Duke Law Magazine Spring 2023

Spring 2023 | Volume 42 Number 1

The pandemic years brought significant changes to law firms.

Many have been a long time coming.

Plus: Seven alumni who pivoted during the pandemic

Contents

Spring 2023 Volume 42 Number 1

DEAN

Kerry Abrams ASSOCIATE DEAN, COMMUNICATIONS, MARKETING, AND EVENTS

Andrew Park EDITOR

Frances Presma CONTRIBUTING WRITERS

Jeannie Naujeck Andrew Park Frances Presma Sean Rowe Eric Surber Melinda Vaughn ART DIRECTION & DESIGN

Marc Harkness

The pandemic years brought significant changes to law firms.

Many have been a long time coming and offer a template for a new workplace culture.

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ILLUSTRATION

Sol Cotti Marc Harkness PHOTOGRAPHY

Colin Huth Ken Huth Jared Lazarus Megan Mendenhall Sean Rowe Les Todd DIGITAL PRODUCTION

John Bigelow Marc Harkness Valerie Marino Frances Presma Michael Wright Sean Rowe

Plus: Seven alumni who pivoted during the pandemic 2 10 46 56 63 64

Dean’s Message The Commons Faculty Focus Profiles Alumni Notes In Memoriam Sua Sponte

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ALUMNI NOTES EDITOR

Janse Haywood

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

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

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The Commons Ideas, achievements, and events from around Duke Law School

Mary Aline Fertin JD/LLM ’23, Catherine Gorey ’25, members of the Bass Connections research team, and Amelia Ashton Thorn ’10, the co-team leader, spoke about their work at the October meeting of the N.C. Supreme Court Chief Justice’s Task Force on ACEs-Informed Courts, held at Duke’s Sanford School of Public Policy.

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Up to 90% of juvenile offenders and 75% of adult offenders in the U.S. report at least one traumatic event early in life.

Bolch Judicial Institute to offer trauma-informed courts curriculum to N.C. judges

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HE BOLCH JUDICIAL INSTITUTE is moving forward with plans to expand its trauma-informed courts curriculum by offering it to newly elected and appointed judges in the state, beginning next summer.

The institute’s trauma education program aims to educate judges about the impacts of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and offer tools to help them translate that knowledge into practices that better serve people who are involved in the justice system.

By developing educational programs for judges and conducting research measuring the effects of trauma-informed courtroom practices, the institute hopes to support courts in achieving the goals of the North Carolina Chief Justice’s Task Force on ACEsInformed Courts and to improve courtroom experiences for North Carolina citizens.

The institute offered a pilot course, developed by Assistant Director Amelia Ashton Thorn ’10, to a small group of district judges and court administrators in 2021. The N.C. Administrative Office of the Courts’ (NCAOC) education committee later approved a provisional plan for the institute to offer an educational program on the effects of trauma to all new judges beginning this year. A full day of programming — on the brain science of trauma, statewide cross-sector efforts to increase trauma-informed practices, and practical tips on how to create more trauma-informed courtrooms — will become part of the curriculum for new judges orientation, beginning with the N.C. District Court Judges’ annual conference.

“The Chief Justice’s Task Force seeks to set the national standard on how to educate the entire judicial system, and the public, on trauma-informed practices,” said NCAOC Training and Services Director Mike Silver.

Understanding the impact of trauma

The economic and social costs of ACEs have been researched since the 1990s, beginning with a groundbreaking CDC-Kaiser Permanente ACE Study, which found an association between traumatic experiences and poor health care outcomes. Trauma changes the brain, increasing activity in the amygdala, which controls the fight or flight response, while suppressing development of the pre-frontal cortex, which governs impulse control and future planning. These changes leave traumatized people susceptible to risky and aggressive behavior: Up to 90% of juvenile offenders and 75% of adult offenders in the U.S. report at least one traumatic event early in life. Research has similarly shown that exposure to trauma makes people more likely to enter the court system, and failure to effectively address trauma makes it harder to exit.

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The Commons Despite recent efforts to implement trauma-informed practices in the judicial context, research has focused on the impact of trauma-focused therapies for individuals involved in the justice system, showing effects such as a reduction in violent behavior. However, the extent to which positive impacts may arise from courtroom-based practices is not yet known.

During the 2021 pilot course, which was held virtually, participants heard presentations on three topics: the science of trauma; the trauma movement in North Carolina; and applying trauma skills from the bench. Presenters included judges and trauma experts. Immediately following the pilot, Eva McKinsey, then a doctoral candidate in North Carolina State University’s Applied Social and Community Psychology Program, led a feedback session to hear judges’ reactions to the training. She and Thorn also conducted in-depth follow-up interviews three months later with participating judges to assess the impact of the training. With help from a team of N.C. State undergraduate students, McKinsey analyzed both sets of feedback to glean 11 essential recommendations for future trauma education programs. The results of their analysis were published in the November 2022 issue of Judicature.

Bench card offers information on trauma, tools, at a glance

Another milestone of the Chief Justice’s ACEs Task Force has been the creation and distribution of an ACEs-Informed Courts Bench Card to all North Carolina prosecutors and judges. The trauma education subcommittee of the Task Force, led by Thorn, created the bench card with input from trauma education leaders, including the National Child Traumatic Stress Network (co-led by Duke) and judges who shared their own trauma-informed practices. The bench card delivers an abbreviated version of the trauma-informed courts curriculum, along with simple, cost-free recommendations for how judges can make their courts more trauma-responsive. For example, the card includes advice on docket scheduling, de-escalation, transparency, and communication, as well as some recommendations tailored specifically to interacting with children in the courtroom.

“The bench card was truly a team effort between Task Force leaders, academics, doctors, and judges,” Thorn said. “It reflects some of the current best practices in trauma-informed judging. We hope it will serve as a helpful resource that judges can keep on hand in court — ultimately benefitting court-users and judges alike.”

An eye to the future

L–R: Catherine Gorey ’25, Mary Aline Fertin JD/LLM ’23, and Amelia Ashton Thorn ’10, following their presentation to the N.C. Supreme Court Chief Justice’s Task Force on ACEs-Informed Courts

Measuring impact

In addition to providing feedback to improve the training sessions, the judges also pointed toward the need for new research.

“Following the pilot training program, it became clear that the judges are looking for evidence that trauma education and restructuring their courtroom to align with trauma-informed principles actually works,” McKinsey said. “Currently, there is almost no scholarship looking at this specific question: What are the impacts of trauma-informed practices in the courtroom?”

That question prompted McKinsey and Thorn to apply for a Duke University Bass Connections research grant. Throughout the current academic year, a project team of undergraduate and graduate students are collecting data for a novel empirical study on the real-world impacts of trauma-informed courtroom-based practices.

“We were thrilled to have so many outstanding members of the Duke student community — undergrads, graduate students, and professors alike — join this groundbreaking research team,” Thorn said. “We are eager to find empirical answers to judges’ questions about how to effectively interact with the citizens who pass through the courthouse doors — questions that go to the heart of our mission at Bolch, which is to promote rule of law principles through scholarship.”

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The institute’s trauma-informed courts initiative is funded in part through a gift from the HopeStar Foundation (formerly the Winer Family Foundation), a Charlotte-based nonprofit that supports initiatives focused on the health and development of children and families. Elizabeth H. Star, founder and president of the foundation, said that the program supports its mission to improve the health and well-being of families in North Carolina while also developing a national model for other states to expand upon.

The institute often fields requests from other states for input into their own court trainings and curricula.

“The Bolch Judicial Institute is becoming a leader in this area,” Star said. “Once we finish this embedding of the trauma-informed courts program, this will be a national model. Then, in partnership with the institute, the HopeStar Foundation wants to expand this program nationwide. We want to take it to other states, so that their court leadership and chief justices can leverage this research and expand the curriculum within their individual states.”

The Bolch Judicial Institute is grateful for the continued partnership and support to the trauma initiative from the HopeStar Foundation, the Kellen Foundation, Stanley A. Star ’61 and Elizabeth Star, Peter Kahn ’76 of Williams & Connolly, John “Buddy” Wester ’72 of Robinson Bradshaw, and Russell Robinson ’56, BA ’54 and Sally Robinson BA ’55.

pro bono

Duke Law student volunteers and their supervisors at the “Second Chance Wilmington” launch

Second Chance Wilmington STUDENT ATTORNEYS GAIN Launching Through a partnership with LANC, seven students spent their October break from classes in coastal New Hanover County, launching the county’s CRITICAL SKILLS WHILE new Second Chance Wilmington initiative and helping 25 clients expunge HELPING CLIENTS CLEAR more than 150 records.

During the three-day expunction clinic, the student team — Hannah CRIMINAL RECORDS Bloom ’24, Elaine Gao ’24, Yuchen Han ’24, Lok Ho JD/LLMLE ’25,

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VER THE FALL SEMESTER, dozens of Duke Law student volunteers gained critical legal skills by helping almost 70 North Carolinians take steps to expunge their criminal records.

Through initiatives coordinated by the Law School’s Office of Public Interest and Pro Bono in partnership with such organizations as the Durham Expunction & Restoration (DEAR) Program and Legal Aid of North Carolina (LANC), students assisted clients with removing criminal records that can impede access to secure housing, employment, and education.

“Helping clients with expunctions represents the perfect example of experiential learning through meaningful pro bono work because it requires our law students to use a wide range of legal skills, including statutory analysis, record review, and document drafting, but also serves to develop important soft skills such as active listening, empathy, and the ability to explain complex legal concepts in a way that a non-attorney understands,” said Director of Pro Bono and Supervising Attorney D.J. Dore. (Read more, page 6.)

and Mujib Jimoh LLM ’23, Nargiz Kazimova LLM ’23, and Courtney Schrater ’24 — interviewed and counseled clients, analyzed their records for expunction eligibility, and drafted petitions, presenting several at hearings in the district and superior courts. Ayana Robinson, the supervising attorney of LANC’s statewide Expunction Unit, selected clients and organized supervisory staff, including LANC paralegals and Dore. The team worked closely with the District Attorney’s Office for New Hanover and Pender Counties, as well as the New Hanover Clerk of Court. They also spent time networking with the Public Defender’s Office, local judges and elected officials, and law enforcement.

The students said they derived important lessons on working with the law and with people impacted by it from their fall break service, which including after-hours volunteering in the New Hanover County Teen Court program that offers juveniles facing misdemeanor charges a diversionary option to the formal criminal legal system.

“The most valuable skill I learned was how to effectively communicate according to whom I was speaking with,” said Ho. “For instance, I found that presenting my findings to my supervising attorney is different from explaining the expunction process to my client.”

Added Han: “We should imagine ourselves in the situations of other people, including clients with criminal records. Abandon complicated professional terms and use straight and easy words to let others understand your point.”

Dore commended the Wilmington-area partners for providing the students with a meaningful pro bono experience. “I’m constantly impressed by the motivated, passionate students Duke Law can bring to bear, but it’s our local partners that tell us where to focus our students’ efforts and energy for maximum effect.”

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pro bono

The Commons Helping individuals recovering from addiction move ahead

Nearly 40 students from Duke Law’s Fair Chance Project offered expungement assistance to 25 residents of Triangle Residential Options for Substance Abusers (TROSA), a nationally-recognized residential program focused on recovery from substance abuse, during a November clinic sponsored by DEAR, LANC, and Duke Law. Having worked with supervising attorneys in advance to review each resident’s case for expunging old convictions for nonviolent offenses, dismissed charges, and acquittals — which, in North Carolina, remain on record — and to prepare necessary petitions, the students then met with their clients individually during the pop-up clinic.

TROSA resident Samuel Downey said he came away from his meeting with a student feeling more informed about his options for dealing with the felony record that has sunk some of his job applications, and more hopeful about his future.

“We had a good conversation,” Downey said. “They really broke down what I needed to know as far as letting me know what I could pursue as far as my criminal record.”

For John Godfrey, Jr. ’25, the clinic was a high point to his first semester of law school. “It was humbling to be trusted by our clients and the supervising attorneys to do meaningful work,” he said.

Students were supervised in the TROSA expunction clinic by Dore, DEAR Supervising Attorney Jessica Luong T’04, DEAR Staff Attorney Ali Nininger-Finch, and LANC Staff Attorney Rachel Smith ’18. DEAR’s Jeremiah Brutus coordinated the clinic.

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HAMPION OLATUNJI LLM ’23, a lawyer from Nigeria, also devoted his fall break to pro bono work on expunctions and landlord-tenant matters as a volunteer at the LANC Durham office. He said he enjoyed the challenge of handling multiple petitions in a legal system so different from his own, noting his appreciation for the careful supervision he received from Gina Reyman, a LANC Regional Managing Attorney. He was particularly impressed by the care she showed for each of her clients.

“Generally, as lawyers, we are expected to be empathetic towards our clients, but watching Gina and the rest of the lawyers at LANC do what they do so passionately helped me re-evaluate myself,” he said. “How much empathy do I have towards representing indigents and people who cannot afford the services of a lawyer? What can I do to move the needle? This helped me roll up my sleeves and get deeper into the work.”

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Meet D.J. Dore DIRECTOR OF PRO BONO PROGRAMS COMES TO DUKE LAW FROM LEGAL AID OF NORTH CAROLINA

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.J. DORE joined Duke Law in May as director of pro bono programs, the latest step in a career devoted to public service.

A veteran currently serving in the U.S. Army Reserve, Dore worked for eight years as an attorney at Legal Aid of North Carolina (LANC), representing hundreds of clients at the administrative, agency, and trial court levels. An experienced litigator and recognized expert in the areas of veterans law and second-chance work, including criminal record expunction and driver license restoration, he was a member of the appellate team that won a unanimous ruling by the North Carolina Supreme Court strengthening due process rights for public housing tenants in the state.

Most recently Dore served as a supervising attorney in LANC’s Durham office and as the Veterans Law Practice Group manager for the state. While there, he helped establish the Durham Expunction and Restoration (DEAR) Program and has organized numerous other pro bono second-chance clinics involving Triangle-area law schools, private attorneys, and community partners.

Dore helped found and supervises Duke Law’s Fair Chance Project, a student pro bono group that provides criminal record expunction relief to Durham residents and has a partnership with Triangle Residential Options for Substance Abusers (TROSA).

He also served as supervising attorney for Duke Law’s Veterans Assistance Project student pro bono

group, which assists low-income veterans with VA benefits appeals and discharge upgrade cases.

“One of the highlights of my work at Legal Aid was mentoring and training law students, so being able to do that full time at Duke is very exciting,” Dore said. “The percentage of Duke Law students engaging in pro bono work continues to grow, so I’m thrilled to be able to augment students’ classroom learning with a broad range of experiential opportunities that help cultivate a lifelong commitment to addressing unmet legal needs.”

A Durham native, Dore earned his bachelor’s degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and his JD from UNC School of Law, where he was an Army ROTC Distinguished Military Graduate. He also holds an LLM in International Criminal Justice and the Law of Armed Conflict from the University of Nottingham School of Law. He has served 13 years in the N.C. Army National Guard and Army Reserve, including multiple deployments in the Middle East, Africa, and Europe with conventional and special operations forces.

