Duke Law Magazine, Summer 2020

Summer 2020 | Volume 39 Number 1

A semester like no other Duke Law responds to Covid-19

ALSO IN THIS ISSUE:

Clinics

Duke Law School’s 11 legal clinics enable students to hone invaluable practice skills, help close the justice gap for clients and communities in need, and cement a lifelong commitment to service.

From the Dean Dear Friends:

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Challenging moments like these often reveal the character of the people who are in the middle of them.

The Duke Law community has responded to these challenges with determination, courage, and compassion.

s lawyers, we often find ourselves in the middle of historic moments: landmark court battles; close, consequential elections; market-moving transactions. But this spring and summer, as we have faced not one, but two profound and destabilizing events at once, it has felt like the whole world is living through a historical moment of monumental importance.

The first, Covid-19, appeared at the beginning of the year, and by March had grown into the worst pandemic in a century. The shutdown of the global economy, which has left tens of millions of people out of work, has exacerbated inequalities that existed prior to the pandemic, creating widespread devastation and fear about the future. The second, the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police on May 25, led to mass demonstrations against police brutality and racial violence not seen in two generations.

What do these events have in common? The challenges they have created are universal. No one in the world is immune to the novel coronavirus, at least until we have a vaccine. And no one can ignore systemic racism and the need to reckon with how we have understood, tolerated, and contributed to it.

The response to Covid-19 at Duke was swift and aggressive. Thanks to contingency planning that began once the risk that the virus would disrupt the spring semester became clear, we were able to shift all of our instruction online in less than a week. Along with the university, we canceled our remaining spring semester events, including Reunion and graduation celebrations.

These were difficult and at times painful decisions that upended our students’ educations and lives, but they were necessary for the safety of our community. (Read more, page 2.)

The disruptions have not been limited to the spring, of course. Our summer educational programs moved online or were canceled, as was summer employment for our students. In close consultation with the university, we have been making plans for returning to teaching and learning in the fall semester. As this issue of Duke Law Magazine goes to press we are preparing to offer a “hybrid� model for fall classes, with some small courses taught in the building but the majority online, as the best public health projections anticipate that Covid-19 will remain a very serious health threat. Our priority will continue to be to

protect the health and safety of our entire community while also providing our students with an excellent learning experience.

Our response to the need to address systemic racism is only just beginning, and it will be a long-term process. We are at a crossroads as a nation, and I think it is important that we take the opportunity as a law school to look critically not only at our legal system but at ourselves. Black students and other students of color have told us about many painful experiences of feeling marginalized in our community. We need to commit ourselves to being worthy of the courage, generosity, and hope that it took to share those stories, and commit ourselves to genuine self-critique and change. As I wrote to Duke Law alumni in June, I want the Law School to be a place where people of all races, genders, and backgrounds can thrive, and I am committed to leading the listening, reflection, and action that are needed to ensure that happens.

It is fitting that this issue of Duke Law Magazine focuses on our clinical program. (Read more, page 34.)

Since the first law school clinic in the nation was established at Duke in the 1930s, clinics have enabled students to apply their knowledge and skills to real-life challenges on behalf of clients who are otherwise shut out of the legal system. This has been true even during this pandemic, which has disproportionately affected communities of color and the poor. Even after our clinic offices closed in March, our student-attorneys continued to use their skills to help others. It is one way that we teach students live up to the highest ideals of the legal profession, and prepare them for the next historic challenge to come.

Challenging moments like these often reveal the character of the people who are in the middle of them.

The Duke Law community has responded to these challenges with determination, courage, and compassion. We have seen students stepping forward to lead, demand change, and help each other succeed; faculty adapting to new circumstances and imparting their expertise on unsettling events; and staff working around the clock to provide support in response to unprecedented challenges. There have been many difficult days, and there will be more to come. But I am immensely proud to be a member of this community and grateful for its strength and support.

Thank you for your support of Duke Law School.

Warm Regards,

Kerry Abrams James B. Duke and Benjamin N. Duke Dean and Professor of Law

Contents

Summer 2020 Volume 39 Number 1 Dean

Kerry Abrams Executive Director of Communications

Andrew Park Editor

Frances Presma

Duke Law responds to Covid-19

A semester like no other

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Contributing writers

Claire Hermann Jeannie Naujeck Andrew Park Frances Presma Sean Rowe Art Direction & Design

Marc Harkness Illustration

Fabio Consoli Marc Harkness Nadya Noor Photography

Courtney Davis Melissa Sue Gerrits Chris Hildreth Colin Huth Ken Huth Jared Lazarus Jay Mallin Megan Mendenhall Rachel Mwombela Sean Rowe Les Todd Leigh Vogel Web production

Maria Bajgain Madeeha Khan Valerie Marino Michael Wright Sean Rowe Alumni Notes Editor

Janse Haywood

Duke Law Magazine is published under the auspices of the Office of the Dean, Duke University Law School, 210 Science Drive, Box 90362, Durham, NC 27708

This publication was produced using paper which supports Duke’s commitment to sustaining our environment.

Duke Law School’s 11 legal clinics enable students to hone invaluable practice skills, help close the justice gap for clients and communities in need, and cement a lifelong commitment to service.

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Dean’s Message 2 The Commons 16 Faculty Focus 51 Profiles 57 Alumni Notes 63 In Memoriam 64 Sua Sponte

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The Commons

Illustration: Fabio Consoli

Ideas, achievements, and events from around Duke Law School

Duke Law responds to Covid-19

A semester like no other As the scale and scope of the novel coronavirus became known in early March, the Law School moved quickly to transition to remote instruction and operations.

By Jeannie Naujeck 2

Duke Law Magazine • Summer 2020

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n early March, when the proliferation of the novel coronavirus in the United States was quickly becoming apparent, Duke Law School students had just begun their spring break.

Scattered around the country and the world, few would have been aware of the extraordinary measures being taken to protect the Duke and Duke Law communities and continue their teaching, research, and service missions in the face of a growing pandemic.

But by the time they returned to Durham or their hometowns the following week, the university and the Law School were focused on responding to Covid-19: transitioning to online learning for the remainder of the semester; canceling, postponing, or virtualizing events; moving staff in every department to a fully at-home work environment; and expanding resources to assist students through unprecedented upheaval in their personal and academic lives.

Law School administrators began contingency planning for operational disruptions well before Duke University’s official announcement on March 10 that on-campus classes and events would be suspended. Because mobilization began early, Duke Law

students were able to resume classes online on the Monday following spring break, as originally scheduled, while other units of the university delayed classes an extra week. To keep the semester’s continuity for students, many faculty and staff members interrupted their spring break to prepare to shift teaching to remote platforms — “a logistical and technological challenge unlike anything we have ever attempted,” James B. Duke and Benjamin N. Duke Dean Kerry Abrams later wrote the Law School community.

“Navigating this uncharted territory has required immense amounts of expertise, hard work, flexibility, and teamwork from our faculty and staff.

It has also demanded extraordinary patience, resilience, and engagement from our students.”

Abrams Indeed, in the days that followed, the Duke Law community stepped up to the challenge. Staff worked quickly to contact vendors regarding event changes, clinics assured clients that case work would continue, and student groups began devising ways to conduct pro bono and other extracurricular activities remotely. By Monday, March 16, the Law School building was largely vacated and most faculty members — with help, hardware, and software from the Academic Technologies staff — were ready to employ online teaching tools such as Zoom, Sakai, Panopto, and Box, many from home or other remote locations.

Remote teaching leads to new ways of engaging with course material While the shift to remote learning was not without technical hurdles, many faculty members were pleasantly surprised by the ease of using online platforms such as Zoom to conduct classes with students logging in around the globe — from Durham apartments to a family kiwi farm in New Zealand. But it meant adapting teaching methods to a virtual classroom, something few had experienced before.

“My colleagues and I needed to be creative with our pedagogy, of course,” said Candace M. Carroll and Leonard B. Simon Professor of Law Lisa Kern Griffin, who taught Criminal Procedure and a seminar, Lying and the Law of Questioning, in the spring semester. Griffin provided students more information in advance of class sessions, added more visual and video breaks to presentations, incorporated more hypotheticals and questions that created clear opportunities for students to enter the discussion, and made use of “breakout rooms” to give students time to check in with each other. She said she was “enor-

mously impressed” with students’ efforts to continue engaging with the material and grateful for their strong attendance.

“It takes a lot of energy to teach into a camera without the sense of collective endeavor that comes from a room full of people,” Griffin said. “But I also think there are ways in which we have grown closer. I am certainly more open and vulnerable with my students, and we have begun a conversation that will last long after classes end about our shared future and the role of lawyers on ‘the other side.’”

Professor H. Jefferson Powell said that while he found Zoom easy to use, he missed the emotional connection and instant feedback of the classroom and tried to compensate by increasing communication through daily follow-up emails and sharing office-hour conversations of general interest. Powell taught Constitutional Law to 72 first-year students and worked with 11 third-year students in the First Amendment Clinic, which he directed.

“I greatly admire the way my students adapted to the drastic changes they are dealing with,” Powell said.

Farrah Bara ’20 called Duke Law professors “angels” for maintaining a sense of normalcy in highly abnormal circumstances. “They are doing a phenomenal job of making us feel like things are as normal as they could be,” she said in a March interview with Law.com. “They are encouraging us to do virtual office hours and talking about where we are and how we’re doing. That has been really nice.”

In her Remedies course, Professor Marin Levy used Zoom as an opportunity to invite scholars she admires as guests in class, including a distinguished group of faculty from other top law schools who engaged with her students on the topic of qualified immunity.

“ The shared camaraderie in a moment like that can lead to an even more meaningful intellectual experience.”

— Professor Marin Levy observed that her children’s occasional appearances in her class helped put everyone at ease.

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“In a normal class we would read excerpts of scholarship, but aside from perhaps having one or two authors come to class or Skype during the semester, we wouldn’t have much engagement with them directly,” Levy said. “In this way, I think it’s made the community of scholars feel closer. And it’s been something special for the students. As challenging as things are, I think what we’ve done in the classroom has been a tremendous experience for all of us.”

Levy added that the glimpses into off-campus lives afforded by technology in many ways brought greater intimacy and connection. With both she and her husband, Lanty L. Smith ’67 Professor of Law Joseph Blocher, teaching from home, their children, Ben, 6, and Sam, 4, occasionally made cameo appearances on screen. Sam drew laughs from a class when he interrupted to ask for help getting dressed.

“I had an absolutely wonderful conversation with several students in office hours on the complex relationship between rights and remedies, and I think at least part of that can be attributed to the fact that it felt like we were in someone’s living room,” Levy said. “We were all just comfortably exchanging ideas, and I think the shared camaraderie in a moment like that can lead to an even more meaningful intellectual experience.”

One spring semester class, Well-Being and the Practice of Law, took on particular relevance. The class, taught by Senior Lecturing Fellow Daniel Bowling ’80, helps students develop skills such as resilience, learned optimism, avoidance of catastrophic thinking, and strategies for navigating isolation and loneliness.

“Each class has a writing assignment afterwards, and they became increasingly personal and moving throughout the last few weeks, as students found the practices taught in the first few weeks are more than theoretical concepts but of great applicability during these trying times,” said Bowling. “Several have said this was the right course at the right time.”

Cancellations and “virtualizations” In accordance with university policy restricting all on- and off-campus events and activities, Law School events such as 1L Blueprint for Success, Admitted Students Open House, and Reunion, as well as all in-person conferences, symposia, workshops, visits, and tours were canceled or postponed. However, faculty, staff, and administrators moved quickly to “virtualize” any organization meetings, faculty workshops, guest lectures, and other special events that could be conducted via online platforms. Prospective members of the Class of 2023 were even able to share their excitement and have questions about Duke Law answered at the virtual 2020 Admitted Students Open House on March 27.

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“ We need each other now more than ever.” — Dean Kerry Abrams Duke Law-sponsored summer programs were adapted to accommodate restrictions on in-person gatherings. While Duke Law’s Pre-Law Undergraduate Scholars Program (PLUS) was canceled, the Duke-Leiden Institute in Global and Transnational Law, a required program for rising 2Ls pursuing an LLM in international and comparative law concurrently with their JD, was presented online to allow students to gain credits needed for graduation. This year’s D.C. Summer Institute on Law and Policy is also taking place online, with live virtual courses and special events and faculty available for one-on-one counseling sessions. The JD/ LLM in Law and Entrepreneurship program altered its 1L Summer Immersion session, with the course component taught online by Clinical Professor Erika Buell, the program director, and the experiential component in Silicon Valley postponed.

The new policy also meant the postponement of University Commencement and the Law School Convocation. Duke University President Vincent Price announced plans for an online celebration called “Marking the Moment: Duke Class of 2020” held May 10 in addition to an in-person Commencement ceremony in the next academic year. Associate Dean for Admissions and Student Affairs William Hoye and Assistant Dean for Student Affairs Lewis Hutchison, Jr. addressed the Duke Law Class of 2020 in a joint message, sharing in their disappointment at not being able to celebrate the culmination of three years at Duke Law, but reminding graduating students that the friendships and memories formed during their time at Duke remain.

“You may not have a ceremony marking it just yet, but you still have the memories — and you still have each other,” they said. “You still have the great relationships you formed in this tight-knit community. You have the shared highs and lows that naturally came with this rigorous experience. Even with a postponed graduation ceremony, you still have the experiences that you all have shared together.”

Classes moved to credit/no credit grading Acknowledging the extraordinary circumstances of the spring and the differing burdens felt by students, the Law School moved to a mandatory credit/no credit grading system for all spring semester classes except Legal Analysis, Research, and Writing, for which students could elect to receive a grade. The decision was reached with the unanimous support of the faculty members of the Curriculum Committee, Abrams wrote in a message to students, as well as consideration of more than 300 comments solicited from students and research on potential American Bar Association, state bar, and regulatory implications.

“Fundamental to our decision is our conviction that what makes Duke Law School great is our strong sense of mutual support and community,” Abrams said.

“The reality is that we are all being affected by the Covid-19 pandemic in different ways, some more dramatically than others. Many more will be affected in the weeks to come. A grading system that levels the playing field for all seems the most just, equitable, and compassionate.”

Abrams assured students that faculty and staff would make extraordinary efforts to advocate for all students for summer and permanent employment, including public interest positions and clerkships. Duke Law is not alone: As of April 6, every top 14 law school had moved to pass/fail grading for the spring semester, according to Above the Law. Shortly after the grading change was announced, James Coleman, Jr., the John S. Bradway Professor of the Practice of Law, emailed his Criminal Law class.

New resources developed for students included: A SUMMER RESEARCH ASSISTANT POOL through which about 60 students who did not have summer positions or were going to organizations that canceled their summer programs were able to work in paid positions with faculty or as interns with other Law School and university organizations; Professor James Coleman in his home office

Knowing some students would be concerned about the decision and its bearing on their careers, he offered reflections on his last semester of college in 1970, when student protests against the Vietnam War and the draft roiled campuses across the nation, culminating with the killing of four Kent State students by the Ohio National Guard. Many universities either canceled the spring semester or made classes pass/fail.

“As I was about to graduate, we had no idea what was going to happen, but the country seemed to be falling apart,” Coleman wrote. “Nevertheless we survived, and looking back there is hardly anything I remember about the courses I took and the grades I didn’t get that semester. In many ways, the upheaval and anxiety of that spring contributed significantly to our education; it turned some of us into life-long activists.”

Coleman said the decision to move to credit/no credit would have “no effect” on their careers, adding that most employers would understand and “you likely don’t want to work for those who aren’t understanding.”

OCI postponed, career and personal support expanded The economic disruption from the Covid-19 pandemic and its impact on legal employment remains to be seen. Consistent with other top law schools, Duke has postponed on-campus interviewing (OCI) with Segment I — generally larger law firms — that ordinarily would have taken place this summer until, most likely, early 2021. The decision was based on extensive conversations with employers and alumni who indicated they would not be able to determine their hiring needs for summer or full-time employment until the new year, said Bruce Elvin ’93, associate dean and director of the Career & Professional Development Center.

The changed circumstances give law schools an opportunity to reimagine traditional ways of doing things, he noted. For instance, even as law firms may look to recruit in 2021, some organizations — particularly government agencies or nonprofit organizations that often hire through Duke’s Government & Public Interest OCI Segment — may be in a position to hire 2L or 3L students on campus in fall 2020. The Law School will remain flexible to meet the needs of all employers and students who may be interested in them, he emphasized.

In an April 6 message, Abrams told students that the Career Center and Law School were identifying opportunities to enable first- and second-year students to continue to develop skills that will benefit their legal careers and fill in gaps that may occur in summer employment this year as many summer positions will be shortened or involve varying amounts of remote work. Many of these were made available to graduating students as well.

A SUMMER SUCCESS DASHBOARD compiling enrichment offerings from Duke and other providers to guide students in creating self-directed study programs, including opportunities for experiential learning, interactive workshops, and virtual internships; The continuation through the summer of some DUKE LAW PRO BONO PROJECTS that normally only operate during the school year and potential new opportunities for students to collaborate with alumni on pro bono work;

VIRTUAL COFFEE CHATS with alumni, CAREER WEBINARS, and

EMPLOYER SPOTLIGHT EVENTS

for students who want to network.

With graduating students also facing the possibility of delayed employment start dates and July bar exams postponed in a number of states, Abrams reaffirmed Duke Law career counselors’ ongoing commitment to assist those with altered employment plans, including those in LLM programs.

All Law School students are also eligible for new Duke University initiatives to assist undergraduate, graduate, and professional students facing mental, emotional, and financial hardship due to the pandemic, including Blue Devils Care, a free 24-hour mental telehealth service, and the Duke Student Assistance Fund to help pay for such needs as living expenses, emergency travel, and technology for online learning.

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Zack Kaplan ’21 is grateful for the support he received from the Duke Law community when he became ill with Covid-19.

“Most employers are going to be operating in a very different way than they normally do, so the experiences you have with them will be different from the norm, and those you miss out on will be less important,” she said. “Just as grades would not have had the same meaning as usual this spring, this summer will be remembered by all as an extraordinary circumstance in which no one expects ‘business as usual.’”

Community shows its strength in uncertain times In a message to students, Abrams praised students, faculty, and staff for nurturing the Law School’s culture of collegiality and support throughout the spring’s unprecedented upheaval of personal, academic, and working routines.

“I am so proud of how everyone in our community has pulled together. Indeed, in this time of challenge and uncertainty, everyone in the Duke Law community seems to recognize the importance of maintaining our strong bonds,” she wrote.

“Engagement with each other on a personal level is a hallmark of our culture, and we will have to be creative about nurturing these connections, even over many miles.

We need each other now more than ever.”

The disruption was particularly acute for international students, especially for those worried about far-away family but compelled by global travel advisories to remain in Durham. Even so, some marked joyous life milestones, said Jennifer Maher ’83, associate dean for International Studies, who kept in close contact with international students and helped them navigate frequently-changing guidelines for study and travel. Taka Kitagawa LLM ’20 missed the March 11 birth of his daughter but was finally able to reunite with his newly-expanded family in Japan a month later. And Saeed Al Darmaki LLM ’20 and his expectant wife Mariam remained in Durham rather than fly to the United Arab Emirates; they welcomed a daughter on April 3. Both emailed Maher within hours of the births to share their happy news.

Professor Donald Beskind LLM ’77 said students in his Evidence class not only showed remarkable engagement in class and virtual office hours, but many reached out with concern for his personal well-being.

“One thing that particularly impressed me was the number of students who contacted me offering to help with shopping or other things since I am in the ‘at risk’ category,” he said. “Duke students are the best. Thankfully, everyone in my family has been helping, but to know people were out there willing to help reminded me of why I love teaching at Duke.”

Zack Kaplan ’21 said he received extraordinary emotional support from the Duke community during his two-week bout with Covid-19, which he developed after a spring break trip to Alaska. Associate Dean for Academic Affairs Liz 6

Duke Law Magazine • Summer 2020

Gustafson ’86 maintained continuous contact on behalf of the administration and Professors Doriane Coleman and Charles Dunlap, Jr., with whom he has never had classes, reached out to offer support.

While professors, classmates, and clinic and externship supervisors were “extremely understanding” and encouraged him to focus on recovery throughout his two-week isolation period, Kaplan was able to continue online classes and participation in the Children’s Law Clinic and an externship with North Carolina Supreme Court Justice Mark Davis MJS ’18. After recovering, he made up missed hours and fulfilled requirements by the end of the final exam period.

Kaplan also donated plasma for use in an experimental treatment for other Covid-19 patients.

“The outpouring of care from the Law School community was really uplifting and encouraging, and I hope that we can all show that same support to all students and community members, whether we know that they are ill or not,” Kaplan said.

“The fact of the matter is that we’re all impacted by this pandemic in one way or another — some of us will get sick, others will care for people who get sick, and even those with no direct connection will face personal, professional, and financial hardships. We all have an obligation, then, to do whatever we can to take good care of the people in our lives and communities right now. The incredible care and support that I received from the Law School community, shared broadly, is in my mind the most important ingredient in our collective recovery from this crisis.” d

“ It’s an enormous change to see women in numbers on law reviews and heading law reviews.

It’s one of the things that makes me optimistic about the future.”

Illustration: Marc Harkness

— Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Duke Law hosts D.C. event honoring women’s advancement in legal profession and at helm of journals

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pening a remarkable conference she described as a “love letter” to future women lawyers, Dean Kerry Abrams praised the editors-in-chief of 16 top law journals who had initiated the event and charged them with carrying on work to advance women’s rights that was begun 100 years ago.

“It is you, the students, who are our future,” Abrams said in her opening remarks at the “Honoring Women’s Advancement in Law” conference held Feb. 3 at the Duke in D.C. offices. “In the next 50 years, it is you who will decide the jurisprudence of gender equality. So this event is our love letter to you. It reflects both our pride in your achievements and our hope for what you will do.”

The daylong event marked a singular achievement: On the centennial of the ratification of 19th Amendment, women occupied the editor-in-chief slot, a prestigious peer-selected leadership position, of the flagship law journals at the 16 top-ranked law schools in America. All but one of the women attended the conference, which was packed with distinguished speakers including feminist icon and Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, an early architect of litigation challenging gender discrimination.

“It’s not just an honor but a great responsibility to be the EIC of a law review,” Abrams said. “For all 16 of these schools to have chosen women is a really unusual and special occasion. But it’s not an accident. The 19th Amendment put into motion the right for women to vote, to serve on juries, and to run for office, and it created the progress that has led to the circumstances that we now have today.”

To commemorate the historical moment, the 16 EICs also collaborated on a special joint publication called Women & Law, a collection of 14 essays by prominent women in the legal community, including Abrams, the James B. Duke and Benjamin N. Duke Dean of the School of Law and professor of law, who contributed an essay titled “Family, Gender, and Leadership in the Legal Profession.”

The idea for the joint journal was conceived by Duke Law Journal editor-in-chief Farrah Bara ’20, and championed by Professor Marin Levy, after watching women

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The editors in chief, front row, from left: Ela Leshem, Yale; Alveena Shah, UCLA; Noor Hasan, Berkeley; Maia Cole, NYU; Farrah Bara, Duke; Nicole Collins, Stanford; Lauren Beck, Harvard. Back row, from left: Christina Wu, Texas; Laura Toulme, UVA; Annie Prossnitz, Northwestern; Emily Vernon, Chicago; Lauren Kloss, Cornell; Gabriella Ravida, Penn; Grace Paras, Georgetown; Sarah McDonald, Michigan; and Andrea Gonzalez, UCLA. Not pictured: Mary Marshall, Columbia

sweep the top 16 schools’ law review elections in January 2019 — a watershed moment that was not repeated when their terms ended.

“At the time that our journals were created, they were run entirely by men,” said Bara. “This event celebrates the fact that at least that much has changed.

“But it’s also not a secret that a lot of us sit on top of mastheads that are deeply unbalanced in terms of race, gender, and ethnicity, and that our successors will be white males. So while we have achieved a significant milestone, it’s clear that there is still a lot of work that remains. What we need are continuing and consistent efforts.”

Bara moderated a panel discussion with four of her fellow editors-in-chief in the 2019-2020 academic year on the challenges they faced in overcoming stereotypes of law review leadership, comparisons to previous editors, differing communication and leadership styles between men and women, and gender-based expectations.

Said Bara: “This job is a lot about giving, but if you’re too much of a giver it may be associated with your role as a woman as opposed to your role as a leader and that is a tension I’ve seen.”

Those expectations are amplified for women of color, some of the panelists noted.

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“Finding that balance of making myself available without having all of my time taken up with mentorship conversations, or just the additional uncompensated labor that people expect from women and from women of color, was a very difficult balance,” said Noor-ul-ain Hasan, who led the California Law Review.

Gabriella Ravida, editor-in-chief of the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, noted that she was only the second Black woman to have held that post in the journal’s 169-year history.

“While this celebration felt so momentous and wonderful, with it came this responsibility of making sure that this door can continue to open the same way for people like me. What can we do to challenge the status quo and use this moment to do that? What better time to ring the alarm for other women to something similar?”

Inspiring ongoing progress The other four panels featured prominent jurists, practitioners, legal scholars, and members of the academy, including nine law school deans.

Panelists included Catharine MacKinnon, a visiting professor of law at Harvard Law School and feminist legal scholar whom Abrams credited with conceiving

“ This job is a lot about giving, but if you’re too much of a giver it may be associated with your role as a woman as opposed to your role as a leader.”

— Farrah Bara ’20

the concept of sexual harassment; Judy Perry Martinez, president of the American Bar Association; Neal Katyal, partner at Hogan Lovells and former acting solicitor general; and a panel of federal jurists that included Justice Ginsburg, who argued six landmark cases against gender discrimination before the U.S. Supreme Court and served on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit before she was appointed to the Court in 1993.

Justice Ginsburg called the women’s EIC sweep “a good beginning,” and recounted how, when she entered Harvard Law School in 1956, its law review included only two women.

“I have a picture of my second year and it shows all these men — and two small women in the crowd. It’s an enormous change to see women in numbers on law reviews and heading law reviews. It’s one of the things that makes me optimistic about the future.”

Moderated by Neil Siegel, the David W. Ichel Professor of Law and Ginsburg’s former clerk, the panel of jurists also included Judge Pamela Harris of the U.S Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, and Judges Nina Pillard and Sri Srinivasan of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. The four focused on the importance of diversity on the bench and discussed how each had been a beneficiary of it — but also how it improves the quality of decision-making.

