Duke Law Magazine, Fall 2021

HOW THE ENVIRONMENTAL, SOCIAL, AND GOVERNANCE MOVEMENT IS GAINING GROUND IN BOARDROOMS, LAW FIRMS, AND LEGAL SCHOLARSHIP

From the Dean

Dear Friends:

ONE

OF THE GREAT STRENGTHS of Duke Law School’s faculty is how adaptable they are to changes in their fields of study and society more broadly. Consider how our criminal law scholars have turned their attention to the root causes of wrongful convictions and mass incarceration or how health law scholars have delved into ethical questions surrounding the emergence of artificial intelligence and big data.

The cover story in this issue of Duke Law Magazine looks at a significant development in corporate law — the increasing focus of investors and regulators on the environmental, social, and governance attributes of corporations — and the leading-edge work that our corporate law faculty are doing on this topic. Twenty years ago, few in the academy were studying firms from this perspective, but with activists demanding both transparency and change, the ESG movement is gaining ground in boardrooms, law firms, and yes, legal scholarship. Our scholars are looking at it from an array of viewpoints and methodologies and drawing different conclusions about its impact. Whether ESG is a new concept for you or something you are dealing with in your practice on a daily basis, I think you’ll be interested in their insights.

Also in this issue are profiles of James Bergin LLM ’93, who as a top lawyer at Johnson & Johnson has been helping to get COVID-19 vaccines to countries around the globe, and Gabe Carillo JD/MD ’23, who is pursuing his passion for helping people by earning degrees in both law and medicine, as well as excerpts of my recent conversation with Andrea Nelson Meigs ’94, who followed a childhood love of acting into a career as a top talent agent in Hollywood.

We also pay tribute to two cherished colleagues who we lost over the summer. Professor Mat McCubbins, a renowned scholar and beloved mentor, died July 1 after a lengthy illness, and for-

mer Dean Paul Carrington, who transformed the Law School in the late 1970s and 1980s and whose legacy lives on in so much of what we do, passed away Aug. 24. They will both be dearly missed.

As we approach the end of the fall semester, I am proud of how our entire community has adapted to the challenge of returning to campus. After more than a year of teaching and learning and meeting remotely, the energy in the Law School this fall has been palpable. Our clinics and pro bono projects have been serving clients, faculty have been holding vibrant scholarly workshops, and alumni have returned to speak in classes and at well-attended lunchtime events. We’ve added stellar scholars, teachers, and leaders to our faculty in Emilie Aguirre, Shitong Qiao, Alex Zhang, and Sarah Bloom Raskin. We were even able to welcome back members of the class of 2020, who weren’t able to have a graduation ceremony due to the pandemic, for a special celebration of their achievements. It was such a thrill to see them back at Duke again and finally get to congratulate them in person.

In the coming season of celebration, I wish you and your loved ones the best. Thank you for your continued friendship and support.

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

After more than a year of teaching and learning and meeting remotely, the energy in the Law School this fall has been palpable.

The Commons

Ideas, achievements, and events from around Duke Law School

Back in person

After almost 18 months of online teaching and learning due to the coronavirus pandemic, the fall semester has marked a return to normal for Duke Law with in-person classes and a full cohort of students and faculty on campus.

In late August Kerry Abrams, the James B. Duke and Benjamin N. Duke Dean and professor of law, joyfully welcomed 282 students in the JD Class of 2024 and 63 internationally trained lawyers in the LLM Class of 2022 (who joined 51 others who began their studies remotely last January).

Student Affairs personnel also hosted a “Welcome to Duke 2.0” orientation session for members of the Class of 2023 who had taken all of their firstyear classes online.

Vaccinations are required for all students, faculty, and staff, as are masks indoors. Many faculty continue to offer virtual office hours and along with administrators and staff have sought to make the semester run smoothly.

Having spent part of her first year and all of her second year taking courses online from Durham or her hometown of Wilmington, N.C., Meredith Criner ’22 said it has been great to be back on campus, even though it’s “still not the same” as pre-pandemic days. “It’s been nice to have professor availability for in-person office hours and I have enjoyed meeting people in person that I have been talking to online for over a year,” she said in mid-October. “Outside of classes, I feel more connected to the Duke Law community, due to being in the building, attending student organization lunch events, and meeting friends for coffee and lunch.” Criner added that she’s also look ing forward to attending Duke basketball games in Cameron Indoor Stadium: “I look forward to hopefully winning season tickets in the lottery like I did at Campout my 1L year!” d

clinic news

The Civil Justice Clinic received a cy pres award in March that is being used to further the work of its Eviction Diversion Program.

A cy pres award is a charitable distribution from funds remaining from a class-action settlement after the class members, fees, and expenses are paid. The award to the clinic came from a case in North Carolina state court against Southwood Realty Company, a property management company that in April 2020 agreed to pay $7.09 million to settle claims it unlawfully collected various eviction filing fees from tenants.

The gift carried only the stipulation that it benefit the Durham Eviction Diversion Program, according to the settlement order signed by North Carolina Superior Court Judge Allen Baddour. A similar award was made to Legal Aid of N.C. (LANC), which co-administers the Eviction Diversion Program with the Duke clinic.

Clinical Professors Charles Holton ’73 and Jesse McCoy, respectively the clinic’s director and supervising attorney, called the gift “a very welcome surprise” and credited plaintiffs’ co-counsel Karl Gwaltney of Maginnis Howard and Patrick Wallace at Whitfield Bryson, both of Raleigh, with recommending the Eviction Diversion Program as the recipient. While the clinic did not have a role in the Southwood case, Holton and McCoy regularly consult with lawyers across North Carolina about housing and eviction matters.

“We understand how beneficial your organization is for an underserved community and are excited to contribute to its continued success,” said Gwaltney.

The clinic used some of the funds to hire student summer interns in anticipation of a significant increase in eviction filings expected after the expiration of a national eviction moratorium. Additional funds are being used to support other aspects of the program. d

The Health Justice Clinic was part of a legal team that secured coverage by Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina (BCBSNC) for gender-affirming facial feminization surgeries for transgender individuals.

Along with the Transgender Legal Defense & Education Fund (TLDEF) and two law firms, the clinic convinced the insurer to reclassify such procedures as medically necessary rather than cosmetic for transfeminine members. As a result, two clients whom the clinic represented after their claims were denied will have insurance coverage for their surgeries. The legal team also represented Equality North Carolina and the LGBTQ Center of Durham.

“This change has the power to affect so many individuals in ensuring that they feel comfortable in their bodies and represents an important step in making health care more inclusive,” said Serena Tibrewala ’21, who worked on the policy initiative. Andrea Boutros ’21, Alex Cochran ’21, Edward Gonzales ’22, Ada Lin ’21, Kailen Malloy ’21, and Amanda Ng ’20 also worked on the project over three semesters, along with Clinical Professors Allison Rice and Hannah Demeritt ’04, the clinic’s director and supervising attorney, respectively.

Duke Law student-attorneys worked on several matters: attempting to engage BCBSNC in structured negotiations over the policy; and direct representation of two individuals, one on an appeal to the insurer on her coverage determination and another on drafting a structured negotiation letter to her employer over offering insurance that excludes coverage for the procedures. Almost all of the work was done virtually due to the coronavirus pandemic shutdown.

BCBSNC is the largest health insurer in North Carolina, covering 3.8 million members through employer-provided and individual plans. The policy change means that a request for facial feminization procedures will now be processed and assessed for medical necessity like any other claim.

Said client Kathryn Vandegrift: “Transgender health care is health care, and health care is a human right. No one should be denied the medical treatment they need. Knowing that care may be within reach has me hopeful that my life might finally move past transitioning. I might finally be able to exist fully as myself.” d

Clinical Professor

Charles Holton ’73

Clinical Professor Jesse McCoy

Edward Gonzales ’22 and Andrea Boutros ’21

Clinical Professor Allison Rice

Students in the Immigrant Rights Clinic secured significant resolutions during the spring semester in two separate matters: grants of asylum for three children seeking refuge in the United States after fleeing domestic violence in Honduras with their mother and grandmother; and the release from immigration detention of a client who had been held by federal authorities for 16 months.

Luca Tomasi ’21 and Andres Paciuc ’21 represented the children at their seven-hour affirmative asylum interview in Arlington, Va., in March, receiving notice of the positive result in early May.

After receiving the family’s case on referral from a California-based asylum organization in 2020, clinic students identified seven separate asylum claims within the family. They continue to represent the mother and grandmother as their cases proceed in Charlotte Immigration Court under the supervision of Clinical Professor Kate Evans, the clinic director, and Supervising Attorney and Senior Lecturing Fellow Shane Ellison.

Alex Bednar ’21, Andrew Frank ’21, and Sam Moore ’21 gathered evidence, drafted affidavits, prepared expert declarations, and developed the core legal theories. Natalie Pate ’21, Christine Mullen ’21, and Lucas Fernandez-Rocha ’20 identified the children’s independent asylum claims and filed the initial asylum applications on their behalf. It took many interviews for the family to feel comfortable enough to share their painful memories, and weeks to peel back the layers of their experiences, Moore said.

Clinic client Luis Juarez emerged from immigration detention on June 16 following an agreement by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to release him on bond. The clinic had filed a petition for a writ of habeas corpus in November 2020, challenging Juarez’s lengthy civil detention absent a determination that he represented a flight risk or danger to the community.

Clinic students Pate, Andrew Lindsay ’21, and Mario Moreno ’21 teamed up with the Immigration Law Clinic at the University of Idaho and attorneys Luis Cortes Romero and Andrew Augustine of Novo Law to represent Juarez under Evans’ supervision. Lindsay and Moreno argued the petition virtually before a magistrate judge in April.

A longtime lawful permanent resident, Juarez faces deportation based on two drug-related convictions from 2015. He successfully challenged removal

proceedings in 2018 and was released to his family, most of whom are U.S. citizens. But in February 2020, immigration officials re-arrested him at his home because his case had been reopened in immigration court.

The habeas petition contended that Juarez’s successful rehabilitation and reintegration into his family and community demonstrated that his civil detention was unreasonable under the Fifth Amendment, that it was unconstitutionally prolonged, and that it violated the Eighth Amendment’s protection against excessive bail.

In addition to ordering Juarez’s release on bond, the judge ordered the government to demonstrate in a bond hearing why his continued detention was justified. d

Wrongful Convictions

Clinic client Charles Ray Finch, who spent 43 years in prison — initially on death row — for a murder he did not commit, received a pardon of innocence from North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper on June 16.

“Mr. Finch and others who have been wrongly convicted deserve to have that injustice fully and publicly acknowledged,” Cooper said.

The pardon makes Finch, 83, eligible under North Carolina law to file a claim and receive compensation from the state for up to $750,000 for his wrongful conviction.

Finch’s conviction was vacated by a federal judge and he was released from prison in May 2019 through the efforts of Duke Law faculty and students over 15 years, first in the Innocence Project and, since 2008, the Wrongful Convictions Clinic. A three-judge panel of the U. S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit had earlier found him factually innocent of the crime, stating in a unanimous decision that “impermissibly suggestive” police lineups violated his constitutional rights and that the totality of old and new evidence would not have convinced any reasonable juror of his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

The clinic filed the petition seeking a pardon of innocence with the governor’s office in August 2019.

“We are very happy for Mr. Finch,” said John S. Bradway Professor of the Practice of Law James Coleman, Jr., who served as lead counsel. “His total vindication is complete.” d

Luca Tomasi ’21 with the clinic’s clients at the children’s asylum interview in March

Charles Ray Finch, center, was greeted by family members on his release from prison in May 2019.

clinic news

In late August, the Children’s Law Clinic released a report on discipline trends in North Carolina’s charter schools, the first of its kind. The report details several key findings relating to the use of suspension among charters, uncovering correlations between the racial demographics of charter schools and suspension use.

Ryan Yang ’21 and Richard Yang ’22 drafted the report under the supervision of Supervising Attorney and Senior Lecturing Fellow Peggy Nicholson. Initially interested in exploring how the use of exclusionary discipline, such as suspension, negatively impacts students, they realized there was very little information on charter school discipline despite steadily increasing enrollment in North Carolina.

By reviewing available discipline data, they identified several trends in charter school discipline, including:

» less use by charters of short-term suspension — 10 days or less — than traditional public schools, but greater use of long-term suspensions of more than 10 days;

» a reduction in the overall use of suspension by both traditional and charter schools over the past decade;

» a greater likelihood for Black students to be suspended than their white peers in charters with the highest rates of short-term suspension, similar to their treatment in traditional public schools;

» a correlation in the increased short-term suspension rates in individual schools to the increase in percentage of Black students enrolled; and

» a correlation between the decreased shortterm suspension rates to the increased percentages of white students enrolled.

In addition to its findings, the report makes several policy recommendations directed at the State Board of Education and N.C. Department of Public Instruction, the state agencies that oversee charter schools. These recommendations, which focus on improved data collection and increased oversight for charter school discipline, would help ensure that the state’s charter schools have discipline practices that are transparent, effective, and promote good student outcomes, the report states.

“This report is an important contribution to the conversation on school discipline in North Carolina,” said Nicholson. d

Former DKU Vice Chancellor Simon joins Center for Innovation Policy as executive director

DENIS SIMON, a professor of the practice at Duke’s Fuqua School of Business and former executive vice chancellor of Duke Kunshan University, was named executive director of the Center for Innovation Policy in March.

“We are delighted to welcome Denis Simon to the Law School to lead the Center for Innovation Policy,” said Kerry Abrams, James B. Duke and Benjamin N. Duke Dean of the School of Law. “His expertise and experience in the field, coupled with his impressive leadership at Duke Kunshan, make him an ideal choice to drive its important research and programming and further enhance Duke’s visibility as a center of excellence in the field of innovation policy.”

The center, which was established in 2013, serves as a campus-wide platform for engaging faculty, students, corporate executives, and government officials in research projects, academic programs, policy analysis, and seminars and conferences regarding the domestic and international issues related to innovation processes and activities. Its mission is to help stimulate competitiveness that spurs economic growth and supports long-term social welfare.

Simon recently returned to Durham following a five-year term as executive vice chancellor of Duke Kunshan, a joint venture of Duke, Wuhan University, and the city of Kunshan located in Jiangsu, China. Under Simon’s leadership, Duke Kunshan launched its undergraduate degree program, expanded its graduate degree programs, and developed a series of research units.

Simon also supported the establishment of Duke Kunshan’s Innovation Research and Training Center, which conducts research studies and operates as an incubator to support student-led entrepreneurial initiatives.

Simon has long specialized in the field of science and technology policy and innovation studies. He recently participated in a special National Academy of Sciences panel titled “Science and Innovation Leadership in the 21st Century,” which explored a new paradigm for sparking more sustained innovation progress in the United States.

He was a founding member of the Experts Group of the U.S.-China Innovation Dialogue organized by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and China’s Ministry of Science & Technology; served as a special adviser to the U.S. Patent and Trade Office on intellectual property rights issues in U.S.-China relations; was a member of the IBM-sponsored project Innovation Outlook 2.0 and 3.0; and served on the U.S. Council on Competitiveness as an expert dealing with China and international innovation issues.

Simon has written extensively on innovation issues in China, and is often consulted by U.S. and Asian media about developments in R&D, technology transfer, and innovation policy in the Pacific Rim. He earned his master’s degree and PhD from the University of California at Berkeley and his undergraduate degree from the State University of New York.

“I am thrilled to assume this strategic position at the Center for Innovation Policy,” said Simon. “Duke possesses deep expertise in all facets of innovation policy. My hope is to harness that expertise to take the center to the next level in terms of international recognition and its involvement in the U.S. domestic policy arena.”

Stuart Benjamin, the Douglas B. Maggs Professor of Law, and Arti Rai, the Elvin R. Latty Professor of Law, who founded the Center for Innovation Policy, continue to serve as faculty co-directors.

“With the arrival of the Biden administration, there are clear signals that innovation will be a topic of immense attention,” said Benjamin. “Our hope is that with Denis Simon as an integral part of our team, we can make certain that Duke is a key player in the evolving discussions and debates about U.S. innovation policy and America’s role in the global innovation system.” d

Bolch Prize celebration honors Justices Moseneke, Marshall

THE 2021 BOLCH PRIZE for the Rule of Law celebration, presented by the Bolch Judicial Institute in a video released in late June, honored two remarkable jurists, Deputy Chief Justice Dikgang Moseneke of the South Africa Constitutional Court and retired Chief Justice Margaret Marshall of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court.

Moseneke, the 2020 prize recipient, is an internationally revered judge who helped build and lead a democratic South Africa as it emerged from apartheid. A lifelong advocate for justice, human rights, and the rule of law, Justice Moseneke helped draft South Africa’s Interim Constitution, laying the groundwork for a post-apartheid society rooted in the just and equal application of law. During 15 years as a justice and then as deputy chief justice of the South Africa Constitutional Court, Moseneke wrote numerous influential opinions that helped clarify and strengthen democratic principles and the separation of powers among the branches of government in South Africa.

Marshall, the 2021 prize recipient and the first woman to serve as chief justice in Massachusetts, is a lifelong advocate for a more transparent, efficient, and accountable judiciary. Her advocacy and defense of the rule of law began with her involvement in anti-apartheid advocacy as a young adult in her native South Africa. Before retiring as chief justice in 2010, she wrote hundreds of opinions, including the groundbreaking 2003 decision in Goodridge v. Department of Public Health, which held that the Massachusetts Constitution prohibits the state from denying same-sex couples access to civil marriage. The opinion made Massachusetts the first state to legalize gay marriage and laid the groundwork for a sea change in attitudes and law across the United States.

In the video hosted

talked about the importance of the rule of law and human rights, including LGBTQ+ rights, and how their different experiences growing up under apartheid informed their jurisprudence.

“I have been asked whether my experience in South Africa, growing up as a white child in South Africa, informed my decision in any way,” Marshall said, discussing Goodridge. “I think I can fairly say that as I was reaching for the correct interpretation of the Massachusetts Constitution, I was not thinking about my experience in South Africa. But on reflection, I have come to understand one thing: It was so clear to me that everything that the government had been telling me as a white child — what Black South Africans were not capable of and could not do, that they could not run a democracy, could not be brilliant lawyers, could not be successful businessmen, could not be leading theorists — it was so patently wrong that I have often thought that when somebody tells me that the other is not capable of something or the other is different, or the other does not belong as a member of our society, there’s a deep-seated nerve that is triggered in my system that makes me think very, very deeply about whether that is the case.”

Moseneke noted that perhaps the most important work of the courts is the handling of day-to-day disputes and injustices that deeply affect people’s lives.

“When we talk about the rule of law we often talk about the higher, larger context, the super-structure of the democratic arrangements in a society,” he said. “But in the many years that I’ve been counsel and then a judge, there are so many disputes of people, of neighbors or spouses, of children. And ask anybody who has been in courts, those disputes require the law to step in and to restore the equilibrium that is brought on by an invasion of rights or perceived invasion of rights. And over the years I’ve built a certain level of sensitivity over the fact that the law serves a purpose much more than the big and powerful in society.” d

Below: retired Chief Justice Margaret Marshall of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court with Professor David F. Levi, director of the Bolch Judicial Institute.

by Duke alumna and PBS NewsHour anchor Judy Woodruff, Moseneke and Marshall

Deputy Chief Justice Dikgang Moseneke of the South Africa Constitutional Court

Wilson Center adds leading legal, public health, and sentencing advocates to staff

“Yvette brings to us a depth of litigation experience, a public health background, and policy and regulatory experience that will add so much to the center,” said Wilson Center Director Brandon Garrett, the L. Neil Williams, Jr., Professor of Law.

“With the center’s incredible body of work and strong national momentum for meaningful change, the center is ready for its next phase of growth,” said Garcia Missri. “And I am excited to help lead the center as we take on bold and innovative efforts to improve criminal legal and behavioral health outcomes for all people.”

THE WILSON CENTER for Science and Justice has made two key hires in recent months. Yvette Garcia Missri, a leading legal and public health advocate for racial and social justice, joined the center as executive director in May. And in August, Ben Finholt came to the center as director of the Just Sentencing Project, an initiative focused on extreme sentencing and racial disparities in North Carolina that he previously directed at North Carolina Prisoner Legal Services.

Garcia Missri most recently served as the litigation counsel for the Center for Responsible Lending, where she used litigation strategies to combat abusive lending practices. There, she authored several amicus briefs in federal and state courts, represented organizational plaintiffs against federal agencies, and led national policy reform efforts to close the racial wealth gap.

She earlier served as an administrator for the Orange County Department on Aging, where she helped lead the county to become North Carolina’s first World Health Organization Age-Friendly County. She also led and implemented a county-level five-year strategic plan and created and managed multiple enduring programs to combat poverty and improve mental health outcomes for vulnerable older adults.

Garcia Missri has also worked as a gender-based violence legal services attorney in Massachusetts and Washington, D.C., including at Merrimack Valley Legal Services, the Legal Aid Society of the District of Columbia, and the Office of the Attorney General for D.C. She received her JD from Boston College Law School, her MPH in Health Behavior from the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health, and her BA in Philosophy from George Washington University.

The move of the Just Sentencing Project to the center under Finholt’s leadership is part of this effort. At Duke, Finholt is addressing extreme sentencing and racial disparities in North Carolina through policy, the courts, and executive clemency, with the goal of developing a model that can be exported nationally. He is working with Wilson Center researchers and the Governor’s Task Force on Racial Equity in Criminal Justice to compile a comprehensive database of North Carolina felony charging, conviction, and sentencing. He is also partnering with district attorneys’ offices, public defenders’ offices, the state General Assembly, the Post-Release Supervision and Parole Commission, and the Juvenile Sentencing Review Board to promote fair and equitable sentencing and best practices related to sentencing review.

“Ben’s holistic approach to addressing excessive sentencing through policy, education, and the courts is a perfect fit for the Wilson Center,” said Garcia Missri. “Ben’s work and expertise will greatly expand the center’s reach and impact and provide many opportunities for students to do meaningful work and make a real difference in our local community.”

Finholt is a graduate of Williams College and the University of Iowa College of Law. He taught math in New England for six years before attending law school, after which he worked in education law before joining N.C. Prisoner Legal Services as a staff attorney in 2012 and becoming director of the Just Sentencing Project in July 2019.

“I couldn’t be more excited to join the Wilson Center for Science and Justice and the Duke Law faculty to continue the Just Sentencing Project,” Finholt said. “I am forever grateful to my former colleagues at North Carolina Prisoner Legal Services, who made it possible for me to pursue this work.” d

Yvette Garcia Missri

Ben Finholt

Prosecutors help shed light on plea agreements in Wilson Center project

IN A UNIQUE PARTNERSHIP with the Wilson Center for Science and Justice at Duke Law, two district attorney’s offices are providing unprecedented access and information about the little-understood world of plea agreements in criminal cases.

Durham County (N.C.) District Attorney Satana Deberry ’94 and Berkshire County (Mass.) District Attorney Andrea Harrington partnered with researchers at the Wilson Center to design and pilot a project called “Plea Tracker” that is generating comprehensive data on the factors that drive case outcomes. The Plea Tracker seeks to measure outcomes, increase transparency, and build public trust throughout communities served by the Durham and Berkshire district attorneys’ offices, as well as serve as a national model.

Researchers began collecting data in Berkshire and Durham counties in April, and in July the Wilson Center announced a third partnership with Utah County Attorney David O. Leavitt in Provo, Utah.

Despite plea agreements accounting for approximately 90 to 95% of all criminal case dispositions, what actually happens during the negotiation process has historically not been studied. The Plea Tracker’s initial yearlong study will result in aggregated data to uncover patterns and trends in how prosecutors use their discretion. The offices will use this data to inform future policies and decision-making.

The prosecutors taking part complete an online form once a case has been negotiated and the plea agreement is finalized. The online form has been tailored to each DA’s office — the particular jurisdiction, interests, resources, and practices used by their staff — to maximize the benefits of participation for the office itself and the independent research team.

In addition to basic case information, prosecutors in each office report on the factors they consider at each stage in their plea recommendations. They document factors not previously measured, including victim and defendant demographics, assessment of danger risks, access to mental health and substance use treatment, and the victim’s desired outcome.

“The Plea Tracker gives so much insight into processes that are otherwise completely unobservable,” said Will Crozier, the Wilson Center’s research director. “This project is an attempt to really see how the justice system works. The lessons learned from this project will undoubtedly have an impact on our understanding

of how justice is negotiated, and I think will result in a better understanding of how progressive prosecution can improve the criminal justice system.”

Prosecutors wield enormous discretion and power by determining which charges to prosecute, which charges to reduce, and which charges to dismiss, yet few prosecuting offices have adopted empirical approaches to assess the impact of negotiated outcomes. In part because of unchecked plea practices, U.S. incarceration rates have exploded in recent decades without evidence to demonstrate those policies make communities safer. The Plea Tracker serves as a check on prosecutors’ practices by identifying potential racial disparities, examining consistency across similar cases, and encouraging individualized case outcomes tailored to the needs of defendants, victims, and the community.