The Pro Bono Program provides experiential learning opportunities for students and critical legal services to the community through partnerships with the Law School’s clinics and outside legal service organizations.

There are more than a dozen student-run pro bono groups at Duke Law. “D.J. is the ideal person to help us expand and enhance the Pro Bono Program given his years of experience in public interest work, his wide range of practice area exposure, his strong ties to the Legal Aid community, and what we already knew from observing his work with our student pro bono groups,” said Assistant Dean of Public Interest and Pro Bono Stella Boswell.

“He is passionate about service, excellent at training students and lawyers, and loves mentoring students. Through partnering with him in the past, I have been impressed with his mentoring skills and how he models the highest levels of professionalism, respect, and client care, regardless of whether or not that client is paying for the help. I love that our students are going to learn that from him.”

Dore’s hire reflects one of the top priorities of James B. Duke and Benjamin N. Duke Dean Kerry Abrams: instilling a habit of service in students so they will continue to use their skills and privilege as lawyers to further access to justice throughout their careers.

He would like to see every Duke Law student participate in pro bono work. “I would love it if every student participated in at least one pro bono project by the time they graduate,” he said. “Developing students’ commitment to pro bono work strengthens the legal profession, endows Duke’s investment in the community, and is absolutely critical for those clients who otherwise wouldn’t be able to access such high-quality legal service.”

Community Discussion Groups initiative aims to foster dialogue across difference

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HE LAW SCHOOL’S DIVERSITY, EQUITY, AND INCLUSION (DEI) COMMITTEE has launched a new initiative designed to open up lines of communication, encourage honest conversations on sensitive topics across the Duke Law community, and foster dialogue across difference.

The Community Discussion Groups initiative launched on Sept. 20 with about 100 students, faculty, and staff participating. The 14 groups have since met monthly for conversations on such topics as building community, belonging, the roots of polarization, humanity in disagreement, and connection across divides. The committee is providing prompts and discussion guides to facilitate the meetings, which will continue throughout the academic year. Katharine T. Bartlett Professor of Law Barak D. Richman, who chairs the DEI Committee, said the initiative aims to strengthen the social fabric of the Law School while enabling all members of the community to feel welcome discussing issues related to their identity.

“I think all of us are still recovering from the pandemic and the isolation that it brought,” Richman said. “We really are a very different community than we were before, just in terms of size and composition, and we want to recover the cohesiveness that we had before. This is a way of building relationships that cut across faculty, staff, and students.”

Richman said the groups were intentionally organized to be as heterogeneous as possible and include a mix of backgrounds, class years, and roles within the community, such as faculty or staff position.

In their discussions, participants have been asked to adhere to eight principles: authenticity, kindness, listening, respect, difference without disagreement/disagreement without argument, making room for all voices, trust and confidentiality, and not identifying subjects of shared stories.

“It’s important to construct these discussion groups with people that you don’t normally have conversations with,” Richman said. “My sense is that there’s a lot of enthusiasm from those who signed up for the opportunity to have periodic conversations with people whom they don’t normally encounter. Saying difference is celebrated in an official sense is different from feeling comfortable expressing your individual identity and comfortable engaging with people with other identities. It’s that degree of comfort that we’re really shooting for.”

Jyren Dillard, a member of the Academic Services staff, said she hopes the small-group setting will enable her to build closer relationships with faculty and students than her job allows.

“I’m always corresponding with professors and other faculty members, but never on a personal level,” Dillard said. “Being connected in a Community Discussion Group has strengthened my knowledge of people’s perspectives and helped me grow more as a person.”

Sahdia Khan ’23 said she values the opportunity to make connections in an authentic way, through the groups’ informal interactions and with the invitation to share personal perspectives on sensitive topics. Growing up in a predominantly white suburb in Kansas, she once thought building community required her to blend in by concealing what made her different. As an adult, she realizes “it doesn’t have to be one or the other.”

“We all yearn for community, but as a minority it can feel like an uphill battle to get there,” she said. “The Community Discussion Groups were a way for me to build ties but also highlight the things about me that make me different.” She said the initiative also promises to have a wider impact. “We have a lot of room for improvement, not just at Duke, but in the legal profession in general. Having these conversations about the importance of having a diverse and equitable and inclusive environment in school will translate when we as students get into the workplace.”

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The Commons

“I’ve been in eviction courts in about five different states, and even in a state that has a lopsided white population compared to the Black population, if you go to the eviction court it’s still going to be the same people getting evicted. So that tells me the systemic issues of the past just continue to show up.”

Notable &Quotable “When a monopolist screws up, the market has a lot of trouble punishing them. I think the reason that people are angry is because after Ticketmaster screws up, you look at the market and there’s no real alternative.”

— Professor Barak Richman commenting on antitrust concerns in the ticket marketing industry that surfaced when Ticketmaster’s site crashed, preventing many Taylor Swift fans from securing pre-sale concert tickets. (The National Desk, Nov. 18, 2022)

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Illustrations: Marc Harkness

— Clinical Professor Jesse McCoy reflecting on national studies that show Black women face eviction at higher rates than other groups. (The News & Observer, Nov. 18, 2022)

“…[C]onsigning all modern gun regulation to a game of ‘What would James Madison have thought of AR-15s’ is not the inevitable result of the Bruen decision. There is still room for research to inform court decisions about firearm regulations. It’s just that such scientific information will have to be framed in a different way than before.

Call it historical translation.”

— Professor Darrell Miller and co-authors arguing that the full scope of the Supreme Court’s 2022 in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen “will remain unclear” until the Court accepts new challenges to existing firearms’ regulations that “will likely involve use of contemporary scientific studies to establish modern analogues for regulatory tradition on laws.” (Newsweek, Oct. 14, 2022)

“The process needs to be made accountable. Making sure that the data itself is not biased and the algorithms are fair is a fundamental challenge not only for China but for the whole world.”

— Professor Shitong Qiao, commenting on Chinese courts’ use of artificial intelligence developed by private companies in rendering decisions and meeting out penalties. (Deutsche Welle, Jan. 20, 2023)

“People recognize the unique sensitivity of their thoughts and emotions. It’s not just the right to keep people out of your thoughts, or the right to not be manipulated. It’s a positive right to make choices about what your mental experiences are going to be like, whether that’s enhancements, or access to technology, or the ability to use and read out information from that technology.”

— Professor Nita Farahany, advocating for a new right to cognitive liberty. (Nautilus, Dec. 19, 2022)

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Faculty Focus

Helfer elected as U.S. representative to the United Nations Human Rights Committee

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ARRY R. CHADWICK, SR. Professor of Law Laurence Helfer has been elected to serve on the United Nations Human Rights Committee for the 2023-2026 term.

The Department of State named Helfer in December 2021 as the U.S. nominee for a position on the international monitoring body. He won the seat in an election at U.N. headquarters in New York on June 17.

“I am honored to be elected to the Human Rights Committee,” Helfer said following his election. “I look forward to serving on an international body that has improved the protection of civil and political rights worldwide. I hope to build on its existing strengths and help to address the challenges it faces.”

The committee is comprised of 18 independent experts charged with monitoring compliance with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), an influential

“Over the course of his career, he has advanced international human rights law without ever losing sight of why it matters. It’s not only about what is written on paper, he says, but also how people actually experience their rights.” — Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield human rights treaty ratified by 173 state parties.

Adopted in 1966, the ICCPR protects universally recognized civil and political liberties and fundamental freedoms including the right to life, liberty, and physical security, the right of due process, and freedom of expression and association.

“Professor Helfer is one of the world’s foremost scholars of international law and human rights, and he has devoted his academic and legal careers to helping safeguard the freedoms of individuals around the globe,” said Sally Kornbluth, then the provost of Duke University, at the time of Helfer’s election.

“His deep expertise in our system of international human rights will be a tremendous asset to the committee and its mission to hold governments accountable for their commitments to protecting civil and political rights.”

Speaking at a June 6 campaign reception for Helfer, U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., Linda ThomasGreenfield, praised Helfer’s “impeccable” credentials, calling him “one of our country’s brightest and most righteous legal minds.”

“Over the course of his career, he has advanced international human rights law without ever losing sight of why it matters. It’s not only about what is written on paper, he says, but also how people actually experience their rights,” Thomas-Greenfield said.

“He stands for what’s right and what the law says — no matter what.”

Helfer is an expert in international law and institutions, international adjudication and dispute settlement, human rights, and international intellectual property law and policy. He has spent his professional career engaging with the international human rights system as a practicing lawyer, scholar, and teacher.

He is co-director, with Jeffrey and Bettysue Hughes Professor of Law Rachel Brewster and Richard Allen/Cravath Distinguished Professor in International Business Law Timothy Meyer, of

the Center for International and Comparative Law. A permanent visiting professor at the iCourts: Center of Excellence for International Courts at the University of Copenhagen, he recently completed a four-year term as co-editor-in-chief of the American Journal of International Law. Helfer is the author, co-author, or editor of six books and author or co-author of more than 100 other publications. His extensive scholarship on international human rights law includes: “Rethinking Derogations from Human Rights Treaties,” 115 American Journal of International Law 20-40 (2021); “Closing International Law’s Innocence Gap,” 95 Southern California Law Review (2021) (co-authored with Duke Law professors Brandon Garrett and Jayne Huckerby); “Walking Back Human Rights in Europe?,” 31 European Journal of International Law 797-827 (2020) (with Erik Voeten); and, with Clare Ryan, “LGBT Rights as Mega-Politics: Litigating Before the ECtHR,” 85 Law & Contemporary Problems 59-93 (2021).

As the principal body monitoring implementation of the ICCPR, the U.N. Human Rights Committee meets three times a year in Geneva. Its main responsibilities are reviewing periodic reports from the state parties, evaluating communications from individuals, and issuing interpretive guidance in general comments.

Extending congratulations from the State Department, which launched a campaign in February 2022 backing Helfer’s election, spokesperson Ned Price said Helfer will bring to the committee “a determined passion to protect and promote civil and political rights.”

“The Human Rights Committee is an important treaty body established under the ICCPR, and the United States views it as a key venue in which American values and perspectives are indispensable,” Price said. “Professor Helfer is known globally as a tireless advocate for human rights, and the United States applauds his election.” — Jeannie Naujeck

An expert in international law and human rights, Helfer has joined an 18-member body that protects civil and political liberties and fundamental freedoms around the globe.

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Faculty Focus

Coleman honored as Lemkin Rule of Law Guardian by Bolch Judicial Institute

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AMES E. COLEMAN, JR., the John S. Bradway Professor of the Practice of Law, received the Bolch Judicial Institute’s 2022 Raphael Lemkin Rule of Law Guardian Medal during a program held at Duke Law on Sept. 7.

Coleman, who permanently joined the faculty in 1996, directs the Center for Criminal Justice and Professional Responsibility and the Wrongful Convictions Clinic and is a nationally recognized leader in pursuing justice for individuals wrongfully convicted of crimes as well as for death penalty reform. Over more than two decades in private practice and public service, and then as a clinician and teacher, he has been dedicated to

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holding everyone in the legal system accountable to the promise of justice for all and to inspiring and training others to take up that cause.

“It is just so fitting and proper that we acknowledge his contributions over many years to the cause of justice for individual people who have been wrongfully accused and for his insistence — across the board, no matter who the defendant, no matter their station in life, their race, their religion, their gender, whoever they are, Jim has lived this principle — that everyone is entitled to due process and to a more-than-adequate defense,” said Professor David F. Levi, then the institute’s director, in presenting the medal.

Coleman represented serial killer Ted Bundy during his death row appeals in Florida in the 1980s. In 2006, he chaired Duke University’s ad hoc committee charged with examining the disciplinary record of its men’s lacrosse team after three players were accused of rape, despite the widespread, though incorrect, assumption of their guilt. And all of the clinical programs he has directed at Duke Law, whether focused on appellate litigation, death penalty appeals, or pursuing plausible claims of actual innocence, have been designed to ensure that the justice system stays true to its constitutional commitments.

To date, 10 clients of the Wrongful Convictions Clinic have been exonerated through the efforts of Coleman, his colleagues, and their students.

“If I could have picked anything about my career that would have been special to have recognized, it would have been to be a guardian of the rule of law — holding myself responsible and holding others to account,” Coleman said on receiving the Lemkin medal.

First awarded in 2020, the medal honors individuals who work to protect the rule of law in their everyday work, in ways large and small. It is named for Raphael Lemkin, a one-time Duke Law faculty member and one of the leading 20th century scholars of human rights, and is awarded by the institute’s director in consultation with its Leadership Council.

“I can make a difference”

Following the medal presentation, Coleman discussed his life and career in a public conversation with Levi, who is now the Levi Family Professor Emeritus of Law and Judicial Studies, beginning with the many “extraordinary” Black teachers he had throughout his upbringing in strictly segregated Charlotte, N.C. “Our teachers saw their job as being to prepare us to succeed in a world that we could only imagine, but that we believed and hoped would be different,” he said. “I credit them with instilling in me the notion that I could succeed, that never giving up was better than never losing, and to have confidence in myself.”

A senior year internship with Julius Chambers, a renowned civil rights attorney who was then at the start of his career, also left a lasting impression on Coleman. He recalled that Chambers’ home and office were firebombed in retaliation for his efforts to integrate a high school all-star football game. Coleman saw that as a sign of the impact that Chambers had as a lawyer — people feared his success — and it imparted a critical lesson: “One person can make a difference and I can make a difference.”

After a post-graduate year at Philips Exeter Academy and four years at Harvard, he entered Columbia Law School as a member of the U.S. Navy Judge Advocate General Corps.

During law school Coleman worked as a legal assistant at the National Employment Law Project (NELP), which engaged in impact litigation in such areas as employment discrimination and labor law.

It was there he learned how to put cases together, to work with facts, and how to shape legal arguments to present to sometimes hostile judges, he said. “I couldn’t wait to get to the office every day.” The experience also seeded his passion for clinical education: “Seeing what you could do with law — law in action — and the things you could accomplish as a lawyer, that really sort of lit my fuse for law school. I did well, I think, as a result of sort of understanding what law was all about, and that is why I think clinical programs are so important.”

Coleman found his yearlong clerkship with Judge Damon Keith, a civil rights stalwart then on the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan, both galvanizing and influential. He and his fellow clerk, Lani Guinier, who later joined the Harvard Law faculty, were among many Black clerks Judge Keith hired during his long tenure on the district court and on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, Coleman said.

“In appreciation of the opportunity he gave us, we felt a special obligation to always do our best so we didn’t let him down. He told us, ‘You’ve got to do good work and take into consideration what is fair in every case, and if it was fair, does the law provide a remedy?’ That was the approach we took in all kinds of cases.”

