writing & Advocacy, filling a vacancy created by professors’ departures and retirement. Finally, Rebecca Feldmann will be the inaugural director of our Veterans Legal Services Clinic and Veterans Pro Bono Services Center. We also have welcomed a new Assistant Dean for Admissions and Enrollment Management, Eruore Oboh. Three members of our faculty have been recognized for their excellence in teaching, scholarship and service. Associate Dean and Professor Terrence Cain has been honored for his teaching. Professor Cain is known for his high professional standards, which he imposes rigorously on students in his classroom. His students say he has shown them “what can be accomplished by taking a professional, detailed, and fearless approach to each aspect of our education.” Bowen has recognized Professor Nicholas Kahn-Fogel for his research and creative endeavors. Over the last five years, Professor Kahn-Fogel has co-authored a legal textbook on Torts and five of his articles have been accepted for publication in highly-regarded scholarly law journals. His legal scholarship pertaining to Africa has been recognized internationally. Professor Anastasia Boles received the faculty excellence award in public service. Professor Boles devotes her time, her skills, and her academic research to bringing attention to the important issues of racial disparity, cultural competency, and implicit bias. She shares this expertise on the local, state, and national level. We also have some incredible alumni. We are proud of December 2019 graduate Janelle Lilley Cline, who earned the top score on the February Arkansas Bar Exam. We were pleased to welcome home 1986 graduate Wiley Cavin, who returned to take a tour of the campus and donate $269,000, which will create the Wylie D. Cavin III Endowed Scholarship for Bowen students. Our Dean’s Conference Room has been named in his honor. Finally, many of our alumni have stepped forward during the last few months to help students, either through continuing summer clerkships or by making donations to alleviate the burden on students with financial needs. We thank you for your support.
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The Arkansas Lawyer
www.arkbar.com
Dean McCabe
When I was first planning this article, I was thinking that when this issue hit your mailbox we would be absorbed in graduation planning, events and recovery. Instead, we are absorbed in learning how to do all of our work—teaching, testing, helping students find jobs and prepare for the bar exam and graduating the Class of 2020—remotely. We are all adapting to these unusual practices, and I have been reminded repeatedly of the innovation, compassion, resilience and dedication of our students, faculty, staff and alumni. The week our courses were moved off campus, a student’s Tweet about his first online class went viral. The student was so entertained and inspired by his professor’s first remote lecture that he posted part of it to social media. As of this writing, the video has been viewed more than 903,000 times. A week later, our students who had planned to join Legal Aid of Arkansas for their annual Spring Break on the Road to Justice project moved their pro bono activities online. While they were unable to look their clients in the eye and reassure them in person, they were still able to provide intensive services to low-income Arkansans in remote and underserved areas. Students have also partnered with the Center for Arkansas Legal Services to help the agency develop a strategy to assist with evictions and foreclosures resulting from the consequences of coronavirus. The following week brought more change when one of our competition teams had to pivot from in-person transactional negotiations to online. They were clearly able to acclimate, as evidenced by taking first place in the 2020 Transactional LawMeet for their side of the negotiation. Our students are doing their best in an unprecedented situation, and I am proud of their hard work and sacrifice—particularly the Class of 2020, who did not get their traditional graduate awards ceremony, family reception and commencement ceremony. We typically take a photo of each incoming class at their 1L orientation and then take a similar one on the eve of their graduation. I have included their 1L photo in this update as a tribute to how far they have come and all they have accomplished.