“We cannot address the deep-seated racial disparities in our criminal legal system without scrutinizing how plea offers are formed and negotiated,” said Deberry. “As prosecutors, the plea process is our biggest opportunity to use our discretion to create a more equitable system. The Plea Tracker helps our office to ensure that achieving fairness and equity — rather than pursuing the highest possible charges and sanctions regardless of the costs to our community — are the starting point for resolving each case.”

Said Harrington: “My approach during these rightfully turbulent times is to lead by example.

As a prosecuting office, that means taking ownership of our institution’s historic role in perpetuating systems of oppression, the vestiges of which persist to this day. Opening my office for scrutiny in the name of digging deeper into the differences between who our justice system affords mercy and who it does not is leading by example.” d

“We cannot address the deep-seated racial disparities in our criminal legal system without scrutinizing how plea offers are formed and negotiated.”

— Satana Deberry ’94

— Professor Lawrence Baxter, arguing that cryptocurrency’s devastating environmental impact is possibly the single most important policy factor against its growth. (The Hill, Aug.25, 2021)

Notable &Quotable

“The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed severe shortcomings in hospital financing. Many hospitals in hotspot areas could not provide an adequate supply of hospital beds; yet, even when filled to capacity, a number of hospitals suffered severe revenue losses. In no well-working market should demand exceed supply while revenue falls. ...

“Health care policymakers must remain farsighted to create a transition to the better system of tomorrow, even as they navigate the current emergency. Their attention should focus on creating population-wide capacity and reforming a hospital financing model that produced shortages during a time of great need.”

— Professor Barak Richman, with Harvard’s Regina Herzlinger, making multiple recommendations for preparing hospitals for the next pandemic given the national health care system’s “woeful” lack of preparation for the surge of COVID-19 patients.

(Harvard Business Review, June 10, 2021)

“Cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin and Ethereum in particular, are so damaging to the environment that they threaten to reverse any gains achieved through the transition to electric vehicles and the reduction in fossil fuels use. Even now the total Bitcoin carbon footprint exceeds the total emission reductions of electric vehicles.”

“Rigid application of a purely historical approach would almost certainly call into question a vast range of modern firearm regulations, from prohibitions on guns in hospitals and daycare centers to criminal sanctions for selling firearms to felons and the mentally ill. It would require judges to employ strained historical analogies rather than familiar legal tools, and would accord the Second Amendment a kind of supremacy that no other right in the Constitution can claim.”

— Professors Joseph Blocher and Darrell Miller, faculty directors of the Center for Firearms Law, discussing the implications of using the “text, history, and tradition-only” approach to decide whether a gun regulation violates the Second Amendment, one of the broad issues in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, a case pending before the Supreme Court. (Talking Points Memo, April 29, 2021)

“When governments respond to ISIS recruits with blanket measures such as citizenship deprivation, aggressive criminal responses, and non-repatriation, these are sanctions that violate the non-punishment guarantee for ISIS recruits who were trafficked. Moreover, this results in a form of double punishment — unwarranted sanctions against trafficking victims in situations when such penalties are, on their own terms, also independently antithetical to human rights. This results in denying the human rights of those who are at once victims of terrorism and trafficking, including rights linked to rehabilitation, recovery, and repatriation.”

— Clinical Professor Jayne Huckerby, director of the International Human Rights Clinic, noting that terrorist groups use trafficking tactics both to lure adults and minors under false pretenses or force and to keep them in exploitative situations, but in practice, governments and courts often overlook the fact that a former recruit was trafficked. ( Just Security, March 15, 2021)

“The ruling in Jones v. Mississippi has larger implications for our jurisprudence under the Eighth Amendment, regarding what consists of cruel and unusual punishment, as well as the rights of juveniles more broadly. The ruling, in short, reflects an emboldened majority on the Supreme Court that feels unconstrained by prior precedent and comfortable with casual state treatment of the constitutional rights of juveniles. … It speaks poorly of our constitutional system that the Supreme Court cannot bring itself to recognize that juvenile life without parole has no place in our country, where every other county in the world has abolished it.”

— Professor Brandon Garrett, director of the Wilson Center for Science and Justice, discussing the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling against Brett Jones, who sought to challenge his resentencing to life without parole for a murder he committed at the age of 15. (Law360 , May 2, 2021)

insignes

Shelby Baird JD/MA ’18

is serving as a clerk to Supreme Court Associate Justice Samuel A. Alito, Jr., for the 2021-2022 term of the Court. She began her clerkship in July. She is the fifth Duke Law graduate to clerk for Justice Alito.

Baird met Justice Alito while taking his Duke Law seminar, Current Issues in Constitutional Interpretation, which he has taught since 2009. She credited her faculty mentors and James B. Duke and Benjamin N. Duke Dean Kerry Abrams with supporting her application for the Supreme Court clerkship, as well as David F. Levi, the Levi Family Professor of Law and Judicial Studies and director of the Bolch Judicial Institute, who was dean during her three years at Duke Law.

A Mordecai Scholar at Duke Law, Baird graduated magna cum laude with a Master of Arts in bioethics and science policy along with her JD, and was elected to Order of the Coif. Following graduation, she clerked for Judge Thomas M. Hardiman of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. Prior to beginning her clerkship with Justice Alito she was an associate with Cooper & Kirk, a boutique appellate litigation firm.

During law school Baird served as notes editor for the Duke Law Journal and received the Duke Bar Association’s Outstanding Student Organization Leader Award for her work as president of the Federalist Society. She also served as a student leader for the Cancer Pro Bono Clinic and earned a Client Service Award for her work in the Health Justice Clinic. d

Abigail Frisch ’18 is serving as a Bristow Fellow in the U.S. Department of Justice.

Bristow Fellows work in the Office of the Solicitor General, drafting briefs for cases before the Supreme Court, preparing recommendations to the solicitor general regarding government appeals in the lower courts, and assisting with oral argument preparation for the Court.

Prior to beginning her fellowship, Frisch clerked for Judge Don Willett JD/ MA ’92 LLM ’16 on the U.S. Court of Appeals for Fifth Circuit. She was previously a Coleman Fellow in the Texas solicitor general’s office and a clerk for Judge William Q. Hayes of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California.

Frisch, who is also a CPA, was an executive editor of Duke Law Journal and co-president of the Business Law Society, and participated in Guardian ad Litem and Volunteer Income Tax Assistance. She served as a research assistant to then-Dean David F. Levi in her third year and credits him with encouraging her to “dream big” with her goal of pursuing a career in public service. Frisch graduated magna cum laude and Order of the Coif and won the Justin Miller Award for Leadership. She is a member of the Law School’s Alumnae Leadership Council.

Frisch is one of five lawyers selected for the prestigious yearlong fellowship this year, and the third Duke Law graduate to be a Bristow Fellow in the last nine years. d

JD/LLM ’21 is spending the fall in a clerkship with Europe’s highest court, the Court of Justice for the European Union (EU), as a participant in the Dean Acheson Legal Stage Program.

The Luxembourg-based court interprets EU law to ensure it is applied the same in all member countries and settles disputes between national governments and EU institutions.

The clerkships, which are offered to a small number of U.S. law students annually, are designed “to promote mutual understanding between the peoples of the U.S. and the European Union in the context of the legal profession,” according to the program’s website.

Huber, who was a professor of European history at Wesleyan College before attending law school, has been assigned to the chambers of Judge Inga Reine of Latvia and assists her on cases before the General Court, where each member country is represented by two judges.

At Duke, Huber was a board member of the International Law Society and the Human Rights Law Society, served on the board of the Public Interest Law Foundation, volunteered with the Women Law Students Association, and was a student representative on the Entry-Level and Lateral Faculty Appointments Committees. She also worked at the Irish Centre for Human Rights at the National University of Ireland, Galway, and Shearman & Sterling in New York, which she will join as an associate in January. d

Rohit Asirvatham ’21 spent his postgraduate summer as a Phillips Fellow in the U.S. Department of Justice, supporting attorneys in the Office of the Solicitor General. Only two Phillips Fellowships are awarded each year to law school graduates who are bound for federal clerkships.

Asirvatham, who plans to pursue appellate law as a career, is now clerking for Judge David R. Stras on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit. During his fellowship he engaged in various research and writing tasks, including assisting with the preparation of briefs on the merits in Supreme Court cases.

Asirvatham was a Duke Law Journal articles editor, a member of the Lateral Faculty Hiring Committee and the South Asian Law Student Association, and a research assistant for Professor Matthew Adler, the Richard A. Horvitz Professor of Law and Professor of Economics, Philosophy and Public Policy. He also served as a teaching assistant for Clinical Professor Sean Andrussier’92, and Sara Sun Beale, the Charles L. B. Lowndes Professor of Law. d

Recognizing significant legal clerkships, fellowships, and honors

Karen Huber

As the inaugural recipient of the Keller Fellowship that supports public interest work, Mary Beth Reed ’21 is spending a year at JusticeMatters in Durham, an organization that provides legal services to protect children and help survivors of human trafficking and other traumas.

Members of the Class of 1987 created the fellowship, that funds work in a U.S. public interest organization, to honor their classmate John Keller and his long career with Legal Aid of North Carolina.

At JusticeMatters, which was founded by Libby Magee Coles ’08, Reed works primarily with undocumented children who have been abandoned, abused, or neglected to find a caregiver and obtain legal status, as well as with local organizations to equip them to find children eligible for immigration relief, including legal and other services. Reed worked for JusticeMatters as an immigration legal intern during her second year at Duke Law.

Along with congratulations to Reed, James B. Duke and Benjamin N. Duke Dean Kerry Abrams expressed the Law School’s gratitude to the Class of 1987 for their generous support of the scholarship and to Keller for the example and inspiration his career offers students. “I am delighted to be able to offer the Keller Fellowship to deserving graduates who aspire to serving the public,” she said. d

Andrew Lindsay ’21 was selected by the American Constitution Society in April as one of its 2021 cohort of Next Generation Leaders. He is among 28 individuals nationwide chosen for the program, which identifies talented ACS student chapter members through a competitive process and helps cultivate their careers through special programs, opportunities, and networking.

Lindsay served as president of the Duke Law chapter of the ACS, which welcomed such guests as White House counsels, solicitors general, and civil liberties activists. He also served as co-president of the Duke Law & Technology Society, and chief of staff of the Black Law Students Association. He was editor-in-chief of the Duke Law & Technology Review and was a special staff editor of the Duke Journal on Gender and Law Policy. He also served as a research assistant for Dean Kerry Abrams, Jerome M. Culp Professor of Law Trina Jones, and Clinical Professor Kate Evans, who directs the Immigrant Rights Clinic. d

Gift from Farrin ’90, wife establishes new post-grad public interest fellowship

A$500,000 gift from alumnus James Farrin ’90 and his wife, Robin, will establish a new fellowship for Duke Law School students to do public interest legal work after graduation.

The Farrin Fellowship will provide salary and benefits, including health insurance and paid time off, for a graduating student to work for a year with a 501(c)(3) organization that provides domestic legal services. Preference will be given to graduates working on behalf of low-income or indigent clients, particularly individuals or groups who have historically faced discrimination, as well as graduates serving clients in the Carolinas.

“I want to thank Jim Farrin for this very generous and timely gift,” said Kerry Abrams, the James B. Duke and Benjamin N. Duke Dean of the School of Law. “Expanding the pipeline of public interest lawyers is critical to increasing access to justice in vulnerable communities. The Farrin Fellowship will be a tremendous opportunity for students who aspire to careers serving the public good and adds to our growing support for them while they’re at Duke and after they graduate.”

The Farrin Fellowship is the third post-graduate fellowship established with the help of Duke Law alumni donors. The Keller Fellowship, which was funded by classmates of John Keller ’87 to honor his more than 30-year-long career at Legal Aid of North Carolina, supports fellows doing public interest legal work for a year. The International Law and Human Rights Post-Graduate Fellowship, which was established with a gift from the Noble Foundation, led by alumnus David Noble ’66, and is currently funded by Stuart Feiner ’74, supports a graduate to work in one or more non-governmental or international organizations for a year.

Alumni donors also support post-graduate positions with public interest, government, and other legal employers through the Law School’s Bridge to Practice program as well as guaranteed financial support for summer internships for Duke Law students while in school.

Farrin, whose Durham-based law firm is the largest personal injury firm in North Carolina, has made previous major gifts supporting the Law School’s Civil Justice Clinic. A $325,000 gift in 2016 enabled the clinic to hire a supervising attorney and start the Eviction Diversion Program, a partnership with Legal Aid of North Carolina that has since received funding from the City of Durham.

The Law Offices of James Scott Farrin focuses on personal injury, car accidents, workers’ compensation, nursing home abuse, whistleblowing, defective products, eminent domain, mass torts, class actions, and Social Security Disability. The firm helped lead a class action discrimination suit on behalf of Black farmers against the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and its recent efforts to protect nursing home residents and others during the COVID-19 pandemic have made national headlines.

“Our firm values the ongoing development of our people, supporting and uplifting others in need, and giving back to the community,” Farrin said. “We wanted the Farrin Fellowship to reflect these values, and the leaders at the Duke University School of Law have done a wonderful job bringing this vision to life. We look forward to being inspired by the important, service-oriented achievements to come from the fellows.” d

Convocation 2021

NEWMAN ’88 URGES GRADUATES TO HELP “BEND THE ARC OF THE MORAL UNIVERSE TOWARD JUSTICE”

IN A CONVOCATION ADDRESS both celebrating the Class of 2021 and marking her own retirement from Duke Law, Charles S. Rhyne Clinical Professor of Law Theresa Newman ’88 charged graduates to combine hope and action to effect justice and praised their countless acts of compassion and generosity toward others during a time of extraordinary challenges.

“You met every typical challenge of a rigorous law school education — and it is rigorous — and then somehow you pulled it all out to meet the truly extraordinary challenges of this year,” Newman told the graduates. “I am so very proud of you for doing so, and excited about what you now know about yourselves and what you can accomplish in the future — truly anything.”

The May 15 ceremony in Cameron Indoor Stadium honored 251 JD graduates, 23 of whom also earned a Master of Laws, or LLM, in international and comparative law, and seven of whom also received an LLM in law and entrepreneurship. Eight earned graduate degrees from other departments and schools at Duke University in addition to their JDs, and 30 JD graduates also received the Public Interest and Public Service Law certificate.

Twenty-one graduates of law schools in other countries, representing 14 nations, received the LLM degree, and eight of those graduates received the Law School’s certificate in business law. Three graduates earned the Doctor of Juridical Science or SJD, the highest degree in law.

Newman: Small acts collectively matter

Newman, a beloved member of the Duke Law community for more than 30 years, recalled how she entered Duke Law feeling like an outsider, as the oldest member of her class, the parent of two small children, and a first-generation college student. While at first she felt unlikely to succeed, the “warmth, generosity, and cooperative spirit” she found in the Duke Law community changed her thinking, “Over the years since, I have witnessed and experienced other acts at Duke — grand and small — that have shaped me but, more important, have left me more hopeful about the state of things larger than myself. Individually and collectively, these acts have provided evidence that, as Martin Luther King, Jr., said, ‘The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.’”

After graduating with her JD, Newman would go on to a federal clerkship and a civil litigation practice in Raleigh before returning to

Duke in 1990 where, among other roles, she served as editor and advisor for student journals, director of legal writing, and associate dean for academic affairs.

But she is best known as a leader in the national innocence movement. In 2008 Newman established, along with John S. Bradway Professor of the Practice of Law James Coleman, Jr., the Wrongful Convictions Clinic, which has helped to exonerate 10 men of crimes they did not commit. She served as associate director of the Center for Criminal Justice and Professional Responsibility and faculty advisor to Duke’s chapter of the Innocence Project, which she and Coleman also helped establish, and was a founding board member of the international Innocence Network as well as a leader in numerous North Carolina justice organizations. (Read more, page 32).

During her address, Newman gave examples of compassion and selflessness she had witnessed during her representation of the wrongly convicted, from a judge who apologized to an exoneree to a client’s refusal to plead guilty, knowing that to do so would allow state misconduct to continue unscrutinized.

And she said that the graduates had risen to the exceptional challenges presented by the pandemic, not only by performing selfless, compassionate acts within the Law School, but also through service

ranging from fostering animals, tutoring children, and serving food to the needy to campaigning, protesting, and voting.

“Without hope, we are not inspired to take action, and without action, change will not occur. You have done that here, identifying areas of need, imagining possible solutions, and taking action.”

Newman said she knew the graduates would “join hope and action, and move forward with optimism. I am humbled — and inspired — by how much good you have done during your short time here.”

LLM class speaker Taisa Brandao Condino, a corporate lawyer from Sao Paolo, Brazil, commended her “brave and resilient” classmates for choosing to begin their studies amid the uncertainties of a global pandemic. Recalling long conversations on WhatsApp, she said the group’s main question was whether they would have a full LLM experience.

And despite classes that were mostly online, limited interaction in person, the oceans separating some students studying in their home countries, and some initial hiccups with technology, they did,

Student speakers praise their classmates’ resilience

“Without hope, we are not inspired to take action, and without action, change will not occur. You have done that here, identifying areas of need, imagining possible solutions, and taking action.”

— Professor Theresa Newman ’88

she said. “We had the opportunity to share different views, question many things, deconstruct ideas, and reframe concepts. More than engaging as students, we had the opportunity to become friends. We made our different cultures become one Blue Devil family.”

Condino urged her classmates to use their power as lawyers for good. “Never forget who you are and what you stand for,” she said. “Be part of a positive change and help build a world guided in love, respect, and care for each other and the environment.”

JD class speaker Garmai Gorlorwulu, a leader in numerous student groups who was honored with a Forever Duke alumni award, acknowledged the difficulties many of her classmates had overcome to graduate. Sharing that her own father had died of cancer last fall, she spoke of how the community had often unknowingly helped her through her grief.

“Little did many of you know, I was leaning on you all, every day, without many of you fully understanding the gravity of your actions,” she said.

Gorlorwulu praised her classmates, whose in-person studies were disrupted by the pandemic during the spring of their second year, for showing up in ways large and small: from serving clients through clinic and pro bono work to sharing notes and checking in with each other over coffee. Those actions, she said, maintained the community during a singular time.

“Though we have spent the past few years pushing ourselves to be better each day, Class of 2021, please never forget that each of you is more than the sum of your parts. The world needs you to be who you are, authentically and humbly yourself.

“As I have heard many others say, and as I have said many times in my three years in this community: You are enough.”

Abrams: Preserve institutions while making law more just Kerry Abrams, the James B. Duke and Benjamin N. Duke Dean and professor of law, reminded the JD graduates that she began at Duke Law at the same time they did.

“We had no idea on that beautiful August morning what was in store for us over the next three years,” she said. “But despite all of the challenges, or, perhaps, because of the challenges we experienced, we have both grown in our respective roles, and it has been a thrill for me to see how far you have come.”

She commended the international LLM graduates for “toughness and resolve” in completing their studies in the face of challenges presented by the COVID pandemic, and said it had both revealed many difficult global challenges and demonstrated the need for lawyers to use their “superpowers” of persuasion, problem-solving, and empathy to help solve those problems.

“You have experienced many of these challenges yourselves, from the devastation and disruption of COVID-19 to the grief and pain of a new racial reckoning,” Abrams told the graduates. “But what you have been through during your time at Duke has made you more thoughtful, more mature, and more empathetic. It will make you better lawyers.”

She reminded them that lawyers are critical to protecting the rule of law and legal institutions required for democracy to flourish: “The world needs lawyers who can simultaneously preserve and protect the institutions that make us strong while creating the changes needed to make our society more just.” d

Above left: 2021 JD class speaker Garmai Gorlorwulu

Above right: 2021 LLM class speaker Taisa Brandao Condino

At right: Dean Kerry Abrams offered graduates congratulations as she handed them their diplomas.

Faculty Focus

New Garrett book illuminates flaws in forensic science

NEARLY 20 YEARS AGO, as a civil rights fellow at the famed law firm Cochran, Neufeld & Scheck (now NSB Civil Rights), Brandon Garrett was struck by the role that flawed forensic evidence played in many of his clients’ wrongful convictions.

That experience is one reason why Garrett, now the L. Neil Williams, Jr. Professor of Law, has made preventing wrongful convictions through research on accuracy and transparency in forensic science a priority for the Wilson Center for Science and Justice, which he directs. While DNA evidence has helped exonerate more than 350 people since it was first used in 1989, more than half were convicted on the basis of fingerprint, bite mark, blood spatter, or other forensic analysis presented at trial, according to a database Garrett maintains.

In his latest book, Autopsy of a Crime Lab: Exposing the Flaws in Forensics (UC Press, 2021), Garrett conducts a critical review of how forensics are used in criminal cases, detailing the many ways that evidence relied upon by courts and juries can be — and frequently is — compromised on its way from the crime scene to the lab to the courtroom. They include: an overreliance on forensic analysis methods that lack scientific validity or have been disproved altogether; the lack of federal regulation of crime labs; and the allowing of trial testimony by “expert” witnesses with unvetted proficiency, undisclosed bias or conflicts of interest, and claims of “100% certainty” in results from methods with troubling error rates not disclosed to jurors. In most criminal cases, this evidence is presented by prosecution witnesses and goes unchallenged by under-resourced defense teams — if the case

The book illuminates the failure of the forensic profession to self-regulate and the toll that widespread problems at crime labs and with forensic disciplines themselves have taken on the integrity of the criminal legal system. Garrett also proposes a comprehensive reform agenda that includes adequate funding, independence from law enforcement, and the establishment of quality-control measures at the nation’s virtually unregulated network of crime labs.

“Stubborn resistance to criticism and hostility to scientific research is the very antithesis of good science,” Garrett writes. “What leading scientists keep telling us is that, apart from the DNA area, no forensic techniques have undergone sufficiently rigorous testing. Error rates have been unknown. ... Simply put, we need to bring good science to forensics.”

Origins of crime labs are in law enforcement, not science

Garrett traces crime labs’ origins in the Prohibition era, which inform the way many still operate today. They didn’t emerge from the scientific community but as evidence-processing divisions within law enforcement, staffed by police officers. Today there are more than 400 publicly funded crime labs in the U.S., the majority of which are still part of law enforcement agencies.

“When you get your funding from police you see yourself as an arm of law enforcement to help solve crimes,” Garrett points out.

The “war on drugs,” a term coined during the Nixon administration, spurred an expansion of crime labs, and today drug-testing accounts for about half the work of a typical lab. The other half involves linking evidence to individuals through firearm and fingerprint analysis, and disciplines like hair and handwriting comparison. DNA analysis, despite its high profile, makes up only 4% to 5% of most labs’ work, yet three-quarters of the $200 million in federal grants available to crime labs is earmarked for it.

There are no federal regulations holding crime labs processing evidence that could send a person to death row to scientific or quality standards. That’s in stark contrast, Garrett notes, to the scrutiny given to clinical laboratories diagnosing minor illnesses, like strep throat, which answer to three separate agencies.

Lack of oversight has led to scores of failures at crime labs across the nation, covering the gamut of forensic disciplines. In Massachusetts, misconduct by two analysts at state drug labs dating back to 2003 has affected close to 100,000 cases, many of which have been vacated. More recently, Washington, D.C.’s Department of Forensic Sciences’ accreditation was suspended over a ballistics error in a murder case and the emergence of broader issues at the lab. And tainting, falsifying reports, improper handling, and other misconduct involving testing at crime labs from New Jersey and Florida to California and Oregon have resulted in the reopening and vacating of tens of thousands of convictions.

“I have documented over 130 crime lab scandals, involving errors or audits of multiple cases, at labs across the country,” Garrett writes. “Hardly a month goes by that I do not find more labs to add to the list.”

Along with the growing tally of costs to government related to investigation, retrial, and remediation, Garrett illustrates the human costs — from fines and incarceration to death — of wrongful convictions based on flawed forensics.

The book opens with the high-profile case of Brandon Mayfield, an Oregon attorney whose fingerprints were erroneously matched by three experienced FBI examiners to evidence from the 2004 Madrid terrorist bombing — despite Mayfield’s never having been to Spain. While the federal government issued a formal apology and $2 million settlement, and the FBI made changes to the way it performs fingerprint comparisons, Mayfield has suffered extended emotional and reputational damage from two-and-a-half years under suspicion for terrorism.

Garrett uses other examples from his earlier book, Convicting the Innocent: Where Criminal Prosecutions Go Wrong (Harvard University Press, 2012), which analyzes the first 250 cases of people exonerated by DNA, to illustrate the many ways forensics can go wrong and the suffering caused to its victims.

Among them are Keith Harward, who spent 33 years in prison partly on the basis of bite mark identification, a widely discredited technique with a high error rate. Harward spoke about his case, the lingering effects of his long incarceration, and his struggle to rebuild his life during an emotional appearance at Duke Law in 2019.

“I’ll never be free. This is something I have to live with the rest of my life,” he said.

The reform agenda: a way forward

Autopsy of a Crime Lab also documents how the scientific community and concerned government leaders have worked to champion forensic reforms. In 2009, the National Academy of Science (NAS) issued a landmark report, Strengthening Forensic Science in the United States: A Path Forward, that cast light on the unscientific methods and foundations of many forensic disciplines and called for major reforms and substantial research to validate forensic evidence and techniques. The report cited Garrett’s article “Judging Innocence” 108 Columbia Law Review 55-142 (2008), an empirical study of the evidence presented at the trials of DNA exonerees.