Holding the system accountable

Following his clerkship, Coleman practiced for a year at Kaye, Scholer, Fierman, Hays & Handler in New York before taking a job as assistant general counsel for the Legal Services Corporation. In 1978 he joined Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering in Washington, D.C., taking two public service leaves of absence early in his tenure: first to serve as chief counsel to the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Standards of Official Conduct, where he directed the special committee’s investigation of two Pennsylvania congressmen, and later to serve as deputy general counsel to the newly established U.S. Department of Education.

At Wilmer, where he became a partner in 1982, he litigated a wide range of cases, including capital post-conviction appeals, civil commercial, natural gas regulatory, administrative, employment discrimination, and other civil rights actions. He also mediated large employment discrimination class actions involving both government and private employers and represented professional athletes in drug and doping cases. In 1987, he received the NAACP Legal Defense

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Coleman is a leading advocate against the death penalty and for civil liberties. He has chaired the American Bar Association’s Death Penalty Moratorium Implementation Project and Section of Individual Rights and Responsibilities and the North Carolina Commission on Racial and Ethnic Disparities in the Juvenile and Criminal Justice Systems. He has also served as a public member of the N.C. General Assembly’s Joint Legislative Commission on Capital Punishment, and a member of the N.C. Commission on Actual Innocence and the N.C. Commission of Inquiry on Torture.

He also has served a trustee of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. In 2021 Coleman received the North Carolina Bar Association’s Legal Legends of Color Award.

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and Education Fund Pro Bono Award for his contribution to the enforcement of civil rights laws.

Coleman appreciated the ethos he found at the firm then led by John Pickering, a renowned appellate lawyer and one of his mentors, and Lloyd Cutler, who served as White House counsel to Presidents Carter and Clinton.

“They set up a firm where pro bono wasn’t something you did on the side, that’s what you did as lawyers,” he said, noting his hope that he has set a similar example for his students. When he led Ted Bundy’s legal team in his death penalty appeals in 1989, he had their full support — despite pushback from some colleagues and an angry public. “Their view was that this is somebody who needs a lawyer and he needs a really good lawyer, so that’s what we do,” Coleman said.

Bundy was then facing execution in Florida for the murder of three young women (although he eventually confessed to killing 28).

“The notion that people should be presumed innocent until they are found guilty by a jury is an important concept in criminal law. I think the only way you can protect people who are innocent from wrongful convictions is by treating every defendant as if he or she were innocent,” Coleman said. “If you take the care that it ought to require to make sure you are not convicting an innocent person, then I think you will convict fewer innocent people.”

Coleman maintained that courts had overlooked evidence of Bundy’s mental illness, raising serious legal issues, but “people wanted to take short cuts,” given their assumption of his guilt.

“I thought that allowing him to be executed without forcing the state and the courts to confront those issues would have been a disservice to the system,” he said.

“It would have undermined the system. So that’s what I tried to do. I thought I had an obligation as a lawyer.

Coleman applied the same care in reviewing the conduct of the Duke men’s lacrosse team, stepping up to helm the university’s investigation after he read an article in which the prosecutor called the students guilty of sexual assault.

“I thought, ‘That’s an unfair thing for a prosecutor to do and it’s the kind of thing that leads to a miscarriage of justice,’” Coleman said, acknowledging both the intense media scrutiny and public backlash he faced, given the allegation that privileged, white athletes had assaulted a Black woman. He pushed ahead with his goal of conducting a fair review that included interviewing all witnesses and anyone who had been quoted in the media, reviewing the police reports, meeting with the students’ families, and turning down a barrage of

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media inquiries. “That’s how I approach the work that I do — just stay focused and don’t get sidetracked.”

Ultimately the district attorney, who was found to have manipulated evidence, was disbarred and briefly jailed, and the indictments of the students were dismissed.

A “happy warrior”

After the lacrosse case was resolved, the university provided funds to establish the Center for Criminal Justice and Professional Responsibility, which Coleman directs, and to support Duke Law’s Innocence Project and the Wrongful Convictions Clinic, which he co-founded and directs.

The center has led a series of coordinated scholarly, advocacy, and educational programs designed to raise awareness of and prevent wrongful convictions, including a new Jury Inclusion Project, funded in part by the Office of the Provost, to help protect the right of people of color to serve on criminal juries. The clinic has secured exonerations for 10 clients, many of whom served several decades in prison for crimes they didn’t commit.

Coleman said that the initial approach to correcting miscarriages of justice that he and his clinic co-founder and longtime co-director, Charles S. Rhyne Clinical Professor Emerita of Law Theresa Newman ’88, took was not adversarial; they worked with students to investigate plausible claims of innocence and prepared reports that they would share with prosecutors, along with their files. “We hoped they would read [the report] and join us,” he said. But while that approach worked at first, he and Newman, who soon were joined by Clinical Professor Jamie Lau ’09, found prosecutors increasingly reluctant to cooperate.

“Then we became a litigation firm and they misjudged [us],” said Coleman, who also teaches first-year Criminal Law. “I think we’ve turned the clinic into one of the top litigation firms in North Carolina. Again, what we’re trying to do is what the system should do itself. We’re trying to identify a miscarriage of justice and get the system to correct it.”

Coleman recalled the moniker given to Sen. Hubert Humphrey in the 1940s for his blend of optimism and fierce advocacy for civil rights reform: the Happy Warrior. “I sort of think of myself sometimes like that,” he said. “I would love to resolve all of our cases with prosecutors who look at our evidence and agree that we’re right. On the other hand, if they don’t want to do that, I’m perfectly happy to litigate against them. I wake up every morning happy to be able to do that.”

— Frances Presma

“Jim Coleman’s unique gift is to create the atmosphere in which justice can be accomplished.

Jim stands unwaveringly for fairness, but he does so in a manner so calm, so reasonable, and so respectful of others that even impassioned people who temporarily disagree with him come to remember that they care about fairness, too.”

— Richard H. Brodhead, president emeritus of Duke University

“Over the years I have known Jim Coleman as an outstanding lawyer and committed professor and counselor to his students, and a brilliant advocate for the rights of the accused.

He has been and is a beacon of leadership in the field of civil rights and a courageous advocate for those in need of legal assistance, particularly individuals who are the object of public anger, misunderstanding, and antipathy.”

— Ted Olson, former U.S. solicitor general and partner, Gibson Dunn & Crutcher.

A true guardian of justice

“I have had the great privilege of working alongside Jim Coleman for more than two decades. Every day, in every case, he demonstrates his utter commitment to the rule of law, to justice, and to basic fair play.

He backs that commitment with sheer hard work and remarkable creativity in examining injustice and striving to correct it. Through his example, hundreds of students have been inspired to do the same during their careers.”

– Theresa Newman ’88, Charles S. Rhyne Clinical Professor Emerita of Law and co-founder of the Wrongful Convictions Clinic

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Faculty Focus

Purdy defends democracy, urges vigilance in latest book

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N HIS NEW BOOK, Two Cheers for Politics: Why Democracy is Flawed, Frightening — and Our Best Hope (Basic Books, 2022) Professor Jedediah Purdy examines the challenges of a political system that many consider to be under threat and others deem a disappointing failure.

Purdy, the inaugural Raphael Lemkin Professor of Law, discussed the book, his seventh, with Lisa Kern Griffin, the Candace M. Carroll and Leonard B. Simon Professor of Law and Senior Associate Dean for Faculty & Research at an event sponsored by the Goodson Law Library on Nov. 1. “The book tries to take those misgivings really seriously, and also to take seriously the idea that democracy is our best hope in politics, and that we need to do it better and not run away from it,” Purdy said.

Purdy, a leading scholar and teacher of environmental, property, and constitutional law, as well as legal and political theory, rejoined the faculty in July from Columbia Law School, where he had been the William S. Beinecke Professor of Law since 2019. Having spent the previous 15 years at Duke where he held the Robinson O. Everett Professorship, Purdy told Griffin that his decision to return to the Law School, and his family’s return to Durham, “was a decision about the importance of community and place and personal history in our lives.”

The following is an edited transcript of their conversation, which focused primarily on Purdy’s proposals relating to constitutional law.

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“If we ask ourselves, what’s the authority of constitutional principle, why is the Constitution the last word, we might start by taking seriously its first words, ‘We, the people.’” — Jedediah Purdy LISA GRIFFIN: Practically speaking, when you talk about politics and how it can be constructive, and democracy and what we should be aiming for, what do you mean by those terms?

JEDEDIAH PURDY: The book’s title is about politics, and not about democracy, because in a sense, to believe in democracy you have to have a clear idea of politics, of what the domain is, the area of questions that democracy addresses.

I put it this way — there’s a set of decisions that we can’t avoid making because they set the terms on which we live together. And as long as we are stuck living together, which people always, everywhere are, we can either make these decisions explicitly, or we can pretend we’re not making them, which is a way of making them without acknowledging it.

What are these decisions? Among other things, they’re the decisions that the curriculum of the first year here gives you some of our working answers to. They are the principles of property law.

They tell you who has what, who can do what, who doesn’t have, how did that happen.

We can’t avoid organizing the world in some of the ways that property law does, to answer the question that unavoidably arises when people are in the same space, which is, what can I do with that? Can I have that?, and so forth.

We have the same sort of questions in constitutional law or in criminal law. How is your body protected? How is your body vulnerable? What happens if someone crosses the threshold that’s supposed to be protected? All of these questions are fundamentally specifications of how we’re going to live together. And we have to answer them one way or another.

We know the Supreme Court made decisions on this last term.

Police make decisions about this every day, for worse and better, and so on. Answering these questions is what the institutions of the law are always doing.

What’s the point of saying that’s politics? Well, being for democracy as a political concept doesn’t mean you want voting on everything. I don’t want voting on what’s the best novel of the 20th century — at least, not a vote that’s going to bind everyone based on how the vote comes out. But with the questions I’m calling political, we all have to live with the answer. You don’t actually get to pick your own answer. And it’s for that reason — that the answer, by its nature, binds all of us — that I think the best way of deciding these questions is the democratic way.

LG: There is an enormous amount of trust that you are willing to place in your fellow democracy dwellers throughout the book.

And it is a leap of faith to come along with you on that trusting premise. Should one do that, the next step, in your view, is a sort of every-generation constitutional revision. Can you say first why you think the Constitution itself is getting in our way, what’s counter-majoritarian about it?

JP: A lot of people have become vividly aware that the Constitution has a number of structural features that are counter-majoritarian, in my terms, counter-democratic.

The electoral college has given the presidency to the loser of the national popular vote twice in this century, and almost did it a third time in 2020. That’s the Constitution, in its electoral college dimension, working for us. The unrepresentative character of the Senate is also notorious. There was an idea for a long time that we didn’t have to think very hard about what democracy was for a couple of reasons.

One was that whatever it was, it seemed like we had figured it out.

And our set of institutions seems to be approximating it pretty well.

The other thought was that we might not have to think about it very hard because it was probably where the whole world was trending. There was the thought that everything ran in one direction, and everything tended to become us. And what we were was pretty stable and was working pretty well. It’s the cracking of all of that expectation that’s part of the backdrop that the book is written against.

And that’s, among other things, forced our attention to the ways that our system is actually counter-democratic.

Being counter-democratic is particularly a problem if the constitutional features we’re talking about, like the electoral college and the Senate, provide the conditions of possibility for an anti-democratic politics — that is, for the minority rule strategy of national political control, where you can take control of the Senate, and you can take control of the White House, and you can take control of the Supreme Court without actually winning national majorities. And the fact that that was the strategy that worked for Trump and for Trumpist politics in the last five, six years makes really vivid what kind of problem we have, not least because it rewards a politics that doesn’t actually try to build national majorities, but rather to frighten and mobilize selected minority votes.

LG: Your idea that issues that need to be put to majority vote are being decided by nine people is something that I think is very much at the heart of what you’re talking about in the book. So let’s talk about the Court.

JP: If we ask ourselves, what’s the authority of constitutional principle, why is the Constitution the last word, we might start by taking

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Faculty Focus

seriously its first words, “We, the people.” It presents itself as an act of fundamental lawmaking, that is, an act of constitution-making, that is performed by the people who will live under its principles and do it with the purpose of enabling themselves to live better under its principles.

I think that’s the best foundation for a constitution — a commitment by the members of the community who will live under its rules and principles to those being the ones that will guide and constrain them. I’m all for the constitutional entrenchment of fundamental decisions about rights, and equality, and limits on institutions. But I think that the further those decisions get away in time from the people who live under them, the more uncertain and manipulatable their meaning becomes, the more the content of those constitutional principles becomes unavoidably a question of interpretation rather than a question of decision. And I think one of the most powerful things about the idea of a constitution is actually the idea that it is the most democratic decision in the system, and that it is authorized in its principles by the people who will live under it.

I suggest a thought experiment, which is what if every 27 or 30 years — basically every generation — you knew that there were going to be a convention or series of conventions, maybe regional, then national, structured in a variety of ways to be genuinely and deeply representative and deliberative, from which some proposals might emerge to change the Constitution? They might not. The answer might be, “Everything’s fine here.” But some proposals might emerge to change the electoral college, to change the representational structure of the Senate, to reverse Dobbs, perhaps.

None of these would be surprising. To reverse Citizens United and the underlying line of decisions back to 1976 that anchor it also wouldn’t be surprising.

Then those proposed revisions would go to a national referendum. That national referendum would be, under the current system, the only direct act of a national majority in our constitutional system. National majorities do nothing else, since they don’t elect the president, and we don’t otherwise vote nationally.

The Constitution that we then lived under for the next 30 years would be, I think in a real sense, the one that we had decided to live under. It would give marching orders to judges. But those marching orders would be, in some ways, significantly more constraining, I think. Because the interpretation that followed would be in light of decisions in living memory. The originals, as it were, of originalism, would be us.

LG: The Constitution itself is quite strict about how it is to be reconsidered or amended. And you suggest that one of the first things we need to do is change that.

JP: The Constitution is very hard to amend. Article V, the amendment article, sets up a series of high hurdles. And the hurdles are structured in a federalist fashion so that amendments, when approved, have to be approved state by state. And it doesn’t take that many small or large states, it doesn’t take that many states, it doesn’t take that much of the population to block any amendment. I suggest you start by amending Article V.

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At least part of the reason it’s so hard to amend things, including Article V, is that our political culture, our movements and reform efforts, and our elite political consciousness, have all been totally turned away from the idea of explicit change of the national Constitution for decades. And what you don’t think about, you definitely won’t do.

They’ve changed the Constitution in quite basic ways before using Article V. The Senate used to be entirely appointed by state legislatures. The 17th Amendment was passed through three quarters of state legislatures. That is, they got the very people who were giving up the power to appoint the senators, which was a powerful source of patronage, among other things, to give it up. How? Partly by defeating a bunch of people who had opposed the effort to pass the amendment a cycle earlier. So you actually can mobilize people with electoral effect around constitutional change of a structural kind. It’s not out of the question, even with Article V. History gives us an existence proof.

LG: There is an unfailing optimism about the way that you express yourself, the things that you choose to write about, and what you imagine to be possible. How do you do that?