“It’s hard to be what you can’t see,” Srinivasan said, recounting his path from becoming a U.S. citizen at age 23 to federal judge at age 46.

“And when you see it, you feel that you can be it.” He credited Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, the first woman appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court, with helping him overcome “impostor syndrome” as a clerk.

He said that in hiring, “I’m cognizant of getting a mix of people who are going to challenge each other.”

Harris said that sitting alongside male colleagues on the bench has helped educate them on how even women at the highest levels of achievement are sometimes treated as inferiors. “[They’ve] seen me be treated differently because I’m a woman,” Harris said. “And it’s important to me that they see it because it’s a surprise to them, sometimes, to see that we’re not always entitled to the same presumption of competence. And it has changed the way they might understand what is a credible or plausible claim of sex discrimination.”

Justice Ginsburg noted that last year was the first time the Supreme Court had equal numbers of male and female law clerks and praised Justice Brett Kavanaugh for hiring an all-woman crew.

When she was seeking a clerkship as a new law school graduate and young parent, she recalled, “there were precious few who would take a chance on a woman. No one would take a chance on the mother of a four-year-old. Now it’s not at all unusual for law clerks to be parents, both women and men. And my colleagues have seen that they can do the job perfectly well. That change has been important.”

Capping off the day, Justice Ginsburg marveled at the range of careers, including entrepreneurship, that are now open to women with law degrees, such as her granddaughter, who graduated from Harvard Law School three years ago.

“Any field in the law that she wants to pursue, she would not face a closed door,” she said. “There’s never been a better time to enter the legal profession. My faith is in the young people.”

The “Honoring Women’s Advancement in Law” conference was sponsored by Duke’s Program in Public Law. d

Meet Farrah Bara ’20

F

arrah Bara is from Richmond, Texas, the daughter of Jordanian immigrants and a first generation college student.

She majored in Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, where she led the Texas Speech Team, as captain, to its first team national championship in 14 years. She also won 10 individual national championships in public speaking events.

At Duke Law, where she was editor-inchief of the Duke Law Journal, Bara won the 2019 Dean’s Cup moot court competition with Luke Morgan ’19 and served on the executive boards of the Moot Court Board and the Mock Trial Board, and as president of the Middle East & North African Law Students Association. In the Appellate Litigation Clinic she worked with a student team to draft briefs to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals. She also volunteered as a speech coach and with Lawyers 4 Literacy.

Bara will work at Williams & Connolly in Washington, D.C., before clerking on the Fifth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals in the 2021-22 term and on the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas in the 2022-23 term. d

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“ We surely don’t have all of the answers but we have settled on some lessons. We will teach our students to press forward, because there is no real alternative. We will teach them to challenge unjust laws because, as Frederick Douglass said, ‘power concedes nothing without demand.’ We will inspire them to harness their outrage and energy into new and better policies. We will underscore that when law enforcement chokes the life from a helpless individual, it is past time to question what the law is and who it serves.”

— Professor Trina Jones and co-author Kimberly Jade Norwood of the Washington University in St. Louis School of Law, acknowledging that as law professors and Black Americans they are struggling with what to teach their students about law and justice. (Medium, June 15, 2020)

Notable &Quotable

Reflections on racial justice and police reform

“ It’s true that these protests seem to be very different. It’s galvanizing a group of young, multi-racial people who are saying enough is enough.

But it’s not going to change if it doesn’t lead to legislation at the state level, as well as at the federal level.”

— Professor Guy-Uriel Charles, noting that current protests against police violence towards Black people are reminiscent of the protests that led to passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, but will lead to change only if people overcome many recently enacted barriers to voting. (Here and Now, June 5, 2020)

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“ The work of improving justice is never truly done. Justice is not an achievement.

It is a practice. As we change and grow as a society, our understanding of justice changes and grows and expands. And our courts must do the same. “ We must come together to firmly and loudly commit to the declaration that all people are created equal, and we must do more than just speak that truth. We must live it every day in our courtrooms. My pledge to you today is that we will.”

— Professor Brandon Garrett, who recently coauthored a slate of policing reform measures to be implemented at the federal, state, and local levels, said meaningful change to policing and racial justice demands a reconsideration of the criminal justice system as a whole, not piecemeal reform.

(Spectrum News 1, June 12, 2020)

Photo: Melissa Sue Gerrits/The Fayetteville Observer via AP

— N.C. Chief Justice Cherie Beasley MJS ’18, speaking at a June 2 press conference on the intersection of the justice system and the protests occurring in cities and communities across North Carolina in which she noted that much of the pain expressed “is grounded in the belief that justice is perpetually denied in cases involving African Americans.”

“ We need to look beyond police — at prosecutors, at court clerks, at the judges that make bail determinations.

There has been justifiable protest at the way people have been kept in jail just because they don’t have money for minor crimes — they don’t have money to pay bail bondsmen.”

“The real monuments to these kinds of movements aren’t the placards at the corners of streets. ... They are the laws that come as a process of translating movements into political power and political change that makes it better structurally for everyone on this issue.”

— Professor Darrell Miller, speaking during a Duke Law virtual event titled “Policing in America: How did we get here and where do we go?” on the current state of policing with an emphasis on how policies and biases impact communities of color, pointed to political participation as a key mechanism for change. (July 9, 2020)

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Feb. 28-29, 2020

25th Annual National Security Law Conference

Dunlap

Center on Law, Ethics and National Security

25th LENS conference continues focus on national security and military law

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uke Law’s 25th annual National Security Law Conference began on Feb. 28 with a keynote speech by the editor-in-chief of the Tallinn Manual on the International Law Applicable to Cyber Warfare, who described how and when offensive cyber operations violate a nation’s sovereignty. Immediately afterwards, a panel of experts from the military and academia discussed legal challenges implicated by the use of drones domestically, humanitarian operations involving military forces, the latest developments in the International Criminal Court, and the prospect of war in outer space. And that was all before lunch.

Maj. Gen. Charles Dunlap, Jr. (USAF Ret.), the executive director of the Center on Law, Ethics and National Security (LENS) and a professor of the practice of law, crafted an agenda for the two-day conference that showcased the dynamism of national security law as a field shaped by an ever-evolving set of interrelated challenges and strategies. Many of them are driven by rapid-fire technological innovation, reflected in discussions of social media, surveillance, the use of technology both to enable terrorism and fight it, and how some nations have utilized it in coercive campaigns against state adversaries that fall short of acts of war. Featured speakers included Lt. Gen.

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Charles W. Pede, the judge advocate general of the U.S. Army, whose talk addressed the important role legal advisors have to help their clients find clarity — or at least confidence — to perform their mission, and Lt. Gen. Charles Hooper, the director of the Defense Security Cooperation Agency, whose talk was titled “Security Cooperation and the Rule of Law.” Also featured: Maj. Gen. Dana Pittard (USA, Ret.) and Master Sgt. Wes Bryant (USAF, Ret.), authors of a book detailing how airpower was incorporated into the ground-level operations in the U.S. fight against ISIS. As always, registration for the conference filled quickly with attorneys from government and the private sector — including military lawyers — judges, students of law and other disciplines, and members of the public.

“I think it’s the best national security legal conference in the country,” said David Hoffman ’93, director of security policy and global privacy officer at Intel Corp., who teaches Informational Privacy and Government Surveillance Law at Duke Law and is a professor of the practice at the Sanford School of Public Policy. A former member of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Data Privacy and Integrity Advisory Committee and chair of an advisory

panel on civil liberties and privacy for the director of the National Security Agency (NSA), Hoffman joined a panel on social media and national security, and noted that senior executives and attorneys from Intel, a longtime sponsor, also attended. He lauded the high level of military participation in the conference and Dunlap’s “tremendous focus” on including students. “For people who are really interested in exploring the development of the underlying issues, there isn’t any better conference.”

Silliman

Fulfilling founder’s vision to inform, teach Few were thinking about advanced technologies like cyberwarfare and the use of drones when LENS hosted its first conference in 1995. Just two years prior, Professor Robinson O. Everett LLM ’59, the former chief judge on the U.S. Court of Military Appeals (now the Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces) and a noted authority on the Uniform Code of Military Justice, had established the center at Duke to support teaching and scholarship on national security topics. Scott Silliman, professor emeritus of the practice of law and director emeritus of LENS, offered a tribute to Everett at the conference, saying that Everett’s “contagious enthusiasm” persuaded him to retire from his long career as an Air Force judge advocate in 1993 and join the Duke Law faculty. He also recalled the center’s early partnership on conferences and curricula with the Center for National Security Law at the University of Virginia, which was led by one of Everett’s former students, John Norton Moore ’62.

Silliman, now deputy chief judge of the United States Court of Military Commission Review, said that Everett aimed, from the outset, to “inform the debate” on national security issues through LENS programming and conferences, not to promote a particular point of view, and he and Dunlap tried to adhere to that vision. “This center has come a distance since 1993,” Silliman said. “All along the path of growth of this center and these conferences, Robinson Everett was steering.” Noting that Everett, who died in 2009, received many accolades and honors, Silliman said he primarily cherished his mentor’s humility: “I never met a kinder, gentler, warmer person than Robinson Everett.”

Sparking interest, advancing careers In addition to organizing center programming at Duke Law throughout the academic year, Dunlap also enthusiastically embraces the mission of teaching and mentoring students interested in careers in national security and military law, both in the public and private sectors.

A prolific writer and commentator, Dunlap teaches and writes in areas including the law of armed conflict, the use of force under international law, civil-military relations, military justice, and ethical issues arising in the practice of national security law. Other offerings in the field include courses relating to cyberwar and cybercrime taught by LENS’ inaugural Robinson Everett Distinguished Fellow Shane Stansbury, a former federal prosecutor who successfully led major cases involving terrorism, cybercrime, and espionage, and a comprehensive range of courses on international and foreign relations law, constitutional law, the executive branch, and the federal courts.

Indeed, the Law School is one of the few institutions that can boast the curriculum and faculty expertise essential to a full understanding of national security law broadly, Dunlap said: “We have it all at Duke.” And while he speaks with pride of his many former students who have entered the JAG Corps and government service, he points out that most of his students are bound for the private sector.

“We try to orient them towards these issues so that they would be uniquely equipped, in the private sector or in clerkships, to address them as they arise,” he said, noting that many national security leaders, particularly political appointees, come from law firms and industry. “In a way we are thinking about students 10, 15 years down the road, in whom we might have lit a flame that will spark their interest. Maybe they are even just keeping up with the issues from time to time so that when the opportunity does arise, they will be disposed to serve and feel comfortable taking those opportunities.”

Having entered law school with a strong interest in a military law career, Capt.

Kara Iskenderian ’18, now stationed at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas, said she could not have realized her goals without the support and guidance she found at Duke. “Gen. Dunlap, my peers, and many other professors taught me an enormous amount about law, but, more importantly shaped my broader understanding of who I am as a person and as a lawyer,” said Iskenderian, who attended the February conference.

Ben Kastan JD/LLM ’12 also found that studying national security and military law at Duke helped confirm his interest in practicing in the area and then secure a position at the NSA through its Honors Attorney Program. Kastan, now the agency’s assistant general counsel for cyber, also credits the opportunity he found at Duke to pursue an LLM in international and comparative law concurrently with his JD, study at the Law School’s summer institute in transnational law in Geneva, and conduct research on U.K. counterterrorism law at the Irish Center for Human Rights in Galway. “Having that sort of background in comparative law was incredibly helpful to working in a field that is inherently global,” he said.

Kastan took part in a panel discussion at the LENS conference on law, technology, and the future of surveillance as well as a Feb. 27 pre-conference career session for students who aspire to enter national security and military careers directly after law school. “My primary message was for them to follow their passions and interests to the greatest extent possible, but that there are a lot of ways to get to the same place,” he said, noting that many of his NSA colleagues started their careers in private practice, others in the military, and some in federal civilian service.

The panel is one of several chances for students to engage with practitioners that Dunlap builds into the event each year. And it’s not just Duke students: The LENS Scholars Program, launched in 2018, enabled 46 students from 25 law schools to attend the conference this year and develop professional contacts.

Funded through targeted donations, the program covers visiting students’ registration and meals and subsidizes their travel and lodging expenses. Duke student volunteers partner with Dunlap in arranging off-hours events.

“We aim to bring together young people from different institutions, students who have similar interests and who can make connections in a way that would be impossible otherwise,” Dunlap said. “Many of them are at law schools that don’t have these opportunities. And Duke Law should be a destination law school for people interested in this area, writ large.” d Duke Law Magazine • Summer 2020

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alter Dellinger, the Douglas B. Maggs Professor Emeritus of Law, told Duke Law School’s 2020 graduates that they “are challenged to be a part of a special time” when he addressed them during a virtual celebration on May 9.

“You have an unparalleled opportunity to help lead us out from a dark period and to think about what fundamental changes need to be made to our way of living, our way of being, and our way of governance,” Dellinger said Dellinger, a renowned Supreme Court advocate, former assistant U.S. attorney general and head of the Office of Legal Counsel, and former acting U.S. solicitor general. A member of the Duke Law faculty for more than 50 years, he also assured them that no correlation exists between law school grades and professional and personal fulfillment and that each of them can commit to being an ethical lawyer and a good person.

“The great qualities of being a lawyer are, by and large, qualities that you can conscientiously adopt,” he said. “That is, having good moral values, being conscientious and having the capacity for hard work, having a willingness to support and assist the work of others who are your peers, a respect for the dignity of every single person who works in your institution no matter what their role may be in the organization, a quality of empathy for those who are unlike yourself.”

Kerry Abrams, the James B. Duke and Benjamin N. Duke Dean of the School of Law and professor of law, hosted the celebration of the Class of 2020, which was held online after the pandemic forced a postponement of their planned convocation ceremony in Cameron Indoor Stadium and included a “name crawl” of all the graduates. She noted that the graduates, their family members, professors, and supporters had logged on from all over the nation and the world.

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Among the 206 JD graduates honored, 24 had also completed requirements for the LLM in international and comparative law and seven were also receiving the LLM in law and entrepreneurship.

Ninety internationally trained lawyers had completed the requirements for the LLM and two attorneys were receiving the LLM in law and entrepreneurship. Twenty sitting state, federal, and international judges had completed the coursework and thesis required to receive the LLM Abrams in judicial studies.

Offering her congratulations to the graduates, Abrams also emphasized her confidence in their ability “to be the leaders that the world needs right now, in your profession and in your communities.”

The pandemic represented an unprecedented crisis that had shaken the global economy and affected many of them personally, creating extraordinary challenges to launching or resuming their careers, she acknowledged. “But I have seen firsthand the resilience of the Class of 2020. You have already overcome so much here today, I know that you are prepared to handle anything that comes at you.”

Dellinger, who received the American Constitution Society’s Lifetime Achievement Award in June, offered the example of Abraham Lincoln, “America’s greatest lawyer,” to demonstrate how legal skills can be applied to a wide range of societal problems — and to challenge the graduates to follow suit.

In 1858, 50-year-old Lincoln was, he said, “a financially insecure, failing politician with no administrative experience.” But Lincoln was galvanized by the Supreme Court’s ruling in Dred Scott v.

Sanford that no person of color, slave or free, could ever be a citizen of the United States and that Congress had no power to limit slavery in the territories. That June, at the Illinois Republican convention in Springfield, he delivered a speech — the “House Divided” speech

Illustration: Fabio Consoli

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Graduation 2020

— that “led him into the debates of his public life,” said Dellinger, a partner at O’Melveny in Washington, D.C. “It was poetical, full of biblical references, metaphorical, and yet it was a legal analysis. He became the first person ever to become a national figure on the basis of an analysis of a Supreme Court decision.”

Lincoln used the Dred Scott decision “to say that we could no longer survive half slave and half free,” Dellinger said. “‘That we shall lie down, pleasantly dreaming that the people of Missouri were on the verge of making their state free and awake to the reality instead that the Supreme Court has made Illinois a slave state.’ And he committed himself to meet and overthrow the power of that dynasty as ‘the work now, before all of us that would prevent its consummation.’”

The techniques Lincoln used to achieve his objective were the same ones he used in his private law practice representing banks, debtors, creditors, plaintiffs, and defendants, never compromising his principles, always trying to reach pragmatic objectives, and always narrowing the issue “to what he needed to win the immediate battle before him,” Dellinger said.

Lincoln “tried to read the Constitution for the best for which it could be read and to find a way to deal with the great issues” and reimagined the founding document as being the Declaration of Independence, not the Constitution, he said.

“When he’s charged with being for racial equality, he says he’s only for equality of those rights that are included in the Declaration of Independence. That’s a narrow group — life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. What’s not within life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? So he understands where he wants to go and is able to do it.”

To counter the fact that the Supreme Court — and, thus, the Constitution — are backing slavery, Lincoln argued that “‘if the Constitution is imperfect, it is imperfect as judged by the Declaration of Independence,’” Dellinger said.

Positing Lincoln as a figure uniquely capable of moral growth and deeply affected by presiding over the Civil War as well as by the death of his beloved son, Dellinger said the president was a very different person by 1864. He called the final section of Lincoln’s second inaugural address the most powerful words uttered by any American president and the work of a great lawyer.

“He says that ‘It’s a curse on all of America that this dreadful war with 750,000 dead must be God’s will that we have earned this retribution, we North and South.’ And he says, ‘If God wills that this war continued until all of the wealth piled up by the bonds of the slaves, 250 years of unrequired toil, when all of that is done, when all of that is sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with a lash shall be paid with another drawn by the sword, the judgments of the Lord are truly pensions forever. We may have deserved this, all of this extraordinary moment.’”

Having described Lincoln as unfulfilled at 50, Dellinger noted that he was dead at age 56. “In between, he changed the world,” Dellinger told the graduates. “Go forth and make Duke proud of you.”

LLM class speaker Karim M’ziani, who holds an LLB from ParisSud University and an LLM in European and international business

law from Paris Dauphine University, said that his classmates had become a family, proving “that love has no border and no nationality.”

M’ziani, a dual citizen of France and Comoros who at Duke organized and moderM’ziani ated a conference on Chinese investment in Africa and represented the Law School at the Vis Moot Court Competition, praised the strength and resilience his classmates had displayed in the face of the pandemic.

“My LLM brothers and sisters, this is your time to show the world your talent,” he said. “My LLM brothers and sisters, embrace your destiny. ... Today we need people like my mother helping in the fight against the pandemic in hospitals. Tomorrow we’ll need you to rebuild the world shaken by Covid-19.”

JD class speaker Donovan Stone congratulated his classmates for “crossing the finish line,” even though they did it remotely. Stone, a native of Shreveport, La., who won the 2020 Dean’s Cup Moot Court Competition and served on the Moot Court Board, as senior online editor of the Duke Law Journal, and as internal vice president of the Black Law Students Association, said the moment of celebration wouldn’t have been possible without the support of friends and family and the “unyielding support” of the Duke Law faculty and staff.

“You all have shown us just how special Duke Law is in your response to Covid-19 this semester,” said Stone, who is headed to federal clerkships at the district court and appellate levels.

While the graduates face tremendous uncertainty as the world adapts to a new post-pandemic reality, they share an opportunity to help construct a “new normal,” he added. “And it is my wish for all of us that we commit to shaping a new normal that is happier, friendlier, and healthier than the old normal.”

While such habits as studying too much or taking on too many responsibilities can be hard to break, the pandemic shutdown offered a model, he said.

“Since this all began, I’ve seen so many people pause, reflect, and reconnect with old friends and family. I’ve seen countless screen shots of Zoom happy hours, and Stone personally I’ve logged more hours of walking and saying hello to neighbors and strangers than I ever did before.

“These are the little moments, relationships, and habits that I hope help define our new normal.”

Lacking a guide to being a lawyer or surviving a global pandemic, he said that he and his classmates would have one another as they begin their lives after graduation from Duke: “Just as we navigated law school together, I’m confident that together the Class of 2020 will be able to navigate whatever life throws at us next.” d Duke Law Magazine • Summer 2020

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Faculty Focus

Gina-Gail Fletcher

Scholar of corporate law, market regulation and manipulation, joins Duke Law faculty

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ina-Gail S. Fletcher, an insightful and innovative scholar of complex financial instruments and market regulation, joined the Duke Law faculty on July 1 from the Indiana University Maurer School of Law. She was a visiting professor of law at Duke in the fall 2019 semester, when she taught Business Associations.

“We are delighted to welcome Gina-Gail Fletcher back to Duke Law,” said Kerry Abrams, the James B. Duke and Benjamin N. Duke Dean and professor of law.

“Her keen analysis of complex regulatory topics and ability to convey them with clarity will be an asset both to our faculty and students.”

Fletcher joined the Maurer School of Law, where she taught Corporations, Business Planning, and Financial Regulation, in 2014, after beginning her academic career at Cornell Law School, teaching Business Organizations and Corporate Governance as a visiting assistant professor. In 2016 she received the Indiana University Trustees’ Teaching Award for excellence in teaching.

Steven Schwarcz, the Stanley A. Star Professor of Law and Business, called Fletcher an “amazing scholar. She has a deeply intuitive understanding of the field, making her scholarship both accessible and incredibly interesting,” he said. “She’s also a wonderful person and colleague. We are all so fortunate that she’s joining us.”

Fletcher’s current research examines how various market innovations can be misused to manipulate the markets and the implications of such practices on the stability of the financial markets and on the ability of regulatory bodies to ensure market efficiency and integrity.

Her recent scholarship includes the essay “Foreign Corruption as Market Manipulation,” U. Chi. L. Rev. Online (Jan. 7, 2020), in which Fletcher examines the possible overlap of certain foreign corrupt practices with the jurisdiction of the Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), the exclusive regulator of the derivatives and commodities market and which has as one of its primary concerns the detection and deterrence of market manipulation. The essay analyzes the possible effects of the CFTC venturing into prosecuting foreign corruption, which could include additional new compliance requirements for derivatives and commodities market participants.

In “Macroeconomic Consequences of Market Manipulation,” 83 Law and Contemporary Problems 123-140 (2020), Fletcher discusses the evolution of manipulative techniques and strategies since the 2008 financial crisis and analyzes the ways manipulation contributes to instability of and greater risk in financial markets, such as decreasing the market’s resiliency to shocks, increasing market volatility, and causing the mispricing of assets.

Said Lawrence Baxter, the David T. Zhang Professor of the Practice of Law and faculty director of the Global Financial Markets Center: “The financial law offerings at Duke Law will be greatly enriched by the arrival of Professor Fletcher. I am particularly impressed at her ability to convey exceptionally complex concepts in the field of derivatives with a clarity that students are going to love. Her research in the area is exciting.”

A scholar and teacher shaped by tumultuous times Fletcher’s research interests were directly shaped by her experiences entering law at the height of the financial crisis. Following her graduation from Cornell Law School in 2009, Fletcher became an associate at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher in Washington, D.C., where she specialized in securities regulation, mergers and acquisitions, banking, and corporate governance. There, she had the opportunity to help draft parts of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street

Reform and Consumer Protection Act which, among other things, established the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Securities and Exchange Commission Office of Credit Ratings, expanded whistleblower protections, created agencies to monitor the financial stability of major financial firms, and enacted new rules to regulate derivatives and limit risky practices by banks, such as speculative trading and investing in hedge funds and private equity firms.

“I can directly say that my interest in this came from being able to work so closely on things like the Dodd-Frank Act during that very tumultuous time,” said Fletcher. “It’s how I became familiar with derivatives, how they were being regulated, and what role they played in the crisis. It also gave me that exposure to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which has regulation over a significant segment of the market and is really important, though it’s often overshadowed by the SEC.” The 2008 financial crisis and the regulatory structures subsequently put in place to avoid another are the focus of a seminar Fletcher taught in the spring at Indiana Law and which she hopes to teach at Duke. That event, and other booms and busts through history, provided reference points for class discussion on current economic turbulence which, while rooted in a worldwide pandemic, raises similar themes and issues and is pressuring many of the same market segments, she said.

“We incorporated current documents that talk about the coronavirus crisis and the impact it’s been having on different segments of the market, what this new bailout looks like for this crisis versus the bailout we had for the last crisis, and I think for some of the students it was really nice to be able to talk about it in such concrete terms, even if it’s distressing for them in other ways.”

Known for her warm classroom demeanor and inclusive teaching style, Fletcher uses what she calls a ‘soft Socratic method’ to engage with students in classes like Business Associations. That class, she said, tends to attract two types of students: those who are already aiming for a career in corporate law and those who intend to pursue another specialty but feel they need some exposure to business. Fletcher said she understands what it is like to be the latter.

A first-generation college and professional school graduate, Fletcher was born in Jamaica and moved to the United States to attend Mount Holyoke College, where she majored in political science and Spanish language and literature. She entered law school intending to be a litigator but, after an unhappy summer doing litigation work, was steered to business classes by a mentor.

“I had the same reaction as a lot of my students: I have no business training and no business background and there’s no reason why this should be interesting to me,” Fletcher recalled.

Against her expectations, she found it fascinating, and after a summer’s exposure to transactions in a corporate department Fletcher decided she “completely loved” the field. She credits her law professors who laid out concepts in a straightforward manner and strives to do the same, frequently stopping to ask students, “Are we all on the same page?”

“My goal is never to confuse them or leave them with more questions than they came into the classroom with, but to push them a bit,” Fletcher said. “I want them to not just learn the black letter of the law, but to understand its application and its implications for various constituencies and other persons.

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“I speak to everyone’s level as best I can and I don’t presume certain knowledge. When you indicate to students that you are willing to meet them where they are and build from there, they tend to find the material a lot more engaging. So I strive to level the playing field.”

Fletcher said she greatly enjoyed teaching at Duke last fall. “My students in Business Associations were some of the most amazing students I’ve ever worked with.” The feeling was mutual; Curtis Bradley, the William Van Alstyne Professor of Law, who chaired the selection committee, said her students made it clear they would love for her to join the faculty permanently.

One of those was Gerardo Parraga ’21, who said Fletcher made Business Associations his favorite class.

“I have seldom enjoyed a class like I did Professor Fletcher’s,” Parraga said. “She is funny, holds a strong command over the classroom and, most importantly, is a master of the material. I am positive that anyone who takes her class next year will benefit from it.”

Fletcher said she is thrilled to join other members of Duke Law’s highly esteemed corporate law faculty, including Professor Elisabeth de Fontenay and James Cox, the Brainerd Currie Professor of Law, as well as Baxter and Schwarcz.