A 2016 report from the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), focusing on problems in forensic techniques including firearms, fingerprints, and bite mark comparisons, concluded that the use of unscientific forensics should be discontinued until reliability studies were completed.

Scientific criticism of the forensics profession has been met with resistance and outright hostility from its practitioners, but progress has been made since the creation in 2015 of the Center for Statistics and Applications in Forensic Evidence (CSAFE), funded by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, which sponsors data-driven research on forensic evidence at universities, including Duke, and works to build relationships between scientists and practitioners. Garrett is a member of the CSAFE leadership team.

The growing body of scientific research on forensic research and high-profile lab failures are also giving momentum to the reform movement, Garrett reports. After multiple problems at the Houston Police Department Crime Laboratory, the city separated its forensics divisions from law enforcement and created the Houston Forensic Science Center with an independent laboratory, comprehensive quality measures, and a citizen oversight board based on recommendations in the 2009 NAS report. It is now considered a national model. In a May op-ed in Slate, Garrett and the Houston lab’s current president and CEO called for the allocation of more federal funding to the nation’s crime labs, severing them from law enforcement, and instituting quality-control measures including blind proficiency testing as part of a broader policing reform agenda.

In his book Garrett also calls for reforms in the way forensic evidence is presented in court. Jurors have long assumed infallibility of evidence, he says, both from experts long having been allowed to declare “100 percent certainty” and “zero error” in their testimony, and in popular culture, where TV shows have presented misleading depictions of how labs actually work and the reliability of forensic techniques. d — Jeannie Naujeck

Copy This Book!

THREE DUKE LAW FACULTY MEMBERS are

offering their new coursebooks as free digital downloads under Creative Commons licenses that also allow readers to copy, share, modify, and build upon the material in any way they choose.

Both of the new texts, Corporate Crime: An Introduction to the Law and its Enforcement by Bernard M. Fishman Professor Samuel Buell and Intellectual Property: Law & the Information Society by Clinical Professor Jennifer Jenkins and William Neal Reynolds Professor James Boyle, are downloadable as a whole book or by individual chapter. The authors have also made bound paper copies available at low cost through a self-publishing platform.

“Why do we do this? Partly, we do it because we think the price of legal casebooks and materials is obscene,” Boyle and Jenkins write in their introduction to Intellectual Property. “Legal education is already expensive; we want to play a small part in diminishing the costs of the materials involved.”

Textbook evolved out of course pack Buell agrees, and says the new book Corporate Crime grew out of the course pack for his popular class by the same name. A former federal prosecutor who served as a lead prosecutor on the Department of Justice’s Enron Task Force, Buell says he developed his own course pack when he started teaching the class 11 years ago because he couldn’t find a suitable textbook for such a young and fast-evolving field.

“As you go along each year you keep adding and sometimes subtracting and re-organizing your materials and you’re just making your course pack better,” he says.

“Eventually I got to a point where I thought, ‘This is closer to a book now than it is to a course pack.’ So many years of work have been put into it, how much work would be involved in just taking this to the next level?”

Two of his research assistants, Lauren Smith ’21 and Sarah Lowe ’23, helped ready the book for digital publication. Lowe also designed the book’s website, where its contents can be downloaded along with review problems for students and syllabi other instructors can use. The book is copyrighted

Two new faculty-authored textbooks can be downloaded, copied, and shared — for free

under a Creative Commons license that allows users to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and adapt and build upon the material for non-commercial purposes, as long as they credit the authors and license their new creations under the identical terms. A bound two-volume text can be purchased through Amazon for $14 per volume.

Buell says going through a traditional publisher to create a hardbound text likely wouldn’t have yielded him much profit.

“If you’ve got one of the leading books in a required course like Torts, then maybe it becomes a profitable enterprise over the course of a career, but I don’t know that the vast majority of more specialized course books really make a lot of money,” he says. “It’s a field-specific, practice-specific course in that sense.”

Corporate Crime covers liability rules and procedural essentials of corporate and white collar crimes including fraud, insider trading, securities offenses, obstruction crimes, health care crimes, and more. A benefit of the digital textbook platform is the ability to keep adapting it, as Buell has been accustomed to doing, with litigation documents, settlement agreements, indictments, and plea agreements from new cases.

“That’s somewhat difficult to do in the traditional casebook format, where every time you want to do a new eddition there’s a whole process you have to go through,” Buell says. Another benefit, he says, is the ability to share his expertise with practitioners in the field.

“This platform just seemed to fit for a whole bunch of reasons.”

Free-sharing advocates walk their talk on licensing

Jenkins’ and Boyle’s Intellectual Property introduces students to the main forms of U.S. federal intellectual property — trademark, copyright, patent, and trade secrecy — but also to the challenges of an information economy, from competition and free speech, to the impact of transformative technologies such as a global internet or genetic engineering.

In its preface, Jenkins and Boyle write about the significance of authoring a coursebook on IP as the world raced to find a vaccine for COVID-19, bringing public awareness to questions such as how best to incentivize research, the role of the public and private sectors in funding, and achieving a bal-

ance between encouraging innovation through exclusion and spreading its results cheaply to the world.

“These questions are exactly the types of issues intellectual property scholars study,” they write. “The pandemic shows us how vital these questions are and how important it is to get them right.”

The casebook is under the same license as Buell’s textbook and the statutory supplement is under a license that allows unlimited reproduction and modification, including for commercial purposes.

Both Jenkins and Boyle are strong advocates for the sharing of information and the release of creative works for free public use. Jenkins directs the Center for the Study of Public Domain at Duke Law and teaches courses in IP, trademark law, and music copyright. And Boyle, who teaches IP, legal theory, legal argument, and other courses, was a founding board member of Creative Commons, formed in 2001 to offer licenses that enable creators to retain copyright while allowing their works to be shared more freely. They have authored two graphic novels together: Bound By Law? on fair use and the permissions culture in intellectual property and Theft: A History of Music, a 2,000-year history of musical borrowing. Both books also are available as free downloads.

Jenkins and Boyle say that while they fully support creators profiting from their work and understand the labor involved in putting together a textbook, the cost of most law school casebooks is disproportionately high and little of the profit flows to authors. That cost is no longer justifiable with the advent of fast, inexpensive, and accurate print-on-demand services and mechanisms for worldwide, almost cost-free distribution, they say, and traditional casebooks are also inflexible, uncustomizable, and hard to preview and search on the web.

They say that while they hope to help put a small dent in law students’ expenses, they’re also challenging an “unjust and inefficient” textbook publishing model. An author could self-publish an 825 page paperback for $100 less than the average hardbound casebook and earn the same amount in royalties per item, they calculate.

“We hope this will provide a pleasant, restorative, competitive pressure on the commercial publishers to lower their prices and improve their digital access norms,” Boyle says. d — Jeannie Naujeck

While they fully support creators profiting from their work, Professors Boyle and Jenkins say the cost of most law school casebooks is disproportionately high and little profit flows to authors.

Zhang named director of Goodson Law Library

ALEX ZHANG, A VETERAN LAW LIBRARIAN and scholar of legal information and access, joined the Duke Law faculty on July 1 as the Archibald C. and Frances Fulk Rufty Research Professor of Law, associate dean of information services, and director of the J. Michael Goodson Law Library.

Zhang previously had directed the Wilbur C. Hall Law Library of Washington and Lee University School of Law since 2018. She has also held positions in the libraries of Stanford Law School and the University of Michigan Law School.

“A nationally recognized leader in law librarianship and a well-respected scholar, Alex Zhang is an excellent choice to head the Goodson Law Library,” said Kerry Abrams, James B. Duke and Benjamin N. Duke Dean of the School of Law. “I feel confident that Alex will continue Duke Law School’s long tradition of excellence and innovation in library and information services.”

Zhang can trace her career back to law school at the University of Kansas, where she worked as an assistant in the law library while a JD student. She followed her interest to graduate school in information science at Michigan, where she once again worked in the law library as well as in the university’s library system and its Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research, which hosts data and provides services and education for social science researchers at 750 academic institutions and research organizations.

Following graduate school, Zhang spent seven years at Michigan as a foreign, comparative, and international law librarian, and then moved to Stanford, where she was the law library’s head of public services.

At Washington and Lee, she worked closely with faculty, staff, and students as well as the university’s library system. She and her team also collaborated with the school’s academic technology group and the university’s architecture office to keep the school’s library open during the COVID-19 pandemic and serve the need for digital access to materials.

“Professor Zhang has extensive experience in supporting a range of faculty and students’ research needs,” said Clinical Professor Jayne Huckerby, who directs Duke’s International Human Rights Clinic. “She also has an impressive track record in operating at the cutting-edge of developments in law library leadership, from focusing on international and comparative law to integrating new technologies to realizing diversity, equity, and inclusion commitments.”

As a scholar, Zhang has pursued a wide-ranging agenda that includes legal information and technology and foreign, international, and comparative legal research. Most recently, she is the co-editor of Global Animal Law Research: Strategies and Resources (Carolina Academic Press, forthcoming), and contributed chapters on mainland China and Taiwan to editions of Foreign Law Guide. An ongoing research project involves looking at open access to legal information in China.

She has also written on information and library management. In one recent article, “The Gaps Model and Faculty Services: Quality Analysis Through a “New” Lens,” 112 Law Library Journal 95-115 (2020), Zhang and co-author Sherry Xin Chen of the Boston College Law Library used a popular management theory to assess how well law libraries serve a key clientele. “That would be an area that I would like to look into to see if there are any other management or business theories that we can use to see how to make library management and information management more successful,” she said.

Zhang is a past chair of the American Association of Law Libraries’ Foreign, Comparative, and International Law Special Interest Section and its Innovations in Technology Award Jury. She is currently a co-president of the Chinese American Forum on Legal Information and Law Libraries, an international organization striving to promote intellectual exchanges among law librarians and legal information professionals in the U.S. and China. She is also a co-chair of the International Legal Research Interest Group of the American Society of International Law.

“Alex is an exciting new director,” said David T. Zhang Professor of the Practice of Law Lawrence Baxter, who chaired the search committee. “She brings not only a deep commitment to the profession but also a strong concern for the development of her staff, varied experiences at top law libraries like Michigan and Stanford, an exciting role in her previous position, and the perspective of a true international scholar.”

Zhang said she is excited to work with the library’s staff. Her goals include providing individualized research support for faculty, expanding services such as support for empirical research and data visualization, and better understanding the needs of students with respect to physical space and intellectual engagement.

“This is an extremely talented group, they are super collegial, and they have a diverse set of expertise, knowledge, and experience levels that is pretty amazing,” she said of the staff. “I feel very, very lucky to be able to join a team like this.” d — Andrew Park

NEW FACULTY Qiao: Property and urban law scholar focuses on comparative law and China

SHITONG QIAO, AN EXPERT ON PROPERTY AND URBAN LAW with a focus on comparative law and China, joined the Duke Law faculty in August as a professor of law and the Ken Young-Gak Yun and Jinah Park Yun Research Scholar. Qiao started his academic career at the University of Hong Kong in 2014, where he was granted tenure. He spent the spring 2019 semester at Duke as the Ken Young-Gak Yun and Jinah Park Yun Visiting Assistant Professor of Law. Qiao was a Law and Public Affairs fellow at Princeton University in 2020-21 and the inaugural Jerome A. Cohen Visiting Professor of Law at NYU in Spring 2020. He has also taught law and development in Shenzhen (Peking University School of Transnational Law) and Shanghai (NYU Shanghai).

“I am very happy to welcome Shitong Qiao back to Duke Law School,” said Kerry Abrams, James B. Duke and Benjamin N. Duke Dean of the School of Law.

“Professor Qiao is an exciting scholar who has broken new ground with his empirical research. He is also deeply committed to teaching and mentoring students from all different backgrounds and to understanding and supporting the work of his colleagues.”

Qiao discovered an interest in the interaction between law, politics, and society and how law can or cannot affect people’s lives while an undergraduate at Wuhan University. He also developed a taste for fieldwork and ethnographic research as a means to “understand how things work.” After completing a master’s degree at Peking University, Qiao came to the United States and earned an LLM and JSD at Yale Law School.

“What I found particularly exciting is really the nature of law and also the interaction between law, politics, and society and how law can really shape ordinary people’s lives,” he said.

In his first monograph, Chinese Small Property: The Co-Evolution of Law and Social Norms (Cambridge University Press, 2017), Qiao examined the informal market that provides housing for millions of Chinese outside the bounds of the legal system. The book won the inaugural Masahiko Aoki Award for Economics Paper from Tsinghua University and the Research Output Prize from the University of Hong Kong. In dissertation form, it won the Judge Ralph K. Winter Prize, awarded annually to the best student paper written in law and economics at Yale Law School.

His second monograph, The Authoritarian Commons: Neighborhood Democratization in Urban China (Law in Context series, Cambridge, forthcoming), investigates how homeowners’ associations have emerged as a means of local self-governance in major cities, working in concert, and competition, with the state. Like his previous book, it will be based on empirical research, including interviews, questionnaires, and experiments.

Qiao’s scholarship has been cited by scholars, policymakers, and Supreme People’s Court justices in China, and published in numerous law journals, including recent or forthcoming articles in the American Journal of Comparative Law, Law and Social Inquiry, Iowa Law Review, Minnesota Law Review, and Southern California Law Review. His works in progress include various projects to understand the co-evolution of law and social norms in the Chinese and comparative contexts, such as eminent domain, copyright and regulation of internet platforms, constitutionalism, and debt.

“Through his extensive fieldwork, Shitong has already revealed important and under-studied aspects of property rights in China,” said Margaret Lemos,

the Robert G. Seaks LL.B. ’34 Professor of Law. “Shitong is also a terrific colleague — always full of ideas, and genuinely interested in others’ work too. I’m thrilled he has joined us at Duke.”

Added Professor Paul Haagen: “Shitong Qiao is a wonderful addition to the Duke Law faculty. He is a remarkably interesting and creative scholar of property law broadly defined, and he brings to that scholarship the insight of a sophisticated practical lawyer. The breadth and importance of his research is impressive.

“At a time when China, and its relationship to the United States, are ever more important, he brings a nuanced understanding of both Chinese and Western legal systems to our community.”

Qiao said he is excited to return to Duke, where he describes his semester as a visiting professor as the happiest of his academic career. He especially appreciated the “rigorous” intellectual climate and the feedback he received after presenting at a faculty workshop, as well as the friendly and supportive community of scholars he encountered. He noted that he is still in touch with students from his semester at Duke.

“At Duke, the students actually strike a nice balance between being talented, working very, very hard, but also being friendly, being supportive, really caring about others, and having a good sense of community,” he said. “It’s just such a friendly environment.” d — Andrew Park

NEW FACULTY

Aguirre: Business law scholar studies socially conscious firms

EMILIE AGUIRRE, A BUSINESS LAW SCHOLAR who studies the challenges facing companies with social and environmental goals in addition to profit, joined the Duke Law faculty on June 1.

Aguirre was previously the Earl B. Dickerson Fellow at the University of Chicago Law School. A graduate of Harvard Law School, she received a PhD in health policy and management from Harvard Business School in May. Her dissertation, “Pairing Purpose and Profit,” was based on empirical research with 14 companies, and she continues to do field work at two sites, one a tech startup and the other a large multinational corporation.

“I am delighted to welcome Emilie Aguirre to Duke Law School,” said Kerry Abrams, the James B. Duke and Benjamin N. Duke Dean of the School of Law. “She brings a deep interdisciplinary background, facility with diverse research

methodologies, and clear talent in the classroom to our already stellar business law faculty.”

Aguirre, who is teaching a fall-semester seminar and will teach Contracts in the spring, said she is thrilled to have joined a cohort of business law scholars who teach, research, and write across a range of subjects, including corporate finance, securities regulation, banking, tax law, and entrepreneurship. “I’m excited about the fantastic research community and business law faculty at the Law School, and about the interdisciplinary engagement at the Law School and more broadly at the university,” she said. “And I am really looking forward to being in the classroom with 1Ls and upper-level students and integrating into my teaching my experience with companies and realworld examples of the types of contract law conflicts and corporate law, corporate finance, and corporate governance issues that they’ll see.”

Aguirre’s scholarship focuses on companies that pursue both social purpose and profit, ranging in size from small startups to household names. While they have the potential to help solve some of the world’s most serious problems, including climate change, health care delivery, hunger, and inequality, they face managerial and legal barriers to their success.

“These barriers remain little understood in both the management and the business law literatures,” Aguirre said. “My research seeks to understand the challenges and tensions facing companies with objectives beyond profit and what role business law does and should play at each stage of the business lifecycle to facilitate their success.”

In “Beyond Profit,” 54 U.C. Davis Law Review 20772148 (2021), Aguirre examines the difficulty these firms face scaling up under current business law. Using retail platform Etsy as an example, she notes that companies seeking social impact often drop their pursuit of such goals when founders are replaced or their influence is diluted following a public offering, acquisition, or other mechanism of growth. To address this, she proposes a “voluntary commitment mechanism” that would require that companies choosing to be public benefit corporations tie executive compensation to social impact metrics and maintain equal board representation between members elected by shareholders and members elected by social purpose stakeholders, such as relevant nonprofit organizations.

In “The Social Startup,” (forthcoming), Aguirre examines the specific problems for these companies in their earliest stages, entailing “all of the challenges and risks facing regular startups, but while also juggling multiple organizational objectives often in tension.” The article uses in-depth qualitative research gleaned from over a year in which she was embedded with a food technology startup to seek to understand the role that legal or quasi-legal tools designed for

socially conscious business play in their survival and how they interact with managerial practice, corporate governance, and corporate finance.

“Emilie is an engaging interdisciplinary scholar who brings a much-needed innovative viewpoint to corporate scholarship and to the Law School,” said Professor Gina-Gail Fletcher. “Her insights into early-stage companies explore an under-studied area of corporate law that is and will be rising in prominence in coming years as more socially conscious startups try to figure out how to be both profitable and true to their founding social principles. Her research methodology of being embedded in these companies provides her with unparalleled access, allowing her to develop theoretical and practical insights into the operations, mistakes, and successes of these increasingly important entities.”

Added Lisa Kern Griffin, the Candace M. Carroll and Leonard B. Simon Professor of Law who chairs the Law School’s entry-level appointments committee: “Emilie asks deeply interesting questions and tackles them with originality, ambition, and creativity. She brings insights from sociology, organizational theory, and management to her research, and she combines qualitative and quantitative methods, including field work embedded at both startups and established companies. She will be a tremendous addition to the faculty and a terrific resource for our students.”

Aguirre’s interest in the law and its intersection with business and equality began in an unlikely place. For her senior thesis as an undergraduate at Princeton, she conducted an ethnography of taco trucks in post-Katrina New Orleans. When local authorities repeatedly shut down the truck on which she was working, she began calling lawyers for help.

“Eventually, a couple of different legal teams, including the ACLU and the Institute for Justice, took on the case and resolved it in a phone call, and I just realized the power that these lawyers had,” she said. “I knew then that I wanted to go to law school and have that same power.”

In her third year at Harvard Law, Aguirre developed an interest in food law through a clinical project in which she studied access to health care for diabetics in rural eastern North Carolina. Through a post-graduate Fulbright fellowship to the University of Cambridge, she studied U.K., European Union, and U.S. law pertaining to diet-related disease and the food supply. That research ultimately led her to UCLA School of Law, where she began investigating intersections of corporate law and the food industry.

“I started working with a lot of food entrepreneurs and venture capitalists and really understanding more of the food supply chain in Los Angeles and more broadly, and realized that there was this lack of research and understanding on how companies could pursue multiple goals — wanting to do good, wanting to make money with their business, and wanting to be sustainable,” she said. “They had all these different goals and there weren’t frameworks for helping them do that. I started with the food industry, but I quickly realized these problems extended

Aguirre’s insights into early-stage companies “explore an under-studied area of corporate law that is and will be rising in prominence in coming years as more socially conscious startups try to figure out how to be both profitable and true to their founding social principles.”

— Professor Gina-Gail Fletcher

across industries and applied to other kinds of businesses as well.”

Aguirre, who is MexicanAmerican, is a participant in Duke’s Culp Colloquium and Emerging Scholars programs, which seek to improve the diversity and inclusiveness of the legal academy by assisting minority candidates in the job market. She credits former Duke Law Professor Guy-Uriel Charles and other mentors with encouraging her to pursue her interest in socially conscious companies through a career in the legal academy. She said she never imagined that her work on a taco truck would lead her to become a law professor.

“Emilie is an innovative and insightful scholar who works on questions that matter,” said Deborah DeMott, the David F. Cavers Professor of Law. “She also brings infectious enthusiasm to her work and her interactions with others. We’re fortunate that she’s come to Duke.” d — Andrew Park

Former Deputy Treasury Secretary Raskin awarded distinguished professorship

SARAH BLOOM RASKIN, the former deputy secretary of the U.S. Department of Treasury and a visiting professor since 2020, has been named the Colin W. Brown Distinguished Professor of the Practice of Law and will become faculty director of the Law School’s Global Financial Markets Center in January.

An expert in financial regulation and monetary policy, Raskin has researched and taught at the Law School since 2017, when she joined Duke University’s Rubenstein Fellows Academy. She is also a senior fellow in the Duke Center on Risk. At Duke Law, Raskin teaches Business Associations and two upper-level seminars, Law and Financial Anxiety and Climate Change and Financial Markets.

“In addition to being a leading voice on the future of our financial system, Sarah Bloom Raskin is a dedicated teacher who cares deeply about her students,” said Kerry Abrams, James B. Duke and Benjamin N. Duke Dean of the School of Law. “Having someone with her deep experience in government, expertise on financial policy and regulation, and national and international stature is an extraordinary opportunity for them and for Duke Law School.”

From 2014 to 2017, Raskin was the second-in-command at the Treasury Department, where she was known for her pursuit of innovative solutions to enhance Americans’ shared prosperity, the resilience of the country’s critical financial infrastructure, and the defense of consumer safeguards in the financial marketplace. She was a champion of cybersecurity in the financial sector both nationally and internationally, helping to elevate this issue with corporate executives and boards. Her efforts, including leading the development of the G-7 Fundamental Elements of Cybersecurity for the Financial Sector, contributed to a more secure and resilient financial sector in the face of increasingly frequent and sophisticated threats.

Earlier, Raskin was a governor of the Federal Reserve Board and a member of the Federal Open Market Committee, where she helped conduct the nation’s monetary policy and promote financial stability. She also served as commissioner of financial regulation for the State of Maryland from 2007 to 2010. She and her agency were responsible for regulating Maryland’s financial institutions during the height of the Great Recession.

As a Rubenstein Fellow, Raskin collaborated with faculty across the university to improve understanding of markets and regulation. She led an agenda focused on shaping a new relationship between regulation and resilience in financial markets and deepening understanding of the management of systemic risks from diverse sources such as financial instruments, cyber breaches, and climate events. She also mentored and advised undergraduate and graduate students on careers in the public sector, guest-lectured in courses, participated in public events, and led collaborative research projects.

She will take over directorship of the Global Financial Markets Center, which promotes the interdisciplinary study and discussion of global financial markets and financial regulation, from Lawrence Baxter, the David T. Zhang Professor of the Practice of Law. Baxter revitalized the center (formerly the Global Capital Markets Center) when he rejoined the faculty in 2009. Raskin has had a close affiliation with the center since arriving at Duke.

Raskin has been a part of two multidisciplinary research projects with center and Law School faculty through the university’s Bass Connections program and during her Rubenstein Fellowship also worked closely with the Rethinking Regulation program at Duke’s Kenan Institute for Ethics. A graduate of Harvard Law School, she currently is a member, with Baxter and Professor GinaGail Fletcher, of the Regenerative Crisis Response Committee, a group of leading experts in law, economics, and public policy focused on the use of fiscal, monetary, and regulatory policies in a climate-transitioned economy. d — Andrew Park

Faculty Notes

Arti Rai, the Elvin R. Latty Professor of Law and faculty co-director of the Center for Innovation Policy, was appointed, in April, to serve as a senior advisor in the Office of General Counsel in the U.S. Department of Commerce. In this role, Rai advises on a range of issues involving innovation and technological competitiveness. The Department of Commerce comprises bureaus that include the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), the National Institute of Standards and Technologies, and the International Trade Administration.

Rai is an internationally recognized expert in intellectual property law, innovation policy, administrative law, and health law. From 2009 to 2010, she headed the Office of Policy and International Affairs at the USPTO. In that capacity, she led policy analysis of the patent reform legislation that ultimately became the America Invents Act and worked to establish the USPTO’s Office of the Chief Economist.