JP: If there’s an optimism in the book, it’s not because I particularly expect that things are going to go really, really well. I’d say, rather, it’s rooted in a political and intellectual judgment. And that judgment is the following: that to the extent that we live with institutions, live under institutions that give us the potential to revise our world, our lives for the better, we have a responsibility to take seriously, put weight on, call out and try to get as much as we can from the aspects of those institutions that let us do that. I think there’s a kind of practical optimism or a practical hopefulness that is actually what I think of as the heart of civic responsibility. If institutions that you have despaired of will not do anything good, institutions that you are demanding more from than you may think they are capable of are the ones that might produce something surprising.

So I try to think about what a kind of troubled idea like patriotism could mean in this world, I think of it as meaning, on the one hand, that all the wrongs and the harms and the crimes, as well as the achievements of the country that you happen to be caught in or that you’ve chosen, are partly your responsibility.

They’re partly on you regardless of whether you have any personal implication in them.

And second, you have a responsibility to try to keep active, and make real and make better the aspects of that system that can actually reform it, to repair and remedy and move beyond some of those harms, and make it more genuinely democratic so that it could be a system that actually deserves a higher degree of loyalty than you might think, or a higher degree of attachment than you might think that it does now. So that’s the kind of judgment that’s behind a certain kind of constructiveness in the book, maybe because it’s easy for me, temperamentally, to despair. And I think I’m not alone in that these days. The book is interested in the reasons that we shouldn’t.

With new book, Powell upholds a shared discipline uniting all practitioners regardless of ideology

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ROFESSOR H. JEFFERSON POWELL first conceived his latest book as a repository of what he calls “guild learning,” a methodological guide to “what lawyers are doing when they argue over the right answers to constitutional law questions” that would be both instructive to students and familiar to practitioners.

But as the idea percolated over 10 years it took on a new, more urgent dimension, he says. Political disagreements in American society were increasingly taking expression in extreme reactions to legal decisions on issues like same-sex marriage and religious liberty. Powell sensed that constitutional law as a shared practice was in danger of slipping away.

“If constitutional law functions, and only can function, as another vehicle for replicating our political and ideological divisions, then it can’t serve as a means of resolving political and other legal disputes in a way that everyone can accept even when we don’t agree with the outcome,” he says.

“If enough lawyers, judges, and other Americans who aren’t lawyers become convinced that there’s nothing to it but politics, constitutional law will lose its capacity to serve the positive function that I think it has come to play in American history and society. And if we lose it or distort it to this time of radical polarization, I think that will be a serious loss.”

A prolific scholar whose work focuses on the role of the Constitution in the activities of the legislative and executive branches of federal government, Powell has served in a number of positions in federal and state government, most recently as deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel, which provides legal advice to the president and executive branch agencies.

In The Practice of American Constitutional Law (Cambridge University Press, 2022), Powell defends against critics and wouldbe reformers the normative practice he regards as fundamentally well-functioning, even while acknowledging the injustices it sometimes allows. Drawing liberally from historical American case law, Powell grounds the practice in time-tested tools and methods of solving constitutional problems, covering the logic of constitutional inquiry, its foundations in the constitutional text, and the presuppositions that shape the analysis of constitutional problems.

Constitutional law’s modes of reasoning and argument, Powell writes, transcend “the contestable and contested theories that divide us.” It’s a position he maintains notwithstanding such controversial Supreme Court rulings as Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the case that overturned Roe v. Wade, that some progressive contemporaries decry as evidence of partisan jurisprudence by the current majority.

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Faculty Focus “People are right to be passionate about things that matter,” Powell says. “But constitutional law’s contribution to society is to give us a way to come out with answers that doesn’t simply end up with you and me just shouting at each other because we, rightly, passionately believe that which we believe.”

Indeed, the traditional view of constitutional law fully allows for the influence of individuals’ political, social, and moral perspectives on their conclusions, he says.

“As Chief Justice [John] Marshall told us, your honest judgments on legal issues — tough legal issues — are going to be influenced by your priors, what he called a person’s ‘wishes, affections and general theories.’ The existence of disagreement, and of constitutional disagreement that tracks politics, shouldn’t surprise us, and it doesn’t mean anyone is arguing improperly. Part of your commitment to the system is a commitment to living with disagreement, and with the fact that there are things that we simply cannot achieve agreement on. But we have a method of articulating a practical answer, nonetheless.

“This book assumes the legitimacy of the system.

The system has produced outcomes that I don’t like and it’s allowed serious injustices, but I don’t think those flaws are fatal to the system’s value to society.”

A system open to outside views but not controlled by them

A substantial portion of the book is devoted to describing a “toolkit” of constitutional reasoning addressing the construction and evaluation of arguments focused on the written text of the Constitution as well as arguments derived from the practice of constitutional law, including Supreme Court precedent. Powell also reviews how institutional perspective influences the questions and answers of constitutional law from within the federal courts, the executive branch, and Congress.

In a chapter devoted to how a plausible constitutional argument can become a persuasive one, Powell addresses factors such as personal judgment, fidelity to and adaptation of precedent, the influence of the historical moment in which an argument is made, and the call of justice.

Each played a role in the evolution of high court decisions that culminated in the overturning of racial segregation in classrooms. Powell recounts how Charles Hamilton Houston, the first general counsel of the NAACP, and his successor, Thurgood Marshall (later Justice Marshall), systematically dismantled the rationale behind Plessy v. Ferguson’s upholding of a “equal but separate” accommodations rule by successfully challenging segregation in law and graduate schools before directly attacking elementary school

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segregation. Houston’s legal strategy played out over 20 years, culminating in the 1954 ruling in Brown v.

Board of Education that racial segregation in public education was unconstitutional.

“Constitutional law method is guild learning but it’s open to arguments that come from outside,” Powell says. “The lawyers who brought Plessy to an end were driven by a deep moral conviction that racial discrimination and injustice are evil, but they knew they had to end it the right way, specifically to make good legal arguments and beat out the other side as a matter of legal reasoning.

“The guild learning doesn’t require us to pretend that one’s ethical and political perspectives don’t shape what you think, an idea that I think is painfully not true, and should not be. They shape it in the sense that your judgment about the right legal answer to a tough question, if you are doing your job right, will correlate much of the time with your political views — not because you’re ‘cheating’ but because your legal judgment cannot be insulated from those views.”

In his short conclusion, Powell addresses why he believes the traditional practice of constitutional law rooted in the 18th century is still suited to addressing modern-day problems, and why it’s worth preserving.

“Traditions, of course, can be perverse, and the fact that an evil practice is long-standing is no reason to preserve it,” he writes. “The practice of constitutional law has sometimes led in the past to monstrous decisions, and perhaps far more often has failed to rectify obvious injustices. ... But constitutional law has also been, often enough, one of the means by which the American political community has sought to eliminate social evils and achieve a greater degree of justice.”

Powell calls his book hopeful, though not optimistic, amid disagreements on both outcomes and the methods of achieving them that he calls “corrosive” to the practice. Too few people, both in the legal academy and on the bench, are stepping up to defend it, he says.

“I feel very much in the minority at the moment, but I think the court of history is with me. The originalists and the anti-originalists both are reformers.

And I’m not in favor of their reforms.

“Part of what impels me to write is the fear that something of great value to us all is at risk, and those of us who notice have a duty to say so. And I claim to present constitutional law as it traditionally has been practiced.

“Human achievements are fragile. Social achievements are fragile. And if no one defends them and people just assume that they will continue — or worse, don’t want them to — then we lose them.”

— Jeannie Naujeck

New Faculty

Timothy Meyer

INFLUENTIAL INTERNATIONAL SCHOLAR FOCUSES ON TRADE, INVESTMENT, FOREIGN RELATIONS, AND USING TRADE AGREEMENTS TO ADDRESS CLIMATE CONCERNS

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IMOTHY MEYER, AN INTERNATIONAL LAW EXPERT whose scholarship focuses on international trade and environmental law, joined the faculty in July as the inaugural Richard Allen/Cravath Distinguished Professor in International Business Law. Most recently he was professor of law and director of the International Legal Studies Program at Vanderbilt Law School.

An elected member of the American Law Institute, Meyer serves on the board of editors of the American Journal of International Law. He has testified before the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations and Judiciary Committees and is on the European Union’s list of potential arbitrators for disputes under its trade agreements.

He taught International Arbitration and International Environmental Law in the fall semester and, with Harry R. Chadwick, Sr. Professor of Law Laurence Helfer and Jeffrey and Bettysue Hughes Professor of Law Rachel Brewster, serves as co-director of the Center for International and Comparative Law. “Tim Meyer is an innovative and engaging scholar who does cutting-edge research on important and interesting international law and foreign relations topics, including energy and climate regulation,” says Helfer. “He is a creative generator of new ideas

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Faculty Focus and a pleasure to collaborate with. We are very fortunate that he has joined the Duke Law community.”

Meyer earned his BA and MA in history from Stanford University and his JD and PhD in jurisprudence and social policy from UC Berkeley School of Law, where he held a Public Policy and Nuclear Threats Fellowship from the National Science Foundation and the University of California Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation. From 2007 to 2008 he clerked for Supreme Court Associate Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, then a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit.

Meyer served from 2008 to 2010 in the Office of the Legal Adviser in the U.S. Department of State and began his academic career at the University of Georgia School of Law, where he taught for five years before joining Vanderbilt Law.

Working at the nexus of trade and sustainable development

Meyer also co-directs the Center for International and Comparative Law, where he will bring a spotlight on how international trading systems can help mitigate the climate crisis.

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Meyer’s recent scholarship focuses on the role of trade agreements in addressing environmental considerations, particularly those related to climate and energy; the role of trade agreements in promoting and addressing economic inequality; and the role of the different branches of government, particularly Congress and the president, in formulating the answers to those questions and trade policy more generally.

Brewster calls Meyer’s scholarship examining how domestic politics shapes international agreements “important for real-world policy making.”

“Particularly in the international trade and energy field, his work has been critical in connecting academic debates to current policy proposals,” she says.

Meyer’s policy recommendations on addressing climate change through global decarbonization reflect deep knowledge of the mechanisms and nuances of international laws and treaties and offer innovative, practical ways of getting around their restrictions.

In “A Green Steel Deal: Toward Pro-Jobs, ProClimate Transatlantic Cooperation on Carbon Border Measures,” Roosevelt Institute (June 2021), Meyer and co-author Todd N. Tucker suggest a sectoral strategy in which the United States, members of the European Union, and other nations would form a “carbon customs union” to impose a common tariff on carbon-intensive steel imports from non-participating countries. Their proposal also would give member countries the flexibility to decarbonize domestic steel production through diverse strategies suiting their particular legal and political constraints.

For example, absent Congressional support, a U.S. president could levy the common tariff through the

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Trade Expansion Act and overhaul domestic production standards through regulatory agencies.

“Climate change is not going to give us the time to develop a single decarbonization program that works and can be legally implemented by all the world’s major economies,” Meyer and Tucker write. “Our approach would thus allow countries to lean on their existing authorities to implement the Green Steel Deal.” In October 2021, several months after the proposal’s publication, the United States and the European Union announced their intention to negotiate a Global Arrangement on Sustainable Steel and Aluminum, which the White House called “the world’s first carbon-based sectoral arrangement on steel and aluminum trade” and under which “the United States and European Union will work to restrict access to their markets for dirty steel.”

In “A Pragmatic Approach to Carbon Border Measures,” 21(1) World Trade Review 109, Meyer and Tucker address the barriers that the World Trade Organization’s primary rules present to a carbon customs union and domestic decarbonization measures, and they suggest workarounds, such as invoking and reinterpreting WTO exceptions. Giving countries space within WTO rules to decarbonize without fear of losing disputes before the body would help them achieve their carbon reduction goals while minimizing economic incentives for companies to move well-paying jobs to countries with lower environmental standards, they maintain.

“The climate crisis is poised to become the most significant trade issue of the next decade,” Meyer and Tucker write. “Building political support to tackle that problem today ... requires offsetting the costs of decarbonization with other economic benefits. At a minimum, it requires a trade policy that does not penalize countries economically for pursuing decarbonization measures.”

Meyer addressed the political and social consequences of trade liberalization and proposed solutions that would bolster popular support for free trade in “Saving the Political Consensus in Favor of Free Trade,” 70 Vanderbilt Law Review 985 (2017).

There, he suggests including an “economic development chapter” in preferential trade agreements that would commit developed nations to spending an indexed portion of trade gains on fiscal programs that remedy domestic economic inequality. In “Misaligned Lawmaking,” 73 Vanderbilt Law Review 151 (2020), he argues that an economic development chapter or sunset clauses in trade agreements could help ensure that the social safety net for those adversely impacted by trade agreements keeps pace with the program trade liberalization created by those agreements.

“Particularly in the international trade and energy field, his work has been critical in connecting academic debates to current policy proposals.” — Professor Rachel Brewster “Trade agreements create huge benefits for the country as a whole, but they create really concentrated losses in some communities,” Meyer says. “If you want to help those communities by providing them retraining programs, extended unemployment, relocation assistance, or any of other kind of trade adjustment assistance, Congress has to reauthorize the program because it requires money.

“In my view, having a functional, well-thought out, well-designed trade adjustment program that is linked to our trade liberalization policies, so that you don’t have to negotiate adjustment assistance separately, is absolutely critical to solving some of the problems that we’ve had in trade policy. It helps those communities hurt by trade liberalization and in so doing helps prevent a backlash against trade agreements.”

Leveraging presidential powers in trade policy

Including enforceable environmental and labor rights commitments in U.S. trade agreements is a relatively recent development, Meyer says. Strengthening enforcement of these commitments gained significant traction as the Trump administration sought to leverage domestic concerns over the role of trade liberalization in economic inequality, renegotiating trade agreements such as NAFTA and withdrawing from the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

“On economic inequality, both the Trump and Biden administrations have been interested in using trade policy more aggressively than prior administrations to address a range of what historically we might have thought of as non-trade issues,” Meyer says.

“But the Biden administration is also interested in how you can use trade policy to promote labor rights, human rights, and environmental protections abroad, not just economic security domestically, and that widening of the frame, I think, is quite useful.”

The Biden administration also appears to be less interested in large-scale, economy-wide trade agreements that characterized policymaking during the Clinton, Obama, and both Bush administrations in favor of smaller agreements that address a different range of priorities and may do so through different formalities than prior agreements, he says. That reflects a shift toward pursuing international cooperation through non-binding agreements, a trend Meyer identified early in his academic career that has recently begun to influence trade law. That work is developed in a forthcoming book, Goldilocks Globalism: The Rise of Soft Law in International Governance, with USC Gould School of Law Dean Andrew T. Guzman, to be published by Oxford University Press.

In another project, Meyer is examining how the softening of trade law may affect the role of Congress in overseeing trade policy.

While the Constitution clearly delegates control over foreign commerce to Congress, since the 1930s trade policy has been dominated by the executive branch, he says, and presidents of both parties often have acted unilaterally, using executive powers to bypass Congress in international agreement negotiations.