“Coming to Duke is an amazing opportunity to be on a faculty with such well-known legal and scholarly minds, and to be able to contribute to that community is something I’m truly excited about,” Fletcher said.

“It’s very important to look at what other scholars have done before me and build on that in meaningful and innovative ways. And I think that opportunity for collaboration is there for me at Duke.”

She has already built relationships with faculty scholars through her long participation in Duke’s Culp Colloquium and Emerging Scholars Program and calls Guy-Uriel Charles, the Edward and Ellen Schwarzman Professor of Law and co-founder of the Culp Colloquium, “one of my biggest mentors and cheerleaders as I’ve been growing as an academic. He has been very instrumental in my development as a legal scholar even though we are not in overlapping fields.”

Fletcher also has reunited with her Indiana Law colleague H. Timothy Lovelace, Jr., who joined the Duke Law faculty in June.

“I’m looking forward to building new relationships at Duke and it’s also great to be able to maintain one that has been very near and dear to me in Indiana,” Fletcher said. d — Jeannie Naujeck

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Photo: Ann Schertz

A strong addition to an already formidable group

H. Timothy Lovelace, Jr.

Legal historian of civil rights movement joins Duke Law faculty

H.

Timothy Lovelace, Jr., a noted legal historian of the civil rights movement, joined the Duke Law faculty in June from the Indiana University Maurer School of Law, where he was a professor of law.

Lovelace, whose work examines how the civil rights movement in the United States helped to shape international human rights law, is the author of numerous articles and a forthcoming book, The World is on Our Side: The U.S. and the U.N. Race Convention (Cambridge), which examines how U.S. civil rights politics shaped the development of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination. He served as Duke’s John Hope Franklin Visiting Professor of American Legal History in the spring 2019 semester, when he delivered the Robert R. Wilson Lecture. He is returning to the faculty as the John Hope Franklin Research Scholar.

At Indiana University, where he taught American legal history, constitutional law, and race and the law, and was affiliated faculty in the Department of History, Lovelace received the Trustees’ Teaching Award in 2015. During the 2015-2016 academic year, he served as a Law and Public Affairs Fellow at Princeton University.

“Tim Lovelace is a rising star in legal history,” said Curtis Bradley, the William Van Alstyne Professor of Law and a scholar of constitutional, international, and foreign relations law. “His addition to our faculty will give us additional depth not only in legal history but also in two areas of existing strength: international law and constitutional law.

“His forthcoming book reflects years of archival research and provides a groundbreaking perspective on how the treaty was developed. In doing so, the book shows that not only was U.S. civil rights law influenced by international affairs but that the direction of influence also operated the other way, with U.S. law and legal concepts influencing the development of international human rights law. Tim combines meticulous research with a compelling focus on the key individuals who helped shape and present the U.S. position during the negotiations.”

In the spring, Lovelace was a visiting professor of law at the University of Virginia, where he received his BA, JD, and PhD, and served as assistant director of the Center for the Study of Race and the Law prior to joining the Indiana law faculty in 2012. During law school he was an Oliver Hill Scholar, the Thomas Marshall Miller Prize recipient, and the Bracewell & Patterson LLP Best Oralist Award winner. As a doctoral student in history, he was a Virginia Foundation for Humanities Fellow and the inaugural Armstead L. Robinson Fellow of the Carter G. Woodson Institute for AfricanAmerican and African Studies.

“I am thrilled to welcome Tim Lovelace to the faculty,” said Kerry Abrams, the James B. Duke and Benjamin N. Duke Dean and professor of law. Abrams met Lovelace when he was a student in her Family Law class early in her teaching career at UVA and said he made an instant impression: “This young man kept pushing me to move beyond the doctrine and think about the history of family law and about the philosophical foundations and the theory. We are very lucky to have him at Duke.”

Raised in Roanoke, Va., where both of his parents were active in civil rights — his mother talked often of desegregating the city’s schools as a student — Lovelace entered law school intent on making that the focus of his practice. He switched to an academic track after identifying complementary interests in critical race theory and legal history. “I decided to write about the civil rights lawyers and leaders that I had heard so much about growing up,” he said.

Lovelace’s early archival research unearthed a rich trove of mutual engagement between activists seeking to end Jim Crow in the U.S. South and the development of an international human rights framework at the United Nations in the 1960s. “I was looking at a protest led by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee — the ‘shock troops’ of the civil rights movement — at a U.N meeting in Atlanta in January of 1964,” he said. “I had to ask: Why is the U.N. in Atlanta in 1964?” Digging in, he found that members of the U.N. Sub-Commission on the Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities, the primary drafters of the U.N. Race Convention, had been invited to study developments there by

the Sub-Commission’s U.S. member, civil rights attorney Morris Abram. “Local people and local activism were helping to inform the development of the world’s most comprehensive treaty on race.”

That insight has proved foundational to a research agenda that illuminates the activities and influence of a broad cast of civil rights attorneys and activists, adds to the understanding of black internationalism in the 20th century, and offers the South as a robust, largely overlooked space for the development of international human rights laws and norms.

“Commonly, in the popular narrative, the South is not part of the genealogy of international human rights,” Lovelace said. “It’s seen as parochial, provincial, a closed space, and a closed society — anything but this really vibrant space.”

In his article on the Sub-Commission’s visit to Atlanta, “Making the World in Atlanta’s Image: The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Morris Abram, and the Legislative History of the United Nations Race Convention,” 32 Law & History Review 385 (2014), Lovelace depicts a “Cold War battlefield” on which two approaches to racial progress clashed. Abram and others sought to use diplomacy to infuse international law with values central to American democracy in the measured hope of also achieving the full manifestation of those values at home. Student activists, including SNCC leaders John Lewis and Julian Bond (whom Lovelace got to know at UVA as a professor, mentor, and friend) demonstrated to expose the inhumanity of Jim Crow to international visitors, bargaining that embarrassment on the world stage could force systemic change in the U.S. Lovelace — who has also written about the insights Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. gained on the power of nonviolent protest from his travels to a newly independent Ghana and a Black foreign correspondent’s invocation of both U.S. constitutional law and international human rights laws in his successful fight to claim his right to return to the United States after defying the ban against travel to Cuba in 1961 — goes deeper into the history of the U.N. Race Convention in his forthcoming book.

“It’s also a biography of the Convention as an idea of racial progress over time,” he said. “As much as I’m telling a story about law, I’m telling a story about lawyers, and as much as the book is about the body of a legal draft, I’m interested in the bodies of the drafters.

Their stories are part of a larger story about America and the world’s ongoing social transformation.”

He offers a preview in “Civil Rights as Human Rights,” an article forthcoming in the Duke Law Journal and the subject of his 2019 Wilson Lecture. It begins with the U.S. State Department’s 1963 appointment of Abram, who was King’s lawyer, a founder of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights, and a voting rights advocate, to the Sub-Commission drafting the Convention, and Clyde Ferguson, then the dean of Howard University School of Law, as his alternate.

The selection of two high-profile civil rights lawyers — one Black, one Jewish, both southerners and veterans of` World War II — was strategic as well as groundbreaking for the State Department: The U.S. sought to “rebrand” the image of American democracy that was tarnished in the international community for its denial of democracy to African Americans, he notes.

“The U.S. delegation literally embodied the nation’s commitment to racial progress,” he writes. “Together, these men told a remark-

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The Commons | Faculty Focus

able story of how America’s ongoing social transformation could serve as a model for the world.” Their charge was to incorporate principles of U.S. constitutional law and policy into the Convention so that, Lovelace said, “the U.S. could argue that it was at the vanguard of racial progress.”

Abram and Ferguson had their own reasons for “leveraging their identities … to symbolize the U.S.’s devotion to racial justice,” Lovelace writes, for one believing their engagement in the treaty process could build synergies between the civil rights movement and U.S. foreign policymakers, and give the cause a new tool in the fight to dismantle Jim Crow.

The two “racial diplomats” crafted the Convention’s first draft with a framework similar to the equal protection concept in the 14th Amendment, he writes; it mandated equal justice under the law, equal access to public facilities, and an end to all governmental and other public policies of racial segregation, and advanced the implementation of “special measures” — affirmative action — as a form of restorative justice. Lovelace details their considerable success in defending those principles through the SubCommission’s debates (and against challenges from the Eastern bloc), building a legislative record for the Convention that would credibly allow the U.S. to argue that its pledge to eliminate racial discrimination in all public authorities and institutions applied to governmental entities only and in that way conformed to the U.S. state action doctrine.

Lovelace explains that Abram, Ferguson, and other racial liberals incorrectly bargained on the state action doctrine quickly disappearing; the Warren Court then seemed on track to “eviscerate both public and private discrimination” against racial minorities. But it didn’t, and a racial paradox remained, he writes: “Two pioneering civil rights attorneys advanced a reading of the Convention that circumscribed the treaty’s definition of racial discrimination.”

His book ends, Lovelace said, with a discussion of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s citation to the U.N. Race Convention in her opinions upholding affirmative action in higher education in Gratz v. Bollinger and Grutter v.

Bollinger. “She was deeply criticized by many people for citing to this ‘foreign source’ and Congress even held hearings around the proper usage of foreign sources in constitutional adjudication,” he said. “But the history of the Convention shows that these critics are not correct. The reason she could cite the human rights Convention so easily was because the ‘special measures’ were produced by Americans — Morris Abram and Clyde Ferguson.”

Lovelace said he is delighted to be returning to Duke, having found an “intellectually rich, warm, and welcoming community” when he served as the John Hope Franklin Visiting Professor of American Legal History — itself a “huge honor.” “John Hope Franklin was so productive, so thoughtful as a scholar, such a pioneer,” he said of the legendary historian who taught at Duke Law from 1985 to 1992. He also enjoyed having a “front row seat” to his former professor’s first year as dean at Duke Law. Lovelace has even deeper Duke ties, forged through his longtime participation in the Law School’s Culp Colloquium and Emerging Scholars Program that help prepare minority scholars enter and advance in the legal academy through job talks, advice, and scholarship workshops. In addition to getting valuable feedback from multiple faculty on scholarship, Edward and Ellen Schwarzman Professor of Law Guy-Uriel Charles, who leads the programs, quickly emerged as a mentor.

“Tim is one of the most exciting legal historians in the legal academy,” Charles said. “He is a careful and smart scholar. We are extremely lucky to attract him to Duke.” d — Frances Presma

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Duke awards distinguished professorships to Farahany, Frakes, and Sachs

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rofessors Nita Farahany JD/MA ’04, PhD ’06, Michael Frakes, and Stephen Sachs have been awarded distinguished professorships from Duke University. Their professorships took effect on July 1.

Dean Kerry Abrams nominated the three professors on the recommendation of those members of the Law School faculty who already hold distinguished professorships.

To qualify for a distinguished professorship at Duke, a faculty member must have amassed a substantial record of intellectual achievement and be one of the leading thinkers in their field. The award recognizes past achievement and predicts future accomplishment.

Farahany

Frakes

Farahany named Robinson O. Everett Professor of Law Farahany, named be the Robinson O. Everett Professor of Law, is an interdisciplinary scholar whose research and writing engage with the ethical, legal, and social implications of emerging technologies, with a particular focus on bioethics and neuroscience. She holds a secondary appointment in Duke’s Philosophy Department and serves as founding director of Duke Science & Society and faculty chair for the Master’s in Bioethics & Science Policy program.

Farahany’s early work was largely oriented toward explaining how existing and potential advances in neuroscience could help reconfigure positive criminal and constitutional law doctrine, particularly those relating to the First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Eighth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution. Her more recent scholarship addresses the use of neuroscience in criminal courtrooms and argues that emerging developments in neuroscience demand the recognition of a new liberty interest in cognitive processes.

Much of Farahany’s recent work is collaborative and includes laborary research. She is the director of the Science, Law & Policy Lab (SLAPLAB), which studies the role of science in law and the policymaking process. In 2010, she was appointed by President Obama to the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues and served until 2017.

“Nita Farahany is one of the world’s preeminent scholars studying the intersection of law and science and technology,” Abrams said. “Her commitment to cutting-edge research, engagement across disciplinary boundaries, and leadership at Duke University have long made her a standout in the legal academy.”

Farahany joined the Duke faculty in 2012 from Vanderbilt University, returning to the institution where she earned a JD/MA

Sachs

and a PhD in philosophy. She received her AB in genetics, cell, and developmental biology at Dartmouth College and also holds an ALM in biology from Harvard University. After law school, Farahany clerked for Judge Judith W. Rogers of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. In 2011, she was the Leah Kaplan Visiting Professor of Human Rights at Stanford Law School.

The Everett Professorship honors the late Professor Robinson O. Everett LLM ’59, who taught at Duke for more than 51 years and inspired thousands of Duke Law students and alumni with his kindness, his service to the law and to the legal profession, and his devotion to Duke Law School. A former chief judge and senior judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces, Everett was a leading authority on military law and justice.

The Everett Professorship was established with support from The Duke Endowment’s Strategic Faculty Initiative as well as the friends and family of Robinson Everett and is designated to a legal scholar who also engages in undergraduate teaching at Duke.

“This was such welcome news amidst the tragedy and struggles we as a community and society face with this global pandemic,” Farahany said. “I’m truly grateful to receive a distinguished professorship at Duke University, and it holds a special meaning for me that the chair is named in honor of Judge Robinson O. Everett, who was an extraordinary public servant, lawyer, judge, and law professor. I had the privilege of working with Judge Everett when I was a law student at Duke Law School as I prepared for an oral argument before the Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces. It was one of the highlights of my time as a law student and it’s humbling to hold a distinguished professorship in his name.”

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The Commons | Faculty Focus Frakes receives A. Kenneth Pye Professorship

Sachs named to Colin W. Brown Professorship

Frakes, a law and economics scholar and legal empiricist whose work spans several fields, including patent law and health economics, received the A. Kenneth Pye Professorship. He holds a secondary appointment in Duke’s Economics Department.

Frakes’ research in health is largely focused on understanding how certain legal and financial incentives affect the decisions of physicians and other health care providers.

He is currently serving as the principal investigator on a grant from the National Institutes of Health exploring the effects of immunizing physicians from medical liability on the extent and quality of the medical care they deliver, and his recent paper on defensive medicine, co-authored with MIT economist Jonathan Gruber, has been selected by the National Institute for Health Care Management Foundation as a finalist for its prestigious Health Care Research Award.

Frakes’ research in innovation policy centers on the relationship between the financing of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and key aspects of its decision-making.

“Michael Frakes is an exceptionally innovative thinker who also takes a strongly interdisciplinary approach to scholarship,” Abrams said. “His focus on influencing policy and his engagement with scholars in law, health economics, and medical sciences has made him a leading figure at the convergence of those fields.”

Frakes, who is also a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, joined the Duke Law faculty in 2016 from Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law. He was previously an assistant professor of law at Cornell Law School. He earned his JD from Harvard Law School and a BS and PhD, both in economics, from MIT. After law school, Frakes was an associate at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom in Wilmington, Del., and later an academic fellow at the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard.

The Pye Professorship is named for A. Kenneth Pye, a distinguished member of the Duke Law faculty for 21 years who twice served as dean, from 1968 to 1970 and 1973 to 1976. Pye also twice served as Duke University chancellor, in 1970-71 and from 1976 to 1982, and served as university counsel in between. The Pye Professorship was previously held by Katharine T. Bartlett, who took emerita status in 2019. Bartlett, who served as dean from 2000 to 2007, had held the professorship since 1995.

“I am beyond honored to receive the A. Kenneth Pye Professorship at Duke Law School,” Frakes said. “I am also honored to be succeeding Kate Bartlett as the holder of this professorship. I cannot possibly imagine adequately filling her shoes, but I will certainly look to Kate’s career as a source of inspiration for my own future progress. I will do the same with respect to this professorship’s namesake, whose accomplishments — as a scholar, institutional citizen, and leader — were simply astounding. I am grateful to his friends, family, and supporters for making this professorship possible.”

Sachs, a scholar of civil procedure, constitutional law, AngloAmerican legal history, and conflict of laws, received the Colin W. Brown Professorship.

Sachs’ research spans a variety of substantive topics, focusing on the history of procedure and private law and its implications for current disputes. His research interests include federal jurisdiction, constitutional interpretation, sovereign immunity, and the legal status of corporations. His scholarship has been cited by the U.S. Supreme Court, including an amicus brief on forum selection agreements in civil cases that the Court ordered the parties to be prepared to address and that was discussed at oral argument and in the Court’s opinion. The brief was later named among the “Exemplary Legal Writing of 2013” by The Green Bag Almanac & Reader.

Sachs was the recipient of the Federalist Society’s 2020 Joseph Story Award, which recognizes an academic under 40 who has demonstrated excellence in legal scholarship, a commitment to teaching, and a concern for students, and who has made a significant public impact in a manner that advances the rule of law in a free society. He is a member of the Judicial Conference’s Advisory Committee on Appellate Rules, an elected member of the American Law Institute, and an adviser to the ALI’s project on the Restatement of the Law (Third), Conflict of Laws.

“Stephen Sachs is a brilliant young scholar whose work has been exceptionally influential from his early years as an academic,” Abrams said. “He is also a beloved teacher of civil procedure and constitutional law who wows Duke Law students with his engaging and enthusiastic dedication to the subjects of his courses.”

Sachs joined the faculty in 2011 after practicing in the litigation group of Mayer Brown in Washington, D.C. He clerked for Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr. during the 2009-2010 Supreme Court term and Judge Stephen F. Williams on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in 2007-2008. He received his JD from Yale, where he was executive editor of the Yale Law Journal and served both as executive editor and articles editor of the Yale Law & Policy Review. He earned an AB in history from Harvard, graduating first in his class, and was a Rhodes Scholar.

The Colin W. Brown Professorship was endowed in 2016 by JM Family Enterprises with matching funds from The Duke Endowment as a tribute to Brown ’74, the president and chief executive officer of the Deerfield, Fla.-based company. Brown, a member of the Duke Law Board of Visitors and longtime scholarship benefactor at Duke Law, has been recognized for his leadership of the family-owned business, one of the largest private companies in the United States. The professorship was previously held by Carolyn McAllaster, who was its inaugural recipient in 2017 and took emerita status last year.

“I am honored and grateful to receive the Colin W. Brown Professorship,” said Sachs. “Duke Law is second to none in its support of its faculty and students, and I am thankful for the generous support of Colin Brown and of the many other alumni who make that possible.” d — Andrew Park

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Faculty Notes

Elvin R. Latty Professor of Law Arti Rai is the lead investigator on a one-year grant from the Laura and John Arnold Foundation to examine whether the administrative system for patent review established by the America Invents Act of 2011 is impacting patent terms for small-molecule drugs and large-molecule biologics and thereby affecting the availability of less expensive generic or biosimilar equivalents.

The study is the first rigorous empirical investigation of the role that the administrative review system, known as the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB), is playing relative to federal district courts, previously the sole venue for patent challenges. It focuses on how the introduction of the PTAB has impacted effective patent terms for small-molecule drugs — those generally administered as pills — and large molecule biologics, which are generally delivered as infusions and injections. In order to evaluate impact, the study is examining both patents on the key compounds as well as secondary patents that cover such ancillary features as formulations and are sometimes considered to be of lower quality than compound patents. Rai, the faculty co-director of the Duke Center for Innovation Policy and an internationally recognized expert in innovation policy and intellectual property, administrative, and health law, is the former administrator of policy and external affairs at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). She is undertaking the study with three colleagues.

Bills pending before both the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate would require challengers to choose between contesting small molecule and biologic patents in federal court or at the PTAB. But in their grant application, Rai and her colleagues point to key research that shows the industry “often manages to extend monopoly protection over patents of even dubious validity simply because it’s so hard to challenge them in federal court.” They contend that the PTAB, with administrative judges who are technical experts, facilitates “faster and cheaper challenges” and, possibly, greater accuracy. The current

study, Rai said, will provide essential empirical context for the current policy debate. They are building novel and highly detailed datasets to facilitate three main areas of inquiry: the factors that drive case selection in the district courts and at the PTAB, to discern the incremental role the PTAB is playing over and above district court litigation for different classes of patents; the effect of the PTAB on the timing and prevalence of generic and biosimilar entry; and what the data suggest about settlements in PTAB challenges and how they may be influencing generic and biosimilar availability.

On Nov. 19, Rai testified before the U.S. House Committee on the Judiciary’s Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property, and the Internet in a hearing titled “The Patent Trial and Appeal Board and the Appointments Clause: Implications of Recent Court Decisions.”

The hearing considered implications of an Oct. 31 ruling of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Arthrex, Inc., v. Smith & Nephew, Inc., Arthrocare Corp., in which the court held the appointment of the administrative patent judges (APJs) to the PTAB by the U.S. Secretary of Commerce to be in violation of the Constitution’s Appointments Clause. The court severed the portion of the Patent Act that restricts removal of APJs from office, thereby making them “inferior officers” that can be appointed by “heads of departments” like cabinet secretaries, as opposed to “principal officers” that must be nominated by the president and confirmed by the U.S. Senate.

After exploring different implications of the Federal Circuit’s ruling, Rai testified that the “cleanest path forward” would involve “surgical” congressional intervention that gives the USPTO director a unilateral right of review over APJ decisions including, potentially, a right that applies retroactively.

“This approach would cure any perceived constitutional infirmity without subjecting APJs to political pressure that isn’t transparent,” she wrote in her prepared testimony submitted in advance of the hearing. “In order to accommodate the director’s workload, the right of review should be discretionary.” d

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The Commons | Faculty Focus L. Neil Williams, Jr. Professor of Law Brandon Garrett is serving as independent monitor for a landmark settlement in Texas that could become a national model for cash bail reform.

Garrett, the faculty director of the Duke Center for Science and Justice, is monitoring implementation of the O’Donnell Consent Decree in Harris County, Texas. Harris County encompasses Houston and, with nearly 5 million people, is the nation’s third-most populous county. Chief Judge Lee Rosenthal of the U.S. District Court of the Southern District of Texas signed the motion to appoint on March 3.

Working closely with deputy monitor Sandra Guerra Thompson, professor of law and director of the Criminal Justice Institute at the University of Houston Law Center, and with Dr. Dottie Carmichael of the Public Policy Research Institute at Texas A&M University, Garrett is directing a seven-year monitoring project that includes ongoing analysis of Harris County data and intensive engagement with stakeholders in Texas.

The O’Donnell Consent Decree settles three years of litigation in O’Donnell v. Harris Cty., a class action lawsuit brought in federal court after the titular plaintiff was arrested for driving on a suspended license and jailed when she could not afford bail set at $2,500. In the complaint, the plaintiffs alleged that the county’s bail practices contributed to an average of 500 people per night being detained in the Harris County Jail for misdemeanors.

In January 2019, after an initial preliminary injunction order that took effect June 6, 2017, and an appeal, Harris County, the misdemeanor judges, and the sheriff promulgated new bail rules that required

Senior Lecturing Fellow Thomas Maher, who has taught criminal trial practice to Duke Law students for nearly 30 years, has joined the Duke Center for Science and Justice as executive director.

Maher practiced criminal defense law in state and federal court for more than 20 years before becoming, in 2006, executive director of the Durham-based Center for Death Penalty Litigation, where he represented capital defendants in trial, appellate, and post-conviction proceedings. In 2009 he became executive director of the North Carolina Office of Indigent Defense Services (IDS), where he advocated for more funding for public defense statewide and pushed forward initiatives to improve the quality of representation.

In February, North Carolina Supreme Court Chief Justice Cheri Beasley MJS ’18 presented Maher with the court’s highest honor, the Friend of the Court award, for his dedication to the Judicial Branch and his 11 years of service at IDS. With Brandon Garrett, the faculty director, and collaborators across the university, Maher is helping to translate the work of the Duke Center for Science and Justice into policy solutions based

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the prompt post-arrest release on unsecured bonds of the vast majority of people arrested for misdemeanor offenses. Pursuant to the rules, everyone else is afforded a bail hearing with counsel, and most are then also ordered released. These rules provided the foundation for the global consent decree, which the parties agreed to in July 2019 and which Chief Judge Rosenthal approved on Nov. 21.

Garrett’s proposal was selected from four finalists in a competitive bid process and was approved by the plaintiffs, judges, county, and sheriff as the proposal “most likely to lead to successful and timely implementation of the consent decree and, ultimately, a self-sustaining, self-monitoring system that promotes liberty, court appearance, and community safety.” The monitorship is being guided by nine principles derived from the consent decree: transparency; accountability; permanency; the protection of constitutional rights; racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic fairness; public safety and effective law enforcement; maximizing liberty; cost and process efficiency; and demonstrated effectiveness.

A leading scholar of criminal justice outcomes, evidence, and constitutional rights, Garrett is focusing on research and policy aspects of the decree, overseeing teams at Duke’s Center for Science and Justice and the Public Policy Research Institute at Texas A&M University. Philip J. Cook, the ITT/Terry Sanford Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the Sanford School of Public Policy, whose current research focuses on the economics of crime, will advise Garrett on cost analysis. d

on empirical evidence for problems and inequities throughout the criminal justice system in North Carolina and beyond.

Said Garrett: “Tom has a deep knowledge of criminal practice, tremendous leadership experience, and a lifelong commitment to public service. He has, in a short time, brought his insight and energies to all of our center projects. We on the faculty are thrilled to collaborate with him — and our Duke Law students, who have been inspired by him for years now, are fortunate to have new opportunities to learn from him.”

Maher’s extensive career in criminal defense includes serving as co-counsel in the high-profile 2003 murder trial of Durham author Michael Peterson, who was convicted and later released after evidence emerged of misconduct by a State Bureau of Investigation agent. He has worked on numerous capital cases, including that of Leon Brown, an intellectually disabled man who was sentenced to death as a 15-year-old after giving a false confession to rape and murder and exonerated by DNA evidence 30 years later. d

James Cox, the Brainerd Currie Professor of Law, has co-authored new editions of two casebooks: Business Organizations: Cases and Materials, Unabridged 12th ed. (West Academic, 2019) (with Melvin Aron Eisenberg); and Securities Regulation: Cases and Materials, 9th ed. (Wolters Kluwer, 2019) (with others). The new edition of Business Organizations offers detailed information on corporate law and covers new principal cases, text, and explanatory materials designed to illustrate the development of corporate law. As it has since its first edition, Securities Regulation: Cases and Materials contains a teachable mix of problems, cases, and textual material, encouraging students to build their knowledge base by being active problem-solvers. d

Clinical Professor Rebecca Rich ’06 received the Duke Bar Association’s 2020 Distinguished Teaching Award on April 9.