Rai recently was the lead investigator on a grant from the Laura and John Arnold Foundation to examine whether the administrative system for patent review established by the America Invents Act is impacting patent terms for small-molecule drugs and large-molecule biologics and thereby affecting the availability of less expensive generic or biosimilar equivalents. It was the first rigorous empirical investigation of the role that the administrative review system, known as the Patent Trial and Appeal Board, is playing relative to federal district courts, previously the sole venue for patent challenges. Her recent scholarship includes “Accountability, Secrecy, and Innovation in AI-Enabled Clinical Decision Software,” 7 Journal of Law and the Biosciences (2020) (with others) and “Clearing Opacity Through Machine Learning,” 106 Iowa Law Review 775-812 (2021) (with W. Nicholson Price II).

Rai regularly testifies before Congress and relevant administrative bodies on innovation-related law and policy issues and regularly advises federal and state agencies on such issues. She is a member of multiple distinguished councils, including the National Academies’ Forum on Drug Discovery, Development, and Translation; the Polaris Advisory Council to the Government Accountability Office; and the American Law Institute. She has also served as a member of the National Advisory Council for Human Genome Research, as a public member of the Administrative Conference of the United States, and on numerous National Academies committees. d

Christopher Schroeder, the Charles S. Murphy Professor Emeritus of Law and professor emeritus of public policy, has been confirmed by the U.S. Senate to be assistant attorney general for the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) in the U.S. Department of Justice, by a 56-41 vote. President Joe Biden announced his nomination in April. Schroeder has led the office as acting assistant attorney general since Jan. 20.

The OLC provides legal advice to the president and all executive branch agencies, drafting legal opinions of the attorney general and providing its own written opinions and other advice in response to requests from the counsel to the president, the various agencies of the executive branch, and other components of the Department of Justice. The OLC is also responsible for reviewing and commenting on the constitutionality of pending legislation and for approving the form and legality of executive orders and substantive proclamations issued by the president.

Schroeder, who led the Department of Justice agency review team for the Biden-Harris transition, previously worked in the OLC during the Clinton administration, serving as deputy assistant attorney general from 1993 to 1996 and acting assistant attorney general in 1996. He served as assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Policy during the Obama administration, from 2010 to 2013. His earlier government service included posts as chief counsel to the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary (chaired by then-Sen. Biden) and in the U.S. Department of Justice.

A member of the Duke Law School faculty since 1979, Schroeder taught Property as well as courses on Congress, federal policymaking, environmental law, and cybersecurity, among others, before retiring from teaching in 2020. In 1998, he established the Program in Public Law 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. His scholarship focuses on constitutional law, Congress, and the scope of executive power, as well as environmental law. His books include Keeping Faith with the Constitution (Oxford University Press, 2010), which he wrote with Pamela Karlan and Goodwin Liu, and Presidential Power Stories (Foundation Press, 2009), a collection he edited with Curtis Bradley. An elected member of the American Law Institute, he is also co-author of a leading environmental law casebook, Environmental Regulation: Law, Science and Policy (8th Edition, 2018), with Robert Percival, Alan Miller and James Leape. d

Three members of the Duke Law faculty — Professors Walter Dellinger, Margaret H. Lemos, and David F. Levi — are serving on the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States, by appointment of President Joseph R. Biden, Jr. Professors Neil Siegel and Marin Levy both testified before the commission in July.

In early April, the president issued an executive order forming the commission, comprised of a bipartisan group of experts on the Court and the Court reform debate including scholars, former jurists, practitioners, and advocates. Charged with providing an analysis of the principal arguments in the contemporary public debate for and against Supreme Court reform, the commission held public meetings to gather diverse perspectives on a range of matters, such as the genesis of the reform debate, the Court’s role in the constitutional system, terms and turnover of justices, the membership and size of the Court, and the Court’s case selection, rules, and practices.

Dellinger is the Douglas B. Maggs Professor Emeritus of Law and a partner at O’Melveny & Myers. He served in the White House as assistant attorney general and head of the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) from 1993 to 1996 and was acting solicitor general for the 1996-97 term of the U.S. Supreme Court. He has argued 25 cases before the Court and has testified more than 30 times before committees of Congress.

Lemos is the Robert G. Seaks LL.B. ’34 Professor of Law, faculty co-advisor for the Bolch Judicial Institute and former associate dean for Faculty and Research. She is a scholar of constitutional law, legal institutions, and procedure. Her current research focuses on the institutions of law interpretation and enforcement, including both public and private lawyers, and their effects on substantive rights. Lemos is also a co-author of a new multidisciplinary coursebook on judicial decision making.

Levi, the Levi Family Professor of Law and Judicial Studies and director of the Bolch Judicial Institute, was previously the James B. Duke and Benjamin N. Duke Dean of Duke Law School. Immediately prior to his appointment at Duke in 2007, Levi was the Chief United States District Judge for the Eastern District of California with chambers in

Sacramento and earlier served the United States attorney for the Eastern District of California. He has served as member and chair of two U.S. Judicial Conference committees — the Advisory Committee on the Civil Rules and the Standing Committee on the Rules of Practice and Procedure. He is a past chair of the American Bar Association’s Standing Committee on the American Judicial System, and currently is president of the American Law Institute.

Levy and Siegel, the David W. Ichel Professor of Law and Professor of Political Science and director of Duke Law’s D.C. Institute on Law and Policy, testified at a meeting of the commission conducted virtually on July 20, on a panel focused on the Court’s composition.

An expert in judicial administration and federal courts who directs the Program in Public Law, Levy provided information in her written testimony about recent changes and attempts to change the size of state supreme courts, the subject of her recent paper “Packing and Unpacking State Courts,” (61 William & Mary Law Review 1121-1158 (2020.) She earlier testified before the House Judiciary Committee Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property, during a hearing on expanding the federal appellate judiciary. (Read more, page 28.)

Siegel’s written testimony reviewed the constitutionality and justifications of court packing, as well as the negative effects on the perceived legitimacy of the Court that court packing might provoke. He noted that two other reform proposals — term limits for Justices and expanding and diversifying the federal courts of appeals — “would enhance both the legitimacy and the accountability of the federal court system as a whole.”

Siegel’s scholarship addresses a variety of areas of constitutional law and, in doing so, considers ways in which a methodologically pluralist approach can accommodate changes in society and the needs of American governance while remaining disciplined and bound by the rule of law. He has served as special counsel or advisor to both U.S. Senators Christopher Coons and Joseph R. Biden during the U.S. Supreme Court confirmation hearings of five sitting justices. d

Dellinger

Lemos

Levi

Professor Marin K. Levy testified virtually before the House Judiciary Committee Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property, and the Internet on Feb. 24 during a hearing on expanding the federal appellate judiciary.

“Based upon my research, I believe that Congress should authorize new judgeships for the courts of appeals to keep pace with higher caseloads — as it has done, traditionally with bipartisan support, nearly 30 times before,” Levy said during the hearing titled “The Need for New Lower Court Judgeships, 30 Years in the Making.”

Levy’s work has been published or is forthcoming in the Yale Law Journal, University of Chicago Law Review, University of Pennsylvania Law Review, Cornell Law Review, and California Law Review, among other scholarly journals, and has been discussed in the New York Times, Washington Post, Atlantic, and other public outlets. She is a co-author of Federal Standards of Review: Appellate Court Review of District Court Decisions and Agency Actions (2nd ed.) with Judge Harry T. Edwards and Linda A. Elliott. d

Professor Gina-Gail

on the capital markets

Banking, Housing, and Urban

Fletcher, whose research focuses on financial regulation, market manipulation, and corporate law, appeared during a hearing titled “Who Wins on Wall Street? GameStop, Robinhood, and the State of Retail Investing.”

“Today, it is easier, cheaper, and faster to trade more complex and leveraged financial products than ever before,” Fletcher said. “This new market reality requires that we rethink the risks that accompany these developments and, in so doing, consider what types of markets we want to create and encourage from a policy perspective.”

Fletcher joined the Duke Law faculty in July 2020 from the Indiana University Maurer School of Law where she was an associate professor of law. Her current research focuses on the interplay of public regulation and private ordering in enhancing market stability and integrity, and her recent scholarship has been published or is forthcoming in the New York University Law Review, the Duke Law Journal, and the Iowa Law Review

Prior to entering academia, Fletcher was an associate at Gibson Dunn & Crutcher in Washington, D.C., where she specialized in securities regulation, mergers and acquisitions, banking, and corporate governance. d

Civil War and Reconstruction Book Award for the most original book on the coming of the Civil War, the Civil War years or the Era of Reconstruction; the Darlene Clark Hine Award for best book on African American women’s and gender history and the Mary Nickliss Prize for “most original” book in U.S. women’s and gender history. It also received the 2021 the John Nau Prize for best book on the American Civil War era and the Society of Civil War Historians’ Tom Watson Brown Book Award.

from the Organization of American Historians:

The Women’s Fight explores the role of women during the Civil War and shows the complicated battles that women — Black and white, enslaved and free — took on to define the meaning of freedom, home, and nation in the North and South.

In recognition of her career impact, Duke University named Glymph the Peabody Family Distinguished Professor of History, effective July 1. She holds a secondary appointment at Duke Law. d

Fletcher testified about the rise of “meme stocks” and their impact

during a March 9th hearing of the U.S. Senate Committee on

Affairs.

Professor Thavolia Glymph’s 2020 book, The Women’s Fight: The Civil War’s Battle for Home, Freedom, and Nation, (UNC Press), has received multiple awards, including three

the

James Coleman, Jr., the John S. Bradway Professor of the Practice of Law, director of the Center for Criminal Justice and Professional Responsibility, and director of the Wrongful Convictions Clinic, was honored by the North Carolina Bar Association (NCBA) as a “Legal Legend of Color” at an awards celebration held June 18. The award honors “attorneys and other legal professionals of color whose legacies represent ceilings broken for all attorneys who follow in their footsteps and whose impacts on the legal profession are undeniable,” the NCBA said in a statement.

The NCBA highlighted Coleman’s entire career, which has included government service and private practice. He served as an assistant general counsel for the Legal Services Corporation, chief counsel for the U.S. House of Representatives’ Committee on Standards of Official Conduct, and deputy general counsel for the U.S. Department of Education. Immediately prior to joining the Duke Law faculty in 1996, he was a partner at Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering in Washington, D.C., where he specialized in federal court and administrative litigation. He also represented criminal defendants in capital collateral proceedings and was an active participant in his firm’s pro bono program. He chaired the American Bar Association’s Section of Individual Rights and Responsibilities and the ABA Death Penalty Moratorium Implementation Project, and has served on various state commissions focused on wrongful convictions, the death penalty, and criminal justice generally.

In addition to teaching Criminal Law and supervising students in the Wrongful Convictions Clinic, Coleman co-founded the Law School’s Appellate Litigation Clinic. His scholarship, largely conducted through the Center for Criminal Justice and Professional Responsibility, centers on the legal, political, and scientific causes of wrongful convictions and how they can be prevented. His administrative work for Duke University has included chairing the Lacrosse Ad Hoc Review Committee and the Duke Athletic Council. d

Thomas Maher received awards from North Carolina Advocates for Justice (NCAJ) in June. NCAJ is a nonpartisan association of legal professionals dedicated to empowering a strong community of trial lawyers by protecting people, preventing injustice, and promoting fairness.

Clinical Professor Jamie Lau ’09 and

Lau, the supervising attorney in the Wrongful Convictions Clinic, faculty advisor to the Innocence Project, and deputy director of the Center for Criminal Justice and Professional Responsibility, shared NCAJ’s Kellie Crabtree Award with clinic client Ronnie Long. The award is given to an attorney and their client in cases when the client’s story and the attorney’s representation has made a real difference in protecting people’s rights. Lau served as lead attorney in the clinic’s successful representation of Long, who was imprisoned for 44 years following a 1976 rape trial tainted by police misconduct and the suppression of exculpatory evidence. Released on Aug. 27, 2020, Long was granted a complete pardon of innocence by Gov. Roy Cooper in December.

Maher received the NCAJ’s Thurgood Marshall Award, “established to recognize extraordinary and selfless service to the people of North Carolina,” according to the organization’s website.

Maher, who teaches Trial Practice and Criminal Trial Practice, is a criminal litigation attorney with the Law Offices of Amos Tyndall and previously served as the inaugural executive director of the Wilson Center for Science and

Justice at Duke Law. For 11 years he was executive director of North Carolina’s Indigent Defense Services, the state agency that oversees the provision of indigent representation in North Carolina, and earlier was executive director of the Center for Death Penalty Litigation, which represents clients on death row, trains lawyers involved in post-conviction litigation, and provides assistance and training for lawyers involved in capital trials.

Senior Lecturing Fellow

Lau Maher

Clinical Professor Crystal Grant has been named director of the Children’s Law Clinic, which provides legal advice, advocacy, and representation to low-income children and families on matters relating to special education, school discipline, and children’s disability benefits. She had served as interim director since July 2020.

Before joining the faculty as the clinic’s supervising attorney in 2018, Grant was a clinical fellow in the Pediatric Advocacy Clinic at the University of Michigan Law School. She earlier was special education attorney for Disability Rights Michigan and served as an adjunct professor at Spring Arbor University. She holds an MSW from the University of Michigan and received her JD from Michigan State University College of Law.

Grant has used her dual perspective as an attorney and social worker to forge new community partnerships for the clinic, which is now an official field placement site for students from the University of North Carolina School of Social Work who consult and collaborate on cases with law students during yearlong internships. This facilitates a holistic approach to client service, with students now also assisting families with non-legal needs such as applying for public benefits, requesting a special-education evaluation, and accessing community resources for homelessness and food insecurity.

A member of the Clinical Legal Education Association’s board of directors, Grant is active in the development and dissemination of best practices in law school clinical education nationwide. She has taken leadership roles in planning continuing education sessions for Duke’s clinical faculty and serves on the Teaching and Learning Committee. Her recent scholarship includes “COVID-19’s Impact on Students With Disabilities in UnderResourced School Districts,” 48 Fordham Urban Law Journal 127 (2021). d

Clinical Professor Ryke Longest became director of clinical programs on July 1, succeeding Clinical Professor Andrew Foster, who served in the role for 15 years and continues to direct the Community Enterprise Clinic. Longest, who co-directs the Environmental Law and Policy Clinic, will serve a three-year term under a new model intended to facilitate greater delegation of leadership responsibilities and diversity of approach over time as different clinical faculty members take on the position.

A graduate of the University of North Carolina School of Law, Longest joined Duke Law as a senior lecturing fellow and inaugural clinic director in 2007. A joint project of the Law School and Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment, the clinic enrolls students from both schools who are supervised by Longest and clinic Co-director and Clinical Professor Michelle Nowlin JD/MA ’92 on matters involving environmental justice, climate change, water quality, natural resources conservation, endangered species protection, sustainable agriculture, public trust resources, and environmental health. Longest has a secondary appointment as clinical professor of environmental sciences and policy at the Nicholas School.

Prior to joining the Duke faculty, Longest worked for 14 years at the North Carolina Department of Justice, where he negotiated and led the state’s implementation of two multimillion-dollar settlement agreements that reduced the adverse impacts from swine farming. The impact of waste management remains a signature issue for Longest and the clinic. An article Longest co-authored with Lecturing Fellow Lee Miller, “Reconciling Environmental Justice with Climate Change Mitigation: A Case Study of NC Swine CAFOs,” was selected by the Environmental Law and Policy Annual Review as one of 2020’s best academic environmental law articles. d

Nita A. Farahany JD/MA ’04, PhD ’06, the Robinson O. Everett Professor of Law and professor of philosophy, received the 2021 Distinguished Teaching Award during the annual Duke Outstanding and Noteworthy (D.O.N.E.) Awards sponsored by the Duke Bar Association on April 13.

Farahany, the founding director of Duke Science & Society, chair of the Duke MA in bioethics and science policy, and principal investigator of SLAP Lab, teaches first-year Criminal Law and the Amicus Lab, as well as other courses and seminars.

Sasha Kahn ’23, the academics chair for the DBA, read student nominators’ praise for Farahany during the virtual ceremony: “‘What stands out to me every day is her extraordinary vulnerability and her deep commit ment to making all of her students feel like human beings. She opens every class asking about our lives, cel ebrating achievements, engagements, and cute pets. She shares details of her life with us to bring a smile to our faces and help us not feel so alone.’”

Farahany called teaching “a true joy and a privilege that I have been so grateful for every day. I consider this award to be, honestly, the most humbling honor of my professional career.” d

Donald L. Horowitz, the James B. Duke Professor Emeritus of Law and Political Science, has published Constitutional Processes and Democratic Commitment (Yale University Press, 2021), his ninth book. Given that an important objective in the process of creating a new constitution is to enhance prospects for democracy, Horowitz argues that constitutional processes ought to be geared to securing commitment to democracy by those who participate in them. Using evidence from numerous constitutional processes, he makes a strong case for a process intended to increase the likelihood of a democratic outcome. Horowitz, who has advised in a number of countries on the matter of constitutional design for divided societies, also assesses tradeoffs among various process attributes and identifies some that might impede democratic outcomes.

Horowitz’s previous books are The Courts and Social Policy (1977), which won the Louis Brownlow Award of the National Academy of Public Administration; The Jurocracy (1977), a book about government lawyers; Coup Theories and Officers’ Motives: Sri Lanka in Comparative Perspective (1980); Ethnic Groups in Conflict (1985, 2000); A Democratic South Africa? Constitutional Engineering in a Divided Society (1991), which won the Ralph Bunche Prize of the American Political Science Association; The Deadly Ethnic Riot (2001); and Constitutional Change and Democracy in Indonesia, published in 2013 by Cambridge University Press and issued in a Bahasa Indonesia translation in 2014. d

Professor Emeritus has published a memoir, Sensing Injustice: A Lawyer’s Life in the Battle for Change. In his first U.S. Supreme Court case — at the age of 28 — he won a unanimous victory that freed thousands of Vietnam War resisters from prison. He led the legal team that secured a judgment against the regime of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet for the 1976 murders of an opponent, Orlando Letelier, and another in a Washington, D.C., car bombing, and then worked with the lawyers who prosecuted Pinochet for torture and genocide. Tigar has been counsel to Angela Davis, Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin (H. Rap Brown), the Chicago Eight, and leaders of the Black Panther Party, to name only a few of his clients.

Tigar has worked for over 50 years with movements for social change as a human rights lawyer, law professor, and writer. He has taught at law schools in the United States, France, South Africa, and Japan, and is emeritus professor at American University Washington College of Law as well as at Duke. He has authored or coauthored 14 books, three plays, and scores of articles and essays. His book, Law and the Rise of Capitalism, first published by Monthly Review Press, has been translated into Spanish, Portuguese, Greek, Turkish, and Chinese d

Theresa Newman ’88, Clinical Professor and Wrongful Convictions Clinic Co-director, retires

THERESA NEWMAN was drawn to study law by her interest in its stories. “As a rule follower I was always interested in rule breakers and what it means to transgress,” says Newman, the Charles S. Rhyne Clinical Professor of Law, who retired in June after 31 years on the Duke Law faculty. “I didn’t think much about the practice of law, but thought it would be fascinating to study.”

For almost two decades, Newman focused her professional energy on stories of innocence and injustice that have revealed errors, bias, and even transgressors within the justice system itself.

Along with faculty colleagues and student attorneys in the Wrongful Convictions Clinic, which she co-directed, and the Innocence Project, for which she served as faculty advisor, she painstakingly investigated dozens of plausible claims of innocence made by North Carolina inmates convicted of felonies and sought exoneration for almost 20 through post-conviction litigation in state and federal courts. In addition to presenting her clients’ stories in meticulously crafted court filings, oral arguments, and negotiations that reflect her expertise in legal writing, superb judgment, and relentless commitment to the pursuit of justice, she demonstrated a level of respect and compassion towards her clients that earned their trust and affection and left a lasting impression on her students.

Dontae Sharpe recalls telling Newman that he didn’t trust anybody when she first came to see him in 2010 at the Harnett Correctional Institution, where he was incarcerated after being convicted of a 1994 murder in Greenville, N.C., for which he steadfastly maintained his innocence. But as they talked “she kind of won me

over,” he says, and the dedication and honesty she displayed as lead counsel supervising students in a thorough reinvestigation of his case “broke down my walls.” Nine years later, Sharpe gained his freedom when a judge in Greenville found that newly discovered evidence presented by the clinic on his behalf destroyed the state’s entire theory of the case against him.

“Theresa was straight up with me every time she came to see me, and she really showed me that her heart was in it,” says Sharpe, one of 10 clients to win exoneration since Newman founded the clinic in 2008 with co-director James Coleman, Jr., the John S. Bradway Professor of the Practice of Law. “I saw her passion and her dedication to undo wrongful convictions — not just in my case, but also in her other cases. She still was trying to help guys who already were released. And that showed me that she was in it for the long haul.”

Newman also has left a lasting impression on her students. While investigating Sharpe’s case in the clinic under Newman’s supervision, Ellie Marranzini ’13 acquired approaches to building connections with clients and witnesses she says are invaluable to her current practice as an assistant federal public defender in the District of Puerto Rico. Newman, Marranzini adds, is the best mentor she’s ever had: “My experience working with her was extremely formative in terms of helping me decide what I wanted to do with my legal career and what kind of lawyer I wanted to be. She’s dedicated, she’s hardworking, she’s poised, she’s eloquent, she’s articulate and respectful. She has a lot of qualities that I was able to observe and admire and try to emulate in my own practice.”

Newman’s remarkable career at Duke also included editing journals, directing the legal writing program, and serving as associate dean of academic affairs and associate director of the Center for Criminal Justice and Professional Responsibility. She was a founding board member of the international Innocence Network, serving as its inaugural co-president and subsequently as president, and helping set standards and ethical guidelines for innocence clinics and organizations across the country. She has twice been honored by the Law School’s Law Alumni Association, receiving the Young Alumni Award in 2003 and sharing the A. Kenneth Pye Award for Excellence in Education with Coleman in 2018. And at the request of Kerry Abrams, the James B. Duke and Benjamin N. Duke Dean and professor of law, she was the distinguished speaker at the Law School’s 2021 convocation ceremony. (Read more, page 14.)

at a local community college and then graduating with a degree in English and secondary education from the State University of New York at New Paltz. She taught high school English and multiple electives for three years in Rhinebeck, N.Y., before moving to east Tennessee, where her then-husband was working at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Newman kept busy, studying broadcast journalism in a graduate program at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, working in information sciences at the National Laboratory, and raising her two small children. After the family relocated to Durham in 1983, Newman found work in Research Triangle Park, first on a study of Vietnam veterans’ experiences with the defoliant Agent Orange and then at the educational testing company, Measurement Incorporated. The spouse of one of her colleagues there, who was studying law at Duke, piqued her interest in doing the same.

She admits to being nervous about starting her legal studies at Duke, finding herself the oldest student and only mother in the JD class — and worried that she would not be able to compete with Ivy League-educated classmates. Her concerns dissipated at an orientation picnic she attended with her two preschoolers, where Professor Horace “Robbie” Robertson — then senior associate dean — and his wife gave the family a hearty welcome. “They revealed to me the warmth of the place, the openness of Duke,” Newman says. “I realized that I actually belong here.”

Sharpe, exoneree

From day one, though, Newman’s family responsibilities shaped her experience in law school. “I approached law school as a job,” she says, noting that she completed all class preparation, assignments, and, in her upper years, duties as a faculty research assistant and Duke Law Journal editor, during the hours that her son and daughter were at school and in child care. “I didn’t miss a class in three years,” she says. “I wasn’t able to go to parties and I missed the after-hours social life of the Law School — I was making dinner and bathing kids. But I loved law school. And I was at the right school.”

“Theresa Newman is simply treasured by faculty, alumni, students, and clients alike, as a colleague, teacher, mentor and advocate,” says Abrams. “Her career offers a wonderful example of the different paths a legal education can open and the power lawyers have to improve the justice system.”

An unconventional student crafts a multifaceted career Newman, the middle child of five who grew up in Suffolk County on Long Island, was the first of her family to attend college, starting

After graduating Order of the Coif, Newman clerked for Judge James Dickson Phillips, Jr., of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit and then entered litigation practice at Womble in Raleigh, where she had worked during her 1L and 2L summers. But when juggling billable-hour demands, a long commute, and her children’s ever-expanding activities and social lives proved unsustainable, she applied, successfully, for a position as general editor of Law & Contemporary Problems and the Alaska Law Review. On her return to Duke Law, she soon found herself becoming friends and collaborators with faculty scholars like John Weistart and Robert Mosteller who had been her professors just a few years earlier.

Newman loved working with students and eventually became advisor to all the student-run journals. She went on to teach Legal Ethics and in 1994 became the inaugural director of legal writing, helping transition the discipline from one taught by small-section professors of the first-year core curriculum to a standardized course taught by specialists.

“Theresa was straight up with me every time she came to see me, and she really showed me that her heart was in it.”

—Dontae

“Theresa was a fabulous director and mentor, particularly on teaching,” says retired Clinical Professor Diane Dimond, who joined Newman in building a legal analysis, research, and writing (LARW) program that is known for helping Duke Law students excel in their first-year summer jobs and beyond. “Her advice was invaluable. And she is a fabulous editor.”