“When confronted with a Congress that is unwilling or unable to work with them, presidents start relying on both their constitutional power as the president as well as what are sometimes very broad delegations of authority and general statutes that are often quite old, and using those kinds of powers to try to advance a policy agenda that has stalled in Congress. The next couple of years will show if that trend continues, or if the Biden administration is successful in engaging Congress as an equal partner on these trade policy questions.”

Making Duke a center for solutions on climate and trade

Meyer names two renowned figures in international law and economics — Guzman, a frequent collaborator, and Berkeley Law professor Robert Cooter — as influences on his scholarship and teaching. He credits his father, a prosecutor in the U.S. Department of Justice who later served in both the New York and Connecticut state legislatures, with helping to focus his career objectives. His five siblings have all pursued careers devoted in some way to serving the greater public good, he notes. And working for Gorsuch instilled the justice’s famously accessible approach to legal writing.

“Justice Gorsuch and I don’t always agree on things,” Meyer says. “But he’s a tremendous writer and thinker, and he drilled into his clerks that a client should be able to understand the essence of a legal opinion or decision — why they won or lost their case — without having to ask a lawyer. I found that a really clarifying way to think about communication.”

Helfer, who invited Meyer to his first academic conference while he was still a lawyer at the State Department, also has been an invaluable source of advice.

“The Center for International and Comparative Law is one of the finest international law programs at any law school in the country, and the international LLM program was also a draw,” Meyer says. “The history, the program, the opportunity to work with Larry Helfer and Rachel Brewster, and the way the LLM program draws in students, both generally but the international law program specifically, were what drew me to Duke.”

As co-director of the center, Meyer hopes to bring a focus on leveraging international trade law to help solve the climate crisis.

“So much of the carbon that is emitted is effectively emitted through production processes or embedded in products that are then consumed or traded elsewhere, so tackling that problem really requires thinking holistically about how you integrate international trading systems and environmental systems,” he says.

“I’ve done some work at both the academic and policy level on how you would do that, and I think there’s an opportunity for the center to be a place that convenes people who are working at the intersection of policymaking and academic pursuits.”

— Jeannie Naujeck

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Faculty Focus

New Faculty

Shu-Yi Oei

AN INNOVATIVE EMPIRICAL SCHOLAR OF GLOBAL TAXATION, DATA, AND THE GIG ECONOMY

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HU-YI OEI, A SCHOLAR OF TAX LAW and policy and economic regulation, joined the faculty on Jan. 1 as the David T. Zhang Professor of Law. She previously was professor of law and Dean’s Distinguished Scholar at Boston College Law School.

An innovative and prolific scholar well known for her work on international taxation and taxation of the gig economy, Oei has focused her recent scholarship on empirical analysis of global tax developments and transparency and privacy in international tax enforcement. She has also written extensively on technology, data and information, human capital investment, and social insurance.

Also a highly regarded teacher, Oei received the 2014 Felix Frankfurter Distinguished Teaching award at Tulane Law School, where she began her academic career and was the inaugural holder of the Hoffman F. Fuller Professorship in Tax Law. She is teaching International Taxation in the spring semester.

Oei, whose research and teaching are informed by almost six years of private practice that included advising clients on federal, state, and cross-border tax matters, transactional tax planning,

24 Duke Law Magazine • Spring 2023

and litigation, is an elected fellow of the American College of Tax Counsel and served as the U.S. National Reporter to the European Association of Tax Law Professors and International Academy of Comparative Law General Congress. In 2018 she chaired the American Association of Law Schools Tax Section. She is a co-author, with Duke Law Professors Richard Schmalbeck and Lawrence Zelenak, of Federal Income Taxation (6th ed., Wolters Kluwer, forthcoming)(also with Sarah. B. Lawsky).

“I have followed Shu-Yi Oei’s career from nearly its very beginning and have always been impressed by her careful analysis of the details of the federal income tax and by her imagination in finding new and interesting angles from which to evaluate both tax and other related issues,” says Schmalbeck, the Simpson Thacher & Bartlett Professor of Law. “When Larry Zelenak and I were considering adding a third co-author to the next edition of our income-tax casebook, we independently decided that Shu-Yi Oei was the first person we should ask. We were very pleased when she accepted the invitation, and I

am simply delighted that she accepted Duke’s offer of a position on our faculty.”

Adds Zelenak, the Pamela B. Gann Professor of Law: “From the latest developments in international tax evasion, to the tax lives of Uber drivers, Shu-Yi’s scholarship identifies emerging issues in tax policy and administration and subjects them to thoughtful and creative analysis. Both in terms of the topics she addresses and the depth of her analyses, her work is consistently on the cutting edge of tax scholarship.”

For her part, Oei is equally excited to be at Duke, with its faculty strength in both tax and international law. “Larry and Rich have been great mentors and great colleagues over the years,” she says. “I think the international tax programming at Duke is just spectacular. And I’ve always been the person who is interested in more than just tax. Having a group of international scholars to engage with is going to be a real treat.”

A creative and insightful empiricist

Oei earned both her JD and a master of theological studies at Harvard after attending Brown University, where she majored in economics and religious studies and graduated magna cum laude. She is currently a PhD candidate in sociology at Boston College, focusing her research on global and transnational sociology.

In her practice at Bingham McCutchen in Boston from 2003 to 2009, Oei engaged in federal and international transactional tax work and represented clients before the Massachusetts Department of Revenue and in the federal courts. “It allowed me to see both sides of a sophisticated tax practice — the upfront planning and then the litigation when it all goes wrong,” she says.

The international dimension of her practice was particularly instructive in the classroom after Oei joined the Tulane Law faculty in 2009 and began teaching a course on international taxation. Her research agenda, which initially addressed questions of domestic policy, gradually broadened to also include international matters. “Part of it was that I got interested in data,” she says. “And once you get into data, you can’t stop at the border. The analysis becomes transnational very quickly.”

Oei applies a wide range of empirical techniques, including quantitative methods, qualitative interviewing, and content analysis, to a research agenda that addresses a similarly broad range of issues, many of them sharply impacted by data proliferation and all with an eye on improving system design. They include the motivations and implications of developing nations’ membership in a new, cooperative international tax order; the effect of a series of well-publi-

cized leaks of tax data on policy; how data availability is affecting informal latitude, or slack, in the law; Uber and Lyft drivers’ tax concerns and comprehension as seen in online forum discussions; the impact of tax code amendments regarding independent contractors on gig workers and workplaces; and how U.S. tax laws are actually drafted, as revealed by interviews with government tax counsel.

Boston College Law School Professor and Interim Dean Diane Ring, one of Oei’s most frequent collaborators and her tax professor at Harvard, praised her former faculty colleague’s curiosity and acuity.

“Professor Oei is such an intellectually exciting colleague — her creativity, insights, energy, and analytical depth drive her accomplishments in both her research and the classroom,” Ring says. “Through our joint research projects, we have been able to explore a wide range of ultimately connected issues in tax policy from human capital to leaks to international tax regime design. The same dedication, frankness, and dynamism that characterize her scholarly life also frame her work in the classroom as she aims to inspire students to push themselves and think critically.”

Examining a revolution in cross-border taxation

Three of Oei’s recent papers written independently and with Ring investigate the origins, establishment, and implications of what they refer to as the “revolution in cross-border tax information exchange and reporting” that has emerged since 2008 as nations attempt to stabilize revenues and minimize tax evasion.

“While this dramatic shift was the product of multiple forces and events, a fundamental reality is that politics, technology, and law intersected to drive the shift to the point where nation-states will now transmit and receive from each other significant ongoing flows of taxpayer information,” they write in “When Data Comes Home: Next Steps in International Taxation’s Information Revolution,” 64(4) McGill L.J. 707 (2020). But they caution that multilateral cooperation can be undermined by domestic policy decisions that affect the use of the data and enforcement of international standards: “Awareness of the possible pitfalls and their determinants can help policymakers identify problem areas, protect taxpayers, and improve outcomes.”

In “Leak-Driven Law,” 65 UCLA L. Rev. 532 (2018), Oei and Ring offer a novel study of one of the new tax order’s key precipitating phenomena: the series of explosive data leaks that exposed the way many multinational corporations and wealthy individuals were using tax havens and offshore accounts to min-

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Faculty Focus

“Professor Oei is such an intellectually exciting colleague — her creativity, insights, energy, and analytical depth drive her accomplishments in both her research and the classroom.”

— Boston College Law School Professor and Interim Dean Diane Ring

imize or evade taxes, often with the cooperation of international banks. The leaks sparked intense public and political scrutiny, some prosecutions, and changes in policies and law. In the wake of 2008 leaks regarding the actions of UBS LGT Banks, for example, the authors note that the United States tightened up enforcement of foreign asset reporting and in 2010 enacted the Foreign Account of Tax Compliance Act (FATCA). And in 2015, the G20 nations struck a multilateral agreement, the BEPS Inclusive Framework, listing steps to tackle cross-border tax avoidance to which 139 countries have since signed on.

In addition to parsing the type of data disclosed in each case, how and by whom it was leaked (by whistleblowers, hackers, or governments), and how it was disseminated publicly, Oei and Ring examine the benefits and risks of tax leaks. For governments, they observe, leaks can be akin to free audits, illuminate previously unnoticed evasion practices, and change the “evasion calculus” of certain taxpayers, and in those ways can facilitate improvements in international enforcement practices more broadly.

But the risks they identify include agenda capture by leakers and intermediaries (such as Wikileaks) who control, respectively, what is leaked, and when and how much of the data is made public.

“In this sense, therefore, leaked data is not just unadulterated free information,” they write. “In relying on leaked data, tax authorities and governments run the risk of being unduly influenced by the interests of and framings employed by these actors without genuine appreciation of the risks.” The shock value of leaks, they caution, can also trigger hasty or reactionary legislative responses that can ensnare the wrong taxpayers — a pitfall of FATCA — or resonate unevenly across nations.

Oei and Ring urge governments to become more sophisticated consumers of leaked data, subject policy responses to cost-benefit analysis, and independently evaluate their enforcement goals. “The question is not simply how governments can use information from leaks to sanction bad behavior, make decisions, and design laws,” they conclude. “Rather, the question is how the actions and responses of leakers, private citizens, governments, and the media work together to create and promote certain policy outcomes, and how those outcomes should be evaluated, supported, or resisted.”

Oei’s forthcoming article, “World Tax Policy in the World Tax Polity? An event history analysis of OECD/G20 BEPS Inclusive

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Framework membership” 47 Yale J. of Int’l L. 199 (2022), examines the proliferation of the Inclusive Framework on BEPS (base erosion and profit shifting) that the G20 nations established in 2015 and is led by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Member countries to the framework commit to reforming their domestic tax laws and treaties to “eliminate tax avoidance, profit shifting, and other harmful behaviors by multinationals that erode domestic tax bases and drain tax revenues,” she writes. But those commitments weigh on developed and developing nations differently and hold questionable benefits for some.

Oei applies world polity theory, which highlights the role of institutions in developing a shared world polity across differently situated countries, to more than 100 non-G20 nations’ decisions to join the Inclusive Framework, identifying incentives that proved persuasive. A key normative pathway to membership that she identifies is countries’ “socialization” towards multilateral cooperation through participation in other OECD-led tax treaties, such as one that facilitates the automatic exchange of cross-border tax information. But she also points to pressure applied by powerful countries and blocs to entice membership in the framework — notably the threat of being included on the European Union’s “Scoreboard” of tax havens or its “Grey List” of jurisdictions deemed to fall short in implementing international tax standards — that can lead to economic countermeasures like denials of aid or monitoring.

That insight regarding the EU’s somewhat coercive role prompting membership in the Inclusive Framework carries significant implications, Oei writes: “[O]ur new and more inclusivelooking tax world polity, and the isomorphism we are seeing as a result, looks less steeped in inclusivity, representation, and willing cooperation, and more driven by fear of shaming and economic and political repercussions.”

She cautions that if similar factors underpin nations’ agreement to other international tax initiatives, such as the push for a global minimum tax favored by the OECD, G20, and EU, it could undermine “the content, legitimacy, and implementation” of the resulting multilateral agreements. And while acknowledging that OECD leadership in facilitating international tax consensus makes logistical sense, she urges policymakers to be “more attuned to how power dynamics may shape outcomes and how to ensure that such outcomes are procedurally and distributionally just.” — Frances Presma

New Faculty

Michael Murphy

SCHOLAR OF TECHNOLOGY AND LAWYER WELL-BEING BRINGS BROAD PRACTICE EXPERIENCE TO STARTUP VENTURES CLINIC

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ICHAEL MURPHY, a legal educator with a wide range of practice experience, joined the faculty Jan. 1 as clinical professor of law and supervising attorney of the Startup Ventures Clinic.

Since 2018, Murphy had been clinical supervisor and lecturer in law in the Entrepreneurship Legal Clinic at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School.

He earlier was corporate counsel at electronic trading pioneer SEI and general counsel during the startup phase of BrainDo, a digital marketing agency in Philadelphia.

A scholar of technology and legal practice and lawyer well-being, Murphy chairs the communications committee of the Clinical Legal Education Association and is an executive committee member of the Section on Balance and Well-Being in Legal Education of the Association of American Law Schools.

Clinical Professor Bryan McGann, director of the Startup Ventures Clinic, calls Murphy “a perfect fit: “His education and experience make Mike the perfect balance of a terrific teacher and an entrepreneur, with a history of instructing students in a similar clinic.”

“On top of all that, Mike has an ability to combine the seriousness of our work with an appropriate levity that only a true stand-up comedian can bring. I know that our students, our colleagues, and Duke Law School will all benefit from his skills.”

Raised in Farmington Hills, Mich., Murphy received his bachelor’s degree in journalism from Oakland University and his JD from the University of Michigan Law School. After clerking at the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, he began practice in the commercial litigation and labor and employment groups at Blank Rome in Philadelphia.

Murphy became known at the firm as an expert in electronic discovery, then in a nascent stage. In 2014 he began teaching a course he created on e-discovery and digital evidence at Drexel University’s Thomas R. Kline School of Law, leading to what he jokingly calls the “derailment” of his career.

“Much to my dismay as a private practitioner, I realized that while I enjoyed practice, I loved teaching,” Murphy says.

Resolving to eventually pivot to teaching, he began to work on law review articles in the evenings. He soon joined BrainDo as its third employee and general counsel,

despite having little experience with common issues facing startups such as entity formation, partnership agreements, commercial leases, and trademarking a logo.

“I learned how to do small business law by figuring it out through necessity, all the while very much wishing I had taken something like the Startup Ventures Clinic when I was in law school,” he says.

Murphy was working as in-house counsel at SEI Investments, a publicly traded financial services technology company, when a post opened up at Penn’s Entrepreneurship Legal Clinic. There he supervised students in providing pro bono transactional legal services to social ventures, economic development projects, and community entrepreneurs in the Philadelphia area.

“I am living proof that a career path with a law degree is by no means a straight line,” Murphy says.

“A lot of what we do in clinical legal education is help students figure out who they are as a professional so they can practice law their way, even if it means making a career decision that people think is crazy.”