Rich, the assistant director of legal writing who teaches first-year Legal Analysis, Research and Writing and the Scholarly Writing Workshop and Writing for E-Discovery for upper-level students, was praised by student nominators for her accessibility and warmth towards students. “Quite simply, there is nobody in the building who offers the blend of humility, availability, authenticity, and positivity that she brings into her classroom and office every day,” wrote one. Another noted her “communicative and open messages” after the Covid-19 pandemic moved classes online: “In the sea of anxiety and chaos, her simultaneous sense of calm, encouragement, and faith in our abilities served as a buoy that helped me get through the first week of remote learning. The Duke Law community is so fortunate to have her on its faculty.”

Rich co-chaired Duke Law’s Teaching Initiative from 2014 to 2017 and has taught in the Law School’s D.C. Summer Institute on Law & Policy and Pre-Law Undergraduate Scholars Program. Prior to joining the faculty in 2009, she practiced civil litigation with Ellis & Winters in Raleigh and clerked for Justice Patricia Timmons-Goodson MJS ’14 on the North Carolina Supreme Court. d

Steven Schwarcz, the Stanley A. Star Professor of Law & Business, is the co-editor of Systemic Risk in the Financial Sector: Ten Years After the Great Crash (Centre for International Governance Innovation, 2019).

The book draws on some of the world’s leading experts on financial stability and regulation to examine and critique the progress made since 2008 in addressing systemic risk, covering such topics as central banks and macroprudential policies; fintech; regulators’ perspectives from the United States and the European Union; the logistical and incentive challenges that impede standardization and collection; clearing houses and systemic risk; optimal resolution and bail-in tools; and bank leverage, welfare, and regulation. Schwarcz, a senior fellow of the Centre for International Governance Innovation, contributes the book’s closing chapter, in which he argues that although regulators have accomplished much in the past decade to help stabilize the financial system, much remains to be done, and that a more systematic regulatory framework is required to correct market failures that could trigger and transmit systemic risk. d

George Christie, James B. Duke Professor Emeritus of Law, is the co-author of Cases and Materials on the Law of Torts, 6th ed. (West Academic, 2019) (with others). The sixth edition continues the use of minimally edited cases, serves as a vehicle for teaching first-year students the essential techniques of case analysis and legal method, and is modified throughout to include developments in tort law since the fifth edition was published in 2012. d

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The Commons | Faculty Focus

Christopher Schroeder

Commitment to government service shapes research and teaching and leaves a lasting legacy at Duke Law

C

hristopher Schroeder, whose scholarship and teaching reflect insights drawn from extensive government service on congressional staffs and as a top executive branch lawyer, retired from teaching at the end of the academic year.

Schroeder, the Charles S. Murphy Professor of Law and Public Policy Studies, joined the faculty in 1979, initially focusing on environmental law and policy and co-authoring a leading casebook on the subject. But as he took on such government posts as chief counsel to the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary (chaired by then Sen. Joseph Biden) and in the U.S. Department of Justice as deputy assistant attorney general leading the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) in the Clinton administration and assistant attorney general in charge of the Office of Legal Policy (OLP) during the Obama administration, his research agenda and teaching expanded to include constitutional law, Congress, and the scope of executive power.

Government service has had “a natural kind of hydraulic pressure” on his career, said Schroeder, the founding director of the Law School’s Program in Public Law.

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“Every time I’ve gone into government I’ve come to be interested in something slightly different. And those times away have really recharged my batteries for coming back to doing academic work and teaching. I think I’m a better classroom teacher, I’m a better colleague, and I’m a better commentator on other people’s work because of the time I’ve had away getting excited about new topics.”

Douglas B. Maggs Professor Emeritus of Law Walter Dellinger, who recruited Schroeder to the OLC as his deputy when he became assistant attorney general in 1993, said few people have held as many senior positions advising the United States government as his longtime Duke Law colleague. “There is no one I have ever encountered who has better judgment than Chris Schroeder. Just within the Department of Justice he’s the rare person who has headed both the Office of Legal Counsel and the Office of Legal Policy, demonstrating the respect that people have, both for his legal acumen and for his sense of wise policy. It is an extraordinary range, not to mention his academic success as a scholar and a teacher and his work in private law.”

Embracing law as agent for social change and environmental protection Born in Ohio, Schroeder and his family moved at regular intervals due to his father’s career as a Presbyterian minister. He initially felt called to the ministry, too, an aspiration rooted in admiration for his father, but he reconsidered after undertaking some “self-evaluation” while pursuing his Master in Divinity at Yale.

By then he was drawn more to law, having engaged with law students who were fellow volunteers in a campus social service organization. “This was the early ’70s, when a lot of us were pretty optimistic about the possibility of law being a substantial agent for social change,” he said.

Schroeder landed at the University of California, Berkeley where he served as editor-in-chief of the California Law Review and met his future wife, Kate Bartlett, the A. Kenneth Pye Professor Emerita of Law and former Duke Law dean, who was a year behind him.

While in practice with a San Francisco firm following his 1974 graduation, Schroeder began helping the Environmental Defense Fund — pro bono — file objections to the rate plans of California electric utilities, part of an effort to drive them towards economizing through conservation. That prompted him to take a year’s leave to research the social and legal obstacles to renewable energy and conservation with a group at the Earl Warren Legal Institute (now the Institute for Legal Research) at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. When the year was up, he resumed practice at a firm he launched with four of his former fellow associates, devoting half of his time to pro bono work on behalf of environmental organizations.

After two years, Schroeder decided his primary interests were in teaching, research, and scholarship. He admits accepting Duke’s offer over others in 1979 partly on the assumption that a move to North Carolina would be beneficial for Bartlett’s career in public interest law. “That did not turn out to be true,” he said, laughing, recalling the absence of Legal Aid jobs in the state, which ultimately led her to accept a teaching post at Duke Law. “We have absolutely no regrets about our choice — far from it. Duke’s been a wonderful place for both of us.”

Schroeder was granted tenure in 1985, receiving the Charles S. Murphy Distinguished Professorship in 2001 and a secondary appointment at the Sanford School of Public Policy in 2011. He focused his teaching and scholarship on environmental law, regulation, and policy for the first 15 years of his academic career.

Widely published in the field, he is the co-author of Environmental Regulation: Law, Science, and Policy (Wolters Kluwer), now in its eighth edition, and the co-editor, with Rena Steinzor, of A New Progressive Agenda for Public Health and the Environment (Carolina Academic Press, 2005).

Making a difference through government service Schroeder’s first foray into government service came during President Ronald Reagan’s second term, when the chief counsel of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Mark Gitenstein, acting on Dellinger’s advice, asked him to help evaluate the president’s judicial nominees with academic backgrounds. Many of them, Schroeder noted, had ties to the nascent Federalist Society, which advanced originalism as the correct approach to constitutional interpretation. “I spent time educating myself on these various constitutional interpretive conflicts and got more and more interested in them.”

When the president nominated Judge Robert Bork of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit to fill the seat vacated by the retirement of Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell, Gitenstein charged Schroeder with doing a complete analysis of his jurisprudence. Gitenstein and Biden liked his work, and after a law review article came to light in which Bork articulated an extremely narrow view of the First Amendment, they asked Schroeder and Jeff Peck (now a principal of Peck, Madigan, Jones & Stewart in Washington and a senior lecturing fellow at Duke Law) to do an even deeper analysis.

In addition to countering the administration’s assertions that Bork was a champion of civil liberties and civil rights, they used his own statements and those of his judicial colleagues to demonstrate a pattern of conservative judicial activism. That analysis, said Gitenstein, now senior counsel at Mayer Brown and former U.S. ambassador to Romania, “defined the debate on the Bork fight. It was really good and important work.” The Senate’s ultimate rejection of Bork for the seat, later filled by the more moderate Justice Anthony Kennedy, is thought to have slowed the conservative shift of the Court by decades.

Schroeder went on to advise Biden on four subsequent Supreme Court nominations, first as special nominations counsel and, from July 1992 to February 1993, as chief counsel to the Judiciary Committee. At the same time, he began to refocus his scholarship and teaching at Duke Law on constitutional matters.

Ted Kaufman, Biden’s longtime chief of staff and successor in the U.S. Senate representing Delaware, said that Schroeder was one of the first people the senator would ask him and other aides to call for counsel on an issue dealing with the Supreme Court, the judiciary, or the Constitution. “Dozens of people can say that Sen. Biden and Vice President Biden has asked for their help at different times, but I don’t know a single person that can say they were brought in in this capacity more and for better use than Chris,” Kaufman said.

In the spring of 1993, Dellinger, who was heading the OLC as assistant attorney general, appointed Schroeder and their Duke Law colleague Professor H. Jefferson Powell as counselors. From April 1995 until January 1997, Schroeder led OLC as deputy assistant attorney general while Dellinger served as acting U.S. solicitor general.

“I loved all my time at the Office of Legal Counsel,” said Schroeder. “It might well be, if you forced me to choose, the highlight of my professional career, working with all those wonderful people on hard problems and thinking that you were doing something that was of some consequence.”

Schroeder’s time leading the OLP from 2010 to 2013 was largely consumed with policy development, although he also oversaw the division that vetted and prepared judicial nominees for their confirmation hearings. For example, he worked on developing a menu of options available to the executive branch for improving the efficacy of firearm background checks as well as an administration proposal for modernizing the laws that govern electronic surveillance, a subject that became a focus of his subsequent teaching.

“At least during the Obama-Holder years, a large part of what that job entailed was convening large internal working groups to work on problems that were of consequence to more than one division

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The Commons | Faculty Focus within the Justice Department, such as the Drug Enforcement Administration, the FBI, the National Security Division, and the Criminal Division if they all have some reason to be genuinely interested in a policy proposal,” he said, characterizing OLP as a sort of designated honest broker. “It’s not supposed to have a dog in the fight, but has the ability to convene meetings and do the kind of synthesis work and background work to make sure policy drafts are fairly presenting the views of all the members.“ Dellinger credits Schroeder’s success in his government roles to his “abiding decency” and lack of a personal agenda. “He is always seeking to advance the public good and the public welfare. And he has never treated government and politics as a sport but as something serious — people working together in society to advance their common goals.”

Promoting understanding of and participation in public law Schroeder’s scholarship, teaching, and on-campus activities also reflect his commitment to advancing a deeper understanding of constitutional principles and an appreciation for public service.

His book, Keeping Faith with the Constitution (Oxford University Press, 2010) — co-authored with two other top constitutional scholars, Stanford’s Pamela Karlan and Godwin Liu, now an associate justice of the California Supreme Court — offers an accessible perspective on constitutional interpretation distinct from originalism. Presidential Power Stories (Foundation Press, 2009), a collection Schroeder edited with Duke’s William Van Alstyne Professor of Law and Public Policy Studies Curtis Bradley, a leading scholar of constitutional, international, and foreign relations law, highlights a dozen notable — and extremely rare — occasions of judicial resolution of presidential power questions. Schroeder’s chapter in that book on the Nixon tapes case exposes an early articulation of the powers of the unitary executive, one of the presidential power questions that continues to interest him.

Schroeder established the Program in Public Law at Duke in 1998 to promote an understanding of public institutions, of the constitutional framework in which they function, and of the principles and laws that apply to the work of public officials. It quickly became integral to the intellectual vibrancy of the Law School through its sponsorship of conferences, workshops, and informal brown-bag lunches on topical public law issues, its sponsorship of visits by elected officials and public lawyers, and its encouragement and dissemination of public law scholarship and commentary by Duke faculty and others. Noting his gratitude to Richard Horvitz ’78 for his longtime financial support of the program (now directed by Alston & Bird Professor of Law Ernest Young and

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Professor Marin Levy) Schroeder identified one of its goals as being to raise the visibility of public lawyering as an option for law students to pursue at some point in their careers. It’s a message he hopes they will take to heart.

“I try to encourage students to avoid thinking of their careers as binary choices — ‘I’m going into corporate law or I’m going to work for Legal Aid,’” he said.

“We’ll all take a number of different turns in our lives where we change positions and move to new jobs, and in that context, I tell them to think about public service as occupying one of those slots. At some point in time, you will respond to a request to volunteer that will become something larger or you’ll be invited to work on a campaign, or go into a state-level agency because there’s a new governor. And when those opportunities come, think hard about them.”

Along with Bartlett, Schroeder committed $100,000 to establish an endowment for the Loan Repayment Assistance Program for Duke Law students bound for public interest careers. The gift sparked other substantial donations, including a directed gift from the Class of 2006.

“I have found, working with lots of people in the federal government, lots of instances where people have really benefitted psychologically and in terms of their career satisfaction by spending some time in public service of one kind or another,” he said.

A gifted teacher Schroeder’s spring semester courses — first year Property, a course he’s taught since his earliest days at Duke, and a seminar titled CyberSecurity, Privacy and Government Surveillance — aptly reflected the breadth of his scholarship and practical experience in both environmental law and government.

Other teaching tie-ins to his work in Washington include the course on Congress he and Kaufman co-taught for more than 25 years and another seminar for law and business students on the relationship between government and business, as well as Federal Policymaking, a seminar he taught with Kaufman and his former Judiciary Committee colleague Peck in the Duke in DC program.

For the past seven years, Schroeder has co-taught evolving seminars on information, privacy, and surveillance with a former student, David Hoffman ’93, who is now the director of security policy and global privacy officer at Intel Corp. and a professor of the practice at the Sanford School of Public Policy. Their classroom collaboration began after Hoffman, who has served in various advisory roles to federal agencies on informational privacy, taught a Wintersession course on privacy and surveillance in the wake of the Snowden disclosures. Schroeder, who had taught Hoffman 1L Property, had been interested in the subject since his time at OLP and audited the course.

“We then had a series of conversations about the substance of the issues and the different perspectives on the substance, and it reminded me of being back in Property class and bringing that sort of intellectual discipline and analytical ability to comparing different perspectives on the same set of facts and then through the lens of legal authorities,” said Hoffman.

“Chris is the most gifted lecturer I’ve ever been around. I am in awe of his abilities in the classroom to weave together issues and lines of reasoning that at first appear disparate and as he develops the analysis throughout the lecture, start exposing the connections and conflicts that are critical for whatever legal theory is being taught through the particular case or the facts that are being discussed.”

In that long-ago 1L Property class, he found, in Schroeder, a “paradigm example” of law as a way of thinking and analysis to be applied across disciplines with exceptional insight into both legal theory and the practical application of the law. In the years that followed, he found a generous colleague and friend.

“I often think of Chris as a role model for who I’d like to be when I’m being my best self,” said Hoffman. “He is one of the kindest people I’ve ever met.” d — Frances Presma

the Children’s Law Clinic. Starting with virtually no knowledge of the field, Wettach became one of the state’s foremost experts in special education law, led the revision of school discipline statutes, won a case before the North Carolina Supreme Court on behalf of suspended students, mentored new education lawyers, and published definitive resources for children in the school system and their advocates.

“She is one of the true founders of the modern clinical program at the Law School, and she has really modeled for all of us the idea that clinical faculty are teachers of our students, advocates for our clients, and leaders in helping to shape the law and make it better for the communities we care about and the people we serve,” said Clinical Professor Andrew Foster, director of the Community Enterprise Clinic and director of clinical programs at Duke Law. Said Kerry Abrams, the James B. Duke and Benjamin N. Duke Dean of the School of Law and professor of law: “Not only was Jane a pioneer of clinical education at Duke Law, but she has taken an active role in building it. Helping clients solve their challenges is a profound experience for a student, and Jane has helped them to have those experiences in a very supportive setting. She will be greatly missed by all of us.”

Channeling a desire to serve through the law

Jane Wettach

Children’s Law Clinic founder led N.C. educational reform, modeled excellence as advocate and clinician

J

ane R. Wettach, a nationally-recognized expert on special education law who helped relaunch Duke Law’s clinical program and shaped it for more than 20 years, retired on June 30.

Wettach, now the William B. McGuire Clinical Professor Emerita of Law and founding director of the Children’s Law Clinic, joined the faculty in 1994 as a teacher of legal research and writing after a 14-year career at Legal Aid of North Carolina (LANC). She found her calling in clinical education two years later when she became supervising attorney in the AIDS Legal Assistance Project, the first in-house legal clinic of Duke Law’s modern era, and went on to launch its second,

A Cincinnati native, Wettach traces her desire to be a lawyer to her grandfather, a longtime faculty member of the University of North Carolina School of Law and its dean from 1941 to 1949.

After graduating from UNC with a degree in journalism, she worked at a newspaper in Connecticut before returning to Chapel Hill and UNC Law. There she met her future husband, Paul Baldasare, and a classmate, Pam Silberman, who helped focus Wettach’s public service leanings and became a longtime LANC colleague and lifelong friend.

“She thinks through all angles of an issue very thoroughly and is so meticulous in preparing,” said Silberman, now a professor of health policy and management at UNC’s Gillings School of Global Public Health. “I’ve always said that if I ever needed a lawyer I would want Jane.”

Wettach developed considerable expertise in public benefits law over 14 years serving clients in LANC’s Winston-Salem and Raleigh offices. But when the long commute began to conflict with the needs of her two young children, she answered an ad to teach legal writing at Duke Law. “I thought I would teach writing for a few years and then go back to practice,” she said. “It wasn’t my expectation that I would go into teaching as a career.”

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The Commons | Faculty Focus That changed in 1996 when Carolyn McAllaster, now the Colin W. Brown Clinical Professor Emerita of Law, launched the AIDS Legal Assistance Project (now the Health Justice Clinic.) McAllaster said Wettach’s knowledge of benefits law made her a logical choice to serve as supervising attorney.

“We worked hand-in-hand to start that clinic and figure out everything we needed to do to make the clinic successful for students and clients,” she said. McAllaster who retired in 2019, praised Wettach’s legal acumen, work ethic, analytical skills, and deep compassion for her clients as well as her dogged advocacy on their behalf.

“I also appreciated her insistence that students excel at their representation of their clients,” she added. “She demanded an excellent work product not only from herself but also from her students.”

Wettach worked in the clinic and continued to teach legal writing, each half time, for five years before approaching Dean Katharine Bartlett, now the A. Kenneth Pye Professor Emerita of Law, about becoming a full-time clinical teacher. Coincidentally, then Pro Bono Director Brenda Berlin also had inquired about clinical teaching.

Bartlett, who wanted to expand clinical offerings, matched the two and suggested they explore the idea of a clinic addressing the needs of children.

The proposal they developed, with Wettach as director and Berlin as supervising attorney, focused on education and special education law, an area neither knew much about but which had great need and few practitioners.

“There was a big learning curve because we had to learn the law and we had to learn a lot about education and the education of children with disabilities,” Wettach recalled. “Looking back, I certainly wasn’t a leader in the field when I started that clinic, but I was able to develop the substantive knowledge on the job.”

Since welcoming its first class in 2002 the Children’s Law Clinic has provided free legal advice, advocacy, and representation to hundreds of low-income families in cases involving special education for children with disabilities, appeals of school suspensions, and appeals of claims for children’s disability benefits. It is one of few such programs in North Carolina and is a highly-regarded resource for parents, school advocates, media, and policymakers.

Along the way, Wettach has trained hundreds of Duke Law students in advocacy skills and social justice through the clinic and Education Law, a non-clinical class on K-12 public school law that she taught for 17 years.

“Professor Wettach combines great teaching with great mentorship,”said Bailey Sanders ’21, who took Education Law and was Wettach’s research assistant. “She makes her students feel like a priority, not a burden, and that is a big deal to me and others.”

As a summer intern in the Children’s Law Clinic in 2019, Sanders helped win a Social Security Administration appeal that restored disability benefits for a 6-year-old girl. That experience, she said, “reaffirmed my decision to go to law school.”

“When I was her student, she showed me the value of patient, forceful, and compassionate advocacy on behalf of clients,” said Chris Lott ’08, who began his career in education law before joining Duke University’s Office of Counsel as deputy general counsel.

“Beyond mentoring students, Jane was a tireless advocate for justice and fairness, and her clinic advanced the interests of individuals who sorely needed the legal support she provided.”

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“Everything you’d hope for in an advocate” As the clinic’s caseload grew, Wettach broadened its reach. She helped develop the children’s special education bar by organizing the Special Education Law Roundtable, an annual event that has tripled in attendance since it began in 2006.

In 2007 she initiated the Durham Medical-Legal Partnership for Families, a collaboration between the clinic, LANC, pediatricians, and other medical personnel to identify and address social and legal issues that impede children’s health and well-being.

She also began to engage in more policy-oriented advocacy, leading a team of lawyers, school districts, teachers, and school administrators to revise North Carolina’s school discipline code, resulting in the 2011 enactment of a new law that protected the due process rights of suspended students and outlawed the “zero tolerance” approach to school discipline — measures shown to disproportionately impact minority students.

“You help kids by having a seat at the table,” said Senior Lecturing Fellow Crystal Grant, the interim director of the Children’s Law Clinic, who credits Wettach with forging the strong relationships the clinic enjoys with state and local officials.

“She has a great relationship with the Department of Public Instruction. She has great relationships with people at the state level and locally with the school district attorneys. It’s always civil and often a collaborative relationship when we start talking to them about cases.”

In 2010, as lead appellate counsel, Wettach argued King v.

Beaufort County Board of Education before the North Carolina Supreme Court. The case established the right of students to attend alternative school during a suspension in most cases. That year, she received the North Carolina Justice Center’s Defender of Justice Award for litigation.

“Jane is everything you’d hope for in an advocate, because she can not only bring to bear the intellectual arguments that you need to make, but she has such a big heart that she understands the law is more than just a legal argument, that it impacts peoples’ lives in a very important and significant way,” said Berlin, who worked with Wettach for 18 years before joining Stanford University as ombudsperson. “She is tireless and she’s fearless and she’s often the smartest person in the room but she doesn’t grandstand.”

A legacy of clinical excellence at Duke Law through leadership and example Wettach’s commitment to the Law School’s clinical program is rooted in her belief that it allows students to “see and feel what it’s like to be a lawyer.”

“To me it’s critically important that our students have opportunities to meet a client and understand what that relationship is all about, and see how you put principles that you are learning about in other courses into practice,” she said. “It is not an obvious thing, when you’re a law student, how you will ever use what you are learning.”

Clinics also help students develop compassion by viewing the world through the eyes of clients who, in many cases, have little power or privilege, she said.

“I want students to leave saying, ‘Really? These are the choices we’ve made with regard to the people who have the least?’ I want them to leave questioning, ‘Is this right? Is this really what we want our society to be like?’ And if it’s not I want them to be thinking, ‘What can I do to contribute to change?’”

Wettach also encouraged and empowered clients to advocate for themselves by crafting resources to help parents and students know their rights and better understand both administrative processes and how to partner with student attorneys and private lawyers. She authored numerous book-length resources for parents and students, including the Parents’ Guide to Special Education in North Carolina that she regards as one of her most significant contributions to the field and her own legacy.

“Over the years, as I learned more and more, I saw the need for a resource targeted at parents and their advocates who were encountering special education because a child they loved was struggling in school,” Wettach said.

“My goal was to pour as much as I could of what I had learned into a comprehensible guide. In a way, I saw it as my gift to parents and other professionals who are dedicated to educating and advocating for children with educational disabilities, many of whom had brought their issues to the Children’s Law Clinic, not only facilitating my learning but facilitating my students’ learning.”

At Duke Law, Wettach also will be remembered for continually striving to improve the quality of clinical teaching and supervision by participating in national conferences and sharing best practices.

“From the beginning Jane has been a leader in our program,” said Foster, noting that Wettach provided guidance in launching his own clinic in 2002 when they were sharing office space. “She is really committed to being a great teacher and making sure that all of us are improving our teaching practice. Whatever success I have had is in large part due to the foundation that she helped lay for me.”

While her in-person retirement sendoff was postponed by the Covid-19 pandemic, an e-card signed by students, faculty, and alumni was filled with messages praising her tirelessness, compassion, quick wit, dedication to improving the education system, and style of teaching both in the classroom and by example. Many cited her as a role model.

“Professor Wettach has been a wonderful mentor to me and I could not be more grateful,” said Amanda Ng ’20. “She shared her belief that a passionate, clear-sighted, and well-respected lawyer can never want for opportunities to make a difference.

“Her legacy is one of integrity and hard work, showing those of us fortunate to learn from her that it is possible to lead a joyful, righteous, and client-centered life in the law. She serves as an inspiration and reminder to all of us who care about public service that a lawyer’s career is long — and an advocate’s work is never done.” d — Jeannie Naujeck

WEISTART BLURB

John Weistart ’68 Scholar of contracts and commercial law and sports law pioneer lauded on retirement as “font of decency”

P

rofessor John Weistart ’68 has retired after 47 years on the faculty. A scholar of contracts, commercial law, and sports law who has taught Contracts to generations of first-year students, Weistart is known for his innovations in teaching. He directed the award-winning Contracts Video Project, which produced The Contracts Experience, the first complete set of multimedia course materials to be used in law schools.

Weistart pioneered the now-developed field of sports law, having co-authored the seminal 1979 work, The Law of Sports. And in 1986, he served as the executive Producer of Fair Game, a PBS show on issues of corruption and commercialization in college sports.

Weistart, who was honored with an honorary doctorate by his undergraduate alma mater, Illinois Wesleyan University, in 1981, was lauded by his Duke Law colleagues and students, via Zoom, during his last class in April. Professor Paul Haagen called him a “font of decency.”

“He has consistently, forcefully, and gently reminded us to call on the better angels of our natures as we make decisions about how to shape and support the next generation of lawyers, the future of the law, and the way we live our lives,” Haagen said.

The next issue of Duke Law Magazine will feature a look back at Weistart’s career. d

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The Commons | Faculty Focus

special masters assisting with the thousands of federal lawsuits filed by cities and states against opioid manufacturers and others.

At Duke Law, McGovern taught courses in ADR, mass torts, and legal strategy. With Chief Judge Lee Rosenthal of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas, he also taught a seminar for judges pursuing Duke’s Master of Judicial Studies degree, examining how judicial institutions and individual jurists approach particularly complex and interesting problems.

An ADR pioneer, integrating practice, abstract thinking — and compassion

Remembering Francis E. McGovern

D

uke Law Professor Francis E. McGovern, renowned for his expertise in alternative dispute resolution (ADR) and his innovative work as a special master and mediator overseeing or advising on the management and settlement of mass tort claims, died on Feb. 14 following a fall at his California home. He was 75.