Newman’s ability to present the procedural and legal history of cases in Motions for Appropriate Relief and other filings in powerful and persuasive ways has been critical to every Wrongful Convictions Clinic case, says Coleman. “Our filings have always had her significant imprint. Even in cases where Theresa has not been the lead counsel, she has handled a lot of the editing.”

“Theresa is very good at finding just the right words to convey a position in a very respectful and appropriately deferential manner,” adds Clinical Professor Jamie Lau ’09, who joined the clinic in 2012 as supervising attorney. “Sometimes when I am unable to find the right words for a point that needs to be conveyed, I reach out to her and ask to work on ‘Newmanizing’ it.”

In 1999 Newman became co-associate dean for academic affairs under then-Dean Pamela Gann ’73, filling the post half-time while still teaching LARW. She moved into the position full-time when A. Kenneth Pye Professor Emerita of Law Katharine Bartlett became dean in 2000 and she held it until 2008, handling such matters as curriculum development, classroom assignments and teaching schedules, and managing the extended faculty with her signature calm and good humor.

“When I was dean, there is no one I depended upon more than Theresa,” says Bartlett. “Her workload capacity was enormous, and the grace and good judgment she brought to every matter she handled was unparalleled.”

Captured by stories of innocence and injustice

Newman and Coleman jumped into wrongful convictions work as a sideline in the early 2000s, when two students sought faculty sponsorship to launch a chapter of the Innocence Project. Again, it was the stories that drew her in, Newman says.

“It returned to the very thing that drew me to law school, which is the stories of the law. Misbehavior interests me and storytelling interests me. People interest me. And there is the intersection of all those interests in these human tragedies, along with the great power lawyers have to help these individuals, to disentangle them from the awful power of the law.”

As faculty advisors, Newman and Coleman supervised Innocence Project members in initial reviews of inmates’ claims of factual innocence to assess their plausibility and helped launch the nonprofit North Carolina Center on Actual Innocence to serve as a clearinghouse for inmates’ claims to avoid duplicative efforts among chapters at law schools across the state. They also began co-teaching a seminar on the different factors that can lead to wrongful convictions, such as false confessions, faulty eyewitness testimony and forensics, and fabrications by “jailhouse snitches,” in which they engaged their students in work on cases where claims of innocence were highly plausible (including some that later became part of the Wrongful Convictions Clinic docket).

Newman was also instrumental in building the Innocence Network, an affiliation of the ever-growing number of organizations providing pro bono legal and investigative services to individuals seeking to overturn convictions and, later, assistance to exonerees.

“Theresa has extraordinary organizational capabilities and she’s a hugely generous person with her time and her intellect, which I think was necessary to allow this group of wonderful — and forceful

Professor Theresa Newman, fourth from left, with Wrongful Convictions Clinic client LaMonte Armstrong and students and alumni who worked on his case in court following his exoneration in June 2012. From left: Jamie Rietema Horowitz ’09, Sachin Bansal ’08, co-counsel David Pishko ’77, Newman, Armstrong, Matthew McGee ’10, John Hibbard ’13, Natasha Alladina ’11, Professor James Coleman, and Michael Horowitz ’09.

— advocates and litigators to work together so well,” says Maddy deLone, a fellow Innocence Network board member and longtime executive director of the Innocence Project. Newman, deLone adds, also helped other law schools understand the educational value and worth of innocence programs and clinics to their educational missions and helped establish legal and ethical best practices and programs and procedures for assessing compliance.

A superb teacher, supervisor, and mentor

Clinical teaching and innocence practice became Newman’s fulltime focus when her term as associate dean ended in 2008, and she and Coleman launched the clinic with seed funding from Duke University. A key pedagogical goal for Newman was training clinic students “to be productive consumers of criminal justice cases and articles, to be good jurors, and to be skeptical assessors of facts.”

As successive teams of clinic students work on cases that often unfold over many years, they undertake fresh — and granular — assessments of testimony offered by eyewitnesses, investigators, and experts at trial, and track down overlooked witnesses and evidence, often developing and testing new theories supporting a client’s innocence.

Michael Horowitz ’09 — a member of the “A-Team,” as LaMonte Armstrong called the clinic students and alumni who worked over multiple semesters to exonerate him of a 1988 murder — says Newman had a knack for working with students. Now managing counsel for RAI Services Company in Winston-Salem, Horowitz oversees a team of lawyers that includes novices, and says the way Newman helped students build skills for serving clients in a manner imbued with autonomy and trust was itself instructive. “She had the attitude that you were bringing new eyes to the case,” he says. “She embraced the possibility that you might see things that even she, as an expert, might not. She got the best out of you in a way that was never distant yet never micromanagerial.”

Armstrong was exonerated in 2012 after clinic students persuaded a prosecutor and detective to undertake a thorough review of the case and police uncovered new evidence during a retest of physical evidence from the crime scene. He subsequently received a pardon of innocence and remained a steadfast clinic supporter until his death in 2019, regularly sharing his story with first-year students during their LEAD Week orientation.

“When LaMonte Armstrong was freed, the judge held up the two big notebooks with student work in it and said to him, ‘You should be so proud of the students who worked on your case,’” Newman recalls.

“We could not do this work without students,” she says. “Many of our cases follow the work of sole practitioners or people who work in small firms, who for a fee tried to handle these cases and in many that’s impossible.”

Emphasizing

clients’ humanity, integrity

Coleman, who joined the faculty in 1996, says his already strong professional bond with Newman flourished when they became clinic co-directors.

“Theresa and I have been on the same page on a lot of what we’ve done, almost to the point that we can complete each other’s sentences,” he says. “We had the same sense of outrage at the injustices that we saw, the same commitment to working with students and bringing them along, the same values we brought to teaching them in terms of professionalism and ethics. It’s been very easy for us to convey a single message, whether we were together or talking to students separately. It’s been an extraordinary partnership.”

The administrative know-how Newman honed as associate dean has made an invaluable contribution to the clinic’s success, as has her unfailing courtesy and warmth, he adds: “Theresa is especially good at knowing what the right touch is when dealing with judges and prosecutors. And she’s such a nice person — even to prosecutors who are being total jerks. I think that’s effective.”

It has been building connections with wary incarcerated clients and their families, keeping them optimistic while also managing their disappointment and expectations when they suffer almost inevitable legal and procedural setbacks, where Newman is perhaps most exceptional, say colleagues and former students. She bonds with clients in personal ways, such as with Sharpe over their shared love of books, for example, and takes pains to remember birthdays and holidays with cards in their native languages.

“One thing Professor Newman has really impressed on me is that our clients are people who have been told by society, told by prison guards, told by these institutions that they’re guilty and worthless and have probably reached out to dozens of innocence organizations trying to get some help and support,” says Steven Dallas ’21, who spent two semesters in the Wrongful Convictions Clinic and three years with the Innocence Project, including one as executive director. “To a large extent, they just want to feel human and to be heard.”

Howard Dudley credits Newman with restoring his integrity. He was exonerated in 2016, having spent 23 years in prison after being falsely accused and wrongfully convicted of sexually assaulting his daughter when she was 9, a claim that she had recanted shortly after his conviction and he always denied. In an evidentiary hearing, the clinic demonstrated to the court that his conviction stemmed from the prosecution’s failure to share with the defense evidence calling the allegations into question, coupled with his trial counsel’s inexperience. During his final courtroom appearance, Newman’s touch was powerful, Dudley says. “I wished my mother could have been there

“

I’m not sure I know anyone at Duke Law School who has accomplished as much meaningful work with as little need for recognition or praise, or anyone I would rather hold out as an example to our students.”

— Professor Emerita Katharine Bartlett

to hold my hand, but Ms. Theresa held my arm. She gave me the comfort that I needed. I always tell her, ‘You saved my life.’ I had no trust in the system, but she restored every bit of it.”

A Duke Law “lifer” with a genius for connection

Newman is fond of sharing the Wrongful Convictions Clinic motto that sums up the way faculty and students approach their clients and cases before and after exoneration: “We never, never, never give up.” She and her colleagues support former clients as they try to find their footing after decades of wrongful incarceration and help them with pardon petitions and appearances before the parole commission. (Of the clinic’s 10 exonerees, so far only three have received the gubernatorial pardons that are required for state compensation.)

Newman says she is grateful for having had the chance to make a difference in her clients’ lives, but always wishes she could have done more. “Had Jim and I not said yes to serving as faculty advisors to the Innocence Project, would LaMonte Armstrong have died in prison? Would Dontae Sharpe have spent his life in prison? If Duke hadn’t funded us, would all of these men still be in prison? And with more money we could be more successful. We could have more lawyers — there’s so much need.”

But she never let herself or her students get snowed under by the solemnity of their tasks. She says she “tilts towards optimism” and loves connecting with people, and gets accolades for doing just that.

“Professor Newman taught me that lawyers, even lawyers fighting against massive injustices, can still be humans,” says Katie Claire Hoffman ’13, who reinvestigated Sharpe’s case and is now a public defender in Charlotte. “She is strong, but she feels the human toll of her work. She allowed herself and the students working with her to grieve or feel angry. She modelled for us how to do this type of work for the long run.”

Bartlett says Newman’s “commitment to proving the innocence of the wrongfully convicted repeatedly underscores both the weaknesses and strengths of our legal system. I’m not sure I know anyone at Duke Law School who has accomplished as much meaningful work with as little need for recognition or praise, or anyone I would rather hold out as an example to our students.”

And even in retirement, Newman expects to continue to have opportunities to serve her alma mater and her clients. In her remarks to the Duke Law Class of 2021 at their convocation ceremony in May, Newman quoted Coleman’s declaration to their clinic students that “we are all ‘lifers’” who will be forever called upon to assist with clinic work. “I knew that getting into it, so I stand ready for the call,” she said. d — Frances Presma

Remembering Paul Carrington, renowned scholar, transformative dean

PAUL D. CARRINGTON, the Harry R. Chadwick, Sr., Professor Emeritus of Law and a former dean of Duke Law School, died on Aug. 24 at the age of 90.

Carrington, a scholar of civil procedure, joined the Duke Law faculty as dean in 1978 and served a decade in the post, overseeing the start of many of the Law School’s signature initiatives and programs, including establishing expansive dual JD/MA opportunities for students and hiring an educationally diverse faculty that includes renowned scholars from other schools and departments of Duke University. His deanship also saw the launch of the international LLM program and overseas summer institutes in international and comparative law and development of other international connections for Duke Law, beginning in 1980 with the establishment of scholarships for Chinese students.

“He was truly a transformative dean,” said James Cox, the Brainerd Currie Professor of Law. “Each of these programs has been nurtured and shaped by successive deans, but they were initiated by Paul and they remain at their core committed to the principles on which he sold them to the faculty. Among those principles are that a great law school needs to have a large foot in the international arena, that law is cultural and touches every corner of the university’s curriculum, the life and study of the law is about engagement, and learning excels when students are challenged with diverse perspectives and methodologies.”

Other of Carrington’s notable initiatives as dean were expanding opportunities for students to engage in legal scholarship through journals such as by establishing Duke Law as the editorial home for the Alaska Law Review, introducing a course on legal ethics into the curriculum, and launching the publication of Duke Law Magazine in 1982 — he served as editor of its inaugural issue. He is remembered by faculty for having been highly supportive of their scholarship and professional development and continually interested in improving legal education.

Carrington was “devoted not just to being the dean of this law school, but also devoted to, and concerned with, the law teaching profession as a whole,” said George Christie, the James B. Duke Professor Emeritus of Law, who called Carrington a dear friend of more than 50 years. Cox agreed: “Paul cared deeply about legal education and loved to discuss with his faculty the merits of what we were doing and should be doing.”

A Dallas native, Carrington received his undergraduate degree from the University of Texas in 1952 and his law degree from Harvard Law School in 1955. He began his academic career in 1957, after completing two years of military service (U.S. Army). Prior to joining the Duke Law faculty in 1978 he was a member of the law faculties at Wyoming, Indiana, Ohio State, and Michigan. He held visiting appointments at 10 other U.S. law schools and taught at five universities abroad.

Carrington was the author or editor of seven books and numerous symposia, and published more than 100 articles in academic journals on subjects including civil procedure, legal education, contracts, criminal law, constitutional law, comparative law, and the history of the legal profession.

His work was supported by the Ford, Guggenheim, Luce, and Rockefeller foundations.

During his academic career Carrington represented numerous individual clients on a pro bono basis in support of their claims to civil liberties and assisted in advancing claims by classes of plaintiffs. His engagement with law reform across diverse areas included participating in a successful effort to secure enactment of the Uniform Commercial Code in Wyoming, directing an American Bar Foundation study of the United States Courts of Appeal, and directing a study of legal education for the Association of American Law Schools. From 1973 to 1975, he served the Federal Judicial Center as vice chair of the Advisory Council on Appellate Justice, organizing the 1975 national conference on that subject. He also directed a program on law reform for the Supreme Court of Michigan.

From 1985 to 1993, Carrington served as Reporter to the Advisory Committee on Civil Rules of the Judicial Conference of the United States and was instrumental in effecting several reforms of those rules. His many other professional activities included directing a program on judicial independence and accountability for the American Bar Association from 1997 to 1999, organizing a national conference on that subject in 1999, and serving on the North Carolina Bar Association’s Committee on Judicial Independence. He also participated in organizing the group that drafted the Model

Fair Bargain Act enacted in New Mexico in 2000 to constrain the misuse of arbitration clauses in standard form contracts unread by the parties; that text has been supported for enactment in other states by diverse groups.

Carrington was an elected member of the American Law Institute, an elected fellow of the American Bar Foundation and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, and an honorary fellow of the American Academy of Appellate Lawyers.

A transformative dean, a nurturing leader

As dean, Carrington “arrived at a very good law school and made it so much better,” said Pamela Gann ’73, who succeeded him as dean. She noted his close attention to faculty hiring and support of faculty scholarship, his addition of women to the faculty, and his creation of a more interdisciplinary faculty through joint appointments within Duke University, including such scholars as the renowned historian John Hope Franklin. Combined with his creation of programs that allowed JD students to concurrently pursue graduate degrees from other departments, he effectively “leveraged the excellence of Duke University,” she said. Gann also praised his internationalization of the Law School and his prescience in seeing the impor-

tance of legal education for Chinese students, whom he actively identified and recruited for admission to the JD program.

“Yet he was ever committed to the idea that important law schools and their faculty and scholarship should be linked to the betterment of law and policy, the legal profession, and the judiciary,” said Gann, who served as dean until 1999, when she became president of Claremont-McKenna College. “I always appreciated his commitment to creating this positive balance between scholarship within the academy and outreach to the professional importance of the practice of law and our legal institutions.”

Added Richard Schmalbeck, the Simpson Thacher & Bartlett Professor of Law and one of Carrington’s early faculty recruits: “His imagination and tireless efforts made such a difference to the school.”

Gregarious and highly collegial, Carrington promoted strong bonds among the faculty, Cox said. “Hardly a week passed without Paul walking the hallways looking for a very large group to go for lunch. These impromptu gatherings are among my most treasured memories of Duke. He also would drop into your office to talk about anything, but usually about your work or something he had read related to your subject. He saw strength in each of us and was extremely supportive of our development — he cared about our careers.”

David F. Cavers Professor of Law Deborah DeMott, a faculty member since 1975 who was untenured when Carrington arrived at Duke, credits him with helping her professional maturation in various ways, such as by asking her to chair the Faculty Appointments Committee and talk to the Board of Visitors about her first scholarly paper. “But I remember Paul for so much more,” she said. “He was a champion raconteur, ranging widely across incidents and observations throughout his life. He owed much, I think, to the variety of experiences he’d had and the people he’d encountered along the way.”

Katharine Bartlett, the A. Kenneth Pye Professor Emerita of Law who served as dean from 2000 to 2007, said she owes her career at Duke to Carrington. “He took a chance on me in 1979 when he asked me to teach a civil litigation clinic, and from there, my position grew even though I didn’t have the traditional qualifications of a faculty hire,” she said. “Over the years, I’ve admired Paul greatly for his commitment to legal education, scholarship, and faculty mentorship. He was a kind and generous man whose basic goodness touched many at Duke and around the world. We will miss him greatly.”

Xiqing Gao ’86, the second student from China to study at Duke Law, counts himself among those whose lives Carrington transformed. “Without his vision, courage and persistence, I would never have been able to get the kind of hard-core legal education from Duke Law,” said Gao, the Yutong Cheng Professor of Law at Tsinghua University Law School and former vice chairman, president, and chief investment officer of China Investment Corporation. “He worked hard throughout his stint as the dean to recruit the Chinese students and find various ways to support them. He constantly talked to the major law firms and Duke Law alumni for their support of the Chinese students both in terms of financial aid and clerkship and job opportunities.

“Paul started a new era at Duke Law School, as far as Chinese legal education is considered,” said Gao, a Duke University trustee. “Without him, Duke’s name brand in China would not be where it is today. More importantly, many aspects of the Chinese legal system and law practices can be attributable to the great educational experiences many of us received from Duke Law School.”

An outstanding scholar engaged with law reform, professional responsibility

A prolific writer, Carrington’s books include Stewards of Democracy (Harper Collins 1999), Spreading America’s Word (Twelve Tables Press, 2005), Law and Class in America: Trends since The Cold War (edited with Trina Jones, NYU 2006), and Transnational Corrupt Practices (edited with Susan Rose-Ackerman, 2013).

Reforming the Supreme Court: Term Limits for Justices (Carolina Academic Press, 2006), a collection of essays by leading academics that examine the benefits and detriments of term limits, arose from a Program in Public Law conference on Supreme Court term limits that Carrington and his co-editor, Roger Cramton, convened at Duke Law in 2005. Through 200 short essays in American Lawyer: Public Servants and the Development of A Nation (ABA Publishing, 2012), Carrington chronicled lawyers’ engagement in designing and developing American democratic government and law from the nation’s founding to the end of the 20th century. He also noted their missteps, from the perpetuation, by some, of slavery, to the American Bar Association’s demand for “loyalty oaths” during the McCarthy era, to Watergate.

Carrington’s last book was his 2016 memoir, A Lucky Lawyer’s Life

“Paul was a gifted writer and an outstanding scholar,” said Cox. “Indeed, my colleague Jamie Boyle best summed up this characteristic by observing, ‘If Carrington were sentenced to a dungeon for the rest of his life, his first action upon entering the cell would be to scramble for pen and paper.’ This is so true of Paul’s possessing a life of the mind, but it also tells us what we who knew him came to appreciate, he had a deep message to each of us that he knew would make us better. I believe he has done so.”

Carrington’s wife of 63 years, Bessie Meek Carrington, preceded him in death in 2016. He is survived by his four children, Clark Carrington, Mary Carrington, William Carrington, and Emily Carrington, nine grandchildren, and one great grandson. d — Frances Presma

Gifts in Paul Carrington’s memory may be made to the Paul D. Carrington Dean’s Innovation Fund through Duke’s secure giving site at gifts.duke.edu/mem/Carrington. The Carrington Fund supports expenses associated with the addition of faculty, innovative initiatives, and staff or student enrichment at Duke Law School.

Duke Law mourns death of Professor Mathew McCubbins

64.

“Mat was a towering figure in his field, a renowned teacher and mentor, and an esteemed member of our faculty for the last eight years,” said Kerry Abrams, the James B. Duke and Benjamin N. Duke Dean of the School of Law. “He will be dearly missed.”

An interdisciplinary scholar whose work explored the intersections of law, business, and political economy, McCubbins joined the Duke Law faculty in 2013. He held a joint appointment in Duke University’s Department of Political Science.

At the Law School, McCubbins had recently taught a seminar with Professor Jack Knight, Democracy and the Rule of Law, and a Statutory Interpretation Colloquium. He also spearheaded several scholarly conferences at Duke, including the 11th annual Conference on Empirical Legal Studies, the Northwestern-Duke Causal Inference Workshops, and the Duke-Oxford Conference on Cognitive Approaches to Law, Economics, Politics and Policy.

“Mat was an extraordinarily creative thinker,” said Knight, the Frederic Cleaveland Professor of Law and Political Science. “His insights into the relationships between the courts and the other branches of government set the agenda for a generation of legal and political scholars. Just as important was the generosity that he demonstrated towards both his students and his colleagues.”

Added Kristen Renberg JD/PhD ’22: “Mat McCubbins was my advisor, friend, visionary researcher, and an incredible teacher. He changed my life for the better and that of so many others.”

Before coming to Duke, McCubbins had been the Provost Professor of Business, Law and Political Economy at the University of Southern California and director of the USC-Cal Tech Center for the Study of Law and Politics at the Gould School of Law at USC.

He spent 2013-2014 as the W. Glenn Campbell and Rita RicardoCampbell National Fellow and the Robert Eckles Swain National Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.

An elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences as well as the American Association for the Advancement of Science, McCubbins also taught at the University of Texas, Stanford University, Washington University in St. Louis, and the University of San Diego Law School. He was a Distinguished Professor and the Chancellor’s Associates Chair in the Department of Political Science at the University of California San Diego from 1987 to 2011, where he received the 2008 Chancellor’s Associates Faculty Excellence Award for Graduate Teaching.

McCubbins was the co-author of six books: The Logic of Delegation (University of Chicago Press, 1991), winner of the APSA’s 1992 Gladys M. Kammerer Award; Legislative Leviathan (University of California Press, 1993), winner of the APSA’s Legislative Studies Section’s 1994 Richard F. Fenno Jr. Prize; The Democratic Dilemma: Can Citizens Learn What They Need to Know? (Cambridge University Press, 1998); Stealing the Initiative (Prentice-Hall, 2000); Setting the Agenda: Responsible Party Government in the US House of Representatives (Cambridge University Press, 2005), winner of the APSA’s Leon Epstein Award; and Legislative Leviathan, Second Edition (Cambridge University Press, 2006). He edited or co-edited eight additional books, authored or co-authored more than 100 articles, book chapters, and encyclopedia entries in political science, economics, computer science, cognitive science, and biology, and authored more than three dozen articles in law reviews or law journals.

McCubbins’s survivors include his wife, Susan Shugets McCubbins; sons Kenny, Colin Hwa-En and Kenneth HwaLong; and three grandchildren. d

MATHEW D. MCCUBBINS, the Ruth F. De Varney Professor of Political Science and Professor of Law, died on July 1 in Menlo Park, Calif. He was

HOW THE ENVIRONMENTAL, SOCIAL, AND GOVERNANCE MOVEMENT IS GAINING GROUND IN BOARDROOMS, LAW FIRMS, AND LEGAL SCHOLARSHIP

Her husband had recently left his own tech career to help restore the Presidio of San Francisco, and the couple had moved into the national park. Mac Cormac found herself among a crowd of passionate environmentalists whose perspective she found fascinating.

“I started to see the intersection between climate and humanity,” she says. “And I put it together that business was going to have to fundamentally change.”

She approached a senior partner at her firm about concentrating her work on the junction of environmental and corporate law. “He said, ‘I don’t see any money in that, but if you want to focus on it we will support you,’” she says.

Indeed, most of that early work was pro bono for nonprofits like The Nature Conservancy rather than businesses. But today it’s a different story. Mac Cormac now chairs her firm’s energy and infrastructure and social enterprise and impact investing practices, leading a group of more than 40 attorneys who work on environmental, social, and governance — or ESG — issues. And among their corporate clients, ESG is at the top of the agenda in response to pressure from consumers, investors, and regulators.

ESG encompasses a broad range of concerns about the power of corporations, including their environmental impact, stance on social issues, employment practices, treatment of suppliers, diversity in governance, and ethics and transparency of operational practices. In contrast to the traditional investor focus on maximizing shareholder value,

are not strictly financial, but they can affect a

The dot-com bubble burst shortly after Susan Mac Cormac JD/LLM ’93 made partner at Morrison & Foerster in 2001. The implosion had a huge impact on Bay Area law firms focused on tech, resulting in canceled deals, layoffs, and even closures. But for Mac Cormac, it would open up new opportunities for her corporate law practice.

— Susan Mac Cormac JD/LLM ’93, who heads a group of more than 40 Morrison & Foerster attorneys who work on ESG issues.

companies have adopted the “triple bottom line,” a voluntary social, environmental, and financial framework that allowed them to profess a corporate commitment to sustainability and social responsibility, there’s a new urgency in today’s ESG movement. Consumers, employees, and especially investors are demanding that corporations pay attention to ESG — and taking action if they don’t.

Take ExxonMobil. During a 2021 corporate proxy voting season that was notable for the number of ESG resolutions introduced, the oil giant ceded three of 12 seats on its board to new climate-friendly directors following an upset campaign engineered by an activist hedge fund and backed by “the Big Three” — BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street, the three largest investment companies in the U.S. and ExxonMobil’s three largest shareholders.

“They won precisely due to the support of the ‘Big Three,’” says Professor Elisabeth de Fontenay, a scholar of corporate law and finance, including private equity. “This was a pretty momentous event that, frankly, blew everyone’s mind in the corporate governance world because people didn’t expect this to succeed.”

The intensifying focus on ESG issues is drawing scrutiny from de Fontenay and other corporate law scholars at Duke, whose activities include advising regulators on a new framework for climate-related disclosures by public companies, proposing metrics for corporate reporting on diversity, equity, and inclusion, and researching the implications of ESG activism on corporate management. They are also adding courses and seminars to the curriculum that focus on corporate social responsibility and climate change and the financial markets.