Adapting the legal profession to a changing world

One of Murphy’s scholarly interests is the impact of technology on legal practice and ways to overcome resistance to innovation. In “The Search for Clarity in an Attorney’s Duty to Google,” 18 Legal Comm. & Rhetoric: JALWD 133 (2021), Murphy discusses how the obligation to investigate facts has evolved with the emergence of new technologies and proposes codifying a requirement to conduct internet research using search engines (the “duty to Google”) in rules governing professional responsibility as part of an attorney’s basic technological competence.

In “Just and Speedy: On Civil Discovery Sanctions for Luddite Lawyers,” 25 Geo. Mason L. Rev. 36 (2017), Murphy argues that judges could impose civil sanctions on lawyers who refuse to adopt technology under Rule 1 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, which directs parties involved “to secure the just, speedy, and inexpensive determination of every action and proceeding.”

“Not adopting technology appears to be doing nothing, but is also itself a decision with risk and benefit,” he writes. “Sanctioning luddite attorneys increases the risk of doing nothing, which makes the avoidance of innovation less of a reasonable choice.”

He also devotes considerable time to studying lawyer happiness and well-being, believing that working alongside entrepreneurs in legal clinics can help law students build confidence and a healthy professional identity through exposure to a growth mindset.

It is an idea Murphy develops in a chapter titled “How Working with Entrepreneurs Makes

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Faculty Focus

Law Students into Happier, Healthier Lawyers,” Contemporary Challenges in Clinical Legal Education (Routledge, forthcoming). He says it occurred to him while reading reflection papers submitted throughout the year by his Penn clinic students.

“Students would refer to seeing the world the way their clients do as being really helpful in finding a place of comfort as a young professional. And it’s really a mindset of becoming comfortable with being uncomfortable.

“Entrepreneurs are radical optimists.

They take a leap of faith that they’ll figure out what they don’t know along the way. Seeing the world through those eyes helps law students function better as attorneys, because the law changes all the time, but they gain a sense that they can understand it and interpret it when they need to.

“So a clinic that gets students into a room with entrepreneurs is not just a great way to help the community and teach valuable skills, but it might actually solve a problem that law schools struggle with, which is why our students and young professionals are so much less happy than other professionals. And regardless of the causes, how do we solve it?”

Teaching resilience through comedy

Murphy and his wife, also a lawyer, are active in pro bono and volunteer work, including dog rescue; they share their home with canine companions Little Ann, Spock, and a rotating pack of foster dogs.

Murphy also is an avid participant in live story slams and improvisational comedy, which he says teaches lessons that can be applied in any legal discipline or negotiation and help law students put their careers in perspective amid inevitable setbacks. He hopes to bring to Duke a workshop or class on improvisational theater and how it can help students be better, happier lawyers.

“If I have one key message for Duke Law students, it’s that it is absolutely possible to be a law student and have fun, and to be a successful lawyer and have fun. And together, we are going to figure out how.” — Jeannie Naujeck

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New Faculty

Amanda Martin

VETERAN MEDIA LAWYER JOINS FIRST AMENDMENT CLINIC

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MANDA MARTIN, a veteran communications attorney with extensive experience in media law, joined the faculty in July as senior lecturing fellow and supervising attorney in the First Amendment Clinic.

A founding partner of Stevens Martin Vaughn & Tadych of Raleigh, which has represented local, state, and national media outlets including The New York Times and The Washington Post, Martin has counseled clients on avoiding libel suits, responding to subpoenas, gaining access to public records and meetings, privacy laws, social media, and other speech-based issues.

Since 2003 she has served as general counsel to the North Carolina Press Association, which represents more than 150 newspapers, and advised countless reporters around the state through its legal hotline. She is co-author of the North Carolina section of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press Open Government Guide and co-editor and contributing author of the North Carolina Media Law Handbook.

“I am delighted that Amanda has joined the First Amendment Clinic full time,” says Clinic Director and Clinical Professor Sarah Hutt Ludington JD/MA ’92. “Amanda worked with us in the fall of 2021 and proved to be an outstanding colleague and teacher. I believe that her addition will deepen our connection with the state media law community and raise the profile of the clinic.”

Raised in the “idyllic” setting of Gulf Breeze, Fla., on a peninsula in Pensacola Bay, Martin majored in journalism at the University of Florida and received her JD from the University of North Carolina School of Law. After beginning her career at an Atlanta firm, Martin practiced at Everett Gaskins Hancock & Stevens in Raleigh until co-founding Stevens Martin Vaughn & Tadych in 2010 with longtime law partner Hugh Stevens, a renowned First Amendment and media lawyer.

Martin has taught at UNC Law, the UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media, and Campbell Law School. After her 2021 semester in the clinic, she decided to make a career change.

Martin says she told longtime clients, “I’ve done this for 30 years. I’m hoping now to develop the next generation of ‘me.’ And I think that gave them a good feeling about it because they need the help.” She remains of counsel at the firm and continues to represent the NC Press Association.

Martin relishes the opportunity to mentor students, as Stevens — whom she calls “the world’s greatest mentor” — did for her over many years. She called teaching last year’s clinic cohort “amazing.”

“People enroll in the First Amendment Clinic because it’s an interest of theirs and they are very eager to do it,” she says.

“Last fall, I would have happily hired any of the students in the clinic in my law firm, because they are so excited and it’s such interesting work. I feel so lucky to be here and be a part of this.”

A strong supporter of clinical legal education since her own experience in law school, Martin says clinics provide not only high-quality legal representation to clients who could not otherwise afford it, but train students in critical soft skills of client service, including maintaining regular communication, that their first jobs may not provide.

“Being a lawyer is part counseling and part advocacy and representation,” Martin says. “Helping advance your client’s legal interests but also being present as they go through the process is an important part of being a lawyer, and that’s true for any area of law — whether you’re helping a client with a contract or a lawsuit. It’s very hard to get that experience in law school, so getting to help actual people is a golden opportunity for students and they love it.

“The clients are always so grateful to have the help and they are happy for it to be a learning experience for the students as well.

It’s a dual mission, the teaching and the client interests, and they just dovetail beautifully, which is why I’m so excited to be here.”

Launched in 2018 by Professor H. Jefferson Powell and directed by Ludington since July 2020, the First Amendment Clinic provides legal representation to individuals and organizations on a wide range of matters pertaining to freedoms protected by the First Amendment. Among other actions, clinic students and faculty have filed amicus briefs with federal courts and the U.S. Supreme Court, drafted civil complaints on behalf of journalists blocked from the social media accounts of public officials, challenged the removal and banning of books from North Carolina high school libraries, and secured a settlement in a long-running federal defamation case against a South Carolina man sued for comments he made online criticizing a real estate developer. The clinic also engages in policy advocacy.

— Jeannie Naujeck

Faculty Notes In testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on July 20, Lanty L. Smith ’67 Professor of Law Joseph Blocher said that a recent Supreme Court ruling expanding Second Amendment rights will have a significant impact on efforts to protect public safety. The hearing was convened to consider how gun violence might be curbed following mass shootBlocher ings at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, and a Fourth of July parade in Highland Park, Ill. Blocher’s testimony included an analysis of how the Supreme Court’s ruling in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen will change the way courts determine whether a gun law or regulation is constitutional. Beyond striking down New York’s gun licensing regime, the Court adopted a new test that says a gun law must have an analogue in text, history, and tradition. That is a marked departure from the two-part test courts have long used, which allows them to consider whether a regulation addresses a concern, such as public safety, that overrides any infringement of individual Second Amendment rights.

Blocher told legislators that the Court offered little guidance on how lower courts should weigh competing historical comparators, which gives judges latitude to choose one that they favor.

“An under-specified analogical test like Bruen’s raises serious problems of administrability and invites judicial discretion and ideology to seep into decision-making,” he said.

Second Amendment law going forward will be characterized by unpredictability as individual judges make their own determinations about whether historical laws are sufficiently similar or not to the ones they are considering, Blocher said. “Legislatures can and must continue to promote public safety, including through consideration of contemporary empirical evidence. Constitutional law must and will continue to reconcile history and common sense.”

Along with Melvin G. Shimm Professor of Law Darrell Miller, Blocher is faculty co-director of the Duke Center for Firearms Law and co-author of The Positive Second Amendment: Rights, Regulation, and the Future of Heller (Cambridge University Press, 2018). The two are serving as co-chairs of the new Association of American Law Schools (AALS) Section on Firearms Law. The section marked its inaugural gathering at the January AALS Annual Meeting in San Diego with a panel discussion, “Gun Rights and Regulation after Bruen.”

Miller moderated the panel, which addressed outstanding scholarly questions raised by Bruen.

Miller

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Faculty Focus Testifying before the House Financial Services Committee on Feb. 8, Professor Gina-Gail Fletcher cautioned against opening unregulated private markets to investors of relatively modest means without also requiring robust financial disclosures from issuers.

Multiple proposals in the House of Representatives aim to lower the qualifications for who gets to invest in companies seeking capital on the private market, which are currently limited to “accredited investors” — determined by such criteria as having individual or joint net worth of at least $1 million, or individual annual income of over $200,000.

But Fletcher, an expert on complex financial instruments and market regulation, said doing so without improving consumer protections and disclosure requirements would increase investor risk, not investor choice, and even put the economy at risk. Private offerings are not regulated by federal securities laws, and issuers are not required to provide information like audited financial statements, thereby opening the door to unsupported valuations. She called those markets “an insiders’ game” where even well-educated investors would be betting their money on “unproven, opaque investments.”

“Allowing retail investors [to invest in] private offerings will simply expose them to a market that is inherently uneven in the distribution of information and increase the likelihood that they are victims of fraud,” she said. “These characteristics are a feature, not a bug, of the private markets and will certainly result in retail investors being exploited by low-value private offerings and losing their hardearned investments.”

Fletcher is a board member of the Healthy Markets Association, an investor-focused not-forprofit coalition focused on improving the capital markets, and a member of the SEC’s Investor Advisory Committee.

Professor Veronica Root Martinez has co-authored Securities Litigation, Enforcement, and Compliance: Cases and Materials, 5th (West Academic, 2023), with Donna M. Nagy and Lisa M. Fairfax. The new edition expands the casebook’s focus to include the prevention, detection, investigation, and remediation stages of compliance in the securities industry, with topics including the role of gatekeepers, monetary awards, and statutory protections for whistleblowing, corporate internal investigations, deferred prosecution agreements, and requirements under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and federal anti-money laundering statutes.

Martinez researches and writes about issues related to professional and organizational ethics, drawing on scholarship from the areas of ethics, compliance, corporate and securities law, workplace law, and equity and inclusion. She is one of the nation’s foremost experts on corporate compliance. Her book, Building an Effective Ethics and Compliance Program, is forthcoming with Edward Elgar. She is also a leading academic expert on the role of monitors and monitorships and is currently serving a four-year term on FINRA’s National Adjudicatory Council.

Donald Horowitz, the James B. Duke Professor Emeritus of Law and Political Science, is the co-editor, with Helen Ting, of Electoral Reform and Democracy in Malaysia, (Copenhagen: Nordic Institute of Asian Studies Press, 2023). The book offers scholarly perspectives on an array of electoral reform issues pertinent to the situation in Malaysia, where proposed reforms were stalled by political unrest, and wherever else the matter is under consideration, particularly in countries transitioning from authoritarianism. Horowitz, who has written extensively on electoral systems, ethnic conflict and accommodation, and constitutional design, also contributed a chapter titled “Electoral System Reform” to the volume and co-wrote the Introduction and Afterword.

In a posthumous honor for Professor Emeritus Walter Dellinger, who died in February 2022, North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein named fellowship opportunities in the Attorney General’s office the Walter E. Dellinger III Memorial Fellowship Program. The program hosts two fellows at the North Carolina Department of Justice, one in the solicitor general’s office and another in the general counsel’s office.

Dellinger, the Douglas B. Maggs Professor Emeritus of Law, served in a variety of roles in the federal government, including as assistant attorney general in charge of the Office of Legal Counsel and acting solicitor general of the United States. Dellinger also represented the State of North Carolina in several important cases, including three cases in the U.S. Supreme Court.

“I can think of no better inspiration for young lawyers than Walter Dellinger,” Stein said in a statement announcing the program on May 23. “Walter was a brilliant lawyer, but perhaps more importantly he was a kind and engaging man. I feel lucky to have been a friend. I hope naming this fellowship after Walter will inspire another generation of dedicated public servants.”

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C

Rice retires after two decades of leadership in Health Justice Clinic, 28 years on faculty

LINICAL PROFESSOR ALLISON RICE has long garnered praise from students, colleagues, and clients for superb teaching and leadership in the Health Justice Clinic, dedicated advocacy on behalf of people living with HIV, AIDS, cancer, and other illnesses, nuanced grasp of health care policy, and kindness. But many also note that Rice, who retired in June after two decades as supervising attorney and then director of the Health Justice Clinic, never wanted to hear that praise.

“Allison has never, ever sought recognition for what she was doing,” says Colin W. Brown Clinical Professor Emerita of Law Carolyn McAllaster, the founding director of the clinic in which students learn to serve the legal needs of low-income clients facing serious health conditions and health care challenges. “It’s a remarkable characteristic.”

A Long Island, N.Y., native and graduate of Colgate University, Rice found her calling in poverty law when enrolled in a clinic at Boston University School of Law, where she earned her JD. She started her career in 1984 as a staff attorney at Legal Services of Southern Piedmont in Charlotte, N.C., where she focused largely on housing and domestic violence matters and later served as managing attorney. She joined the Duke faculty in 1994 as one of the first cohort of full-time instructors of Legal Analysis, Research and Writing, helping to cement the strength of the Law School’s writing program and later ensuring that excellent written advocacy was part of her clinic students’ toolkits. Over her tenure at Duke she also taught Ethics and co-founded the HIV/AIDS Policy Clinic.

For Rice, the real power of the clinical experience lies in taking law students out of their bubbles of privilege and connecting them

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Faculty Focus

“I’ve learned from Allison that if you tackle things that seem impossible, you can master them with enough dedication and passion, and that few problems that we encounter in our work are too complex to solve, even when they seem too complex on their face.”

— Clinical Professor Hannah Demeritt ’04

with people who face very different challenges, needs, and social obstacles. She says providing that “experience of proximity” was her primary pedagogical goal as she taught students to craft clients’ wills and end-of-life directives, help them secure medical benefits, or pursue claims of employment discrimination related to their conditions.

“You’ve got to be up close to people to know what their lives are like to both think about solving problems for individuals and to look at what the policy needs to be,” she says. “In a poverty-focused clinic, you get an open door into a different part of the work that most Duke Law students haven’t experienced.”

Rice’s students say she continually stressed the importance of listening carefully to their clients, treating each with respect, compassion, and empathy, and stepping back to consider what systemic forces might be in play.