“I have admired and enjoyed knowing Francis for many years, long before I came to Duke,” said David F. Levi, the Levi Family Professor of Law and Judicial Studies, director of the Bolch Judicial Institute, and former dean of Duke Law. “He was one of a kind — brilliant, dedicated, kind, energetic, and with a great sense of humor. As a lawyer and teacher, he was focused on moving the field forward, solving seemingly intractable problems, making things better without the friction and expense of traditional litigation.”

A member of the Duke Law faculty since 1997, McGovern combined teaching with the practice of ADR and work as a court-appointed special master in almost 100 cases, including those arising from DDT toxic exposure in Alabama, asbestos contamination, the Dalkon Shield contraceptive intrauterine device, silicone breast implants, Rhode Island’s Station Nightclub fire, and the BP-Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. At the time of his death, he was serving as one of three

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A native of Charlottesville, Va., McGovern received his BA at Yale University in 1967 before serving for three years in the U.S. Marine Corps, where he achieved the rank of captain. He received his JD at the University of Virginia in 1973 and subsequently practiced law at Vinson & Elkins in Houston. He began his academic career at Samford University’s Cumberland School of Law in Birmingham, Ala., in 1977 and came to Duke from the University of Alabama School of Law, where he was the Francis H. Hare Professor of Torts. He served as a visiting professor at numerous law schools in the U.S. and abroad, and held longtime teaching posts at the University of California Berkeley School of Law, at Stanford Law School, where he was a senior fellow at the Stanford Center on Conflict and Negotiation, and at UC Hastings College of the Law. “I decided very early in my academic career that my highest and best use was to combine teaching with the application of that teaching in the real world, what we typically call translational learning,” McGovern told Duke Law Magazine in 2018. “My focus has been to understand the theories and the principles, but then be able to apply them. And I found the reverse works as well: What you learned in the application gives you an opportunity to develop theories and principles.” That approach led him, after working on several mass tort cases, to develop the concepts of “maturity” and “elasticity” in mass tort litigation, two concepts now seminal to the field.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, McGovern was among the first in the nation to write about and to use ADR techniques to avoid or improve the litigation process. “Francis McGovern was a founding father of the modern ADR movement,” said Kenneth Feinberg, another ADR luminary who served as special master of the 9/11 Victim Compensation Fund.

“Long before it was fashionable, well before ADR was a permanent fixture in law school education, he predicted that mediation, arbitration, administrative

claims programs like the 9/11 Victim Compensation Fund and BP oil spill fund, and other forms of alternative dispute resolution would become mainstream pillars of our American legal system. He wore many hats simultaneously: active mediator and arbitrator, designer, and administrator of mass claims programs, an academic of the first rank, and a credible bridge between federal and state judiciaries and the legal profession. He paved the way with a blueprint as to how our civil justice system could accommodate and be more responsive to the individual citizen seeking efficient and cost-effective justice.”

Seeing that mass claims take years to reach and proceed through trial at tremendous expense to the parties and the courts, McGovern pioneered new roles for court-appointed special masters as “case managers” and “settlement masters.” As a case manager, he organized the pretrial administration of cases and used ADR techniques to help parties agree on efficient discovery approaches and schedules. As a settlement master, he was often required to develop innovative ways to implement potential settlements.

In the litigation emerging from the 2003 fire sparked by a rock band’s pyrotechnic display at The Station nightclub in Warwick, R.I., McGovern designed a point system to distribute a $176 million pool of funds among 310 plaintiffs in full settlement of all of their claims, while acknowledging that their true injuries could never be fully compensated.

“We had a limited list of variables, all objective,” he told Duke Law Magazine in 2010. “The goal was to develop a matrix that achieves ‘horizontal equity’ and ‘vertical equity.’ Horizontal equity means that everybody who had exactly the same injury gets exactly the same number of points. Vertical equity means that the more severe get more points than the less severe.

The enterprise then shifts from dollars and cents to vertical and horizontal equity.” It gained unanimous approval from the plaintiffs.

The point system was “so transparent, objective, and simple that all plaintiffs understood that it was the only way it could be done,” said Providence lawyer Mark Mandell, who directly represented more than 100 plaintiffs and served as co-lead counsel of the steering committee that coordinated the litigation. Critical to its success, he said, was the fact that McGovern, who worked on the highly emotional case pro bono, spoke with every plaintiff or their representative, usually in person. “He created a level of trust with them and gave them a forum to be involved in identifying what the issues were and the kinds of plans they wanted. Everybody was so appreciative. …

Francis dealt with them fairly and compassionately and that went a long way.”

Innovating in an unprecedented case As special master in the massive multidistrict federal opioid litigation consolidated before Judge Dan Aaron Polster of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Ohio, McGovern also oversaw a settlement track for the case. He had been crisscrossing the country almost continually for two years to meet with lawyers for the defendants and the plaintiffs and facilitate a framework for negotiation. The plaintiffs include 2,500 cities and counties to date, with the possibility of thousands more lawsuits to come.

“This has never happened in the history of our country, and there is no existing structure available to resolve these cases,” said Polster, referring to the sheer scale of the multidistrict litigation. “I believe one needed to be created and Francis was a principal architect.” A key aspect of the plan would survive any appellate ruling against the negotiation class itself, he added: “Probably the most important aspect of it is the mechanism by which the cities and counties have agreed to allocate any funds produced by settlement or verdict — a fair way based on hard data and metrics.” The mechanism is designed to ensure that sparsely populated areas devastated by the opioid epidemic will be treated as fairly as densely populated ones, he said.

In recent years, McGovern applied mediation and other forms of ADR to institutional reform efforts emerging from federal lawsuits over bureaucratic failures in the Texas foster care system and the New York City Housing Authority’s efforts to abate mold, among other housing problems. Traditional court-based remedies, such as fines, didn’t guarantee change, he said. “I became interested in what a federal judge can do that would reform the institution in a positive way.”

A cherished member of the community At Duke Law, McGovern is remembered by his colleagues as a cherished friend.

Professor Thomas Metzloff first got to know McGovern when Metzloff visited at the University of Alabama School of Law in 1995 and taught courses in legal ethics and dispute resolution. McGovern, Metzloff noted, was already a legend in the ADR world, and they quickly became friends.

“I always started our weekly lunches with the same question, ‘So what interesting thing are you working on today?’” Metzloff recalled. “We never needed another question as he always had about three or four interesting things he was ‘working on that day.’ I would marvel at his reports of the truly fascinating challenges he was working on in the mass tort world.” Metzloff said he continued to pose that question to McGovern throughout their long friendship. “He never failed to have an answer. I am still expecting to see Francis walk down the hallways any minute — with a suitcase as he heads off someplace to work on solving a problem.”

Said Professor Donald Beskind LLM ’77: “It’s hard to think about Francis in the past tense. In life he was an active verb. He used his energy and creativity to create action. Lawyers and judges who considered their cases intractable came to him to help them find resolutions.

“As a friend he was generous with ideas, time, and warmth. A dinner with Francis and his wife, Katy, the high point of any day, was filled with discussions of current events, his children of whom he was immensely proud, his travel, and his work. But always of interest to Francis were the lives of others and their families. In his life and his work, he took pleasure in empowering and encouraging those he encountered with his ideas, connections, and generosity.”

“Francis was an extraordinary person and cherished member of our community,” said Kerry Abrams, James B. Duke and Benjamin N. Duke Dean and professor of law. “We miss him greatly.” d — Frances Presma

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Duke Law School’s 11 legal clinics enable students to hone invaluable practice skills, help close the justice gap for clients and communities in need, and cement a lifelong commitment to service.

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w

hen his daily runs took him through

downtown Durham in mid-April, Kevin Cergol ’20 sometimes passed makeshift food stations set up by the Durham Neighbors Free Lunch Initiative, where volunteers wearing masks and gloves prepared to hand out boxed meals to adults, teens, and small children. The arrival of the Covid-19 pandemic was causing economic shocks and a spike in local food insecurity, and Durham Public Schools had ended its free lunch program after a worker had fallen ill. In the midst of the mounting deprivation, though, Cergol would allow himself a small sense of satisfaction: A student attorney in Duke Law School’s Community Enterprise Clinic, he had helped his client, the sustainability nonprofit Don’t Waste Durham, become the fiscal sponsor of the initiative.

Cergol

“It was great to handle a transaction that helps feed people,” he says. “I wasn’t cooking the meals but I felt a very strong connection to the project. And I found myself inspired less by the minutiae of the work, but more by what I was helping create.”

»

by Frances Presma Illustration: Nadya Noor

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clinics Still, Cergol knew the legal minutiae that would allow the Free Lunch Initiative to collect corporate donations under his client’s existing 501c3 designation needed to be properly executed, even as all parties pressed to have that happen as quickly as possible. He had to be careful, for example, to ensure that restaurant workers preparing the meals did not become Don’t Waste Durham employees and that the initiative’s work properly fell within his client’s tax-exempt purpose. He also had to secure the nonprofit’s right to exert increased control over the initiative should it begin to evolve in a new direction.

“The hard part as a lawyer here is that you’re stepping into an environment where everyone at the table really likes each other and is trying to do something positive,” says Cergol, who previously spent two semesters counseling entrepreneurs in the Start-Up Ventures Clinic. “You have to very carefully bring up potential problems and talk about some worst-case scenarios. But through three semesters of clinic work, I feel like I’ve developed that skillset relatively well — I can talk about the worst thing that could happen somewhat lightly while having everyone realize that I’m not kidding, that things can go bad.”

After two days of research, consultations, Zoom meetings, and emails, Cergol had secured a formal agreement in his client’s best interests and to everyone’s satisfaction, including his own.

“A phrase I heard used over the summer when I was at a law firm was, ‘You’re quarterbacking the deal,’” says Cergol, who will start practice at Latham & Watkins in Silicon Valley, where he spent his 2L summer. “This wasn’t nearly as complex as an enormous M&A transaction, but you can see how the skills involved would be transferable. I think my clinic experience will make me a better attorney.”

The story of how a law student jumped in at a time of crisis to help clients come together to meet a community need “is the story of all of our clinics,” says Andrew Foster, who directs the Law School’s clinical programs and supervised Cergol as director of the Community Enterprise Clinic. Students in each of the Law School’s 11 clinics gain practical knowledge of a discrete area of substantive law. They develop an array of professional skills — including such essential “soft skills” as case management and teamwork. They address critical legal issues for needy individual and organizational clients and communities. And they do it under the supportive supervision of superb clinicians. The experience helps set the stage for the transition from law school to legal practice, he says.

“While each clinic works with clients and partner organizations in very different ways and in different areas of the law, we all share a common foundation: We give our students the chance to work directly with peo36 Duke Law Magazine • Summer 2020

ple to use the law to solve their problems,” Foster says.

“These challenging and critical experiences help our students to develop their lawyering skills and — at least as important — to build their confidence and begin to hone their professional judgment.

“Because our clinics all serve clients and communities that would otherwise not have access to lawyers, our students also see firsthand the impacts of inequality and the role that lawyers can play in helping to secure justice. This helps to instill a lifelong commitment to service and leadership that is a hallmark of Duke Law.”

A Duke Law tradition Clinical education at U.S. law schools began at Duke Law in 1931, when Professor John S. Bradway started supervising student attorneys in their representation of indigent clients, directing an in-house legal services clinic for 28 years. During the 1970s and early 1980s, it was revived with a program, led for several years by Professor of the Practice of Law Donald Beskind LLM ’77, then working as a Bradway Fellow, in which students gained skills in civil or criminal practice through placements in Legal Aid offices or with prosecutors and criminal defense attorneys.

The modern era of clinical legal education at Duke began in 1996 with the establishment of the AIDS Legal Assistance Project by Carolyn McAllaster, now the Colin W. Brown Clinical Professor Emerita of Law. The clinic, which provided free legal assistance to low-income people with HIV, would later become the Health Justice Clinic and now serves clients facing any serious illness. In 2002, the Law School launched the Children’s Education Law Clinic (now the Children’s Law Clinic), which provides advice, advocacy, and legal representation of low-income children in school-related cases and was led initially by Jane Wettach, now the William B. McGuire Clinical Professor Emerita of Law. The same year saw the birth of Foster’s Community Enterprise Clinic, which helps nonprofit organizations and social entrepreneurs plan and implement community development projects that improve the quality of life in distressed areas and for marginalized people.

In the ensuing 18 years, the Law School would launch nearly a dozen more clinics, each fueled by a match of student interest to community need and an assessment that it will complement existing areas of curricular depth. Duke’s clinical program now enables students to engage in supervised practice across a broad range of subject areas and develop a similarly broad lawyering skillset. The program currently includes practice areas ranging from entrepreneurship, wrongful convictions, civil justice, and appellate litigation to envi-

Working directly with clients and using law to help solve their problems allows students to develop their lawyering skills, build confidence, and begin to hone professional judgment.

What they did A client who had been receiving assistance from the Durham Housing Authority (DHA) voucher program that helps very low-income families to pay their rent, was rendered homeless after her landlord declined to renew her lease that ended Oct. 31 and her voucher was terminated due to a criminal charge her minor daughter incurred the previous May. Her attempt to avoid the loss of her voucher by vacating her rental early was unsuccessful. Following direct negotiation with the DHA’s attorney, Batra and Shadeed secured the reinstatement of the voucher, giving their client a chance to secure private rental housing.

Meghna Batra ’20 and Jared Shadeed JD/LLM ’21 Civil Justice Clinic

What they learned “Without access to justice through the Civil Justice Clinic, a client such as this one would likely be left with no real avenue to advocate for herself,” says Shadeed. “We had to be purposeful advocates, and that entailed using many different skills, from legal research to drafting arguments to effectively advocating in an actual hearing. The value of persistence was quite evident because we had to come back from the negative decision and find an alternative way to ultimately achieve success for our client.”

ronmental law, free speech, and international human rights. A new Immigrant Rights Clinic welcomed its first students in January and an Ethical Tech Clinic is in the planning stages. Operating collectively as “a teaching law firm with a public interest mission,” the clinics effectively comprise the second-largest public interest law firm in North Carolina — second only to Legal Aid of North Carolina.

Almost 75% of students take at least one clinic or externship while at Duke Law, with many enrolling in more than one clinic, spending a second clinic semester as an advanced student, or both. Their cumulative clinic service amounts to approximately 20,000 hours of pro bono legal representation each year to clients who would otherwise not have any, with an estimated economic value over $3.5 million. Clinic participation is open to international LLM candidates and mandatory for the growing number of JD students — 98 in the 2019-2020 academic year — pursuing the Law School’s Certificate in Public Interest and Public Service Law. The clinics are, in fact, closely connected to and complemented by the Law School’s robust public interest and pro bono program that meshes experiential learning and professional development with service from students’ first days of law school and, for many, works as a pipeline to upper-year clinic enrollment.

“In addition to the economic value and the importance of access to a lawyer, the outcomes that student attorneys working in collaboration with our clients and partners achieve are obviously invaluable, and that’s what really matters,” says Foster. “In that sense, I think the clinics are one of the main ways in which Duke Law School fulfills what I see as our core mission — positioning our students to be essential members of the next generation of lawyer-leaders.”

Batra

Shadeed

That was evident in the spring, as the pandemic forced clinic students to continue their work on a wide range of matters remotely, collaborating with each other and their faculty supervisors and clients at a distance. A team in the Civil Justice Clinic negotiated the reinstatement of a homeless client’s federal housing voucher, paving the way for her to regain rental housing; a group of advanced Start-Up Ventures Clinic students helped entrepreneurs understand the implications of bringing on interns as employees or independent contractors of their rapidly growing company; students in the International Human Rights Clinic contributed research to a report, released in May, identifying the principles of international human rights law that should guide the work of the U.S. Secretary of State’s Commission on Unalienable Rights; and students in the First Amendment Clinic and the Children’s Law Clinic finalized their contributions to amicus briefs submitted in support of applications for certiorari to the Supreme Court of the United States in cases of national import.

“The dedication, energy, and professionalism that our students bring to their clinic work is truly remarkable,” says Kerry Abrams, the James B. Duke and Benjamin N. Duke Dean and professor of law. In addition to building essential practice skills and exemplifying the Law School’s commitment to Duke University’s core value of the translation of knowledge in service to society, the clinics significantly advance Abrams’ broader goals of increasing participation in the public interest and pro bono program and supporting students who want to enter public interest and government careers.

“Our public interest and pro bono program is one of my top strategic priorities for the school,” she says. “I want all Duke Law Duke Law Magazine • Summer 2020

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clinics In Bruno v. Northside Independent School District, a child with autism whose family moved from Florida to Texas in the middle of the school year due to his father’s military relocation had his instructional time cut in half, causing him to regress in his education. Yet the Fifth Circuit found it met the standard required by the “comparable services” provision of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). Under the supervision of clinic faculty, Yu and Kaplan drafted an amicus brief urging the U.S. Supreme Court to grant certiorari in the case, arguing that current interpretation and enforcement of the comparable services provision is inconsistent between courts and often strays from its statutory purpose, resulting in potentially severe harm to students with disabilities.

What they did

Tom Yu ’20 and Zack Kaplan ’21 Children’s Law Clinic

“ I want all Duke Law graduates to understand themselves as public servants.”

Dean Kerry Abrams

“We were each writing different sections that needed to meld together into a broader and important message,” says Kaplan. “The process taught me the importance of taking a step back from the specific facts of this litigation, and this student in particular, to consider the broader context and broader impact of the matter.”

What they learned

graduates to understand themselves as public servants.

Lawyers contribute to society by working to preserve the institutions that allow democracy to flourish. Lawyers have a special obligation to use their skills and talents for the public good.”

Addressing student attorneys during an online end-ofyear celebration, Abrams praised their choice to undertake clinic service as “an expression of the highest values of the legal profession,” particularly in light of the unique challenges brought on by the pandemic.

“Even in the best of times, the work you were asked to do as student attorneys is hard,” she said. “We want you to learn while you’re still students about all the difficult kinds of choices you’re going to have to make when you represent clients. But I expect that this spring, that choice required you to have additional commitment, additional resilience, and additional drive to do this kind of work.

“Your clients have needed you and you have stepped up to help them.”

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Yu

Kaplan

A cycle of planning, execution, and reflection

In each clinic, student attorneys are supervised by faculty clinicians who possess a wealth of subject-matter and procedural expertise forged in private and public-interest practice, government service, and non-governmental and intergovernmental organizations. Passionate about their individual practice areas, the clinicians, who also teach seminars in their relevant fields of substantive law, are equally passionate about helping students develop as effective counselors and advocates capable of serving clients and solving problems in those fields — or any other they choose to enter after law school.

“I see clinics as a chance to understand what part of practice is most appealing for you in developing your professional identity,” says Clinical Professor Jayne Huckerby, director of the International Human Rights Clinic. “They haven’t had the exposure to different skillsets to think that through. It’s been very formative for students in their career and curricular choices to know what they excelled at in the clinical environment.”

Huckerby and her faculty colleagues, who meet regularly to share strategies for improving their teaching and supervision, offer their students a supervised learning experience that follows a cycle of planning, execution, and reflection facilitated through one-on-one meetings, class discussions, and journals in which they can reflect on aspects of their cases or client interactions that have challenged or moved them.

“We spend a lot of time with students reflecting on what they did, what they’re thinking about doing, and what their game plan is for what they’re going to do on their cases,” says Clinical Professor Allison Rice, director of the Health Justice Clinic. “Was a particular action effective? Was it ineffective? Was it ethical? It sets up a framework for being thoughtful and intentional in practice.”

The clinicians “curate” case and project assignments, aiming to give each student a range of clients, experiences, and responsibility for a variety of work products. They also try to ensure students master personal skills they might otherwise not have exposure to, or even avoid. For Clinical Professor Bryan McGann LLMLE ’15 and Senior Lecturing Fellow Thomas Williams, the director and supervising attorney, respectively, in the Start-Up Ventures Clinic, that includes privately asking each student at the start of the semester what parts of their chosen future practice they might fear the most, be it public speaking or even speaking up in a smaller group.

“All of them are very honest, and when we have our weekly one-on-one meetings, we make sure they have had the opportunity to work on those skills,” says McGann, who is also of counsel to Smith Anderson in Raleigh and an entrepreneur-in-residence at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, having invented the Pill Pockets brand pet treats for medicine delivery. “I want our students to understand what makes an associate valuable to their law firm in the emerging growth and start-up space. That would include the professional competence they learn in law school, but it also involves the confidence to properly communicate, both orally and in writing. Are you comfortable in your own skin and able to interact with senior associates and junior and senior partners in a confident and professional manner? The ability to do so maximizes a young attorney’s opportunities within the firm.”

And as in any professional setting, the clinical faculty, functioning as the senior partners in their individual “practice groups,” set high expectations for their student associates, even as they acknowledge the trepidation and challenges that all novice attorneys face, particularly when engaging in high-stakes work. They emphasize how procrastinating on tasks — a student’s prerogative when an individual grade is at stake — is not an option when other students are relying on a teammate’s contributions to a project, when clinical faculty have to review work before it goes before a judge or client, and when the consequences to the client for anything less than a first-rate effort can be severe.

Explains Theresa Newman ’88, the Charles S. Rhyne Clinical Professor of Law and co-director of the Wrongful Convictions Clinic: “That’s particularly pointed in our clinic where the students visit their client in prison and when they walk out, the client remains behind.” Given that a post-conviction claim of innocence can involve years of painstaking investigation, advocacy, and litigation with successive classes of clinic students picking up and advancing their predecessors’ work, completing tasks is crucial, she says.

Patrick O’Connell JD/LLMLE ’20 and Neil Datar ’20 Start-Up Ventures Clinic What they did Protect3d, a company started at Duke by engineering students who also played football, had already secured grants and garnered buzz for its product — custom-fit athletic pads made through 3D scanning and printing. With the founders ready to start raising money, adding personnel, manufacturing, and selling, O’Connell and Datar got to work on a range of matters, including drafting customer contracts and employee agreements, navigating securities regulations to help organize a first fundraising round, and registering a medical device with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

What they learned “I knew the clinic was in line with what I wanted to do and that it would teach me useful skills but I had no idea the degree to which it would give me practical experience in contract drafting, in working with entrepreneurs, in working with supervisors, and getting and implementing feedback in transactional law,” said Datar. “It has been my greatest avenue for learning and for growth, and for adding value as a future lawyer.”

O’Connell

Datar

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clinics In the same vein, Clinical Professor Sean Andrussier ’92 says he impresses on the students he oversees as director of the Appellate Litigation Clinic that while parties who lack access to lawyers may have no shot at justice, “justice may also be denied if a party doesn’t have a lawyer who is sufficiently rigorous, innovative, and persistent.” Equally crucial for his students to understand as they brief and argue federal appeals, by court appointment, brought by inmates and other litigants who have filed pro se appeals, is that advocates are also officers of the court, he says. “The latter role affects how we conduct ourselves.”

Neil Joseph ’20 and Harrison Newman ’20, et al First Amendment Clinic In 2017, Kevin Hennelly, a retired utility worker, posted comments on Facebook and a newspaper website that were critical of a wealthy businessman’s efforts to rezone Hilton Head National Golf Course for residential and mixed-use development, prompting claims from the businessman for defamation, negligence, and injunctive relief. Building on work conducted by several teams of prior clinic students, Joseph and Newman drafted a summary judgment brief. When in-person arguments were canceled due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the judge in the federal district court in South Carolina decided to rule on the parties’ briefs, ultimately awarding summary judgment to Hennelly and praising the clinic students for the quality of their representation.

What they did

Lecturing Fellow and Supervising Attorney Nicole Ligon ’16 and Professor H. Jefferson Powell, the clinic’s director, “invested much time and effort into making our case the best it could be, while also empowering Harrison and myself,” says Joseph.

“I felt like an integral part of a team, an equal part of Kevin’s defense. This experience prepared me for being a lawyer more than anything I’ve done at the Law School.”

What they learned

Joseph

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Newman

Practical insights on substantive law and procedure — and essential soft skills

In the course of addressing their clients’ legal needs and concerns and otherwise advancing their clinic assignments, students inevitably gain insight into the ways legal principles they first encountered in doctrinal classes operate in real life. They also hone myriad skills transferable to a wide range of practice areas, such as legal research and writing, the iterative process of building evidentiary records and crafting briefs, drafting such documents as contracts and articles of incorporation, and becoming effective advocates who know how to be persuasive in different contexts, orally and in writing.

“When a student in the Health Justice Clinic is faced with digesting a three-inch medical record and translating what they’ve learned about their client’s condition to very opaque Social Security rules for how one qualifies for disability benefits or Medicaid, they are practicing the skill of complex problem-solving that you can use in any kind of lawyering,” says McAllaster, noting that students in other clinics undertake similar challenges. “Then you have to figure out how what you’ve learned applies to a legal theory that is going to win. Again, that’s a skill that every lawyer in any kind of practice is going to have to learn.”

Specific practical insights, such as the logistics of filing different kinds of motions in different courts or how to track a court’s docket, can really only be developed in clinics, says Professor H. Jefferson Powell, a constitutional scholar and former executive branch attorney who founded the First Amendment Clinic in 2018. “Students learn how to do things that no sensible academic class could actually spend time on,” he says. “The importance of clinical legal education cannot be overstated.”

Clinics are a unique venue for students to learn a range of skills, including active listening, interviewing, and effectively communicating with clients, colleagues, and opposing counsel. Faculty impress on students that these are as important to successful representation as are the formal tools of litigation, regulatory, or transactional law.

“Students don’t realize how much lawyering is done outside of filing a complaint and going into the courtroom,” observes Senior Lecturing Fellow Crystal Grant, interim director of the Children’s Law Clinic. “Some come with the expectation that they will spend their time filing pleadings. It’s the interviews with other stakeholders, reviewing records, analyzing facts, and ongoing client coun-

A central goal of clinical training is to impart to students the importance of collaborating with their clients — and giving them the skills to do so.

seling that will enable them to develop a case strategy and ultimately move the case towards their client’s goals. And that’s transferable. Most of the students in my clinic will not end up practicing children’s law, but it’s helped them become better investigators and develop those skills that they’ll use in almost any practice area.”

Developing client management and interpersonal skills — “how to write an email, how to talk to someone on the phone, how to coach or counsel a client and help them advocate for themselves, how to deliver bad news” — isn’t expressly taught elsewhere on the law school curriculum, says Rice. “We focus a lot on those things.”