The profession is responding, too. Many of the nation’s largest law firms have added or expanded ESG divisions comprised of lawyers from practices such as energy, environment, labor, human rights, litigation, government relations, and finance to serve corporate clients anxious for guidance on ESG policies that will minimize risk and liability, help them comply with evolving standards, and protect their brands.

“Five years ago nobody had an ESG practice. Now everybody does,” says Mac Cormac. However, she notes that many of those groups are headed by environmental lawyers and so tend to be heavily focused on environmental, compliance, and litigation, which is only one element of ESG. Her pioneering work in the field has also included helping draft California’s flexible purpose corporation, the progenitor of the benefit corporations now hosted in a majority of states, including Delaware. “Tying ESG to investments in public and private markets, operations, and corporate form and governance is the purview of corporate lawyers,” she says.

Today’s ESG movement can be traced back at least 50 years to the campaigns for corporate divestment from South Africa over apartheid and later against profiting from conflict minerals and “blood diamonds,” according to Lawrence Baxter, the David T. Zhang Professor of the Practice of Law, who chairs Duke University’s Advisory Committee on Investment Responsibility. In recent years, he says, activists have turned their focus to the impact of a fossil fuel-based economy on climate change. And with a confluence of factors, including political and generational shifts and severe weather events affecting virtually every area of the country, those views have gained much wider acceptance, even among corporate executives who used to dismiss climate change as natural weather cycles.

“Mainstream industry and finance has become very much aware of it,” says Baxter, the faculty director of the Global Financial Markets Center (GFMC). “Before, it was really difficult to sell the danger of climate change to people who were going to be retired long before their companies took a hit from it.

“It’s less difficult now as we see the impact, over and over again, of fires and droughts and violent storms and so on. It’s gotten the attention of people who now realize that it could happen within the span of their careers and they’ll lose everything.”

Mac Cormac, who now focuses on late-stage growth and private equity investments, says interest in ESG issues has accelerated over the past two years as the COVID-19 pandemic and the killing of George Floyd by a police officer brought racial, social, and economic inequality into the national consciousness. In fact, most of her private equity deals now are impact investments aimed at producing social or environmental benefits as well as profit, with clients most interested in addressing climate change and inequality.

“It’s been gathering steam, but from the beginning of COVID there was a fundamental shift,” she says. “Most of the large asset managers in New York say they can’t raise capital now without considering ESG, whereas two years ago I was trying to convince them that this is not concessionary capital — that you can focus on this and still be return-based.”

EXAMINING INVESTOR PRESSURE BEHIND THE CORPORATE ESG FOCUS

Multiple drivers are contributing to the momentum in ESG, says Ronald Wu JD/ MEM ’10, head of ESG/sustainability research, Asia Pacific, for UBS Investment Bank. These include asset owners pushing investment managers to integrate ESG considerations and markets drafting new regulations to create the ecosystem and rules for ESG investing.

“And for a lot of younger people, ESG and climate are important issues and their attitudes and their actions are really changing companies and how investors are acting. All those things coming together are really pushing the agenda forward,” Wu says.

x“Five years ago nobody x xhad an ESG practice.x

xNow everybody does.”x

Ronald Wu JD/MEM ’10

308: Number of weather events since 1980 that caused $1 billion or more of damage

The biggest push is coming from institutional investors whose assertion on ESG matters is having a profound impact on corporate behavior and governance, notably the Big Three — BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street. These investors collectively have more than $20 trillion in assets under management and own more than a fifth of the shares in S&P 500 companies.

Much of that money is invested on behalf of pension funds, but the firms also are catering to a growing market for ESG investing by creating funds that purport to invest in companies focused on environmental sustainability and social impact along with growth. Such funds, which often come with higher management fees, are attracting large amounts of capital, particularly from socially conscious millennials. In the first quarter of 2021, investors poured almost $21.5 billion into ESG or sustainability-focused funds, more than double the amount for the same quarter one year ago, according to Morningstar.

Institutional investors have been using their massive leverage to vote against management and to back shareholder resolutions on issues related to climate change and the environment, human rights, employee treatment, and corporate board diversity. BlackRock CEO Larry Fink also has used his annual letters to issue increasingly urgent warnings to company executives on climate change. In January 2021 he requested they disclose plans for adapting their business models to a net-zero emissions economy.

“These letters have really, I think, propelled the conversation forward in a very significant way,” says GFMC Executive Director and Lecturing Fellow Lee Reiners, who teaches seminars relating to financial policy and regulatory practice.

“They are managing trillions of dollars worth of assets, so when they say that they are going to focus on something or care about something, firms listen and take action.”

But not everyone believes ESG activism is the proper role for investors or in the best interest of companies or their shareholders. Professor Ofer Eldar, who holds secondary appointments in Duke’s Economics department and the Fuqua School of Business, was an early critic of ESG investing, arguing in two articles that most of it appears to be solely profit driven. “There is a concern that [ESG funds] may simply claim to pursue social impact to increase their fund flows,” he writes in “Designing Business Forms to Pursue Social Goals,” 106 Virginia Law Review 937-1005 (2020).

De Fontenay says investor activism incentivizes corporate management to “greenwash” their ESG reports by selectively representing favorable data while glossing over less desirable consequences, including unintended ones. Until recently, she says, institutional investors have declined to take a position on such issues and have instead focused on maximizing investors’ financial returns. That has changed with the ascendance of ESG. Activism by the Big Three, she adds, may do companies more harm than good by adding unrecoupable costs and may even constitute a breach of fiduciary duty.

— Professor Elisabeth de Fontenay

— Professor Ofer Eldar

“BlackRock, which has been by far the biggest proponent of ESG activism, says what it’s doing is improving the long-term financial returns of all its investors, but there’s really very little theory to back that up. Unless they can prove that their ESG activism increases shareholder value, they are arguably breaching their fiduciary duties to those shareholders who are not interested in pursuing ESG if it harms their pocketbooks.”

Eldar is less worried about the impact on shareholder value, pointing to research that shows a positive correlation between shareholder returns and compliance with ESG metrics.

“Paradoxically, many of the ESG policies are entirely consistent with shareholder value maximization,” he says. “For example, firms have revamped their compliance committees to ensure that they do not engage in illegal behavior that could cost the company a lot in fines and liabilities.”

Eldar, whose new fall course, Corporate Social Responsibility and Social Entrepreneurship, addresses the increasing importance of social issues in legal practice and business transactions and the rise of ESG investing, says the key problem with ESG is that its actual social impact is unclear, given how difficult it is to measure. Several agencies rate companies in accordance with ESG performance, but all apply different criteria and there are discrepancies in their scores. “A company like Tesla might get a high score on one metric and a very low score on another,” he says, making ESG measures particularly susceptible to greenwashing.

De Fontenay says that’s why government regulators, not privately organized ESG movements, should impose new ESG standards in areas like emissions reductions for companies heavily involved in fossil fuel production.

“By making it totally voluntary you are creating an uneven playing field among companies, so the companies that do the best at reducing their emissions are going to be punished the most financially,” she explains. “Without government regulation of their emissions, companies really don’t have any strong financial incentive to comply. You’ll get a lot of talk about what they’re doing to reduce their impact on the climate but little in the way of actual change.”

But even if ESG activism did cause companies to reduce emissions significantly, she is skeptical that this would have much impact on climate change. Rather, it could add disruptive or even fatal costs to targeted U.S. companies and industries while creating unintended consequences that do more harm. Already, she says, U.S. fossil fuel companies under pressure to cut emissions have simply sold off assets to foreign owners, foreign governments, and private parties that are subject to far less oversight.

“We’re talking about a relatively small set of companies — U.S. public companies that are primarily in the oil and gas industry — so when you view that as part of total global emissions it’s actually almost insignificant,” she says.

“You’re basically asking them to sell half as much oil and gas as they normally would, so it’s going to have a big financial impact on these companies and an almost negligible impact on the climate. By pressuring U.S. public companies so much on ESG while not applying the same pressure to private and foreign companies, you create new incentives for companies to stay private or sell to foreign owners. And that’s likely to lead to worse ESG outcomes because these companies are not going to be in the public spotlight.”

DISCLOSURES A FIRST STEP TOWARD ACCOUNTABILITY

Politically charged issues are more recent entrants into the ESG conversation. Wealth inequality, the disparate health and economic impacts of the pandemic on communities of color, the MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements, and the passing of controversial laws around issues like voting restrictions have only increased pressure on corporations to make statements on social matters and provide transparency around their own employment practices, community investment, and diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts.

In August 2019 the Business Roundtable, which includes many of the nation’s largest companies, including Apple, Walmart, General Motors, and JPMorgan Chase, issued a new version of its “Statement on the Purpose of a Corporation” signed by 181 CEOs. While for 22 years the statement had emphasized shareholder primacy, the 2019 statement prioritized all stakeholders, including communities, customers, employees, and suppliers, and encouraged companies to adopt sustainable practices and disclose information about workforce diversity.

Says Reiners: “I think companies are just responding to the demands of the marketplace. People are saying, ‘We care about this stuff now and we are not going to buy your products if we feel like you’re environmentally irresponsible, or we feel like you are mistreating your employees.’ And employees aren’t going to work at your company if they feel like you are not doing the right thing either, so I don’t think shareholder maximization has gone out the window by any means.”

In 2020, BlackRock issued a strong statement in support of Black Lives Matter, made granular disclosures of its own workforce diversity data, issued specific goals for improving Black representation at the firm, and discussed how it would address racial justice in the communities where it operates. It also asked companies in which it invests to disclose racial and ethnic data of their workforces and other data related to diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Professor Gina-Gail Fletcher, a scholar of complex financial instruments and market regulation, applauds the policy for its transparency and specificity. “I think they were trying to model for their corporations what they expect because BlackRock has been asking for this information from different companies for some years now,” she says. “They have committed to doing these things themselves, so it’s expected that if corporations are unwilling to do so, BlackRock will probably use its considerable influence to press them or incentivize them to get the ball rolling.”

Companies are already required to record diversity data under Equal Employment Opportunity Commission rules, but that information is kept private. Publicly available data shows Fortune 500 corporations have made little progress in filling more board seats with directors of color. Diversity gains have mostly come from

— Professor Gina-Gail Fletcher

appointing white women to boards rather than people who identify with racial and ethnic minorities, according to “Missing Pieces Report,” published by Deloitte and the Alliance for Board Diversity in June 2021.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has begun acting on new disclosure requirements regarding “human capital management” in corporate workforces, including diversity in hiring, promotion, and on boards. In August the agency approved a new board diversity rule that requires firms listed on the Nasdaq exchange to disclose a standardized set of demographic data about their boards of directors and, by 2025, to have two or more board directors who qualify as “diverse” by gender, ethnicity, or sexual orientation or explain why they have not complied. But Fletcher argues that board representation doesn’t give a full picture of diversity or equality within an organization.

“You may have two or three people of color on your board, but do you have the same percentages reflected in the workforce and what does it look like at each level? Are your workers of color just in the lowest category? What do they look like at the senior management level? We want to see what the composition of your firm looks like at different levels and within the supply chain.”

Following George Floyd’s 2020 murder many corporations made public statements in support of the Black Lives Matter movement. In their essay “Equality Metrics,” published in June on Yale Law Journal Forum, Fletcher and co-author Veronica Root Martinez of Notre Dame Law School call on companies to adopt a more mean-

ingful initiative: the systematized corporate disclosure of workforce and supply chain demographics and specific, measurable plans to improve racial equity and eliminate inequality within firms. They also argue that large institutional investors, because of the leverage they hold over companies, are ideally positioned to demand this kind of data. It is wholly within their purview to do so, Fletcher says.

“When institutional investors take this more holistic approach in terms of their engagement with corporations in thinking through ESG issues, I would argue that this is completely in line with their fiduciary obligation to these firms and to the shareholders whose money they are managing,” she says.

“Recognizing the impact that ESG can have on the whole firm is important,” she adds. “You can’t just divorce shareholder wealth from ESG because the two things aren’t traveling on different tracks. They’re actually on the same track, so thinking about the way in which the firm engages with environmental, social, and governance matters is an important part of ensuring that they maximize shareholder wealth.”

Regulators would, ideally, be the ones enforcing these standards, but pressure from institutional investors is also useful, Fletcher says.

“It gives us a chance to create an open sandbox in which people can put their data out there, put policies they have implemented out there, and see what works. There’s a positive side to it being untethered to regulators, but regulators have an important role if we want this to be widely adapted and implemented across all public companies.”

: Net amount that flowed into sustainable funds in 2020, more than twice the previous record set in 2019

Source: Morningstar Sustainable

SEC SET TO REQUIRE RISK DISCLOSURES

On climate, regulators have been slow to act on measures that would level the playing field for all companies, such as capping greenhouse gas emissions or imposing a carbon tax, even as the U.S. falls behind international jurisdictions such as the European Union, Singapore, and China that have carbon markets in which greenhouse gas emissions units are traded as a commodity.

But President Joe Biden’s pledge to transition to a net zero economy by 2050 has spurred some movement on an idea that some global competitors have already adopted but did not get traction here under previous administrations: requiring public companies to make annual disclosures related to climate impacts and risks. While many large U.S. companies already voluntarily disclose the amount of their greenhouse gas emissions, there is no standard set of metrics required for all. That may change by next year, when the SEC is expected to issue a standardized framework for mandatory reporting of greenhouse gas emissions and other quantifiable climate-related metrics.

The move is intended to improve transparency in the markets by forcing companies to provide information on the climate-related risks they are exposed to and what they are doing to mitigate risks to their business from climate change. Those include physical risks, such as the destruction of a factory, refinery, or entire supply chain, and transition risks, or abrupt policy changes that could affect a company’s bottom line, such as carbon pricing or a ban on oil extraction.

“Investors want to know what the risks to their investments are,” Reiners says. “They’re less focused on how companies are contributing to climate change, and more concerned about how climate change and the policy response is going to impact the cash flow to these companies.

“Ultimately the government is going to need to play a role here. Otherwise we’re not going to have consistent, comparable, and reliable information from companies that are disclosing ESG information, or from asset managers and investment funds that claim to be investing in ESG stocks.”

Reiners is on the leadership team for the Climate Risk Disclosure Lab, an initiative of the GFMC that collaborates with other groups

THE GLOBAL FINANCIAL MARKETS CENTER LEADERSHIP: Professor Sarah Bloom Raskin, center, will become faculty director of the center in January, taking over from Professor Lawrence Baxter, left, who has held the post since 2009. Lecturing Fellow Lee Reiners, right, is the center’s executive director. Raskin, Baxter, and Professor GinaGail Fletcher are members of the Regenerative Climate Response Committee, an outside group offering policy responses for a more climate-resilient economy.

11 : Percentage increase in shareholder proposals submitted to public companies during the 2021 proxy season over 2020;

within and outside Duke University. The lab has submitted comments to the SEC on the proposed disclosure requirements and to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission regarding the formation of a subcommittee that would explore how to best design a U.S. carbon market.

Regulators across all agencies need to think about adapting existing tools such as the bank stress test introduced after the 2008 financial crisis, says Sarah Bloom Raskin, a former Federal Reserve governor and deputy secretary of the Treasury during the Obama administration who is now the Colin W. Brown Distinguished Professor of the Practice of Law. (Read more, page 25.)

“Could the stress test be adapted for a climate purpose? If the stress test incorporates a shock, maybe the shock could be a climate shock,” says Raskin, also a senior fellow at the Duke Center on Risk. “The Bank of England is doing this, the European Central Bank is doing it, and the Fed could be trying to do it as well. I’m not trying to prescribe anything specific. But there are things they have in their toolbox that can be redeployed,” she says.

Financial markets are especially vulnerable to potentially climate-related risk. The nation’s largest banks face hundreds of billions of dollars of risk exposure to their loan portfolios, according to “Financing a Net Zero Economy,” released in September 2021 by Ceres, with the biggest physical risk coming from coastal flooding.

“Think about a 30-year mortgage in Dade County, Florida,” says Baxter, who will co-teach a spring-semester seminar with Raskin on the impact of climate change on the financial markets. “Half of that’s going to be underwater in 30 years unless something is done. Banks and underwriters — Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and companies that buy mortgages from banks and from other originators — are holding this collateral property that has serious risk of losing significant value. That’s straight physical risk.

“And then you’ve got transition risks. Banks have to replace one type of investment that they make, like loans to the fossil fuel industry, which will be affected quite significantly over time, with new investments in alternative energy, which are still fairly risky at that stage. Banks also invest in securities, so they’re facing the risk that those securities lose value because of catastrophic events. There are so many layers of risk that they face.”

He and other Duke Law faculty have been advising regulators and economic policymakers on how to address the risk that climate change could destabilize financial markets and the broader U.S. economy. Baxter, Fletcher, and Raskin are members of the

Regenerative Crisis Response Committee, a select group of experts in economics, law, and public policy that also includes Joseph Stiglitz, the former chief economist of the World Bank, and others who have held high-level economic advisory roles in government.

Sponsored by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the group convened in September 2020 to strategize ways that agencies such as the SEC, Federal Reserve, Financial Stability Oversight Council, and Federal Housing Financial Agency can enact new fiscal, monetary, and financial regulatory policies to help the U.S. transition to a carbon-neutral economy. Raskin says the group’s focus on climate change wasn’t derailed by COVID-19, but rather gained momentum.

“Many people feared climate would need to take a backseat while we dealt with the pandemic,” she says. “Surprisingly, a lot of countries and a lot of people said, ‘Hey, maybe these are linked — the need for a resilient economy that can withstand certain stressors, the stressor of a virulent virus, the stressor of a set of climate events like hurricanes and fires.’ People actually started linking the ideas and events.”

The group has submitted to the SEC recommendations authored by Fletcher on the new ESG disclosure rules, comments to the Office of Management and Budget on the social cost of carbon, and commentary by members, including an August op-ed Baxter wrote for The Hill titled “Cryptocurrency Makes the Climate Crisis Worse” and one Raskin published in Project Syndicate in September, titled “Changing the Climate of Financial Regulation.”

“The committee has done a lot in that period of time,” says Raskin. “It has catalyzed a lot of thinking among people who had not really been thinking about these issues before.”

LAWYERS INTEGRAL TO CREATING NEW ECONOMY

Creating an economy resilient to new challenges, Raskin says, will require a collective effort. Such a collective effort might include infrastructure spending through legislation, private sector investments in clean energy technology such as the Breakthrough Energy Catalyst project led by Bill Gates, and new “green” federal procurement policies. An initiative announced in January to replace the federal government’s massive fleet of cars and trucks with U.S.-made electric vehicles resulted in Ford’s announcement in late September that it would spend $11.4 billion to build carbon-neutral factories in

x“There’s a sense now that this work is not a nice-to-have, it’s a must-have. It isx xabsolutely integral to economic prosperity … It’s permeating, as it must, ourx xentire set of structures and lawyers know how to navigate that.”x

— Professor Sarah Bloom Raskin

Kentucky and Tennessee that will produce electric cars, trucks, and batteries. Ford, a major government supplier, plans to transform its product line to 40% electric-powered vehicles by 2030.

“It sent a really strong market signal that a big purchaser called the federal government is going to be buying in a specifically green way and the private sector needs to scale up,” Raskin says. “And that’s something that is lasting. People don’t want to see things that are temporary or transitory or ephemeral.

“If we can develop a certain momentum in all of these different areas, it’s an all-hands-on-deck kind of endeavor where it’s not just the responsibility of the EPA, it’s not just the responsibility of the private sector, it’s not just Wall Street. It really does need to be collective, and I think at a certain point we are going to start seeing a mutually reinforcing set of actions that bring us some real progress.”

Lawyers, she says, will be instrumental in the transition, whether at law firms, science and technology companies, nonprofits, or in public service.

“There’s a sense now that this work is not a nice-to-have, it’s a must-have,” Raskin says. “It is absolutely integral to economic prosperity, so from that perspective there’s no going back. It’s permeating, as it must, our entire set of structures and lawyers know how to navigate that. It’s almost like the lawyerly way of thinking itself brings about a set of opportunities where you can contribute in almost any dimension.”

Indeed, younger lawyers may not be able to avoid it, says Charlie Wowk ’21, an associate at Sullivan & Cromwell in New York. As a research assistant at the GFMC, Wowk published an article titled “Burning Down the House: How Inadequate Climate Risk Disclosures and Information Asymmetries Threaten to Disrupt the U.S. Mortgage Market” on the Climate Risk Disclosure Lab’s website.

“Climate change is the issue of my generation,” Wowk says. “If it’s farmland, think of the impact that it has on the crops, if it’s in a dense city, the impact that it has on infrastructure and hospitals, if it’s a coastal city, the impact that it has on housing. Some places are just going to become unlivable, so you’re going to have a swath of climate refugees. And a lot of law firms have dedicated oil and gas practice groups — so I’m interested in how the shift towards renewable energy will affect that model.

“I don’t think I or any of my peers will have a choice. We will all have to be ‘ESG lawyers’ in some way or another, because these issues are going to impact pretty much every sector.”

While the issues are urgent they’re also complicated and interwoven, and solutions will require patience and coordination, says Baxter.

“To the extent that climate change and global warming is a highly systemic matter, that it comes in many directions and right across everything we do, it’s also systemically difficult to change and it’s going to require concerted action.

“We’ll get there but it’s going to take longer than people think.” d

ESG: RELATED SCHOLARSHIP

Emile Aguirre

“The Social Startup” (forthcoming, 2022)

“Beyond Profit,” 54 U.C. Davis Law Review 2077-2148 (2021)

Professor Emilie Aguirre, who joined the faculty in June, is a business law scholar whose research focuses on companies pursuing both social purpose and profit.

James D. Cox

“A Revised Monitoring Model Confronts Today’s Movement Toward Managerialism,” 99 Texas Law Review 1275-1307 (2021) (with Randall S. Thomas)

James D. Cox, the Brainerd Currie Professor of Law, is a renowned scholar of corporate and securities law.

Elisabeth de Fontenay

“Private Equity’s Governance Advantage: A Requiem,” 99 Boston University Law Review 1095-1122 (2019)

Ofer Eldar

“Designing Business Forms to Pursue Social Goals,” 106 Virginia Law Review 937-1005 (2020)

“The Role of Social Enterprise and Hybrid Organizations,” Columbia Business Law Review 92–198 (2017)

Gina-Gail Fletcher

“Equality Metrics,” 130 Yale Law Journal Forum 869-915 (2021) (with Veronica Root Martinez)

x “I don’t think I or any of my peers will have a choice. We will x

x all have to be ‘ESG lawyers’ in some way or another, because x xthese issues are going to impact pretty much every sector.” x

— Charlie Wowk ’21

LAWYERS

Profiles Profiles

AND LEADERS:

Andrea Nelson Meigs ’94

OVER ALMOST TWO DECADES as a talent agent, Andrea Nelson Meigs ’94 has represented such actors, writers, producers, and directors as Beyoncé, Idris Elba, Halle Berry, Jamie Foxx, Ellen Burstyn, and Christina Applegate. In addition to negotiating their deals in television, film, and theater, she also secures multimillion-dollar branding and book deals.

Meigs, a partner at United Talent Agency in Los Angeles, her hometown, worked briefly as a prosecutor after graduating from Duke Law, before joining another major agency as an entry-level trainee — in the mailroom — in service of her long-term career goals. In March, she was selected as one of Essence magazine’s 2021 Women in Film Pathmakers.

Dean Kerry Abrams spoke with Meigs in March as part of the Lawyers and Leaders series. Excerpts of their conversation follow.

Dean Abrams: You were a child actor. How did you get from there to Duke Law?

Andrea Nelson Meigs: As a child, I really got the bug for wanting to act and I would tell my parents that I wanted to be on television. But when I was about 10 years old I said, “I don’t want to be in front of the camera where I’m being judged.” I wasn’t sure exactly what I would do but I knew I wanted to be behind the camera where I could be more of a decision-maker.

I went to undergraduate at Tufts, then went to work at a local television station. It was wonderful. I was working on a current events show and a children’s educational program. Both were Emmy-nominated shows so I felt really excited. But I realized that everybody who was in a position of taking charge and making real decisions at the station had either gone to business school or law school. And because I see myself as a woman in charge and one who likes to make decisions, I knew I needed to go back to school. I also wanted to be the first in my family to become a lawyer. That was really important to me. And a woman I admire who was a sorority sister of mine, Tamara Woolfork ’91, had gone to Duke Law, so that was my top choice.

When I was at Duke it was really all about going into corporate law and going to the big law firms. I did think about entertainment law but in the back of my mind I knew that I wasn’t going to practice for a long period of time. It was really important for me to stay the course and to remember the long-term goal. So I applied for moot court. I loved oral advocacy and it was the best training for me because I graduated and went to the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office to be a prosecutor. As a litigator you need to have your best oral advocacy skills, and what I do now is I speak to people all day long, pitching projects, so that skill set really was great for me.

Abrams: The DA’s office seems like a deviation from where you thought you were going. How did that happen and how did your transition to being an agent happen?