“Allison really challenged you to think about what’s going on in this person’s life — what are they experiencing, and what systems are they working through?” says David Gardner ’20, who worked with Rice over three semesters in the clinic and as co-president of the student-run Cancer Pro Bono Project, for which she was the faculty advisor. Gardner says that approach, which included asking whether and how systems in which clients are struggling should change, is invaluable to his current practice as an attorney in the Disability Rights Section of the Civil Rights Division at the U.S. Department of Justice.

In addition to facilitating their direct service to clients, Rice involved her students in cutting-edge policy advocacy on a range of matters on which she has been engaged at the state and national levels. She has also been an influential mentor to many, particularly to those hoping to craft public interest careers.

Bethany Lilly ’12, now executive director, public policy at the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, says Rice remains an inspiration as she works to improve health care access for people with chronic conditions and disabilities. “It can be incredibly hard to keep going in the face of the extreme odds and when victories are small and few and far between,” says Lilly. “But Allison’s unshakable conviction and commitment to the work she did and the work’s importance to the people we served has always guided my own commitment.”

A trusted and dedicated counsellor

Rice’s evident commitment routinely earned her trust — and deep affection — from clinic clients, says Clinical Professor Hannah Demeritt ’04, the clinic’s supervising attorney since 2011. “Allison’s clients feel her dedication. She really cares about them as whole people and doesn’t see them as ‘cases.’”

Adds McAllaster: “She had clients who weren’t clients of the clinic anymore but were ‘lifers’ for her. They would just call her when they needed advice or when they had a problem.” Whenever the clinic was unable to take on a particular matter, Rice

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would try to connect the individual in need of assistance with representation or other resources.

Rice’s ethos of client service was also central to her teaching. She routinely pointed out to her students the importance of narrative in developing the solution to any problem.

“You have to really understand the individual and their values, and it takes a lot of listening to do that,” she says. “The real work is hearing the story and helping the client think about what it is they want, hearing what they want, and being able to counsel them when you hear what their story, their family situation, and their values are, about what choices to make.”

Says former student Lilly: “Allison always reminded us that even the smallest changes could matter a lot to a client. I recall making changes to one client’s will that seemed fairly minor and Allison telling me that they mattered to him and so they needed to matter to me, too. I also recall her care for a client whose case had no good remedy beyond ensuring he felt heard and that someone cared that his privacy rights had been violated.”

Rice says she found her work with students on behalf of clients seeking disability benefits to be particularly gratifying, especially those marginalized by substance abuse, homelessness, and HIV, who faced considerable challenges engaging with care. Their cases are hard to win given regulations that disallow benefits if substance use materially contributes to a claimant’s disability, and are generally avoided by private attorneys who work on contingency.

“Over the years, we’ve been able to work collaboratively with the providers and the case managers to work around those rules,” she says “And we’ve been able to get these clients some stability in terms of getting disability and Medicaid to cover insurance.”

In addition to her “inspiring” students and colleagues, Rice says she’s grateful for the support of clinic partners in the medical and care community for marginalized clients with HIV. “At Duke and UNC and a lot of other clinics we deal with, there is an embrace of really stigmatized, vulnerable patients,” she says. “We’ve worked and developed relationships with them over the years to really kind of double-, triple-, and quadruple-team it. It’s that little village that sometimes is what can take these clients over the finish line.”

A highly effective policy advocate

In 2022, Rice became the second recipient of the Legal Services Justice Award from the National LGBTQ+ Bar Association, which recognizes a practitioner whose work on behalf of low-income, marginalized members of the LGBTQ+ and HIV+ communities has advanced

the cause of justice and equity with excellence and compassion. And in 2018, she received the American Bar Association’s Alexander D. Forger Award for Sustained Excellence in the Provision of HIV Legal Services and Advocacy, in recognition of both her direct service to clients and her engagement in statewide and national policy research and advocacy focused on health care access.

Among Rice’s achievements in collaboration with students: monitoring and evaluating health plans offered through the Affordable Care Act with respect to their suitability for people living with HIV and publishing an annual guide for caregivers’ use; studying insurance assistance programs offered by AIDS Drug Assistance Projects (ADAP) and lobbying North Carolina policymakers both for an expansion of health insurance cost assistance in the state’s ADAP and applying Medicaid funds to such non-medical needs as food, shelter, and transportation that can affect health; and educating stakeholders in the HIV community about control measures designed to reduce transmission and HIV criminalization.

Many such initiatives have been in partnership with the North Carolina AIDS Action Network (NCAAN), which Rice and McAllaster helped found in 2010.

Rice, along with McAllaster, helped draft revisions to North Carolina’s control measures that went into effect in 2018 that reflect scientific advances in HIV treatment and removed stigmatizing language. She continues to be engaged in efforts to ensure that insurers meet their obligations to cover prophylactic medication regimens that help prevent HIV transmission.

“For everyone living with HIV in North Carolina, your life [today] was likely changed in some way or other because of Allison’s work, be it having more freedom because those criminal laws are changed, because you have insurance, or because the AIDS Drug Assistance Program is fully funded,” said Lee Storrow, the former executive director of NCAAN. Rice also engaged her students in health justice policy advocacy, such as a successful 2021 effort to secure coverage for gender-affirming facial feminization surgeries for transgender individuals by Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina. Along with the current clinic faculty, she is continuing to advocate for expanding coverage of gender-affirming care further in accordance with standards set by the World Professional Association of Transgender Health.

In 2020, Rice co-chaired a subcommittee of national experts who contributed recommendations for closing the justice gap as it relates to health, a part of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences

“Making Justice Accessible” project. The health subcommittee’s three key recommendations involved the increased use of medical-legal partnerships to promote a broad definition of health that incorporates its social determinants, facilitate effective and efficient collaboration in solving civil justice problems, and expand sources of revenue for helping to solve health-related legal problems.

A beloved mentor, colleague, and friend

For students and colleagues alike, Rice has been a stalwart and supportive colleague, a cherished friend, and an inspiring mentor.

McAllaster highlights the many tasks Rice took on outside of the Health Justice Clinic, such as training students in the Cancer Pro Bono Project how to prepare powers of attorney and health care powers of attorney and training all students newly enrolled in the Law School’s clinics — about 100 each semester — how to use the clinical case management software.

Demerrit, who was one of Rice’s early clinical students, calls herself fortunate to have later had the opportunity to practice with her.

“I’ve learned from Allison that if you tackle things that seem impossible, you can master them with enough dedication and passion, and that few problems that we encounter in our work are too complex to solve, even when they seem too complex on their face,” says Demeritt, who also recalls the encouragement Rice gave her when, as a student, she faced her first standby guardianship hearing. “And I can’t imagine a more supportive co-worker. You can bring your ‘whole self’ to work and she brought her whole self to work. I think her authenticity is one of her great traits, too. That’s why students love her.”

Lilly describes Rice as a “calm, guiding mentor” on her clinic cases who never hesitated to offer blunt assessments of specific situations or share her outrage over outdated laws and incompetent bureaucracies. “I use things that I learned in the clinic almost every day,” she says. “Not only the importance of understanding the needs and wants of the people I represent, but everything about the Affordable Care Act. It’s knowledge that got me one of my first jobs in D.C. and that I rely on every time I need to draft comments on the law or come up with a policy solution in the health care space.”

Edward Gonzales ’22, whose clinic experience included working with Rice on securing coverage for a client’s facial feminization surgery after a sex change, lauds her career-long dedication to fighting stigma and discrimination against people living with HIV: “As a gay man at Duke Law it was incredibly inspiring getting to see how Allison’s work has positively affected countless queer men and women in North Carolina.”

“She’s a really great friend,” adds Gardner, recalling her outreach when a gas explosion in downtown Durham displaced him temporarily from his apartment, and the support she offered him and others for their goals of entering public service and public interest law.

“I saw her, not only with myself, but with so many other law students really take the time to talk through what worried them, what steps they could take, how she could be supportive. She’s much too humble to say it, but she really has made such an impact with so many students.” — Frances Presma

Duke Law Magazine • Spring 2023

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Illustrations: Sol Cotti

34 Duke Law Magazine • Spring 2023

The pandemic years brought significant changes to law firms. Many have been a long time coming and offer a template for a new workplace culture.

By Jeannie Naujeck

ROM WHERE SHE SITS in Midtown Manhattan, Lisa Simpson ’94 T’91 has a comprehensive view of the legal hiring market. A trial lawyer and former member of the management committee at Orrick, she has also served as hiring partner for its New York office and partner in charge of firmwide campus recruiting.

Simpson sees a marked shift in the way attorneys, from new recruits to lateral hires, are thinking about their careers since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020. While Simpson — and Orrick — felt this shift was well underway before the pandemic and had already started adjusting for it, the COVID pandemic accelerated the change.

“I think there’s a recognition by both lawyers and our firm that we need to make careers sustainable,” Simpson says. “It takes incredibly hard work to build a topquality practice — and just like an athlete, lawyers need to recover.

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“The folks that I’ve spoken to are looking for flexibility, and a big lesson coming out of the pandemic is that we can be both more flexible and more productive. So if you want to hire those people you need to have that built into your platform.

“We want to get and keep the best people, and if they want more agency in their careers, then we are going to give it to them. We’re willing to embrace that approach because we think overall that’s a better way to build a strong, healthy, and inclusive law firm and our clients recognize it means they get inspired and consistent teams.”

Three years on, a new model of the law firm workplace is emerging. Nationally, attorneys are strongly in favor of a hybrid model that combines one to three “anchor days” per week in the office with the rest remote. In the American Bar Association’s 2022 Practice Forward survey, 87% of respondents said their employer allows remote work, with 63% able to work remotely either fulltime or on their own schedule, and sizable numbers said they would switch jobs for more flexibility.

Associate Dean Bruce Elvin ’93, director of the Career & Professional Development Center, agrees with Simpson, while noting that defining “flexibility” remains an ongoing challenge in the profession.

“Every one of the dozens of employers that I have spoken with recently is genuinely concerned with finding the optimal approach to ensure their new lawyers develop professionally as expected and that their organization continues to achieve its goals, while also recognizing that the landscape of ‘where’ people work is a moving target and that many have different views. It is an ongoing conversation.”

To a large extent, employers are supporting hybrid work, which may not only help with employee retention, but also with reducing fixed expenses.

And hybrid work arrangements are just one of several shifts that accelerated during the pandemic years and have now taken root.

Many firms, driven in part by corporate clients, had already implemented metrics-driven diversity, equity, and inclusion programs that are slowly beginning to move the needle on racial, ethnic, and gender disparities in leadership roles — though Elvin notes that diversity at the equity partnership level remains low.

And with support for lawyer well-being widely acknowledged as vital to inclusive culture, compensation packages include an array of wellness benefits that recognize employees’ differing physical and mental health needs, caretaking responsibilities, and cultural backgrounds, and actively seek to counter burnout and improve retention.

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“The folks that I’ve spoken to are looking for flexibility, and a big lesson coming out of the pandemic is that we can be both more flexible and more productive.”

— Lisa Simpson ’94 T ’91, a partner in Orrick’s New York office

Underlying these changes are larger societal trends that had begun to transform the way lawyers and other professionals think of work and what they ask of employers well before 2020. While the COVID-19 lockdowns exposed the fragility of the systems people rely on, from childcare and public schools to support for physical and mental health, generational attitudes toward social justice and worklife balance also have changed. Building a culture that balances teamwork with individual needs is now critical to recruiting and retaining legal talent.

“Early in my career when I was doing recruiting, it was very much like, ‘Just go to the best firm that you get an offer from and don’t really worry about the rest of the stuff. Get trained and then you can go somewhere else if you want to, but go to that firm,’” Simpson says.

“That, I think, is no longer the way that future lawyers are approaching their job searches. There’s a more focused effort at identifying firms that are going to support them in all aspects of their life — not just career, but career, community engagement, pro bono service, and well-being, recognizing that you really need to pay attention to all those facets of yourself in order to succeed.”

Remote work, once a novelty, becomes ubiquitous efore the pandemic, fully remote work was limited to a small percentage of white-collar employees, and few U.S. employers offered remote or hybrid work options to office-based professionals. But in March 2020, about a third of all U.S. workers began working from home full time.

That included more than half of all lawyers, according to the American Bar Association’s 2021 Profile of the Legal Profession.

Law firms that adjusted most easily to remote work when the lockdowns began tended to have a pre-existing institutional culture of flexibility, collaboration, and lawyer autonomy; had invested significantly in cloud-based technology; and already allowed lawyers to work away from the office at least a day a week, Thomson Reuters concluded in its Pandemic Performers report. The most well-resourced firms were able to leverage that platform and emerge as top performers during a period of intense economic activity that created a massive influx of client work, particularly in M&A and capital markets, and pushed revenues and profitability to

record highs. Competition for talent quickly intensified, fueling compensation and bonuses at all levels of hiring.

“Certainly in 2021, and in the back half of ’20, a lot of law firms had some of their most profitable, productive years ever,” says Peter Ocko ’97, managing director in the partner practice group at Major, Lindsey & Africa.

“During that time, you saw an avalanche of not only lateral movement, but even in the non-equity partner and associate space. Since there were a lot of health restrictions in place, you might turn in your laptop from one place via UPS and get a new one from the new place [in the same trip].”

Hiring at the 200 highest-grossing firms in 2021 was 56% higher than the previous year, driven by demand for corporate attorneys, according to Firm Prospects. Many were recruited, hired, and trained entirely remotely.

After fits and starts in 2022 with return to office dates that were delayed due to new COVID-19 variants and continuing health concerns, law firms have largely refrained from five day a week mandates — or from enforcing them. Two-thirds of respondents to Withum’s 2022 Law Firm Leadership Survey said their attorneys were working on hybrid schedules, with two or three days per week in office the most common arrangement, and over half said they were making hybrid work policies permanent. Most respondents in Thomson Reuters’ 2022 Law Firm Business Leaders Survey said they would likely support remote work in 2023.

“I think you’ve seen a slow march back towards some sort of structure and policy,” says Ocko. “A lot of firms in the Am Law 200 have been searching for the right nomenclature with regard to what that is.”

A small number of firms, notably Quinn Emanuel, have adopted a fully remote “work from anywhere” policy. More than a year ago, the firm announced that

attorneys, including first year associates, would have no obligation to report to an office, except for orientation and onboarding and for client work as necessary. The firm would leverage remote technology for training and mentoring, reconfigure its office space for a “more vibrant” experience when attorneys gather for meetings, team building, and trial preparation, and to maintain its culture, increase offsite gatherings, such as its annual hike in places like the Dolomites in Italy and Laugavegur trail in Iceland.

Indeed, many firms are rethinking their real estate footprint. Some, like Perkins Coie, Davis Wright Tremaine, and Duane Morris report reducing their office space, while others are taking advantage of soft demand for space to expand geographically into new markets and negotiate new deals in prime locations. With fewer people in offices at any one time, a sizeable percentage are considering reducing or reconfiguring their office space with fewer private offices and more “hoteling” desks for in-office days, and adding large casual open spaces to foster socializing and collaboration, Withum found.