In the Health Justice Clinic and others, she notes, students are often representing clients whose backgrounds and life circumstances differ markedly from their own: “Students have to be able to communicate in ways that people can understand. That helps to foster the lawyer-client relationship, ensuring the client understands what you are saying and doing on their behalf and feels that they are being heard.

“We have our students read about empathy and talk about it and reflect on how well they feel they understand their clients. It’s a good characteristic to have for any kind of law practice.”

A central goal of clinical training is, in fact, to impart to students the importance of collaborating with their clients — and giving them the skills to do so. A key element of that is developing respect for the clients’ personal experience and community context and being prepared for challenging conversations across cultural boundaries.

Clinical Professor Ryke Longest, co-director of the Environmental Law and Policy Clinic, frames this as teaching students to be counselors at law as well as exceptional attorneys. Through their service of real clients, they begin to recognize the need to keep asking questions to fully understand not just the immediate problem, but its underlying causes.

“A counselor is a person who advises another and listens — truly listens — to what they have to say so we can know and understand what their case is about and who they are,” says Longest. “We have to learn not just how to ask the questions we want to know as lawyers, but how to invite

Victoria Rose JD/MEM ’21 and Hannah Smith MEM ’21 Environmental Law and Policy Clinic What they did The clinic has represented Yadkin Riverkeeper since 2009, working to ensure adequate cleanup around a shuttered Alcoa aluminum smelting plant in Badin, N.C. Almost a century of large-scale production with improper waste disposal has seriously polluted soil and water in the former company town, particularly in the largely Black community of West Badin. In addition to comparing site conditions in Badin to those in Massena, N.Y., where Alcoa had conducted a more rigorous cleanup after closing a smelter, Rose and Smith began an ArcGis StoryMap, an online tool illustrating the source of Badin’s toxic legacy and results of research conducted by successive clinic teams. The client will use the StoryMap in public education and advocacy campaigns.

What they learned “While lawyers play a key role in the environmental justice movement, it is the voices and stories of our clients and the communities we serve that really give the movement strength and push it forward,” says Rose. “As I move forward in the field of environmental law, I will continue to be mindful of the power of storytelling and look for opportunities to share the stories of my clients to help them achieve their goals.”

Rose

Smith

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clinics

David Gardner ’20, Amanda Ng ’20, and Nick Lynch ’20 Immigrant Rights Clinic The client, whose relationship to a witness in a prosecution tied to a public official made her a target for violence in her home country, was seeking asylum in the United States. Gardner, Ng, and Lynch and their clinic supervisors collectively invested more than 700 hours over eight weeks on the case, which challenges new nationwide restrictions placed by the U.S. attorney general on asylum based on family relationships. In addition to compiling 800 pages of documentary evidence and crafting a 25,000-word brief to preview a possible appeal, each student identified and secured an academic expert to provide key testimony and argued a portion of the four-hour hearing. [The client’s asylum application was denied in late June but is now on appeal and will make use of the substantial record the students established.]

What they did

“It was difficult at first to navigate the language barriers and to balance the need to understand our client’s story against the need to understand the substantive law around asylum eligibility,” says Ng. “But the further we got in the process, the more strongly I felt that genuine and effective legal advocacy requires a partnership with our client.”

What they learned

“ All Duke Law students should think of themselves as public servants and all lawyers should think of themselves as public servants.”

The Immigrant Rights Clinic team with their client. From left: Hila Moss (co-counsel), client, Kate Evans, Nick Lynch, David Gardner, and Amanda Ng. (The photo is used with the client’s permission; her face is obscured to preserve confidentiality.)

42 Duke Law Magazine • Summer 2020

our clients to ask us questions and maybe even to help them know what questions they need to ask.”

That approach is particularly critical, he says, to the cross-disciplinary research, analysis, advocacy, and problem-solving that students in the Environmental Law and Policy Clinic engage in on matters of environmental justice, sustainability, and public health, cases that involve multiple stakeholders and the sustained efforts of successive student classes. The clinic enrolls equal numbers of law students and master’s students from Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment.

The counseling function is similarly foundational to other clinic practices. Students in the Start-Up Ventures Clinic are often surprised at how the entrepreneurs who are their clients think differently from lawyers and by their single-minded focus on their enterprise, says McGann. And the learning can go both ways: “Sometimes entrepreneurs are a little blinded to some of the issues they should be thinking of. They just have a great vision for what the product can be. So we work on counseling as much as possible.”

In the Wrongful Convictions Clinic, student attorneys are challenged to establish trust with clients traumatized by incarceration, negative interactions with the criminal justice system, and, sometimes, previous counsel. Clinicians frequently bring in experts to discuss communication and connection: their exonerated clients. In September, just a few weeks after being released from prison after serving 25 years for a murder he didn’t commit, Dontae Sharpe had a stark message for the fall 2019 cohort of clinic students. “Keep your word,” he said. “Be straight up and to the point. Don’t beat around the bush, don’t hide things. If you lie, the trust is gone.

Be as genuine as you can with your client, and ‘be real’ with the D.A., too.”

Sharpe’s mother, Sarah Blakely, who interacted closely with the clinic teams who worked on his case over nine years, told them to learn about their clients from their families. “You’ve got to be a protector for your client,” she said.

Cultivating a sense of justice while bridging the justice gap By design, student attorneys fill a yawning gap in legal services; meeting a critical community need for services is a prerequisite to the establishment of any clinic at Duke Law. To cite one example, few attorneys can take on post-conviction claims of innocence from start to finish and face the many procedural hurdles clients face in getting judicial review of their claims.

“You don’t get a hearing unless you spend at least two or three years with students investigating a case,” Newman says. “Without our students’ work, I am certain the eight innocent men who have been released through our clinic would still be in prison.” The stakes are similarly high for clients of other clinics who are seeking access to such essential services as health benefits, educational services, safe housing, and asylum.

And facilitating access to justice for underserved clients and communities is often galvanizing for students, says Huckerby. “They

“ All Duke Law students should think of themselves as public servants and all lawyers should think of themselves as public servants.”

To prepare the clinic’s May 7 submission to the U.S. Secretary of State’s Commission on Unalienable Rights that was co-signed by individuals associated with human rights clinics at 20 law schools, Jackson, an advanced clinic student, attended and monitored all five of the commission’s public meetings. Working with two other students, she kept meeting records and engaged in advocacy, research, and analysis that involved delving directly into many of the most pressing and timely questions regarding human rights law and its institutions. Jackson helped frame the submission that puts forth eight principles of international human rights law that the commission should rely upon, including that “there is no hierarchy of rights,” that sexual and reproductive health are “human rights guarantees,” and that rights such as the right to food, work, and social security are “equal to civil and political rights.”

What she did

“Monitoring the commission taught me the importance of the small things — showing up, paying attention, and taking good notes,” says Jackson. “Our meticulous notes provided a more timely and accurate record than the official minutes and enabled us to support our partners’ advocacy efforts. This project also required strategically selecting the right time, audience, and mechanism for our advocacy efforts. Finally, drafting the final submission was a challenging exercise in messaging, as we distilled comprehensive legal doctrines into concise summaries, balancing academic rigor with accessible language to create a document instructive for both the commission and the public.”

What she learned

Michelle Jackson ’20 International Human Rights Clinic

engage in very meaningful, very impactful work in all of our projects, and that work wouldn’t get done without them. Students have an opportunity to make a very unique, very concrete contribution to the enjoyment of human rights. And when you think about what makes people satisfied in their professional identities, having a meaningful impact and knowing how to think about what constitutes impact and how to measure impact — thinking those kinds of things through is very important.”

Adds Clinical Professor Kate Evans, director of the Immigrant Rights Clinic which serves clients who have often fled hostile circumstances in their home countries to face daunting hurdles in U.S. courts: “Clinics can show students, in some of their very first experiences with the law, how powerful they can be to bring justice to their clients, justice to the country, justice to their communities. That’s not always because they’re going to win. It’s because they can understand what the difficulties and obstacles are that are facing the people they’re serving. They can understand their clients’ stories. They can immerse themselves in that sort of shared humanity.

“And I think that allows students to develop a set of tools and sensitivities that transfers to any context, whether it’s a public interest-legal services context, or in the service of a corporate client. The empathy, the listening, and the advocacy is a constellation of tools that inform each other, and allow for a sort of progress within the systems of justice as a whole and our communities as a whole.”

For many students, making connections with clients and communities whose backgrounds differ from theirs and who are often poor challenges preconceptions and stereotypes in a way that plants the seeds for a lifelong commitment to pro bono service and social change. Proximity almost inevitably breeds empathy, observes Wettach, noting her longstanding goal for her students to “see the world” from their clients’ perspectives.

“It’s very special when Children’s Law Clinic students come away with admiration for what the parent has done and is doing and the struggles that that parent has, partly due to the societal structures that we have in place.” She wants students to look critically at those structures and the choices facing those with the

Jackson

Meeting a critical community need for services is a prerequisite to the establishment of any clinic at Duke Law.

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clinics

Farrah Bara ’20, Ellie Hylton ’20, Mark Rothrock ’20, and Spencer Scheidt ’20 Appellate Litigation Clinic What they did The team represented Gerald Howell, a Pennsylvania inmate serving a life sentence without parole for a 1982 Philadelphia murder he has long maintained he did not commit, in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. Howell, who has been incarcerated since the age of 18, presented new evidence of his innocence in the district court. At issue on appeal is whether this evidence fulfills the Supreme Court’s actual-innocence standard for overcoming the statute of limitations governing habeas petitions. The students, who researched and briefed the appeal under the supervision of Clinical Professor Sean Andrussier ’92, the clinic director appointed by the Third Circuit as pro bono counsel for Howell, argued that it does. Scheidt argued the appeal via telephone conference on June 17 before a three-judge panel, having been assisted in preparation by his clinic teammates. All have accepted offers for post-graduate appellate clerkships.

What they learned “Working in the appellate clinic taught me that law is a team sport,” says Scheidt. “Although everyone in our group was brilliant on their own, because each person brought something different to the table the whole became greater than the sum of its parts. Bouncing strategies, arguments, and syntax off of each other for almost a year made our briefs and oral argument stronger than anything any of us could have accomplished working alone in twice that time.”

Hylton

Rothrock

Scheidt

Bara

44 Duke Law Magazine • Summer 2020

least in society and to be moved to change them if they are inadequate. (Read more, page 29.)

And proximity is facilitated by the clinical faculty’s exceptionally close connections with the communities they serve. Many of them practiced in North Carolina prior to joining the Duke Law faculty and hold leadership posts in bar associations and other professional and community organizations.

“We’re able to help students see the impact they’re having in a very immediate sense,” says Clinical Professor Michelle Nowlin JD/MA ’92, co-director of the Environmental Law and Policy Clinic. “I also think that it helps give them a model, wherever they go, for ways they can be involved in their communities in the future, even if it’s outside of their practice area. They can join a citizen planning commission. They can get involved in pro bono projects with their communities and in some way lend their talents and be civic contributors.”

Exposing opportunities for systemic change

Their exposure to real cases often shows students how the law can create unintended policy outcomes and other systemic and societal problems. Increasingly, the clinics are leveraging faculty expertise, community partnerships, and the openness to cross-disciplinary and cross-departmental collaboration that is a core value of Duke Law and Duke University to address these issues.

The Health Justice Clinic’s longtime representation of people with HIV and AIDS revealed the unequal regional distribution of federal grant funding. That resulted in the establishment of a clinic led for several years by McAllaster devoted to related policy work and the ongoing Southern AIDS Strategy Initiative (SASI). SASI includes Duke health policy researchers to create

data-driven policy solutions to ending AIDS in the U.S. South.

The Children’s Law Clinic’s representation of children facing longterm suspensions exposed racial disparity in its implementation and culminated in Wettach’s leadership in rewriting the applicable state law. In the International Human Rights Clinic, students’ research, analysis, and advocacy contributed to the work of the North Carolina Commission of Inquiry on Torture that investigated and exposed the role the state played in the U.S. torture program following 9/11, as well an Amnesty International report on guns in domestic violence in the United States. And a catalyst project involving the Community Enterprise Clinic’s Foster, Longest from the Environmental Law and Policy Clinic, and faculty at Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment is considering how to create affordable, safe, and environmentally sustainable housing.

The environmental clinic’s focus on policy as well as law since its inception has, in fact, led to an array of novel policy initiatives, such as an annual symposium on environmental justice, an advanced clinic class led by Nowlin and Professor of the Practice of Law Steve Roady ’76 through which students developed policy recommendations for the use of drones in conservation, and a Duke Bass Connections project co-led by Nowlin on the capacity of regenerative cattle grazing methods to help mitigate climate change and its implications for rural economic development.

In 2017, as gentrification caused a dearth in affordable housing and a rise in homelessness in Durham, Civil Justice Clinic Director Charles Holton ’73 initiated the Eviction Diversion Program in partnership with Legal Aid of North Carolina (LANC). At the time, the city’s rate of evictions was about one for every 28 residents. Holton, a former chair of the LANC board of directors and a longstanding member of the local advisory committee for its Durham office, saw an ever-increasing number of eviction matters being added to the clinic’s caseload and was aware of the high stakes involved for clients.

The program, initially designed in significant part by students under Holton’s supervision, quickly made an impact and garnered national attention as well as significant financial support from the Durham City Council and Board of County Commissioners.

Students help clients avoid eviction by negotiating payment plans for overdue rent with landlords, accessing public emergency funding sources to help, representing them in court to defend eviction actions and sue for unsafe housing conditions, or developing plans to move out voluntarily. Through the clinic and LANC, the Eviction Diversion Program was handling approximately 100 eviction cases each month prior to the pandemic shutdown, achieving an 80% rate of success in helping its clients avoid eviction judgments that could impede their ability to secure alternative housing. Many of the clinic’s eviction clients have been able to remain in their homes.

The Eviction Diversion Program has spawned other policy initiatives, including an academic research project by Professor Sara Greene to test clients’ views on law and lawyers and see how securing assistance and advocacy through the clinic may be shifting their views of and trust in attorneys and the legal system. And programs based on the Durham model have been launched in Charlotte and Raleigh.

Students often find clinic participation to be one of the most meaningful experiences of law school, one that builds lasting commitments and connections.

“We expect them to be advocates for justice, whatever path they take” Students who have participated in a clinic invariably describe it as one of the most meaningful experiences of law school. Often, it is also one of the most memorable and builds lasting commitments and connections.

In early May, the full U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit took up the innocence claim of Wrongful Convictions Clinic client Ronnie Long in a rare en banc hearing. With courts shut down due to the pandemic, Clinical Professor Jamie Lau ’09, the clinic’s supervising attorney, argued via videoconference that Long, who has served 44 years of an 80 year sentence for a rape he says he did not commit, deserved a new trial due to the significant exculpatory evidence withheld from his lawyers at his 1976 trial and the fact that no physical evidence ever linked him to the crime.

Long had received a negative ruling in late January from the same court. Facing a two-week window for filing a request for en banc review, Lau, Newman, and clinic students Shoshana Silverstein ’20 and Nicole Wittstein ’20 took the lead in looking for ways to convince a majority of the full Fourth Circuit that the case was of sufficient importance and presented such a serious error of law that it warranted review. Former clinic student attorney Ace Factor ’17, now a litigator at Susman Godfrey in Houston, participated in every moot of the case to help Lau prepare.

That willingness to “jump in” is a characteristic of alumni of all the Duke Law clinics, whether called for help by their alma mater or to address needs in their communities.

Clinic co-director James Coleman, Jr., the John S. Bradway Professor of the Practice of Law, tells students at the start of each semester that he and his colleagues will expect them to help out, if asked, to assist with the case they work on in the clinic until their client is exonerated. But the expectation, he tells them in their first class, goes even deeper.

“We expect them to be advocates for justice, whatever path they take after graduating from Duke Law,” Coleman says. “I say that we hope the lessons they learn about miscarriages of justice will compel them to be advocates in whatever community they become a part of, whether they are in criminal justice or not. Their education and positions of influence will make them effective advocates, especially if they are not directly involved in criminal justice in the careers they pursue. In that respect, they are ‘lifers.’” d Duke Law Magazine • Summer 2020

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clinics Learning the value of service: Katarina Wong ’19, T’12 Katie Wong spent three semesters in the Civil Justice Clinic, the second as an advanced student and the third as a volunteer. She and her clinic partner, Zachary Ezor ’19, spent a year helping a couple navigate multiple, related legal actions: bringing a lawsuit over unsafe housing, defending them from eviction, opposing the garnishment of wages in an employment suit, and a separate fight for unemployment benefits. The experience produced a deep resolve to serve in Wong, who is now a general litigation associate at Brooks Pierce in Raleigh and has already handled pro bono housing cases in Durham and Raleigh through Legal Aid of North Carolina’s Volunteer Lawyer Program and Duke’s Lawyer on the Line Program.

“The clinic gave me the confidence to be able to take on cases on my own and it certainly established my commitment to work in this space. Understanding

HEADLINE Carrying

experience into practice

Clinic alumni often find their experiences to be relevant and resonant long after they graduate from Duke Law.

46 Duke Law Magazine • Summer 2020

the implications of eviction proceedings and how they impacted our clients’ lives made me realize how important it is to offer these free services. Eviction actions are common in Durham, but it’s hard to find an attorney to defend something with such high stakes for such little remuneration. This work involves basic needs that so many people are at risk of losing on a day-to-day basis.”

Refining a career path in human rights: Rym Khadhraoui LLM ’17

Gaining professional footing for private and pro bono practice: Jonah Retzinger ’11 Jonah Retzinger took on his first disability benefits hearing in the AIDS Legal Project — now the Health Justice Clinic — early in the spring semester of his second year, at the request of the clinic’s director at the time, Carolyn McAllaster. “I was absolutely terrified, but as Professor McAllaster told me, if you’re going to be terrified, the clinic’s a good place to be, because there are training wheels on,” he says. He remembers every detail about preparing for that first hearing: learning the difference between different federal disability benefits, scouring the client’s medical records, and plotting a course for direct and cross examination. He also remembers how grateful his client was when they won. Now a health care litigator and co-leader of the government enforcement service team at Epstein Becker Green in Los Angeles, Retzinger says that in many ways his career started in the clinic, learning his craft as a litigator and “doing really good work at the same time.”

Rym Khadhraoui’s view of law as a tool to bring about systemic change against oppression propelled her through legal studies in France and graduate studies in political science in Lebanon. Arriving at Duke Law after working with Oxfam in Tunisia and other Middle Eastern countries in the wake of the Arab Spring uprisings, Khadhraoui enrolled in the International Human Rights Clinic, where she worked on a report on the effects of counterterrorism financing measures on women’s rights organizations. The project enabled her to re-think the human rights framework in a way that helped refine her post-graduation career path. For more than two years, including one as the Duke Law Fellow in Public International Law and International Human Rights, she has been a researcher at Amnesty International’s Europe Regional Office in London, investigating human rights violations in the context of counterterrorism, discrimination, migration, policing, and the right to freedom of assembly.

“My clinic work taught me my profession: to be a human rights researcher. This is also when I realized research is what I enjoy the most — trying to prove a point by finding academic sources, laws, and testimonies to build an analysis. With the clinic, we had to go through a thorough and in-depth fact finding leading to the publication of the report. It was the first time I was involved in a big human rights report, and since then it has been my day-to-day job.”

“The clinic serves as a bridge to private practice because you have obligations to someone else, not just to yourself.

You’re representing somebody and they’re reliant on you.

There’s a burden that is motivating in so many different ways. The whole experience put me in a position to excel when I got out of law school. At my firm, I’ve managed teams on many different pro bono cases.”

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clinics A clinic lifer: Daniel Becker ’09 As a 2L, Daniel Becker was on the first team of Wrongful Convictions Clinic students to work on the innocence claim of Quincy Amerson, who was serving life without parole for the 1999 murder of a 7-year-old Harnett County, N.C., girl.

Tasked with reinvestigating the case, the first step in proving a post-conviction claim of innocence, Becker recalls going to the courthouse with his teammates to review and photograph the evidence used at Amerson’s trial. He spent two more semesters involved with the case, and in the 12 years since, Becker, now assistant counsel at KPMG in Washington, D.C., has stayed engaged as the claim moves forward.

“After graduation I started working at a large New York law firm that encouraged associates to find a pro bono endeavor they were passionate about. I was able to continue working with the clinic as my primary pro bono endeavor for the almost 10 years I was with that firm. I would check in with Professor Coleman periodically to see if and how I could help, and whenever I traveled back to Duke I always tried to meet with him or Professor Newman. A number of years later, he told me the clinic was ready to start putting together a draft Motion for Appropriate Relief based on the wonderful work that all the successive teams of students had done up to that point, and I was fortunately able to help draft that motion.

Since then, I’ve left BigLaw and joined KPMG as assistant counsel, where I advise on internal compliance matters, and KPMG has similarly allowed me to continue working on Quincy’s case as needed. It has been a privilege to stay involved in this case beyond my time at Duke.”

Directly connecting clinic experience with post-grad practice: Changlan (Lucy) Xu ’19 By the time she enrolled in the First Amendment Clinic as a 3L, Lucy Xu knew she would be starting her career as a litigator at Cahill Gordon & Reindel in New York City, a firm known for expertise in that field. “I knew the experience would help inform my practice,” says Xu, noting her eagerness to apply what she had learned in her doctrinal classes “to defend the free speech of real people and media outlets.”

“The experience of drafting deposition questions, affidavits, and a summary judgment motion has supplied a framework in understanding how each of my assignments represents a different litigation strategy. It is also the experience I draw upon for any First Amendment assignments. One day, a partner called me to help develop legal arguments in defending a potential news media client in a defamation action.

I drew upon the legal principles I learned from the defamation case I worked on at the clinic, expanded upon them with research, and conveyed how I believed they would apply to facts of this potential client’s case.”

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“An extraordinary advocate” David Gardner ’20

D

avid Gardner was always intent on a career in public interest law, but over his 1L summer in the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, he was introduced to disability rights work. He was invited to work on a wide-range of cases, including matters involving HIV discrimination and accessibility, by attorneys who were clearly passionate about their work. “It felt like everyone there was trying to do the right thing that would lead to outcomes that make a difference in people’s lives,” he says.

Gardner went on to spend three semesters in the Health Justice Clinic, which he calls his “rock” at Duke Law. His mentors, Clinical Professors Allison Rice, the clinic’s director, and Hannah Demeritt ’04, the supervising attorney, pushed him to build skills and reflect on his strengths and passion.

“I know that I learn best from hands-on experience,” he says. “The skills and tips that I develop working on a case will stick with me and I’ll use them for the rest of my life.”

The highlight of Gardner’s first semester in the clinic was representing a client before a Social Security Administration judge who had been denied years worth of disability benefits and had already been through one administrative hearing. Making the case for the client’s eligibility involved gathering and sifting through thousands of pages of medical records to identify details that supported his claim of an affliction that prevented him from working.

Under Demeritt’s supervision, Gardner crafted a brief that included a statement from the client’s longtime doctor. At the hearing, he handled the opening argument, the direct examination of the client, and the cross-examination of the government’s vocational examiner. The judge made a fully favorable ruling for the clinic’s client, awarding him thousands of dollars in back pay as well as ongoing disability benefits.

David Gardner led a discussion on working in the federal government at the 2018 Public Interest Retreat.

St. Paul, Minn.

Political science and economics, University of Wisconsin, Madison, where he was student body president Pre-law Supported and mentored Minneapolis high school students who would be first in their families to attend college through the nonprofit College Possible Duke Law The John R. Parkinson Memorial SchOlarship Law Scholarship Leadership Managing editor, Duke Journal of Gender Law & Policy; co-director, Cancer Pro Bono Project; assistant director, Lawyer on the Line Clinics Health Justice Clinic (basic, advanced, and independent study); Immigrant Rights Clinic Postgrad Entering the U.S. Department of Justice Civil Rights Division through the Legal Honors Program Hometown

Undergrad

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clinics “This means stability for our client, who was ecstatic,” Gardner says. “He’ll be able to live more comfortably despite his disability.

It was an amazing thing that we were able to do for him — a real thing. That’s why I love clinics.”

Demeritt recalls that the way Gardner handled that hearing, one of “the most difficult” she had ever witnessed, was an early indication of his talent as an advocate. “Although David had formed excellent rapport with the client and prepared him well for the hearing, the judge surprised us all by focusing solely on a difficult line of questioning none of us had anticipated her pursuing in such depth.

David had to really think on his feet and reassure the client, who was becoming increasingly agitated by the judge’s questions.” But he proceeded to navigate the tense situation, she says, convincing the judge the client had indeed been disabled during a particular period of time she felt was not supported by the record.

“David has a strong drive to fight injustice, to use the law to help improve the lives of marginalized clients,” Demeritt says. “This drive, combined with his inquisitive and sharp mind, make him an extraordinary advocate.”

As an advanced Health Justice Clinic student last fall and in a spring semester independent study, Gardner worked with Demeritt on a client’s appeal to the U.S. District Court of a denial of Social Security disability benefits by an administrative judge. The case involved a mental health claim, which some judges reject, Gardner says, because they often need to be developed through the client’s subjective claims of their feelings and experience, as opposed to presenting through objective tests.

“In district court we could make broader arguments that say, ‘Mental health claims are hard to prove and you’ve recognized that they’re hard to prove,’ which is why they require special attention,” says Gardner, who worked on both the appellant’s brief and a reply brief. “I enjoyed thinking through what arguments would resonate with a judge.”

Gardner focused part of his independent study on helping two clients facing possible discrimination due to their health status — one with HIV and another with a mobility limitation — advocate for themselves. “I think as law students we’re geared towards thinking about litigation,” he says. “But in cases like these, sometimes the best and easiest solution for the client is not resorting to a lawsuit.

“We’re empowering them to advocate for themselves — to use the right words and the right forms so that they can continue to work and overcome the discrimination they face.”

In his last semester at Duke, Gardner threw himself into the newly launched Immigrant Rights Clinic’s first asylum removal case. Working under the supervision of Clinical Professor Kate Evans, he and his clinic teammates invested more than 700 hours in the case, which was heard March 13. The experience allowed him to hone his litigation and advocacy skills in service of a familiar goal, he says: access to justice for a deserving client. “The Immigrant Rights Clinic, like the Health Justice Clinic, serves people who have very few resources. These are some of the most vulnerable people in society who have faced terrible tragedies, and we can help them speak up and advocate for themselves through their cases.