Meigs: After my first year I worked for Congresswoman Maxine Waters on Capitol Hill. I also was involved at Duke with the guardian ad litem program, so I found myself leaning towards the public sector. I interned after my second year at the DA’s office and was offered a position. I took it as an opportunity to get courtroom experience immediately — I was doing preliminary hearings before I even finished studying for the bar. I did love that aspect of it. But it was a lifestyle that was not suited to me, and so less than four months later I exited.

Before I left the DA’s office I reached out to a few people. Erika Johnson ’92, who is a Duke Law alum, was working for Michael Ovitz at Creative Artists Agency and said I might want to look at the agency business. It’s not the traditional practice of law, but you are dealing with contracts, you’re negotiating, you’re advocating for your clients, a lot of similar skill sets. She said she’d be happy to put my resume in with HR, so that’s exactly what happened. And after having gone to Tufts and graduated from Duke, I literally had to start as a trainee in the mailroom after going through a battery of probably seven different interviews.

My job was to push mail carts around the building and drop off mail in the different slots. I had to make coffee and fruit platters and get yelled at because the bananas were too ripe or the grapes were too mushy. Parts of me were like, “I cannot believe I have to do this. I’m more educated and have more work experience, I’m older than everybody in the mailroom.” But in entertainment you have to pay your dues, even with all those credentials.

My first client was from helping out a colleague. And that’s how I built my initial client list and then from there I was able to sign outside of the building and recruit people that I was particularly passionate about.

Abrams: What is the typical day of an agent like?

Meigs: My day will start around 6:30 or 7 when I make my London calls. About 9 or so, after I make breakfast for my kids, I’m in staff meetings. We’re talking about everything that’s going on around town, every project that’s happening at Warner Brothers, Fox, Sony, Disney, Netflix, which ones are looking for a director, which ones need a new writer, what are the roles that need to be filled, which ones are actually casting. There’s a lot of swapping of information.

I easily get 300 emails a day so I’m constantly on the phone and on emails in between meetings. There’s probably another

meeting or two in the afternoon with a client or potential client, and then in the evening I’m usually going to a meeting with an executive at a studio or a client or a manager, or going to a screening because obviously after the culmination of negotiating these deals you want to be able to see the work and see how it will be able to best leverage the next job. That usually ends around 9 or 10 p.m., then I’m catching up on emails for another hour. It’s a long day.

Abrams: It sounds like the connection to your legal training isn’t just contracts. It’s client service, talking to your client about roles and opportunities and their long-term goals.

Meigs: It can range from the negotiation of how much money they’re making to what their perks are on a particular movie. It could be the actual script, because when we close a deal it’s usually contingent on the script that was submitted to them being preapproved. I just got an email from a client saying, ‘I’m on set and I’m not anywhere in the script.’ That’s a problem. We need to have a call with the producers. So you’re dealing with the actual creative material too.

Abrams: I have a sense that being an agent has been a very white and male career path. Did you feel like a trailblazer?

Meigs: I don’t feel like a trailblazer but I’ve been told that I am. When I started at CAA, I was the only African-American female trainee. And when I became an agent, I was the second [AfricanAmerican female] motion picture talent agent in the history of the company. Today, almost 20 years later, I think they have had maybe five more. When you think about the people you turn on the tube to watch, or the movies that you go to see, pop culture artists represent a plethora of people of different backgrounds and cultures and races and genders, and our corporate entities should represent that as well, from the entry level all the way up.

Abrams: As an agent, are you in the position to be a change maker in the salary parity issue?

Meigs: Absolutely. Being in meetings where we’re talking about different deals that are being made, you certainly have a sense of what other actors and other writer-directors are making. One of my proudest moments as a young agent was when I was representing an actor and we were negotiating a sequel. The first movie had done really well. They made it for about $15 million and it went on to gross north of $80 million so it was very profitable for the studio, and in the sequel negotiation I was coached by my colleague and boss at the time that I should just close the deal at half a million. Looking at comps, I thought we should be getting $1 million. So I countered higher and ended up getting the $1 million for the client, who was an African-American male.

Maybe it’s me being aggressive, maybe it’s me having a much better understanding of how these deals get made that I decided to push forward, or maybe it’s me having a like-minded experience with this actor and saying, ‘Not only do I think that I should be getting more, but he should too,’ and making that my agenda. I was a little disappointed that my colleagues thought the lesser pay day was okay for that actor. d

James Bergin LLM ’93

JAMES BERGIN has spent most of the past two years negotiating and drafting agreements to get Johnson & Johnson’s COVID-19 vaccine to the world’s most vulnerable people.

When the new strain of coronavirus emerged and the threat it posed was becoming apparent in early 2020, Bergin was vice president of legal for Johnson & Johnson Innovation, whose JLABS unit supports over 700 startup companies in innovation hotspots around the world. In the legal department, he says, “it was all-hands-ondeck helping keep our incubators open during local and state shelter-in-place laws and allow over 50 of those startups to work on COVID-19 countermeasures.”

The longtime deal lawyer took on an even more direct role on COVID-19 — and got a front-row seat to history — when he became the first vice president of law for Johnson & Johnson Global Public Health in May 2020. He has since worked with multilateral organizations, governments, and pharmaceutical industry peers on policy initiatives to encourage governments to incentivize the development, testing, and worldwide deployment of COVID-19 vaccines and to ensure the equitable distribution of his company’s single-dose vaccine, in particular.

Now Bergin, whose unit also supports the distribution of vaccines and medicines for such other infectious diseases as Ebola, HIV, and tuberculosis, stays informed at a granular level on COVID developments around the world. With a team of colleagues, he is involved in direct negotiations with COVAX, the multinational framework established to support equitable global access to COVID vaccines. While richer countries pay for their doses, COVAX provides donor-funded vaccine doses for free to 92 low- and middle-income countries and non-governmental organizations working with vulnerable stateless populations, he explains.

Bergin has also been on the team that facilitated the U.S. government’s donation of tens of millions of doses of the J&J COVID-19 vaccine to more than 30 countries, and he directly negotiated an

agreement with the African Union’s Vaccine Acquisition Trust to purchase it for 43 member states and seven Caribbean Community countries. He notes that sales of the company’s vaccine during this emergency pandemic period are made only to governments and organizations on a not-for-profit basis.

“I’ve been really privileged to have this opportunity to try to help end this pandemic,” says Bergin, a member of the Law School’s International Advisory Board who received the Law Alumni Association’s International Alumni Award in 2019. “I also can’t believe how well my time at Duke and my career prepared me for this moment.”

Bergin has been a deal lawyer throughout his 24 years at J&J and earlier in private practice in his native Australia and in New York. He held leadership posts and handled contracting and complex transactions across seven J&J companies, led some of the largest acquisitions in the company’s history, and served as counsel for the pharmaceutical business covering the Asia-Pacific region before joining the Johnson & Johnson Innovation unit in 2015.

Having grown up on military bases along the east coast of Australia, Bergin studied law at Macquarie University in Sydney before joining Allens, a venerable international law firm, where he spent yearlong rotations in practices that included real estate, mergers and acquisitions, and insurance. “It was with the insurance group that I first got a taste of health care,” he says.

Encouraged by his firm to pursue an LLM abroad, he was persuaded to choose Duke Law over a number of programs in the U.K. and U.S. by a University of Sydney law professor who had spent a year at Duke and was certain that it would be the right place for him. It was.

“I learned about securities regulation with Professor [James] Cox and had other great mentors and teachers like Deborah DeMott and Walter Dellinger,” says Bergin, who was president of the International Bar Association and also played rugby on the Duke

graduate students’ team. “I had a blast.” He also got “very, very lucky” when the practitioner teaching a seminar in advanced securities regulation, Bob Hart ‘69, invited him to interview for an opening at his white-shoe New York law firm, Donovan, Leisure, Newton & Irvine.

Over four years at the firm, Bergin gained deep experience in mergers and acquisitions and venture capital transactions and did a lot of work with China “before it was cool,” largely due to the connections partner Edward Cox made when he accompanied his father-in-law, Richard Nixon ’37, on his groundbreaking 1972 presidential trip. “I learned venture capital work from him,” Bergin says of Cox. Several of the startups he worked on were in health care.

Recruited to J&J on the basis of that expertise, he made the move in November 1997 and calls its timing another stroke of luck: Donovan, Leisure unexpectedly dissolved several months later.

From day one Bergin found J&J’s law department and the company’s decentralized structure a good fit for him. “You would be assigned to a specific business and you would have to learn that business and be prepared to advise its leadership on its investments, its M&A, its employment law, and its litigation,” he says. “Johnson & Johnson is one of the most complicated companies you’ll ever get to work with. If you make it your mission to understand every little thing about how the company works, it ends up making you effective at getting things done.”

Bergin started at McNeil Specialty, a company that produced consumer products with a health angle such as, at the time, Splenda and Lactaid, and then worked with a joint venture focused on developing over-the-counter versions of prescription medications. He then joined Johnson & Johnson Health Care Systems, Inc., as lead lawyer and secretary, overseeing a contracting group responsible for the parent company’s biggest customers, including the U.S. government, hospital purchasing groups, and pharmaceutical benefits organizations. “It was very exciting to be on the board of that company,” he says.

A “happy accident” brought his focus back to M&A when, in 2006, J&J successfully bid on Pfizer’s consumer health care unit and another legal team was busy with a different acquisition. Bergin was tapped to lead the $16.6 billion deal, the biggest in the company’s history to that point, after which he spent six years heading a group of lawyers who handled all the deals for J&J’s medical device sector. That culminated, in 2012, in his leading the $21 billion acquisition of the Swiss orthopedic device maker Synthes, Inc.

Feeling ready to step away from M&A at that point, he took a post in Singapore as regional counsel for the pharmaceuticals group, serving on a leadership team that had to take into account the diverse health care needs of 24 nations, both developed and developing. Doing so conferred useful insights that he could not have picked up in the U.S., he says, using a hypothetical prostate cancer drug that adds six months to life expectancy as an example: While it might be in high demand in such developed countries as Australia and Japan, it would be less so in developing nations where life expectancy is lower but other diseases, such as tuberculosis, are prevalent. “Those basic diseases have to be prioritized over cancer,” he says.

Returning stateside as legal chief for the Johnson & Johnson Innovation unit allowed Bergin to return to his venture capital roots and experience helping entrepreneurs try to “take early science and

solve all sorts of problems through innovation.” That has continued in his current post with the Global Public Health unit, where his first assignment was to draft a contract with the World Health Organization (WHO) for a novel iris-scanning and interconnected telephone and messaging system that reminds people to come back for their second dose of the J&J Ebola vaccine and ensures it is administered to the same person. The system is used whenever a country has an Ebola outbreak.

For more than a year, Bergin has served as co-chair of the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers & Associations’ Vaccines Legal Committee, which advocates for and supports countries in developing vaccine injury compensation systems to encourage citizens to take vaccines as a pillar of pandemic preparedness. He points out that the number of countries to implement such injury compensation systems jumped from 26 to more than 145 as the pandemic unfolded, most spurred by WHO’s creation last February of a no-fault compensation system for its COVAX Facility. The same group advocates for appropriate limitations on liability for all those involved in the development, manufacture, distribution, and use of vaccines — an essential part of incentivizing the development of new vaccines and countermeasures to combat the next pandemic, he says.

“The risk of litigation disincentivizes people to step forward in the event of a pandemic, especially small companies with limited resources. When you explain it to a government like that, they get it immediately because they want small and big companies alike to set up business in their country and do the science work to prevent pandemics.”

Bergin describes his work on COVID as easily the most rewarding effort of his professional life, taking particular satisfaction in seeing the vaccines flowing on the contracts he helped put in place for up to 900 million residents of low and middle-income countries.

“I have never seen close up how the whole world galvanized to fix a problem,” he says. “It’s been fascinating to watch how governments, international organizations, and individual countries come together to deal with COVID and how they have worked with the private sector, including manufacturers like us, and with distributors and health care providers. And as we get more and more jabs in arms — it’s just very rewarding to watch that happen and be a small part of ending a pandemic.” d — Frances

Presma

“I have never seen close up how the whole world galvanized to fix a problem. ... And as we get more and more jabs in arms — it’s just very rewarding to watch that happen and be a small part of ending a pandemic.”

— James Bergin LLM ’93

Gabriel Carrillo III JD/MD ’23

LAW AND MEDICINE are among the most rigorous graduate courses of study. Few students set out to earn both professional degrees and fewer still undertake the programs concurrently. But Gabe Carrillo, a veteran who already holds a master’s from Duke, decided long ago to embark on the six-year journey.

Raised in Angier, N.C., Carrillo laid the groundwork for a career in medicine over more than eight years in the U.S. Navy, first as a hospital corpsman serving with the U.S. Marines and then as a cardiac device specialist stationed at the nation’s flagship military medical center. He added law to his career plan when he saw firsthand how the legal system can directly influence patient care.

While stationed at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center and Fort Belvoir Community Hospital, Carrillo had his first encounter with the arduous task of hospital management and says he was hooked thereafter. He recalls watching staff attorneys discuss the legal issues facing hospital administrators and saw how the effective delivery of medical services involves far more than scientific expertise and a commitment to patient care.

“I realized that medicine can be the sword in the fight against disease,” he says. “But I also learned that the law could serve as

the shield that drives health care in a new direction — a direction I hope to influence someday.”

Carrillo is now in his fifth year of medical studies at the Duke University School of Medicine and in his third year at Duke Law, where he has gained legal clinical skills through the Health Justice Clinic, Children’s Law Clinic, and summer internships, and where he currently serves as president of the Duke Law Veterans Society. He has long been involved with Duke’s Professional Student Veterans Council and engages with students across several graduate programs.

He has overlapped his medical and legal training by furthering a partnership between the Health Justice Clinic and Duke’s Obstetrics and Gynecology department aimed at training doctors and staff on pregnancy discrimination and employment laws relevant to clinical practice. Upon completing both degrees in 2023, Carrillo plans to attend residency in emergency medicine — something he says was born out of his clinical experiences in Afghanistan.

Carrillo describes his dream job as combining the practice of medicine, public health policy, and legal training in a way that emphasizes the development of future technologies related to artifi-

cial intelligence, machine learning, cybersecurity, and pandemic preparedness. His deep history with Duke has also inspired his desire to help manage hospitals’ interactions with government agencies and he hopes to serve alongside innovators at academic institutions in his home state.

Carrillo traces his interest in healing others to his mother’s nurturing spirit, having admired the way she cared for his seven siblings and the plants that filled their home.

Knowing early on that medicine was his calling but finding college out of reach financially even with a partial scholarship, Carrillo instead decided to take the “scenic route,” and joined the Navy, where he was quickly trained in operational emergency medicine and direct patient care. Enlisting also satisfied his inclination to follow in the footsteps of his late father, a Cuban immigrant who served two tours with the U.S. Army during Vietnam and his maternal grandfather, who served in the Coast Guard during World War II.

“There are many ways people can make a difference if they will only push hard — especially when times are tough,” he says. “I’ve learned that if you have the guts to jump feet first, the grit to see it through, and willingness to serve something larger than yourself, then you can really influence positive change.”

Carrillo’s naval service included deployments to Afghanistan and training in cardiovascular technology at the Naval School of Health Sciences where he graduated second in his class. Following his honorable discharge, he attended N.C. State University on the Post 911 GI Bill, completing a Bachelor of Science in human biology with a minor in neurotoxicology, conducting research into the effects of lead toxicity on child brain development, and graduating magna cum laude. He cemented his interest in clinical research while pursuing his master’s in biomedical science at Duke, one of the few institutions where he could pursue concurrent legal and medical degrees.

Still engaged with veterans’ health issues at Duke, Carrillo helped organize fellow medical students to administer thousands of COVID-19 vaccines to veterans at the Durham VA Medical Center last spring and summer. He says the VA hospitals offer important lessons for public health infrastructure and deliver effective treatments and services to millions, often at affordable prices.

“Unlike Medicare, the VA can negotiate drug prices, which is one major reason why VA health care costs are often lower,” he says, adding that he also respects and appreciates the health system’s patient-centered focus. “When a veteran walks in to be seen at the VA, we don’t ask ‘What can you afford?’ We ask, ‘How can we help serve you the way you served us?’ It is a very different mentality.”

Carrillo furthered his interest in patient care with enrollment in Duke’s Longitudinal Integrated Clerkship (LIC) program during his second year of medical school.

“The LIC program teaches medical students to value the connectedness with our patients the same way they may value the complexities of disease,” he says. “It’s important that we students learn to treat the person and not just the illness. The LIC program really focuses on that key aspect.”

Having immersed himself in a wide range of courses and clinics at the Law School related to health law and policy, Carrillo is hoping to someday help change the way medicine is delivered.

“There’s an opportunity to better understand how we can influence medicine through law, but also at the same time, influence the law through medicine,” he says. “For me, interviewing patients in

the exam room is very similar to interviewing clients. It’s a dynamic process, and the overlap is remarkable. That said, policymakers with real-world understanding of clinical practice could have a profound impact on the drafting of future laws. Many aspects of today’s health care system struggle to provide equity and fair access for the most basic health care needs. Unfortunately, much of this is rooted in legislative misunderstandings about what goes on in clinical practice.”

Noting that only a small fraction of published clinical research findings — derived at prohibitive cost — are directly applicable to clinical practice, Carrillo says he aims to make the research enterprise become more practical in design.

“Gabe’s perseverance, passion for improving society, and love of evidence-based reasoning are all qualities to which any future lawyer or doctor should aspire,” says Arti Rai, the Elvin R. Latty Professor of Law, an expert on health and administrative law, intellectual property, and innovation.

Carrillo brought a “unique toolkit” of insights drawn from his training in medicine as well as law to his work in the Health Justice Clinic, where students serve the needs of low-income clients facing debilitating illnesses, according to Clinical Professor Allison Rice, the clinic’s director. “It was invaluable in unravelling complicated medical-legal issues in our cases,” she says. “Gabe not only used those tools in his own casework, he also generously consulted on other students’ cases, helping them put together sophisticated legal theories to the benefit of our clients.”

Adds Clinical Professor Hannah Demeritt ’04, the clinic’s supervising attorney: “Gabe is also incredibly dedicated to serving underserved communities, and this is apparent in so much of the work he does.”

In addition to navigating two challenging graduate programs, Carrillo is raising two small children with his wife, a registered nurse who is also completing a degree program.

“Having a family keeps you motivated and challenges you to become more efficient in your daily calculus,” he says. “You learn how to manage your time effectively and balance competing priorities — the key is organization. I live and die by my calendar and little black date book.” d — Maria Bajgain

“Gabe’s perseverance, passion for improving society, and love of evidence-based reasoning are all qualities to which any future lawyer or doctor should aspire.”

— Professor Arti Rai

Alumni Notes

The Tenth Circuit Historical Society has published an oral history of Harold A. “Hal” Haddon ’66, a renowned trial lawyer and founding member of Haddon, Morgan and Foreman in Denver, where he is now special counsel. Among the topics Hal discusses: growing up on a Michigan family farm; his recruitment to Duke by Dean Elvin R. Latty out of a master’s program at the University of Michigan (on the recommendation of his Albion College roommate Charlie Campbell ’65); his engagement with the civil rights movement in Durham during law school; his work as one of Colorado’s first state public defenders; and his political engagement with the presidential campaign of Robert F. Kennedy and managing two successful Senate campaigns for Gary Hart. Hal also discusses his storied career in private practice representing such individual and corporate clients in high profile criminal and civil litigation as Kobe Bryant, Hunter S. Thompson, the family of JonBenét Ramsey, and the corporate manager of the Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Plant. The oral history is available in video and print formats at 10thcircuithistory.org/halhaddon d

1969

Charles Becton received a 2021 Distinguished Service Award from the Samuel DuBois Cook Society at Duke University, which recognizes, celebrates, and affirms the presence of African-American students, faculty, and staff at Duke. From Duke Today: “Charles Becton was a trailblazer advocating for racial and social justice on many fronts: as a member of the N.C. Court of Appeals, as a noted law professor, and as the first African-American man to hold the position as president of the North Carolina Bar Association.”

1972

Ron Frank has founded The Law Offices of Ronald W. Frank in Sewickley, Penn. He previously was partner and senior counsel at Blank Rome in Pittsburgh.

John Wester has received the Advocate’s Award, the highest honor given by the North Carolina Bar Association’s (NCBA) Litigation Section. The award is presented as merited, rather than annually, and “honors litigators who have high ethical standards, possess great skill and ability, demonstrate commitment to the highest level of service and to their clients, and exhibit

respect of and love for the law,” according to the NCBA. John, a business litigator in the Charlotte office of Robinson Bradshaw, is also the 2021 recipient of the NCBA’s Citizen Lawyer Award, which “recognizes and thanks lawyers who, in addition to their legal work, exemplify the ideals of a citizen lawyer by volunteering their time for worthy community or civic causes to improve the quality of life of those in their local or statewide communities.”

1973

Ward Greene has joined the Portland, Ore., firm of Farleigh Wada Witt as senior counsel. He has a varied transactional and litigation practice with a focus in commercial law, business reorganization, bankruptcy,

collections, employment law, and real estate matters. Ward is the founder and president of SAGE (Senior Advocates for Generational Equity), a Portland-based nonprofit organization inspiring people over 50 to give of their time, talent and passion to help future generations thrive.

1974

Curtis Collier has been honored with the establishment of an endowed scholarship in his name at Tennessee State University. Judge Collier has served since 1995 on the federal bench as judge on the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Tennessee. He served as chief judge of that court for seven years, taking senior status in 2014.

This section reflects notifications received between January 1 and August 31, 2021.

Karen Bethea-Shields ’74 received a 2021 Legal Legends of Color Award from the Minorities in the Profession Committee of the North Carolina Bar Association (NCBA). A longtime criminal defense lawyer and one of the first three Black women to graduate from Duke Law, Karen’s first case — immediately on passing the bar — was the successful defense of Joan Little, a young Black woman who became the first woman in United States history to be acquitted using the defense that she used deadly force to resist sexual assault. Karen was the first woman to be elected to a judgeship in Durham County; she served on the bench from 1980 to 1986. In an NCBA video, she advised attorneys of color to “never lose their passion for justice” and to always care about their clients. Ensuring the justice system “really becomes just for everyone” remains her goal, she said. d

1979

Michael Bellinger has joined Schiff Hardin’s white-collar defense and government investigations practice group as a partner in the New York office. He was previously co-chair of the internal investigations and white-collar defense group at Carter Ledyard & Milburn.

Richard Gergel’s critically acclaimed book, Unexampled Courage: The Blinding of Sgt. Isaac Woodard and the Awakening of President Harry Truman and Judge Waties Waring (Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2019), was the basis of a recent PBS “American Experience” documentary titled “The Blinding of Isaac Woodard.” Judge Gergel, of the U.S. District Court for the District of South Carolina, received the Duke Law Alumni Association’s 2021 Charles S. Murphy Award for Achievement in Civic Service. (See page 62.)

1980

Justin Klimko, president and CEO of Butzel Long, has received the Association for Corporate Growth (ACG) Detroit Lifetime Achievement Award. The award was presented as part of ACG Detroit’s Annual M&A All Star Awards. Justin is a board member and secretary of ACG Detroit.

Barbara Arnwine ’76, the president and founder of the Transformative Justice Coalition, received the honorary degree of Doctor of Laws from Duke University during Duke’s 2021 commencement ceremony on May 2. President Vincent Price (at right) highlighted her contributions to critical justice issues such as the passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1991 and the 2006 re-authorization of provisions of the Voting Rights Act, as well as her vocal advocacy for diversity programs, the preservation of affirmative action, and equitable practices across a wide range of areas. Barbara has served as executive director of the national Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, organized the national conference on African-American Women and the Law, serves as co-chair and facilitator of the National Commission for Voter Justice and the Voting Right Alliance, and is on the boards of directors of MomsRising and the African-American Policy Forum. d

Andromeda Monroe has been appointed chair of the Senior Lawyers Committee of The Florida Bar for a one-year term. She has a solo practice in the Miami-Ft. Lauderdale area.

1984

Gary Jack has been recognized by West Virginia Executive Magazine and West Virginia College of Law as

an inductee into the Lawyers & Leaders Class of 2020. Gary is senior corporate counsel for FirstEnergy, an electric utility spanning six states, and practices regulatory, real estate, litigation, and general corporate law.

1986

Kathleen Byrnes was named vice president for student life at Villanova University on April 1, having previously served as associate vice president for student life. During her 30-year tenure at Villanova she has worked to progress campus-wide initiatives, assist departments with student-related work, aid student organizations, and build leadership programs. Kathy also is board chair of the Association of Student Affairs at Catholic Colleges and Universities.

Brent Clinkscale has been elected president of the Atlanta International Arbitration Society. Brent is an independent arbitrator and managing member of Clinkscale Legal & Global Dispute Resolution, headquartered in Greenville, S.C.

David McKean’s new book, Watching Darkness Fall: FDR, His Ambassadors and the Rise of Adolf Hitler, will be published by St. Martin’s Press in November.