“In this case we helped someone tell her story in a way that is authentic and powerful and also meets the legal standard for asylum.”

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Gardner and one of his Immigrant Rights Clinic teammates, Amanda Ng ’20, with their completed brief in the clinic’s first asylum case.

Gardner’s contributions to the case included identifying and preparing testimony from an expert witness on the specific dangers the client faced in her home country, crafting a successful motion to have almost 800 pages of documents admitted into evidence, and handling closing argument at the hearing before an immigration judge in Charlotte. He had to make quick adjustments to his prepared argument in order to address concerns signaled by the judge earlier in the four-hour hearing. “I had to balance a persuasive oral argument with getting the information we needed into the record and had to cut sections as I prioritized the most important arguments.”

During end-of-year ceremonies held online, Gardner was named “Outstanding Clinic Student” for his work as a student attorney and a “Pro Bono All-Star” for his exceptional dedication to service and encouragement of public interest engagement at the Law School. In addition to participating in the Innocence Project, he co-led both the Cancer Pro Bono Project and Lawyer on the Line in his second year.

“Both projects require a lot of coordination by the student leaders as they involve multiple clients, student volunteers, and attorney supervisors,” says Assistant Dean of Public Interest and Pro Bono Stella Boswell. “It is highly unusual to have a student take on key leadership roles in two pro bono projects at the same time, and this is evidence of David’s dedication to service. He’s a gem.”

Gardner’s peers honored him with one of two Justin Miller Awards for Integrity; the award recognizes a “courageous person with strong principles, a solid character, and a true sense of altruism.” In presenting the award, Amanda Ng ’20, his teammate in both clinics and fellow Integrity Award winner, said he was “one of the rare people who has managed to successfully align their strong personal values with their professional goals. He never fails to treat everyone with respect and consideration, and exemplifies what it means to lead by example.”

Having earned the Law School’s Public Interest and Public Service Law Certificate, Gardner feels his clinic work has superbly prepared him to return to the DOJ Civil Rights Division through its highly competitive Legal Honors Program. “I think I can really use my skills in ways that can change someone’s life fundamentally,” he says. d

Photo: Stephen Lam / REUTERS

Profiles

Master class:

T

Dan Scheinman ’87

intelligence” — EQ — and the compatibility he Covid-19 pandemic has roiled Scheinman, an angel of the two teams as being a key to the success financial markets, but one company in of mergers and acquisitions; and as head of an angel investor Dan Scheinman’s portfolio has investor and Zoom’s internal start-up, he learned a critical lesson: “I seen stratospheric growth during the global first investor, spoke with learned that what differentiates early success Covid-19 shutdown: Zoom. “We had planned students in Duke’s Law from failure is actually not the technology side. that video would run the world at some point. and Entrepreneurship Software you can change — it’s malleable.

We didn’t plan for it to happen over a few Program, sharing insights It’s really can you figure out how to price and months in 2020,” said Scheinman, who nine on advising, investing in, distribute your product to reach your customers years ago wrote a check to Zoom founder Eric and growing emerging in a cost-effective way?”

Yuan before even hearing his pitch for the companies, and taking Scheinman spoke with students in Duke’s videoconferencing platform. their questions relating to Law and Entrepreneurship Program on April 17, Scheinman, a Silicon Valley native, became an career development and sharing insights on advising, investing in, and investor in technology companies and a soughtsatisfaction. growing emerging companies and taking their after start-up advisor after practicing law and then questions relating to career development and serving in a range of leadership positions over satisfaction. Clinical Professor Erika Buell, the program’s director, 18 years at Cisco Systems. As general counsel, he pioneered the use led the conversation that was held — naturally — via Zoom. of technology to reduce legal costs for the fast-growing company; Excerpts follow. as head of corporate development, he zeroed in on “emotional Duke Law Magazine • Summer 2020

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Profiles

My investing thesis as an angel investor in technology companies was that there were underserved niches in the market that offered investment opportunity. When I started in 2011, many

large venture capital firms would base early investment decisions on “pattern recognition.” This meant they looked to seed-invest in certain types of entrepreneurs and markets. In practice, at that time, they tended to invest in 20-something-year-old graduates of a very narrow number of universities who had been at a very narrow amount of companies. And then they would compete over those people.

For me, I found that as an angel investor, I could not compete with those firms to invest in those kind of companies. To be successful, I needed to find an underserved niche in the market of seed-stage startups. In 2011, there was a bit of a bias against experienced founders. Today, the market has really changed. Then, people who are over 35 in this valley had a really tough time raising the first round of capital — the “seed” round. It turned out, there were a lot of good business reasons to like older founders. First, they understood their go-to-market strategy and had existing customer relationships. They understood how they were going to reach their customer and they understood how to build what I call the reverse wedding cake, where the first layer is the smallest and then you build up to the bigger layers.

I invested in four “unicorns” — companies that have over a billion [dollar] valuation — and two that are well north of that, Zoom and Arista Networks, out of a relatively small portfolio. My

report card on all this is that I’ve now been part of well north of $50 billion worth of value creation. It’s all my own capital.

Because the market for older founders has become more saturated, I’m actually shifting and looking at female founders, where I’m hearing some of the same things I used to hear about older founders.

I delivered the first check to Zoom founder Eric Yuan. Eric Yuan had worked at Cisco as the vice president of

engineering for video conferencing, joining when Cisco acquired the videoconferencing software company Webex. Eric began as an early engineer there and worked himself up to VP. And then he and I actually quit Cisco on the same day. A friend of mine said, “Hey, he’s starting a business. Can I do an intro to your new email?”

On my drive to meet him, I did the fastest reference checks ever.

I was hearing things like, “He’s the greatest person I’ve ever worked for, the greatest technical business mind ever.” By the time I got there, I was already convinced. I just wanted to be involved. So I actually wrote out a check and I handed it to him. And he said, “For both of our sakes, let me show you the presentation.” And what he showed was how he wanted to reinvent video to make it bigger, better, faster, stronger.

His whole thesis was, “I want to build a product people love.” He knew exactly how he was going to emerge from the primordial ooze.

He said, “We are going to sell to education and we are going to sell

52 Duke Law Magazine • Summer 2020

to small and medium business, and then we are going to let the rest of the world come to us over time as they realize this is a better product. We’re just going to execute better than anyone else.” I also was honored to join the board.

And so for the last nine years, we’ve been working together on building a world-changing software company. It’s been an incredible experience to watch something come out of nothing. Obviously we’ve been in the news a lot recently. We are now seeing the daily meeting participants on par with daily usage of some consumer internet companies. The amazing thing to me is that the service just works, even under the volume loads we have seen.

As a company of course we are not perfect. We have run into a wave of issues relating to our popularity. Honestly, I have never seen a company be more transparent or move faster to fix issues than Zoom has. We are constantly updating the software to offer a more secure experience.

On the financing side, Eric never struck the hardest bargains, which was incredibly smart: We took lower valuations than the market would bear in order that no investor would be unhappy. It meant that those investors have been great partners both on the terms of the investment and in the level of effort they put in to help the company.

I loved law school and I love the training I received in law school. There were just incredible teachers who actually

cared about their students and spent time with their students. That has stuck with me forever.

In terms of specific legal training, I think in the beginning it actually focused me too narrowly on risk in a too narrow way. The focus on risk is actually really important, but you have to see risk in a broader context. As an investor, my biggest risk is missing out on the next Zoom. There is no risk greater than missing a good company. And once I understood that, actually I find the kind of rigorous analytical thinking learned during my time at the Law School is similar to how engineers think. That helps me to have a common way to analyze problems along with founders.

The single most important factor in investing in new technology companies is figuring out which are the smart risks to take and then eliminating the companies with poor risks. And developing a clear filter for that is super-important. So I found the law school training to be incredibly useful. But I also found that having my own sense of ambition and not limiting myself — thinking bigger — helped propel me to bigger outcomes.

Lawyers are core to successful company-building. The entrepreneurial journey is a bit like building a railroad. You’re just laying track and you’re hoping that you don’t hit a bend in the road and you can keep laying the track. But the best lawyers in the world would say, “You’re going to hit a bend in the road,” and can articulate it in a way that doesn’t cause friction. Being able to articulate those things in the nicest possible way is a useful skill among the successful lawyers out here.

I’m a huge believer in the whole EQ thing. High IQ is great, but without people skills, it does not mean much. My personal strength is more on the EQ side. That’s what helps me to be able to read a room. If you have those skills, it is a great building block for success.

In terms of assessing a company’s chance of success, and this is my personal opinion, the things that matter most for the early investor are the founder and the go-tomarket strategy. Getting over-worried about whether

a segment is too big or too small is the wrong thing early on. The question is: Can the early, small, entry market become that much bigger? And if you have a great founder who understands how to get a product into the hands of customers in a certain space, worrying about everything else, at the early stage, is too much worry. So I try to focus on what I think is most important.

I like technical founders who understand their first set of customers. That’s where value gets created. Another huge risk early on is whether the founders know each other and like each other. One of the problems in young teams is the founders really don’t know each other. And then you have what we call founder drama, where there is huge conflict between the founders learning to work together. That is one of the most debilitating things to start-up companies on the planet.

Another reason companies fail, apart from founder drama, has been incredibly smart founders who could not find customers. So figuring out, “Is your founder able to sell? Do they understand where their first customer is going to come from? How does it work?” Engineering, particularly, produces a lot of introverts. So do you have someone who is willing to spend time with customers and who will learn how the sales process works?

And if I find a technical founder who can sell, that’s where you have to basically back up the Brinks truck. My regret in Zoom was, I knew that Eric was one of those type of founders.

I mean, literally I’m writing the guy a check. I should’ve written it for double.

My advice to young lawyers: Be strategic about where you want to go. Every year sit down

and say, “Is being at this law firm getting me closer to where I want to go or not? How can I use being here to get the skills I need for whatever’s next?” You always need to understand what your long term career goal is and then figure out the tactics to get there.

Maintain your network of people. Listen as much as you talk.

And always ask open-ended questions about people’s career strategy. I was always strategic. I was always trying to say, “What do I want to do? And then how do I end up there?” At the law firm I looked around and said, “OK, if I’m going to be a general counsel, how do I act? How do I learn from this? What do I need to take from this law firm to do that?” When I was at Cisco, I said, “If I’m going to be a VC at some point, who would I fund?

Who would I hire? Who would I not fund? Who wouldn’t I touch?” And I was always kind of thinking forward, always.

One thing I know for sure is you’re going to have an incredible network coming out of Duke because the people I went to law school with are just incredible. d

F

Frances Fulk Rufty ’45

rances Fulk Rufty wasn’t just the only woman in the Duke Law Class of 1945. For a time she was the Class of 1945.

“One day I went to school and it was filled with boys and the next day I was the only one there,” said Rufty, recalling the effect of America’s entry into World War II early in her first year. “So I had the class — legal research — in the professor’s office for the semester.”

Rufty, 95, never set out to become a double-Duke alumna, she explained during an animated interview at her Las Vegas home. She had her heart set on attending the College of William & Mary at age 15 after finishing 11th grade — the highest grade in her Spencer, N.C. school — but wasn’t able to secure one of its slots for out-ofstate students. She was late in applying to the Women’s College at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, but was assured that slots would open up when crop failures forced students from farming families to withdraw. “Well, that year every crop in the

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Profiles

Rufty in front of the law office she shared with her husband, Archie, in 1958.

world was great and nobody, but nobody got accepted,” she said with a laugh. “I was turned down there and had no place to go!”

Rufty’s father, while not a churchgoer, was on a first-name basis with all the local clergy, and he took her to see the Methodist minister whose brother, he said, worked at Duke.

In fact, the brother oversaw admissions.

“The next thing I knew, I was accepted at Duke University’s Women’s College and I had not even applied,” she said. Her delight was tempered only by the challenge posed

by Duke’s cost, which her father met by selling his car: “My daddy walked to work every day. It was difficult, but I got to Duke and went to Duke just like I belonged there.

I had more guts than sense, I think.”

After graduating, Rufty decided to stay on at Duke for law school. It was, she said, “the craziest thing I ever did,” motivated simply by her complete disinterest in teaching, nursing, or secretarial work, positions then occupied almost exclusively by women.

And from the start, she said she felt both welcomed and nurtured at Duke Law. “Everyone was so nice — they helped me every which way,” she said, recalling Dean H. Claude Horack with particular affection.

“Dean Horack was wonderful, so sweet to me. I could go in and talk to him anytime I wanted to, and I did.”

With a precipitous drop in enrollment during the war years — Rufty was joined by a handful of men classified as unacceptable for military service — Duke and Wake

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Rufty was elected as the clerk of the Rowan County Superior Court in 1958.

Forest University joined forces to keep their law schools open, with Wake students traveling to Duke for classes taught by professors from both institutions.

“The professors were just marvelous — we had the cream of the crop,” Rufty said. Constitutional Law was a favorite course and her professors treated her with the same support and respect they extended to the male students.

But keeping up with tuition and board remained a challenge and Rufty needed a job. She found one in the library, helping the two women in the law library, accessing the stacks by crossing a lawn and jumping through the window into the basement of the law school, then in the center of Duke’s West Campus. The library became her “home place” and she grew close with the librarians, who took her on her first and only visit to New York City when they went to a professional conference, making the trip by car at a steady 45-mile-perhour pace.

Decades later, Rufty and her husband, Archie, endowed a distinguished research professorship for the head of what is now the J. Michael Goodson Law Library. Initially held by the late Richard Danner, for whom the couple had great affection, it is now held by Femi Cadmus, who also is associate dean of information services and technology.

Although she loved her time in law school, Rufty was frustrated in her early attempts to begin her career following her graduation.

“I had no realization that it would be so hard,” she said, noting her lack of familial connections to the profession. On a trip to Washington, D.C., with her parents, she walked the streets tracking down leads. One lawyer she approached pointed out to her that his firm’s receptionist was a woman with a law degree; he further insulted Rufty by telling her to hide the fact that one of her grandfathers was an American Indian. “I said ‘thank you’ and got up and got out of there,” she said. “But I had no place in the world to go and no hint of a job.”

Chatting about her predicament with a fellow patron at a drugstore lunch counter where she had stopped for a drink, Rufty got a solid lead: “He told me to go to a firm called Pike, Fischer and Willis. He said, ‘They’re really nice people and they will help you.’

I’ll never forget it.” Rufty landed a job reading and summarizing administrative opinions relating to the conduct of the war and its aftermath for digests the firm produced, which she did for a year.

“And then I said, ‘I’ve had it. I’ve read all the opinions I can.’”

Rufty returned to Durham and worked as a research librarian at Duke Law until she found a job with the firm of Edwards and Sanders, led by two lawyers who were “progressive” in their attitudes towards women. “They were wonderful people and I learned a lot,” she said. But her duties were limited to checking titles and her salary was low, so Rufty went home to Spencer, taking a job with the nearby Salisbury newspaper until she was offered a position with an attorney for the U.S. government. The catch: She had to be expert in shorthand, a secretarial skill she had long avoided. She sought after-hours tutoring from the head of a local secretarial school and mastered it in two weeks. “I’ve loved shorthand ever since,” she admits now.

It was at that job that she met Archibald Rufty, a widower with two young sons, who had a law practice on the same floor. They married in 1955 and started practicing law together, over time also expanding their family with a third son and a daughter. In 1958, Archie Rufty, who was active in Democratic politics and served three terms as Rowan County solicitor and two as a judge of the county court, encouraged his wife to run for the position of clerk of the Rowan County Superior Court. “I thought he was crazy, but I thought everything he said was gospel,” Rufty said. “And he knew everybody.” She won, becoming the first woman in the post. “We traveled all over the county, day and night, and I met a lot of wonderful people,” she said, noting her gratitude for the “wonderful” housekeeper who helped care for her young family at that time and long after. Newspaper coverage of Rufty’s political career includes her encouragement for other women to get involved in politics and for all to vote.

After serving two terms as clerk, Rufty left politics to resume practicing law with her husband. They continued to handle wills and other matters for friends from their home even after they closed their firm in the late 1980s (she is licensed to practice in Washington, D.C. and North Carolina). The couple moved to Las Vegas in 1989; otherwise nobody in Salisbury would have permitted Archie to retire, she joked.

Informed that women comprise 59% of students in Duke Law’s Class of 2022 and that in the last academic year, women served as editors-in-chief of the flagship journals at the top 16 law schools in the country, Rufty was pleased.

“Things have really changed,” she said. Her road to professional satisfaction, and even acceptance, was rocky, but it was a great experience. “I wouldn’t have swapped it.” d — Frances Presma, interview

by Kate Buchanan AB ’92

Duke Law Magazine • Summer 2020

55

Profiles

Danielle French ’21, T’18

D

anielle French takes up the mantle of battalion commander for Duke University’s Army Reserve Officer Training Corp this fall.

French will work with active military officers to help guide the military education and training of approximately 70 cadets from Duke and North Carolina Central University in the joint ROTC program.

“I’m very honored to have gotten this role,” French said. “It wasn’t something that I could necessarily seek out. I just tried to be the best that I could be in the battalion. There’s a lot of great cadets in the program and I am excited to get the opportunity to lead such a phenomenal group.”

Maj. Gen. Charles J. Dunlap, Jr., a professor of the practice of law and executive director of the Center on Law, Ethics and National Security, called French an ideal pick for the command.

“Not only is she super-smart and hard-working, she’s a gifted leader,” said Dunlap, the former deputy judge advocate general of the U.S. Air Force. “Over my more than 34 years of service, I’ve seen thousands of young officers, and I’d put Danielle among the very best. This is a win-win.” Dunlap noted that French was superb over the past two years in her leadership of the LENS Scholars Program that facilitates professional networking at the center’s annual conference for students from law schools across the U.S. who aspire to careers in national security law.

A South Carolina native earning her second degree at Duke — she earned her BA in 2018 as a political science and religious studies major — French joined the university’s Army ROTC midway through her senior year. She started doing physical training with the battalion, finding that she enjoyed it, and committed to the ROTC program after she received her acceptance to Duke Law. “I have always wanted to practice law, but with the desire to apply this passion to public service,” she said. “I have also always sought purpose, drive and direction towards a greater cause in my life. So when I found out that I got into Duke Law, I kind of thought about joining. It’d always been in the back of my head, that military aspect of life.”

French’s decision was also informed by her husband’s military experience. A six-year U.S. Army veteran, Paul French has a son in the U.S. Marines, and his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather all served in the U.S. Navy. The two met at Duke — Paul is an IT analyst for Duke Health — and married in 2017.

“Paul was actually more hesitant than me when I first wanted to go in because while he loves it, he also understands the unique difficulties of the military,” she said. And both knew that taking on ROTC while starting law school would be challenging.

56 Duke Law Magazine • Summer 2020

“At first the most difficult and interesting time was doing PT in the morning,” French said. “I was doing physical training from 6 a.m. to 7 a.m. and trying to get to Professor [James] Coleman’s criminal law class at 8:05 a.m. Monday through Thursday in the spring of my 1L year.” Juggling the demands on her time remains a challenge.

“I would be lying if I said it was always easy,” she said. “But time management, self-care, and a love for both parts of what I do always keep me going.”

French says wearing Army fatigues to her classes is a point of pride with her and a connection with a rising 2L who’s also in ROTC and often wears his fatigues on the same days. “It’s always nice to see the same uniform in the hallways,” she said.

The uniform is a visual nod to her professional aspirations to commission as a member of the Judge Advocate General’s Corps. Her studies and service at Duke are a helpful step in that direction, she said.

Having worked on personal injury, business litigation, and pro bono matters at Everett Gaskins Hancock in Raleigh after her first year, French spent her 2L summer in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of North Carolina. She will deepen her practice skills in the fall semester in the Immigrant Rights Clinic.

Criminal law and litigation skills are particularly relevant to her JAG Corps aspirations, French said. “In the JAG program you’re getting a very wide range of law and you’re getting thrown into the deep end very quickly. You might be a first chair on a trial within your first year.”

As incoming battalion commander, French is preparing for changes to the ROTC program brought on by the coronavirus pandemic. Health concerns forced the cancellation of the summer’s six-week cadet training at Fort Knox in Kentucky, as well as a training program at the U.S. Army Airborne School at Fort Benning, Ga., where French was granted a rare spot.

“We missed out on a lot of really important training,” she said. But in late July she remained hopeful that cadets would be able to return to campus in the fall semester for labs, physical training, and field training exercises. “We are working hard to adjust to new university and state guidance and I am confident that we will still be able to produce excellent officers in the safest way possible.” d — Sean Rowe

Alumni Notes This section reflects notifications received between May 16, 2019 and December 31, 2019.

BOV

denotes membership on the Law School’s Board of Visitors.

Judge Gerald Bard Tjoflat ’57, the longest-serving active federal appeals court judge in U.S. history, has moved to senior status on the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, where he has served since 1975. Appointed

by President Gerald Ford, Judge Tjoflat served as chief judge of the 11th Circuit from 1989 to 1996.

Before joining the appellate bench, he served on the state court and U.S. District Court benches in Florida. Over the course of his long judicial career, Judge Tjoflat, a founding member of the Duke Law School Board of Visitors, hired more than 100 Duke Law clerks.

He was awarded Duke University’s Distinguished Alumni Award at the 2014 Founder’s Day Convocation by then President Richard Brodhead (pictured at left). BOV d

1967

Bill Constangy has authored a third legal treatise, Noncompete Law (LexisNexis Matthew Bender, 2019).

A retired North Carolina superior court judge living in Charlotte, Bill is an active arbitrator and mediator, serving as a member of employment, commercial, judicial, and large and complex case panels for the American Arbitration Association. A certified N.C. superior court mediator, he is an associate editor of the American Bar Association Labor and Employment Law Reporter.

1968

Donald Messinger received the Ohio State Bar Foundation’s Ramey Award for Distinguished Community Service on Oct. 4. A partner in Thompson Hine’s corporate transactions and securities practice group

in Cleveland, Don was honored for the volunteer leadership roles he has undertaken with multiple charitable organizations in Northeast Ohio.

treaties, immigration matters, and events related to the World Court.

Ron is a partner in the Pittsburgh office of Blank Rome. BOV

1969

Joseph McManus has joined Carlton Fields as a shareholder in the firm’s construction practice group in Washington, D.C. He was a partner at McManus & Felsen for more than 25 years and is a past president of the American College of Construction Lawyers.

Sid Boone retired, in March 2019, as counsel at Burr & Forman in Charleston, S.C. Sid represented developers in real estate matters, where his focus included land acquisition of large tracts, annexation, rezoning, development agreements, variances, and special exceptions.

1972

Ron Frank is chair of the Pennsylvania Bar Association’s International and Comparative Law Section, which focuses its efforts on monitoring

John Wester received the North Carolina State Bar’s John B. McMillan Distinguished Service Award in October. The award honors Bar members who have demonstrated exemplary service to the legal profession.

At Robinson Bradshaw in Charlotte, where he has spent his entire career, John tries cases and argues appeals in complex civil litigation, prosecuting and defending cases in state and federal courts, including numerous class actions. BOV

1973

Pamela Gann, former dean of Duke Law and former president of Claremont McKenna College, has joined the volunteer board of directors of Cottage Health. She also serves on the board of directors of IES Abroad (a third-party provider of study abroad programs) and the Scholarship Foundation of Santa Barbara. She is vice chair of the board of directors for the nonprofit Direct Relief, and is vice chair of the Santa Barbara Foundation Board of Trustees.

James Garrison has published The Safecracker (TouchPoint Press, 2019), a legal thriller set in North Carolina that begins in 1980 during the Iran Hostage crisis. His previous novel, QL 4, published in 2017, has won awards for military and literary fiction, including for both categories in the 2019 Independent Book Awards.

Duke Law Magazine • Summer 2020

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Alumni Notes Kirk Nakamura, presiding judge of the Orange County (Calif.) Superior Court, was honored by the Japanese Bar Association at its third annual Judge’s Night Reception on Aug. 28. First appointed by Gov. Gray Davis as a judge of the Orange County Superior Court in 2001, Kirk is in the second year of his two-year term as presiding judge after earlier serving as assistant presiding judge.

He has previously received the Outstanding Service Award from the Orange County Asian American Bar Association and the Trailblazer Award from the National Asian Pacific American Bar Association.

Elizabeth McCulloch ’75 has published her first novel Dreaming the Marsh, described as “an environmental fable” that is set in Opakulla, Fla. (Twisted Road Publications, 2019). Retired from the Levin College of Law at the University of Florida where she was a legal skills professor, she blogs at The Feminist Grandma. d

1977

Lisa Davidson, a longtime Brevard (Fla.) Circuit Court judge was elected by her peers to serve as chief judge of the two-county 18th Judicial Circuit. A onetime public defender and prosecutor in Broward County before going into private practice, she was appointed to the county court in 1994, and became a circuit court judge in 1998. Lisa co-chairs the Brevard/Seminole Pro Bono Committee, founded the Brevard County Domestic Violence Task Force, and has worked with the Florida Judicial Ethics Advisory Committee to assist judges in dealing with ethical obligations.

1979

Nancy Nasher, a noted art collector and philanthropist, was honored with the Storm King Award by the Storm King Art Center at its 10th Annual Gala and After Party, held at the Rainbow Room in New York City on Oct. 15. The award recognizes meaningful contributions in the fields of visual arts, landscape, and nature conservation. The Storm King Art Center is a 500-acre outdoor museum in New York’s Hudson Valley. BOV

Chris Richards, retired executive vice president, general counsel, and secretary of FedEx Corp., has joined the board of directors of Spirit Airlines.

Jeffrey Ritter has completed five years as an external lecturer at the University of Oxford, teaching graduate students in the Department of Computer Science, for which his students nominated him as “Most Acclaimed Lecturer” at the university.

He was appointed a visiting fellow in 2017, conducting research on the future of the rule of law when quantum computing becomes real. In October 2019, he was invited to testify before the U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs.

1980

John (Jack) Hickey, a trial lawyer and principal of Hickey Law Firm in Miami, has been elected chair of the Motor Vehicle and Premises Liability Section of the American Association for Justice. He spoke at the AAJ annual convention in July 2019.

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1981

Michael Dreeben has joined the Washington, D.C., office of O’Melveny & Myers as a partner in its appellate and white-collar practices. Michael retired, in 2019, as deputy solicitor general in the U.S. Department of Justice. He is also a distinguished lecturer from government at Georgetown University Law Center.