1987

Rob Harrington, chair of Robinson Bradshaw’s litigation department, has been included on Business North Carolina’s 2021 Power List. Rob, who is based in Charlotte, also serves on the firm’s diversity and inclusion and recruiting committees. He is the past chair of the Charlotte Mecklenburg Library’s

board of trustees and is co-chair of the library foundation’s CommonSpark campaign for the new main library campus.

1989

Yibing Mao has been appointed to the board of Las Vegas Sands Corp. She previously was chief legal counsel of Marriott International in the Asia Pacific.

Kenneth Remson has joined Goldberg Segalla as a partner in the firm’s global insurance services group in Los Angeles. He was previously with Woolls Peer Dollinger & Scher in Los Angeles and was a deputy attorney general for the state of Hawaii in the Civil Recoveries Division.

1990

John DeGroote, founder of Dallas-based DeGroote Partners, has been named a 2021 inductee into Lawdragon’s Hall of Fame. DeGroote Partners handles the mediation of complex business disputes.

John Hairr has been elected chair of the North Carolina Wildlife Federation’s (NCWF) board of directors. John has served on the NCWF’s board and its executive committee since 2017. He also chaired its governance committee from 2015 to 2020. John is a partner in the Charlotte office of Parker Poe Adams & Bernstein.

Charlie Lucas, managing member of Pope Flynn in Charlotte, N.C., has been elected as a trustee of the Mary Duke Biddle Foundation, which supports education and the arts in the Triangle region, as well as at Duke University.

Drew Rosenhaus, the co-founder and CEO of Rosenhaus Sport Representation in Miami, was featured in conversation during the first event of the 2021 symposium of the Duke Law Sports and Entertainment Law Society on April 9. He is a frequent national commentator on sports issues.

Rhonda Tobin has been elected managing partner at Hartford, Conn.-based Robinson+Cole. She is the first woman to lead the 175-year old firm. A trial lawyer, Rhonda has spent her entire law career with the firm, where her practice focuses on the litigation, arbitration, and mediation of complex disputes involving insurance and reinsurance coverage. She was recognized by the National Law Journal as an “Insurance Law Trailblazer” in its inaugural listing in 2021.

1991

Darla Pomeroy has been named senior advisor, Office of Domestic Finance at the U.S. Department of the Treasury. She earlier served as senior advisor for special situations for the Biden-Harris transition team. Darla has extensive domestic and international finance experience as an executive in the communications industry. She was a co-owner and senior vice president of corporate development at Edge Wireless, where she negotiated its successful sale to AT&T.

Dara Redler has been named interim chief legal officer and corporate secretary at the Canadian cannabis company, Tilray, following its recent merger with Aphria, a grower and consumer packaged goods manufacturer. Dara joined Tilray as general counsel in 2019.

Joel Reed has joined the board of trustees of The Christian Chronicle. He is executive vice president and general counsel for Stanley Martin Homes in Reston, Va.

1992

Norman Petty has been named general counsel of The Meet Group, owner of several mobile social networking services, headquartered in New Hope, Penn. He leads the legal team as well as the trust and safety team. Norman previously spent 25 years as a lawyer for Dow Jones advising its consumer division.

Geovette Washington, senior vice chancellor and chief legal officer at the University of Pittsburgh, has been elected chair of the board of trustees for the Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh, which oversees four major museums in the city: the Carnegie Museum of Art, Carnegie Museum of Natural History, Carnegie Science Center, and the Andy Warhol Museum. Geovette is the first Black person in the history of the institutions to head the museums board, which she joined in 2017.

Don Willett (JD/MA ‘92, LLM ‘16), a judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, delivered the 2020 B. Kenneth Simon Lecture at the Cato Institute’s annual Constitution Day symposium. He discussed how Americans’ civics illiteracy imperils the rule of law. He published an article, “Supreme Stalemates: Chalices, Jack-O’Lanterns, and Other State High Court Tiebreakers,” 169 U. Pa. L. Rev. 141 (2021), which examines how state supreme courts use various substitute-justice mechanisms to avert or break legal logjams. He has also joined the Baylor University Board of Regents.

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, Law360, BTI Client Service All Stars, D Magazine, and Thomson Reuters This list reflects notifications received by Aug. 31, 2021, and includes such designations as “Rising Stars.”

Ron Frank ’72

James Ummer ’72

Mark Prak ’80

Kirk Warner ’83

Dan Douglass ’85

Rhonda Tobin ’90

Caryn Coppedge McNeill ’91

Paul Genender ’94

Subhash Viswanathan ’95

Alex Parker ’96

Norwood Blanchard III ’99

Alex Dale ’01

Krista Patterson ’06

John Jo ’06

Yaniv Adar ’08

Justin Outling ’08

James Healy ’09

Isaac Linnartz ’09

Joseph Apatov ’11

Serena Rwejuna ’13

Joseph Silver ’13

Sam Bivins ’14

1993

Adam Cohen has been named interim president of the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation (OMRF). He joined OMRF in 2002 and has served as its chief legal officer since 2004. For the past 13 years, Adam held the title of senior vice president and general counsel, overseeing a variety of functions that currently include technology ventures, public affairs, safety, and comparative medicine.

David Ross has been named chair of the international trade, investment, and market access practice group at WilmerHale in Washington, D.C. He is also a member of the firm’s public policy and legislative affairs practice group.

1994

Elizabeth Barry has joined the Martha Newman Realty Group as a broker/ realtor based in Chapel Hill, N.C.

David Lewis has been named managing partner of the Phoenix office of DLA Piper, where he is a corporate and securities lawyer.

Sterling Spainhour has been elected as an independent director to the board of directors of Gray Television, Inc. Sterling is senior vice president, general counsel and corporate secretary, and chief compliance officer for Georgia Power, where he oversees corporate governance, corporate compliance, risk management, security and legal services functions, and serves on the company’s management council.

1995

Natalie Sanders has been selected as one of the Triad Business Journal’s “Outstanding Women in Business” (2021). She is of counsel in the Greensboro, N.C., office of Brooks Pierce.

1996

Marcel Imery has been named director of business development at JTC Group’s New York City office, where he provides structuring services to private and corporate clients across U.S. and Latin American markets. He earlier co-founded and co-managed a top-tier law firm in Venezuela.

Darren Jackson has been appointed by Gov. Roy Cooper to a vacancy on the North Carolina Court of Appeals. Darren has served over a decade in the N.C. House of Representatives, including two terms as the minority leader. He also served on the N.C. Sentencing Commission and the N.C. Courts Commission.

1997

Odetta MacLeish-White has been named director of Georgia initiatives by the Center for Community Progress, tasked with designing and implementing strategies to help stabilize neighborhoods and grow urban and rural communities across Georgia. Odetta is a long-time community development leader and former managing director of the TransFormation Alliance.

Alan Whitehurst has joined the Washington, D.C., office of McKool Smith as a principal. He is a trial lawyer specializing in intellectual property and unfair competition cases. He previously practiced at Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan.

1998

Rob Bryan has been elected to a fouryear term, beginning July 1, as a trustee of the University of North Carolina Board of Trustees. He recently started Break Bread Ventures, a franchisee of Slim Chickens, with two partners and serves as the executive vice president for development, legal, and people. He was previously a partner at Womble Carlyle, and chief development officer of Cardinal Innovations Healthcare Solutions.

Niles Bryant has been promoted to senior vice president and chief investment officer at Bowdoin College with responsibility for its $1.8 billion endowment. He joined the Bowdoin staff in 2020 as director of investments. He previously was an attorney and investment professional for the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation.

1999

Michael Anstett has been elected partner at Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson, where he is a member of the litigation department and government contracts practice resident in Washington, D.C.

Chad Burkhardt has been named the first general counsel at Dallasbased hemp processor Generation Hemp, Inc. Chad previously was vice president, general counsel, and corporate secretary at Transatlantic Petroleum, Ltd.

Michael Chiaravalloti has joined private equity firm RedBird Capital Partners as counsel and chief compliance officer. He previously spent 15 years with J.P. Morgan’s alternative investment group.

Alan “Trip” MacCracken has joined the NFL’s Jacksonville Jaguars as director of roster management. Trip is in his 20th season with the NFL, last serving in the league from 2010 to 2017 as the director of football administration for the Kansas City Chiefs. He served as the director of player personnel for the XFL’s New York Guardians from 2019 to 2020.

John Shepherd, former director of legal policy at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, has joined Hunton Andrews Kurth as a partner in the firm’s energy and infrastructure team. Based in Washington, D.C., his energy regulatory practice focuses on rulemaking proceedings, litigation, investigations, and appeals.

2000

Sarah Schott has joined the health benefits company Gravie as general counsel and chief compliance officer. She previously was the chief compliance officer at Northwestern Mutual.

2001

David Borde is leading the utility strategy and regulatory efforts of Entergy Corp. and managing transformation intiatives across the company’s five utility operating companies. David joined Entergy in 2009 and has held leadership positions in corporate development and finance.

Collin Cox has joined Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher as a partner and leads the firm’s ligitation practice in Houston. He was formerly a partner with Yetter Coleman.

Carol Lin (LLM ‘01, SJD ‘05) has been elected chairperson of the Board of Directors of Taiwan’s Financial Ombudsman Institution, which oversees financial dispute set-

tlement and financial education. She remains a full-time faculty member at National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University School of Law in Taiwan.

2001

Brad Whitehurst has been elevated to chief financial officer of Energy Transfer. He joined the company in 2014 and has served as executive vice president and head of tax and managed the company’s information technology and business optimization divisions. He also serves on Energy Transfer’s investment committee and is a director of USA Compression Partners.

2002

David Searle has joined Tesla, Inc. as deputy general counsel and senior director of compliance. He most recently was international chief ethics and compliance officer at Walmart.

2004

Xavier Baker has joined the healthcare industry team at Sheppard, Mullin, Richter & Hampton as a partner in the Washington, D.C. office. He previously practiced at Crowell & Moring.

John Miller is a practicing family medicine physician. He has joined the staff at Olympic Medical Center in Port Angeles, Wash., after running a private family medicine practice in Mississippi.

2005

Gretchen Bellamy has joined McDonald’s Corp. as senior director — diversity, equity & inclusion for international markets. She previously served as a senior director in the Office of Diversity and Inclusion at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Dylan Fuge has been appointed as general counsel at the New Mexico Energy, Minerals and Natural Resources Department. He previously was responsible for nationwide local permitting at T-Mobile. Dylan earlier spent six years at the U.S. Department of the Interior as counselor to the director of the Bureau of Land Management and attorney adviser to the Office of the Solicitor.

Timothy Gould has been appointed by North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper as a superior court judge in Judicial District 19C serving Rowan County. He had served as an assistant district attorney in Rowan County since 2009.

Adrienne McFadden has been named chief medical officer at Buoy Health, a Boston-based digital health company. Adrienne, who also earned an MD at Duke University, most recently served as vice president for Medicaid clinical at Humana Insurance.

2006

Audry Casusol has joined Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton as a partner in the New York City office. Her practice focuses on employment law, executive compensation, and employee benefits matters. Audry previously was a partner at Sidley Austin.

Adam Doerr, a litigator at Robinson

Bradshaw, has received a 40 Over 40 Award from the Charlotte Ledger. The awards celebrate local unsung heroes 40 years or older who are doing great things in the Charlotte community. In late 2020, Adam led a pro bono effort to facilitate equity in the way the North

Carolina Department of Revenue distributed Extra Credit Grants and to assist and raise awareness of the application process for receiving COVID-19 relief aid. He is in his second year leading the Mecklenburg County Bar’s Diversity & Inclusion Committee and he recently served as chair of the Bar’s Charlotte Legal Diversity Clerkship program.

Marcus LeBeouf has joined the National Hockey League’s Chicago Blackhawks as the team’s first general counsel. He joins the Blackhawks after almost four years as assistant general counsel of the National Basketball Association’s Charlotte Hornets. Marcus is among the first three Black legal chiefs employed by an NHL team, all of whom have been recruited within the past year.

Ian Millhiser has authored The Agenda: How a Republican Supreme Court is Reshaping America (Columbia Global Reports, 2021). Ian is a senior correspondent at Vox Media, Inc., where he focuses on the Supreme Court, the Constitution, and the decline of liberal democracy in the United States. He earlier was a correspondent at ThinkProgress.

Amy Yeung, general counsel and chief privacy officer at Lotame Solutions, Inc., has been recognized by Law.com and Corporate Counsel as a 2021 Women, Influence & Power in Law honoree in the “Thought Leadership — In House” category.

2007

Shardul Desai has joined the Washington, D.C., office of Holland & Knight as a partner focusing on cybersecurity, data privacy, and white-collar defense and government investigation. He previously was a federal prosecutor in the Cyber and National Security Section and the Economic Crimes Section at the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Pennsylvania.

Carlton Fleming has joined Sidley’s global life sciences practice as partner in the firm’s San Francisco office, where he represents leading life sciences and technology companies. Carlton was previously a partner at Cooley.

Giovanna Moscoso has been appointed as an independent director to the board of directors of Palladium One Mining, Inc. She previously was a partner, vice president, and assistant general counsel at Barrick Gold Corporation.

2008

Daniel Simon has joined McDermott Will & Emery as a restructuring partner in the firm’s Atlanta office. He previously was a partner and associate at DLA Piper.

Sarah Hawkins Warren, a justice on the Georgia Supreme Court, was the featured commencement speaker, on May 8, at Berry College in Mount Berry, Ga., where she serves on the board of trustees.

2009

Jennifer Brevorka has been promoted to counsel in the Toronto litigation boutique Henein Hutchison, where she practices civil and criminal law. She frequently represents officials or executives accused of wrongdoing by employers, prosecutors, or government regulators.

Genaira Tyce has joined Ackerman’s New York office as a labor and employment law partner. She previously was a senior field attorney for the National Labor Relations Board.

2010

Virginia Fitt has been promoted to vice president and head of legal and compliance for biopharmaceutical company ChemoCentryx, Inc. She

joined the company in 2020 as head of commercial law and compliance. She previously served as counsel at Alexion Pharmaceuticals and GSK.

David Fry has been honored by the ACLU of Delaware for his contributions to voting rights litigation in the 2020 elections. He has worked on several cases with the ACLU of Delaware in recent years. David is a partner at Shaw Keller in Wilmington, where his practice focuses on patent infringement and complex commercial litigation.

Beth Hatef has joined the international food and beverage practice at Davis Wright Tremaine as counsel in the firm’s Washington, D.C., office. Beth’s practice focuses on alcohol regulation and distribution issues. She previously practiced at McDermott, Will & Emery.

David Mandell has recently completed a two-year term as legal counsel to the Office of the President of the Republic of Palau.

Steve McIntyre has been elected partner in the Los Angeles office of O’Melveny, where he represents clients in civil and criminal investigations, government enforcement actions, and high-stakes private litigation.

Catherine Singer has been elected shareholder at GM Law, a boutique litigation firm in Kansas City, Mo. She and her husband, Daniel, welcomed a second child, Rigby Singer, on Nov. 23, 2020.

2011

Cassandra Lenning has been promoted to partner in the New York office of employment law firm Outten & Golden. She is part of the firm’s individual practice group where she represents employees and executives in litigation, arbitration, and negotiation matters.

Matt Tappin has been appointed vice president of corporate development at Stem, Inc., a global leader in artificial intelligence-driven clean energy storage services. He also joins the Stem executive leadership team. He previously held senior corporate development positions at Royal Dutch Shell and Centrica.

Alex Wilson, a corporate partner in the Raleigh office of Wyrick Robbins, has been appointed to the North Carolina State Banking Commission by Gov. Roy Cooper. The commission supervises, directs, and reviews the activities of the Office of the Commissioner of Banks under North Carolina banking laws.

Erica Wilson has been elected partner at Troutman Pepper, where her practice focuses on corporate law and mergers and acquisitions in the Berwyn, Penn., office.

2012

Zach Anderson has joined Chamberlain Hrdlicka’s Atlanta office as an associate. His practice is primarily devoted to commercial litigation and construction law. He previously worked at litigation boutique Mills Paskert Divers in Atlanta.

Nakita Cuttino has joined the faculty of Georgetown Law as an associate professor of law. She previously was a visiting assistant professor of law at Duke Law and earlier practiced as a corporate associate with Simpson Thacher & Bartlett in Houston and New York, where she specialized in complex debt finance transactions. Nakita’s scholarship examines the interplay between financial innovation, private ordering, and regulation to address economic inequality.

Jennifer Dickey has been named associate chief counsel at the U.S. Chamber Litigation Center, the litigation arm of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Jennifer most recently was acting assistant attorney general and principal deputy assistant attorney general in the Civil Division at the U.S. Department of Justice.

Sarah Elliott has been named partner at Porter Hedges, based in Houston. She represents clients on a variety of corporate matters with a focus on debt and equity finance.

Shamika Haldipurkar has started a direct-to-consumer brand of beauty and skin care products, “d’you,” in Mumbai. The brand’s first product, a multi-purpose product called Hustle, recently won a Best Serum in India award at the Micro Beauty Awards.

Hassan Kanu has joined Reuters as a full-time columnist, writing on issues of justice and equality under the law. He previously was legal editor at Bloomberg BNA.

J.P. Long has been elevated to partner at Finnegan, Henderson, Farabow, Garrett & Dunner in Washington, D.C., where he assists clients with various intellectual property matters involving high technology, including litigation, licensing, and patent portfolio management.

Ryan O’Quinn has been elevated to partner at Finnegan, Henderson, Farabow, Garrett & Dunner in Reston, Va., where he maintains a versatile practice focusing on U.S. district court patent litigation, post-grant proceedings at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, patent prosecution, and portfolio management and counseling.

Serena Rwejuna, an associate in the energy practice at Jones Day in Washington, D.C., has been nominated by the firm to serve as a 2021 Leadership Council on Legal Diversity (LCLD) fellow. The LCLD Fellows Program is designed for diverse, high-potential lawyers working in law firms and in-house legal departments.

Joseph Silver, a partner at the disability and personal injury law firm Silver & Silver, has been reappointed as co-chair of the social security disability committee of the Philadelphia Bar Association. He also co-chairs the association’s disability law committee. Joseph represents disabled Social Security claimants at both the administrative and federal court levels.

2014Mary Pat Dwyer has joined the Brennan Center for Justice as a liberty and national security fellow. She previously was litigation counsel at O’Melveny & Myers in Washington, D.C.

Prerna Dhoop has joined the faculty of the National Law School of India University, Bangalore as an assistant professor. She taught at the National University of Legal Studies and Research, Hyderabad-Telangana, India from 2016 to 2019.

2016

Hunter Bruton has joined the Washington, D.C., office of Jones Day, where he focuses on appellate advocacy and motions practice. He clerked for United States Supreme Court Associate Justice Samuel A. Alito, Jr., during the 2019-2020 term of the Court.

Elliot Chen has joined the Los Angeles office of Ervin Cohen & Jessup, where he is an associate in the firm’s litigation practice group, focusing on complex business and corporate litigation.

2017

Rosemary Chandler Wells has joined the Charlotte office of Robinson Bradshaw where she practices corporate law, with a focus on mergers and acquisitions and private equity transactions. She was previously an attorney at McGuireWoods in Charlotte.

2018

Cheri Beasley has joined the litigation and appellate teams at McGuireWoods in Raleigh as a partner. She most recently served as chief justice of the Supreme Court

of North Carolina, having served on that court since 2012. Prior to that, she served on the N.C. Court of Appeals and as a district court judge.

Mark Davis was nominated by Gov. Roy Cooper and has been appointed special superior court judge on the North Carolina Business Court for a term that began July 1. Judge Davis is also visiting distinguished jurist in residence at Elon University School of Law. Previously he was an associate justice on the Supreme Court of N.C., and an associate judge on the N.C. Court of Appeals.

Chaniece Mulligan has joined the Atlanta office of Kilpatrick Townsend & Stockton where she is an associate in the mergers, acquisitions, and securities practice. She previously was an associate at Skadden, Arps in New York.

2020

Samantha Smith has joined the Dallas office of Weil Gotshal & Manges as an associate in the commercial litigation practice.

Congratulating the 2021 Law Alumni Association award recipients

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.

Richard Gergel ’79 Judge, United States District Court for the District of South Carolina Charleston

CHARLES S. MURPHY AWARD FOR ACHIEVEMENT IN CIVIC SERVICE

Venroy July ’07 Partner, Dickinson Wright PLLC Washington, D.C.

YOUNG ALUMNI AWARD

Liz. A. Gustafson ’86 Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and Counsel to the Dean

A. KENNETH PYE AWARD FOR EXCELLENCE IN EDUCATION

Kodwo Ghartey-Tagoe ’88 Executive Vice President, Chief Legal Officer, and Corporate Secretary, Duke Energy Charlotte

OUTSTANDING VOLUNTEER SERVICE AWARD

Ralph B. Everett ’76 Telecommunications lawyer, policy expert, and leader in civic and government engagement Former president and CEO of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies Washington, D.C.

CHARLES S. RYNE AWARD FOR PROFESSIONAL ACHIEVEMENT

Gitanjali Workman LLM ’02 General Counsel and Chief Operating Officer of Soros Capital Management LLC New York

INTERNATIONAL ALUMNI AWARD

In Memoriam

Reflecting notifications received between February 2 and September 27, 2021

Class of 1949

Charles Fuller Blanchard March 10, 2021

Class of 1951

Edward Arthur Loeser August 28, 2021

Class of 1954

Seymour Garland Clark, Jr. March 2, 2021

W. Richard Kelly, Jr. February 2, 2021

Class of 1955 Trent Calvin Bowen March 15, 2021

Class of 1956 Carlyle C. ‘Connie’ Ring, Jr. August 19, 2021

Class of 1957 Irwin Lawrence Dickman July 20, 2021

Class of 1958 John F. Lowndes February 12, 2021

Class of 1964

Walter T. Johnson, Jr. July 24, 2021

Class of 1965

Reginald Eugene Burleigh August 31, 2021

Robert S. Rankin, Jr. May 24, 2021

Class of 1966

Richard W. Buhrman August 9, 2021

Robert D. Cabe May 14, 2021

Class of 1967 William Christopher Barrier July 3, 2021

Class of 1968 Donald Bradley Brooks February 13, 2021

R. Bertram Greener March 23, 2021

Class of 1970 Richard H.G. Cunningham III July 4, 2021

William F. Robinson, Jr. March 8, 2021

Class of 1971 Paul R. Caldwell February 13, 2021

James R. Fox August 15, 2021

Class of 1972 Jack LaSonde February 12, 2021

Cym H. Lowell February 23, 2021

Class of 1973 Sherrie Louise Gibble April 27, 2021

Class of 1974

Anne Maxwell Dellinger

April 21, 2021

Class of 1976

Jamie Lee Hingle May 18, 2021

Class of 1977

James E. Starnes April 5, 2021

William H. Pauley III July 5, 2021

Class of 1978 William Bernice Bunn III April 9, 2021

Class of 1981 Richard John Sherback March 15, 2021

Class of 1988

Jeffrey J. Wang February 13, 2021

Class of 2001 Kevin Richard Jones August 15, 2020

Class of 2011

Aonghus Edward Cheevers April 6, 2020

Sua Sponte

Duke Law celebrated the Class of 2020 with a Recognition Ceremony in Page Auditorium on Sept. 25. Dean Kerry Abrams welcomed more than 100 alumni in caps and gowns, as well as cheering family and friends, and many more via livestream, to recognize, in person, their achievement in completing their legal studies and launching their careers as the coronavirus pandemic unfolded.

“The more than 300 members of the Class of 2020 are unique not just because they were the first to graduate having taken classes on Zoom and final exams from home,” said Abrams. “They were also the first class to hold their graduation celebration online, with family and friends watching live from around the world.”

Speaking on behalf of her JD and LLM classmates, Maddy Mumma ’20 celebrated the diverse postgraduate achievements, activities, and milestones — professional, pro bono, and personal — they had reported. “But when asked what you were proud of accomplishing this past year, one answer was far and beyond the most common, and I was happy to see that it was unrelated to work,” she said. “Most of us were proudest of having maintained and strengthened relationships with family and friends, old and new, during a largely virtual year, including our Duke Law classmates. That’s quite the accomplishment given all that we have been through.”

Nita Farahany ’04, PhD ’06, the Robinson O. Everett Professor of Law and professor of philosophy, impressed on the class the importance of celebration “for resilience, character, and living a meaningful life.”

Said Farahany: “Sometimes, it takes extraordinary effort to choose to celebrate when we feel like we’re just trying to survive. But it may be that our darkest hours are the most important ones to reach for things to celebrate in life. …

“Before you turn your focus back to your next big challenge or life goal, take some time, belated as it is, to really soak up your accomplishment of graduating from law school. Our celebrations may not look like they used to — they may be smaller, masked, and more distanced from one another. But it’s never been more important to find new ways to mark the occasion.” d

“Sometimes, it takes extraordinary effort to choose to celebrate when we feel like we’re just trying to survive. But it may be that our darkest hours are the most important ones to reach for things to celebrate in life.”

— Professor Nita Farahany ’04, PhD ’06

Professor Nita Farahany

2020 class speaker Maddy Mumma