Abigail Reardon, a litigation partner at DLA Piper, has been appointed chair of the Attorney Grievance Committee for the First Department of the Appellate Division of the New York Supreme Court. BOV

1982

Brooks Eason has published Fortunate Son — The Story of Baby Boy Francis (WordCrafts Press, 2019), a memoir about his birth and adoption and the mystery of his birth mother’s identity. Senior counsel at Baker Donelson in Jackson, Miss., Brooks is also the author of Travels with Bobby, a book about hiking trips with his best friend to the mountains of the American West.

1983

Rich Baer has joined Airbnb as chief legal officer, based in San Francisco.

Most recently, Rich led the legal team at Liberty Media, a set of five

public companies that own or hold large stakes in companies such as SiriusXM, Formula 1, LiveNation Entertainment, TripAdvisor, Qurate, Zulily, the Atlanta Braves, Charter Communications and GCI, among others.

Robert Fletcher has joined Fox Rothschild in Washington, D.C., as a partner. He has a national corporate litigation practice and previously was a member of the business litigation group at LeClair Ryan.

Kim Hoover has published Girl Squad (Bella Books, May 2019), her debut novel for young adults.

She is CEO of RED Multifamily, in Washington, D.C., and founder and managing partner of Allyson Capital of D.C., New York, and Miami.

1984

Grier Hoyt joined Cozen O’Connor’s real estate group in Washington, D.C., where he co-chairs the firm’s leasing practice. He previously was a partner for 14 years at Linowes & Blocher.

1985 Janet Ward Black was honored, in October, by the Elon University School of Law with its 2019 Leadership in the Law Award. Janet has been a longtime Elon Law supporter, delivering the 2016 convocation address and welcoming Elon Law alumni into her practice.

Principal owner of Ward Black Law in Greensboro, Janet also received a 2019 “Women of Justice” award from N.C. Lawyers Weekly.

1987

Tim Ritchie became president of the BostonMuseum of Science in February. A veteran nonprofit executive, he most recently was president of The Tech Interactive, a science and technology center in Silicon Valley.

Joseph Wilson has been hired as attorney for the town of Kiawah Island, S.C. He practices in Charleston and has served as attorney for the city of Folly Beach since 2016 and for the town of Ravenel since 2018.

Photo: Jacksonville Times-Union

1991 Audrey Moran ’84 received the the Arnolta J. “Mama” Williams Lifetime Achievement Award at the 50th annual Jacksonville (Fla.) Times-Union’s EVE Awards and was profiled in the paper in June 2019. Coverage noted her achievements in a range of positions.

Currently executive vice president of Baptist Health and president of the Baptist Health Foundation, she has been involved in the Jacksonville community as a private-practice attorney, a prosecutor, a mediator, head of a homeless resource shelter, a top aide to two mayors, and a trustee for a high-profile foundation. She ran for mayor in 2011. Her many awards include selection as the first woman to receive the Jacksonville Bar Association’s Lawyer of the Year award in 1998. d

1988

Marc Golden has joined A+E Television as vice president, legal and business affairs. Mark has spent over 20 years representing writers, actors, and directors, most recently as senior counsel at Gendler & Kelly.

1990

Thomas Contois has joined the Raleigh office of Phelps Dunbar as a partner, focusing on the firm’s insurance and litigation practices.

He previously was a partner at Fox Rothschild.

Kip Plankinton has joined the Texas A&M University System as assistant general counsel in the System Energy Resource Office. For more than a decade he ran a Dallas practice specializing in oil and gas transactions and title work, as well as general corporate contracts and transactions.

Deanna Okun was selected as managing partner of Adduci, Mastriani & Schaumberg, the first change in leadership since the Washington, D.C., firm’s founding in 1981. A former chair and commissioner of the International Trade Commission, her practice involves all aspects of unfair trade litigation and trade remedy advocacy. BOV Rhonda Tobin was named one of Benchmark Litigation’s “Top 250 Women in Litigation” for 2019. She represents insurance companies in litigation, arbitration, and mediation, and is a partner, litigation co-chair, and member of the managing committee at Robinson+Cole in Hartford, Conn.

Ron Krotoszynski has published The Disappearing First Amendment (Cambridge University Press, 2019).

Ron is the John S. Stone professor and director of faculty research at the University of Alabama School of Law in Tuscaloosa.

Maureen Gimpel Maley has joined Saxton & Stump in Lancaster, Penn., as senior counsel for its labor and employment and internal investigations groups. She most recently was vice president of employment and business affairs at Penn National Gaming and Hollywood Casinos.

Caryn McNeill received a North Carolina Lawyers Weekly 2019 “Women of Justice” award. The 2017-18 president of the N.C. Bar Association, Caryn is a partner at Smith, Anderson in Raleigh, where she leads the employee benefits and executive compensation practice group. She was elected, last fall, to membership in the American Law Institute.

1993

Susan Bock counsels clients from both the Portland, Ore., and Boise offices of Stoel Rives in matters related to estates and trusts, as well as estate, corporate, tax and financial planning. She joined the Portland office in 2015.

Mark Brown has joined Comiter, Singer, Baseman & Braun in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla., as senior counsel. Previously with Arnold & Porter, Mark’s practice focuses primarily on wills and trusts, domicile planning, probate administration, and estate tax and income planning.

Kudos

The following alumni have been recognized by their peers for excellence in their respective specialty areas as listed in such publications as Best Lawyers in America, Super Lawyers, Chambers USA, Law 360, BTI Client Service All Stars, D Magazine, and Thomson Reuters.

This list reflects notifications received by Dec. 31, 2019, and includes such designations as “Rising Stars.”

James Sheriff ’79 Mark Prak ’80 Richard Van Nostrand ’80 Jeffrey Donaldson ’81 Rhonda Tobin ’90 Paul Genender ’94 David Kushner ’96 Steven Rosenwasser ’98 David Kaplan ’03 Krista Patterson ’06 Shane Tintle ’08 Andrew Prins ’09 Michael Schobel ’09 Mark Dowling ’10 Emanuel Clark ’12

Kelly Capen Douglas has been appointed president and chief executive officer of Voices for Children, a nonprofit certified by the courts in Riverside and San Diego Counties (Calif.) to recruit and train court appointed special advocate volunteers. She previously was general counsel of the University of San Diego, leading the university’s legal department and serving as chief legal advisor to the board of trustees.

David Lender, co-chair of Weil Gotschal & Manges’ global litigation department and a member of the firm’s management committee, was recognized by The American Lawyer as a 2019 “Litigator of the Year.” BOV

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Alumni Notes Candice Savin has been elected chairman of the Westport, Conn., Board of Education. A solo practitioner in Westport, she has served on the board since 2016.

Richard Smith has joined Holland & Knight in New York as a partner in the firm’s corporate, M&A, and securities practice group. His practice focuses on corporate transactions, mergers and acquisitions, private equity, and capital markets.

He was previously managing partner of Nelson Mullins Riley & Scarborough’s New York office.

Mark Thurmon became deputy chief administrative judge of the Trademark Trial Appeals Board of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office on May 28, 2019. Trademark law and litigation were his primary focus through more than 10 years in private practice and 16 as a law professor, most recently at the Southern University Law Center where he also served as director of the Technology and Entrepreneurship Clinic.

1994

Kevin Lally has joined the Los Angeles office of McGuireWoods as a partner in its government investigations & white collar litigation department. He previously served for 18 years as a federal prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California, most recently as senior litigation counsel in the Major Frauds Section.

Laurie Sanders has joined Wendel Rosen in Oakland, Calif., as a partner in the firm’s business group, advising on mergers and acquisitions, corporate restructurings, venture capital financings, private equity transactions, succession planning, and corporate governance. She was previously at Osborn McDerby in San Francisco.

1995

Jill Morganbesser Patrone has been promoted to vice president and deputy general counsel of Public Broadcasting Service headquartered in Arlington, Va. Jill joined PBS in 2000 and most recently was managing corporate counsel.

1997

Erik Belenky has joined King & Spalding’s corporate, finance and investments practice group as a partner in the Atlanta office. Previously a partner at Jones Day, Erik’s practice focuses on mergers and acquisitions and representing public and private companies and private equity firms in a variety of domestic and global transactions.

Stacy Friedman, executive vice president and general counsel of JPMorgan Chase, was named by American Banker as one of the 2019 “Most Powerful Women in Banking and Finance.”

Jewelle Johnson received a 2019 Distinguished Alumni Award from her alma mater, Cardinal Mooney High School in Youngstown, Ohio. Jewelle is assistant general counsel and chief employment counsel at Graphic Packaging International in Atlanta.

Tim McCarthy has joined the commercial litigation practice group at Dykema, as senior counsel in the Dallas office. He most recently practiced with Carter Ledyard & Milburn.

1998

Rob Bryan is currently a member of the North Carolina Senate from the 39th district. A member of the University of North Carolina Board of Governors and former member of the N.C. House, Rob was selected

by Mecklenburg County Republican Party leaders last October to complete the remainder of a term that expires in 2020.

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Valecia McDowell, co-head of the white collar, regulatory defense and investigations practice at Moore & Van Allen in Charlotte, was named to the inaugural Lawyers of Color “Nation’s Best” list, which recognizes minority law firm partners and senior-level corporate counsel. She also received a 2019 “Women of Justice” award from N.C. Lawyers Weekly.

Steven Rosenwasser has joined the Atlanta office of Greenberg Traurig as a shareholder in the firm’s commercial litigation practice. He previously was with Bondurant, Mixson & Elmore and focuses his practice on contracts, business torts, fraud, and class action matters.

Feng Xue (LLM ’95) managing partner of Katten Muchin Rosenman’s Shanghai office, has been appointed chair of the China Committee of Chicago Sister Cities International, a program that promotes Chicago as a global city, develops international partnerships and networks, and shares best practices among city leaders.

1999

Augusto Cauti was appointed, in May 2019, as Peru’s vice minister of mines.

Lisa Glover, assistant town attorney for Cary, N.C., was awarded the designation of Local Government Fellow by the International Municipal Lawyers Association. The program recognizes “attorneys as legal specialists in the field of local government law.” She is one of two IMLA fellows practicing in North Carolina.

Morgen Sullivan has been appointed vice president-growth for Voleo Trading Systems Inc., a mobile fintech company. She most recently served as associate general counsel at CSX Transportation, Inc.

2000

Brian King has been appointed executive director of the Betty Brinn Children’s Museum in Milwaukee.

He oversees all aspects of the organization, including strategic and operational planning, and leading the museum to achieve its mission and goals. Brian previously served as both the head and director of innovation at the Milwaukee Jewish Day School where he transformed the school’s educational model to a student-centered, hands-on learning approach.

2001

Rodney Bullard, vice president of community affairs for Chick-fil-A and the executive director of the Chick-fil-A Foundation, gave the August commencement address at the University of North Georgia. A 2015 graduate of Leadership Georgia, he received that organization’s 2019 E. Dale Threadgill Community Service Award.

Edgardo Portaro van Oordt has been appointed partner in the mining and natural resources practice at Garcia Sayan Abogados, a law firm in Lima, Peru.

2003

David Kaplan has joined Saxena White as a director and oversees the firm’s San Diego office. He was previously a partner at Bernstein Litowitz Berger & Grossmann, where he co-chaired the direct action practice.

Jaime Klima has been named chief of staff and chief operating officer of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. She previously served as chief counsel, Office of the Chairman, U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission.

2004

Gray Chynoweth has been named CEO of Minim, a cloud-managed WiFi and IoT security platform for smart homes, located in Manchester, N.H. Prior to Minim, Gray held the positions of chief membership officer for Advanced Regenerative Manufacturing Institute (ARMI) and COO of Dyn. He is a director for Millworks Fund, 10X Ventures, and Primary Bank.

Nita Farahany and her husband, Thede Loder, welcomed a daughter, Alectra Loder Farahany, on Nov. 20, 2019. She joins big sister Aristella. Nita has been awarded Duke Law School’s Robinson O. Everett Distinguished Professorship, effective July 1. (Read more, p. 20.)

2005

Carter Vance has been named the first general counsel of the lottery app Jackpocket. He previously was a vice president and associate general counsel at Churchill Downs, overseeing legal and regulatory matters around iGaming, sports wagering, and online horse racing.

Chandra Westergaard, a health care regulatory and enforcement lawyer, has joined Norton Rose Fulbright’s Denver office as a partner. She previously practiced at Perkins Coie and represents companies and individuals in civil, criminal, and administrative government enforcement actions and investigations.

2006

Kenneth Ching has joined Argentum Partners in Reno, Nev., as a litigation, business, and employment law partner. He previously practiced at Hutchison & Steffen and DickinsonWright.

Jeremy Dresner has been elevated to partner at WilmerHale’s Washington, D.C. office, where his practice focuses on government and internal investigations, regulatory counseling, and crisis management assistance.

Rohith Parasuraman has been promoted to counsel in the Washington, D.C., office of Latham & Watkins. He is a member of the corporate department whose practice focuses on M&A and private equity transactions and general corporate matters.

Matt Leerberg is the co-author of North Carolina Appellate Practice and Procedure (LexisNexis 2019), a new treatise offering detailed discussion of the constitutional provisions, statutes, rules, cases, and customs that govern North Carolina appellate law. Matt is managing partner of Fox Rothschild’s Raleigh office where he leads the firm’s national

Katherine Weaver Patterson has been named South Carolina director and managing attorney for the South Carolina Second Chance Justice Collaborative, a partnership between national reentry advocate Root & Rebound and Soteria Community Development Corporation.

appellate team.

2007

Jared Manse has joined the St. Louis office of Greensfelder as an associate in the intellectual property practice group. He assists clients in the biochemical, pharmaceutical, and material sciences areas with patent prosecution and licensing, and also handles patent and trademark freedom-to-operate analyses and enforcement.

Allison Jones Rushing, a circuit judge for the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, has been elected to membership in the American Law Institute.

2008

Adam Laughton was named a corporate partner in the Houston office of Seyfarth Shaw, where he focuses on health care regulation.

Brandon Neal has been named senior vice president and deputy chief legal officer at Novant Health in Charlotte. He was previously managing counsel at Wells Fargo.

John Niles has been appointed special counsel of the National Veterans Legal Services Program. He previously practiced at Covington & Burling.

Have news to share?

Sarah Hawkins Warren, a justice of the Supreme Court of Georgia, has been elected to membership in the American Law Institute. BOV

2009

Erin Blondel, an assistant U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of North Carolina, has received a Department of Justice Director’s Award for Superior Performance. She was recognized for a successful prosecution of the first sex trafficking trial in the district.

Christopher Cronin has been promoted to counsel in the Washington, D.C., office of Latham & Watkins, where he is a member of the corporate department and represents private equity firms, investment banks, and public and private companies in a variety of corporate financings.

Jacyln Genchi has joined Lateral Link, a legal recruiting agency, as director located in south Florida. She focuses on placing associates and partners throughout the Southeast, and also on placing in-house attorneys and general counsel in corporate legal departments nationwide.

She previously was an associate at Hughes Hubbard & Reed.

2010

Benjamin Feit married Nicole Gill in Waltham, Mass., on Aug. 17, 2019.

Ben works in Boston as an education law and policy specialist for the Community Training and Assistance Center, a nonprofit group that provides policy support, technical assistance, and evaluation services for education organizations. He is also pursuing a doctorate in education leadership from Columbia University.

Wade Kolb has been elected to the executive committee of Wyche Law Firm, with responsibility for the firm’s overall leadership and direction. Located in Greenville, S.C., Wade focuses his practice on litigation, appellate advocacy, education, internal investigations, and governmental representation.

Daniel Mandell has joined the Office of the President of the Republic of Palau, where he provides advice and counsel to the president, his senior staff, and government ministers on domestic and international issues.

He blogs about his experiences at theunexpectedjourney.home.blog. He previously was an associate at Cohen & Gresser in Washington, D.C. Peter McCary has been commissioned as a first lieutenant in the United States Army Reserve. He serves as a judge advocate in the 12th Legal Operations Detachment.

Kip Nelson has been named partner in the Greensboro office of Fox Rothschild, where he represents clients in a range of litigation and appellate matters.

Ashley Wagner has been promoted to partner in the Silicon Valley office of Latham & Watkins, where she is a member of the tax department and advises public and private companies on executive compensation and employee benefits matters.

» Drop us a line at law.duke.edu/alumni.

Duke Law Magazine • Summer 2020

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Alumni Notes

2011

Pia Naib has been promoted to counsel in the New York office of Latham & Watkins. She is a member of the corporate department and advises domestic and foreign financial institutions, including banks, broker dealers, and investment funds, on U.S. bank regulatory issues.

2012

Tyson Shaw has been appointed assistant United States attorney in the Civil Division of the District of Kansas United States Attorney’s Office. He was previously with the Employment Law Branch, Office of General Counsel, Federal Bureau of Prisons.

2013

Linda Behnke is associate human resources officer at the United Nations Secretariat in New York, Department of Management Strategy, Policy and Compliance. She previously worked as a public information officer at the United Nations office in Vienna.

Kevin Maloney has joined the Chicago office of Barack Ferrazzano Kirschbaum & Nagelberg as an associate in the firm’s real estate group.

His practice focuses on commercial real estate law with a concentration on property acquisitions and dispositions, secured financing, REIT transactions, leasing, and joint ventures. He previously practiced at Latham & Watkins.

2014

Sara Campbell and Jeff Steiner were married on Sept. 14, 2019 in Brooklyn, N.Y. Jeff is an associate at Latham & Watkins and Sara is an associate at Kirkland & Ellis, both in Los Angeles.

Kem Thompson Frost, chief judge of the Court of Appeals for the 14th District of Texas, has been named a 2019 Outstanding Texas Leader

and was inducted into the Texas Leadership Hall of Fame by the JBS Public Leadership Institute at the University of Texas-Permian Basin.

Donna Stroud has been appointed chair of the 12-person North Carolina Rules Advisory Commission, which was created last fall by the N.C. Supreme Court to recommend changes to court rules. She serves on the N.C. Court of Appeals.

2015

Judea Davis has joined Bradley Arant Boult Cummings as an associate in the litigation practice group in Nashville. She previously clerked for Judge Michelle Childs MJS ’16 of the U.S. District Court for the District of South Carolina and Judge Garrison Hill of the South Carolina Court of Appeals.

2016

Jeff Alpert has joined the TuneIn legal team as corporate counsel, based in its Venice, Calif., studios.

M. Rebecca Cooper has joined the labor and employment law practice at The Kullman Firm in New Orleans.

She previously was an associate at Stanley, Reuter.

Pu Deng is an investment banking associate for China International Capital Corporation Limited, focusing on debt underwriting, especially innovative capital replenishment instruments for banks.

Ethan Goemann has joined the Charlotte office of Seyfarth Shaw as a labor and employment associate.

Patrick Vinett is an associate in the private funds group at Cleary Gottlieb in New York.

Alex Waldrop has joined the Dallasbased intellectual property and business litigation firm Caldwell Cassady & Curry. He previously was an associate at Baker Botts.

62 Duke Law Magazine • Summer 2020

2017

Dina Alawneh has joined the Wayne County (N.Y.) Public Defenders Office. She previously was an assistant public defender in Franklin County (N.Y.).

Maria Rita Bastos-Tigre, a partner in the Brazilian law firm Bastos-Tigre, Coelho da Rocha, Lopes and Freitas, has joined the Chilean law firm Larrain and Asociados as an associate of their Brazilian Desk. Her practice focuses on the corporate area, especially advising Brazilian clients who want to settle in Chile or foreigners who want to settle in Brazil.

Marcus Benning joined Kitchens Kelley Gaynes in Atlanta as an associate in the SBA lending and real estate groups in August. He previously was a finance attorney at Moore & Van Allen in Charlotte.

Emily Harrington has joined the Santa Barbara, Calif., law firm Price, Postel & Parma as an associate focusing on civil litigation. She previously was a litigation associate at Cooley.

Bryan O’Brien has joined the capital markets practice as an associate in the Singapore office of Allen & Overy.

Zachary Perron has joined Goulston & Storrs as an associate in the firm’s real estate group in New York.

Chuck Thompson has joined the Washington, D.C. office of Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson as an associate in the firm’s asset management practice group focusing on derivatives transactions and regulation. Chuck was previously an associate at Eversheds Sutherland.

2018

Maria Pia Bandera was promoted, in June, to junior associate in the law firm Cedeño & Mendez in Panama City, Panama.

Mark Davis, a justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court, has published A Warren Court of Our Own: The Exum Court and the Expansion of Individual Rights in North Carolina (Carolina Academic Press, 2019), an examination of the N.C. Supreme Court between 1986 and 1995 when James Exum served as chief justice.

Josh Zaslawsky has joined Winstead’s real estate development and investments practice group.

Located in Dallas, his practice involves a variety of commercial real estate transactions.

2019

Fifaliana Ratodimahavonjy and Andrew Toig ’20 were married on Dec. 28, 2019. A traditional Madagascar marriage ceremony, the “Vodiondry,” was followed by a ceremony in Duke Chapel. Fifaliana is the first lawyer from Madagascar to be sworn into the New York Bar. Carolina Restrepo has joined Legal View S.A.S. in Bogota, Colombia as chief of operations.

Taobin Yang has been promoted to a new position in the prosecutor’s office of Xi’an, China, serving as the head of the division of prosecutor education and training.

In Memoriam

Received between October 29, 2019 and March 31, 2020

Class of ’48

Class of ’59

Class of ’71

Joseph W. Grossenheider

Robert Carnahan Hudson

John Taft Benson

Jerry C. Sanders

John Carl Russell

Peter T. Meszoly

Class of ’50

Class of ’60

Class of ’73

February 10, 2020

April 30, 2019

John E. Batten III October 11, 2019

Roy Joe Grogan March 30, 2020

February 19, 2020

February 25, 2020

November 14, 2019

November 24, 2019

Herbert O. (Bert) Davis

Stuart Alan Albright

Class of ’62

Class of ’75

February 21, 2020

November 2, 2019

John Gardner Lile III

Frank Johnstone Dana III

Class of ’52

March 30, 2020

March 31, 2020

Class of ’63

Class of ’82

James S. Byrd Class of ’53

Robert D. Elf March 3, 2020

L. Stacy Weaver, Jr.

Harvey Denison Carter, Jr. March 31, 2020

Louis F. Tidwell February 6, 2020

April 8, 2020

James Barrett Hawkins December 6, 2019

Class of ’83

Roland Benton Gray

Class of ’64

December 1, 2019

Class of ’55

December 23, 2019

Class of ’87

March 5, 2020

Class of ’66

November 15, 2019

Class of ’57

January 26, 2018

January 29, 2020

April 7, 2019

Class of ’68

Class of ’89

December 16, 2019

John A. Carnahan

Bernard M. Kostelnik

Robert J. Bertrand

H. Templeton Fowlkes, Jr.

Charles Bryan (Chuck) Burton February 17, 2020

Alice Higdon Prater Junya Sato

Patricia L. (Tricia) Wilson October 2, 2019

Edward Malinzak January 6, 2020

Duke Law Magazine • Summer 2020

63

Sua Sponte

Mutual appreciation The Class of 2020 completed their studies at Duke Law remotely due to the Covid-19 pandemic shutdown, receiving kudos from faculty and administrators for demonstrating resilience, focus, and good cheer under trying circumstances. On the eve of their graduation, more than 100 members of the class sent the following message of appreciation to the faculty, indicating the feeling was mutual.

To the Incredible Faculty of Duke Law,

W

e, the Class of 2020, want to extend our formal gratitude to all of you for transforming your roles as educators these last few months in ways that went far beyond our expectations.

In these especially challenging times, you worked tirelessly to transfer the academic excellence and quality for which many of us chose to attend Duke Law into our online classrooms.

You maintained your commitment to our legal education even when you were undoubtedly dealing with your own challenges. You actively asked to hear about our struggles, both academic and personal, so you could adapt your classrooms accordingly. You listened when we answered.

You chose to expand your role as educators, volunteering your time outside of the virtual classroom to talk to us about your favorite topics and offering helping hands or listening ears for the challenges we faced outside of academics. You virtually welcomed us into your homes and personal lives to make it more comfortable for us to do the same.

Some of you conducted recorded interviews of your fellow scholars to make our virtual classes more engaging, some of you bought us a meal, and some of you held extra office hours or stayed in constant communication to check in with us. By doing these and countless other intentional acts that took you outside of your traditional duties as professors, you extended your commitment beyond educating us and took on the role of helping to guide us through these difficult times.

We had hoped to be able to share our gratitude for your impact on our legal education and our lives in person, as we celebrated our entry into the legal profession together. This is far from how any of us pictured we would complete our time at Duke. But, in the midst of this crisis, we saw and felt how you all willingly rose to the challenge of being there for us, in whatever ways and forms possible. This is our way of sharing with you that your tremendous efforts have been both recognized and greatly appreciated. We are hopeful that we will be able to do so properly and in person in the near future.

For everything you have done for us, we are endlessly grateful.

Thank you.

Sincerely, Duke University School of Law, Class of 2020

64 Duke Law Magazine • Summer 2020

Congratulating the 2020 Law Alumni Association award recipients Charles S. Murphy Award for Civic Service

In mid-June, the Law Alumni Association and Dean Kerry Abrams honored the following members of the Duke Law community for their career accomplishments, service, and dedication to Duke Law. The Law Alumni Association awards are among the highest honors given by Duke Law School.

A. Kenneth Pye Award for Excellence in Education

Satana T. Deberry ’94, MBA ’06

Guy-Uriel Charles

District Attorney Durham County

Edward and Ellen Schwarzman Professor of Law

Charles S. Ryne Award for Professional Achievement

Jennifer Baltimore ’92 Senior Vice President, Business & Legal Affairs Universal Music Group Los Angeles

International Alumni Award

The Hon. Mandisa Muriel Maya LLM ’90, P ’17 President, Supreme Court of Appeal of South Africa Bloemfontein, Free State South Africa

John C. Yates ’81, AB ’78 Senior Partner Morris, Manning & Martin Atlanta

Young Alumni Award

Lauren Fine ’11 Co-Founder and Co-Director Youth Sentencing & Reentry Project Philadelphia

Duke Law Magazine Duke University School of Law 210 Science Drive Box 90389 Durham, NC 27708-0389

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Corporate law scholar Gina-Gail Fletcher and legal historian H. Timothy Lovelace, Jr. join the Duke Law faculty page 16

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