Still, with most top-grossing firms expecting some level of in-office attendance, Ocko doubts that permanent remote work will emerge as a dominant trend.

“First, real estate still is a marker of status and stability, whether or not we see a return to the days of the burled walnut corner office,” he says. “You certainly have some virtual firms that are successful. But those firms and maybe the Am Law top 50 think of themselves very differently.

“I think you’ve seen a slow march back towards some sort of structure and policy. A lot of firms in the Am Law 200 have been searching for the right nomenclature with regard to what that is.”

— Peter Ocko ’97, managing director in the partner practice group at Major, Lindsey & Africa, a recruiting firm

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“The other part of it is there are different opinions around integration and onboarding of new lawyers, whether it be partners or associates, how you maintain both an adherence to culture and practice, and also to the ability to learn and interface from one another, which occurs on a very informal level in offices.”

Orrick has long had fully remote attorneys, with each partner class over the past eight years including at least one member who did not live in the market of the office with which they were affiliated, says Simpson. And a third of its members are on some type of flexible work arrangement, such as reduced hours or a compressed workweek.

But the firm’s onboarding and integration processes are now more structured and “high touch” to allow first-year associates to make connections with each other and senior members, and to be able to navigate a hybrid environment with those relationships already established. It’s part of a broader rethinking of the office as a destination for team meetings, trainings, client opportunities, and networking — and less a place for attorneys to commute to every day, sequester themselves in individual offices, and “parallel work,” says Siobhan Handley, Orrick’s chief talent officer.

“We are having success with getting people into the office more often by relying on people thinking of the office more as a hub of connection and community, as opposed to linking it to productivity, which we know we can maintain remotely,” she says.

At Palo Alto, Calif.-based Cooley, attorneys are encouraged to come to the office at least three times a week. Lila Hope ’02, a partner in Cooley’s Life Sciences Partnering practice, says she thrives on personal interactions within the firm’s tight-knit community and finds giving feedback and sharing knowledge in person more effective and rewarding.

“There is flexibility to have a hybrid structure, but people do want to come back in and work together because we really like each other,” says Hope. “The learning 38 Duke Law Magazine • Spring 2023

experience is different. The community building is different. A whole lot of organic stuff happens and people connect, and all of those are much more attainable when we’re in the office.”

She recalls a recent day at the office revising a document with an associate: “It’s got 200 pages with various parts we were working on at different times and we’re running back and forth, exchanging notes with the pages tabbed. At the end she told me, ‘I learned so much, and it was so much fun working together,’ and that just melted my heart. I was thinking, ‘This is how practicing law should be.’”

Moore & Van Allen, a Charlotte-based firm with about 400 attorneys, is maintaining flexibility on in-office attendance. Attorneys are encouraged to come to the office three times a week but not everyone is choosing to do so. And that’s fine, says Valecia McDowell ’98 T’95, co-head of White Collar, Regulatory Defense and Investigations, head of Civil Rights & Racial Equity Assessments, and a member of the management committee.

“On a team-by-team basis, lawyer by lawyer basis, we’ve given everybody the flexibility to figure out what’s going to work for them,” says McDowell, who like Simpson and Hope is a member of the Law School’s Board of Visitors. “We’re just trying to meet people where they are, which is who we are as a firm.

We try to focus on people’s individual needs.”

McDowell is rigorous in managing her team practice and mentoring responsibilities in the new hybrid world. Meetings in her white-collar practice group, which has about three dozen lawyers, are routinely held both on Microsoft Teams and in an office conference room. Members join from wherever they are working that day.

“I feel like I see my people from a regular, let’smanage-these-matters perspective all the time,” she says. “I do not care where they are most days. It’s just not relevant to me.”

She also keeps a document for everyone she mentors with notes on where and when they prefer to meet and sets regular check-ins.

“I borrowed all of that from how I manage my client development activity. Once we went remote, I thought, ‘These people are as important for me to stay in touch with as my clients. And how am I managing that with my clients?’ And I just tried to mirror that.”

McDowell acknowledges that keeping attorneys connected is more difficult when not everyone is in the office five days a week but maintains that it can be addressed with intentionality. “We’re looking at who’s doing it the best on individual teams, talking to them about tips or advice they can give to other folks on keeping people connected,” she says.

“If you’re trying to create an environment that is as inclusive as possible, you have to listen to people and figure out how to get your clients’ needs met while also respecting the needs of the people who are on your team. And from a diversity perspective, flexibility is an important tool for us in making sure that this is a welcoming place for people, no matter their experience. That’s true for working parents, and we also found that in the wake of the events of the Black Lives Matter movement, sometimes people needed a break — to not always be in the office.

That was, I think, a collective learning.”

New DEI frameworks emphasize accountability he murder of George Floyd in May 2020, subsequent racial justice demonstrations around the country, and a rise in hate crimes against targeted groups brought a new focus on DEI efforts at corporations, many of which issued new diversity guidelines for outside counsel. Seventy percent of respondents to Withum’s 2021 Law Firm Leadership Survey said their focus on DEI initiatives increased in 2020, although that dipped to 62% last year.

Orrick launched a Racial Justice Fellowship Program that pays five experienced attorneys their full salary to spend a year embedded with organizations like Common Future and Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. In 2021 it partnered with Legal Innovators to introduce a fellowship program that aims to increase the pipeline of junior associates from underrepresented backgrounds, such as law schools typically overlooked by Big Law recruiters, and provide those lawyers with the training they need to succeed. The program has been so successful that the firm has engaged Legal Innovators to deliver a version of the training to all incoming junior associates.

Under a DEI action plan approved in August 2020, Cooley pledged to strengthen existing efforts within the firm and to direct more resources toward early engagement and recruitment programs such as its long-running summer 1L Diversity Fellowships.

“It’s really about doing what’s best for individuals, trying to help them become the best person and lawyer they can be, and giving people a path and opportunities at Cooley,” says Hope.

“It’s more about identifying folks who would be a good fit here. And not only do we recruit them and hire them, but we want to make sure there is an opportunity for long-term success, and we’re committed to helping them achieve it.”

Moore & Van Allen took immediate steps to extend its outreach to diverse employees, expanding its affinity groups from one group for lawyers of color to separate groups for Black, Hispanic, Asian Pacific, and LGBTQ+ lawyers.

“All of that really came from the emotional necessity for folks to have a place to feel safe and comfortable,” says McDowell, who co-chairs the firm’s diversity committee. “The issues that were coming up for our Black lawyers were so specific to our experiences as Black people that it wasn’t always comfortable to talk about it in the larger space.”

The firm increased outreach to law students from diverse backgrounds and launched new community programs, partnering with other local law firms to provide volunteer legal services to low-income entrepreneurs and small businesses. Associates, counsel, and staff attorneys can now receive up to 50 hours of billable credit annually for diversity and inclusion work, and many other national firms, including Orrick and Cooley, have adopted similar policies.

Additionally, Moore & Van Allen hired a consultant to do a cultural assessment of its own operations, similar to the civil rights audits McDowell conducts for corporate clients. The exercise identified nine areas to address within the firm, including culture and shared values, onboarding and embeddedness, inclusion and belonging, work allocation, and pathways for advancement. Members from all levels of the firm joined workstreams charged with proposing ways to make each process more equitable. Those recommendations are starting to be rolled out.

“I have an acute awareness of the importance of that work and the impact it can have, whether it’s a public audit like we see in the shareholder space, or a private privilege review,” says McDowell. “So we, as an institution, decided that we wanted to do likewise.”

Law firms have long struggled to diversify, especially at the top levels. While people of color grew to a record 28.3% of all associates in 2021, they made

“If you’re trying to create an environment that is as inclusive as possible, you have to listen to people and figure out how to get your clients’ needs met while also respecting the needs of the people who are on your team.”

— Valecia McDowell ’98 T’95, a partner, practice group head, and member of the management committee at Moore & Van Allen in Charlotte

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“It’s ... about identifying folks who would be a good fit here.

And not only do we recruit them and hire them, but we want to make sure there is an opportunity for long-term success, and we’re committed to helping them achieve it.”

— Lila Hope ’02, a partner at Cooley, in Palo Alto

up only 11.4% of partners in major U.S. law firms, with Black partners comprising only 2.3% of all partners, according to the National Association for Law Placement (NALP) 2022 Report on Diversity released in January. Nearly half of all associates were women, but just over a quarter were partners.

However, The American Lawyer’s 2022 Diversity Scorecard showed the largest gains in the number of minority attorneys in 20 years, with the “war for talent” creating hiring opportunities for attorneys from more diverse backgrounds.

Both as a strategic business priority and with pressure from corporate clients, the legal profession had begun to employ data-driven approaches to diversity, equity, and inclusion prior to 2020. Those include the Diversity Lab’s Mansfield Rule, a certification program for diversifying leadership in the legal profession and improving transparency of pathways to advancement. Participating firms commit to considering women lawyers, racially and ethnically diverse lawyers, lawyers with disabilities, and LGBTQ+ lawyers as at least 30% of the candidate pool for leadership positions and activities that develop leaders.

The 41 law firms in the Mansfield Rule pilot saw racial and ethnic diversity on their management committees increase by 4.4 percentage points, a rate 30 times higher than firms not in the program. Diversity Lab, an incubator focused on strategies to boost diversity and inclusion in law, cites external accountability and knowledge sharing among participants as key to the program’s success.

Nearly 400 legal workplaces, including more than 180 large law firms and 140 midsize firms, have joined since the 2017 launch.

Ocko, the recruiter, says large firms would do well to look outside traditional metrics that exclude good candidates to find lawyers the firm can develop and grow. They should also examine, and break, any biases they may hold about what kinds of people will be successful in their organizations.

“There are a lot of tremendous, high-quality lawyers out there who I think sometimes get overlooked,” he says. “Where the rubber meets the road is when firms are able to look at someone who they believe makes sense, and would be, whether in the near term or long term, a valuable addition to the firm — not only because they’re diverse, but because of their practice and perspective and direction — and bring that person on as opposed to spending money on a lot of other things.”

He calls diversification at law firms a matter of fund allocation: “Major law firms have to decide that it’s worth investing in and making those hires — not just at the associate and the partner levels but making investments in communities to develop and widen the pipeline. That, to me, is the real investment in diversity.”

“Some [ firms] that had not previously done so are trying 360 degree reviews of recent partners to help them be better managers, while others are adding internal coaches who can help people at all levels develop in different ways.”

— Bruce Elvin ’93, associate dean and director of the Career & Professional Development Center

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Creating a culture of wellness and mental health OR MANY LAWYERS, the stresses of the pandemic years were compounded by overwork and burnout as firms dealt with a large volume of business. The pandemic exposed cracks in the façades of lawyers who like to appear in control, says Hope, who sits on Cooley’s mental health and wellness committee and is chairing a BOV task force on lawyer wellness.

“You look at people and think, ‘They’ve got everything together,’ but they don’t,” she says. “Nobody does. We all are kind of treading water at some level, and I think the pandemic may have done us a favor in showing, ‘Hey, we’re all vulnerable here.’”

Now, mental health is a front-burner issue, with firms elevating it to the executive suite. Kirkland & Ellis hired a director of wellbeing in 2019. At Weil, a litigation partner made a career transition to become its chief wellness officer. Twelve Big Law firms sponsor the Institute for Well-Being in Law, launched in 2021 to promote a culture shift in the profession that prioritizes mental health.

Workplace assistance programs have become more robust, accessible, and tailored to employees’ particular needs. Benefits now include such amenities as billable hour allotments for wellness activities and bonus money to spend on a massage, dinner out, or a weekend getaway. Orrick offers attorneys a week of “unplug” time each year where they are expected to completely disconnect from phones, email, and videoconferences.

Lawyer well-being is a critical part of engagement and retention. Hiring and onboarding is a costly part of doing business, and associate turnover in the Am Law 100 was higher than usual in 2021 due to intense competition and pay. Yet lawyer surveys show that a supportive culture goes further to create firm loyalty than raising compensation.

“I think there’s a lot more focus on wellness than there ever was when I was starting out,” Simpson says. “If you took care of yourself, great, but no one really talked about it.

“The recruits of today are really looking at those issues and putting a level of importance on them. Are they going to choose a firm for wellness over another firm? Maybe not for their first job, but some are, and in the lateral market we certainly see it.”

Lawyers also desire clarity regarding advancement pathways, support to do so, and viable career alternatives to the partner track, such as less intense “career associate” positions that may handle functions such as research, drafting, and due diligence. Training and mentoring were top features that respondents, especially younger attorneys, wanted to see more highly valued by their firms, followed by more attention to diversity and policies to support well-being and worklife balance, according to Major, Lindsey & Africa’s 2022 Law Firm Culture Survey.

Firms are also increasing their focus on developing critical management and development skills with a goal of adjusting to hybrid work and general improvement of the work environment, says Elvin, who teaches a seminar on the business and economics of law firms.

“Some that had not previously done so are trying 360 degree reviews of recent partners to help them be better managers, while others are adding internal coaches who can help people at all levels develop in different ways,” he says. “While some firms have employed these tools for a number of years, a growing number of law firms are focused on those types of efforts.”

As a consensus emerges on the future workplace, development will almost certainly include training on how to collaborate and communicate in a hybrid world. While in the long term fully remote work might be reserved for experienced lawyers with proven competencies and practices where distributed teams are already common, many law firms appear to be permanently evolving toward a model that offers team members more flexibility, choice, and autonomy on days working out of office and a complement of services for developing, maintaining, and supporting a diverse pool of talent.

In the meantime, the office isn’t going away.

Rather, it is becoming a locus for interactions with colleagues, including collaborative work training, team building, and social interactions that help maintain organizational culture and cohesiveness and ensure early-career lawyers have the resources and mentoring they need to develop.

If a recession brings mass layoffs in the legal industry, the dynamic may change. But maintaining the right balance of flexibility to meet the needs of the workforce and the needs of firms appears to be the future of the profession.

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Seven

pandemic pivots These alumni used the lockdown as a time for career reflection, relocation, and renewal.

For Nichelle Johnson Billips JD/LLM ’03, the pandemic brought the work of the U.S. Agency for International Development into stark relief. As an attorney-advisor for the agency, she helped keep critical health and nutrition programs running in developing countries when clinics were closed and logistics snarled, worked on messaging campaigns to encourage hand-washing, and supported the distribution of millions of vaccine doses.

It was a singular professional experience, and Johnson Billips believed deeply in USAID’s mission. But COVID-19 had taught her the importance of being open to new possibilities. In October, after nearly a decade of government service, she joined FHI 360, a large nonprofit supporting human development around the world, as deputy general counsel.

“With the pandemic, we had a lot of things taken away, and it forced us to think about what we want to put back,” Johnson Billips says. “I had been at USAID for a number of years at that point, and I was thinking, ‘Okay, I’m doing this. I’m doing a good job. Is this what I want to keep doing?

Exactly this?’”

Johnson Billips had aspired to international work during her time in Duke’s JD/LLM in International and Comparative Law dual-degree program. After graduation, she joined Hogan & Hartson in Washington, where she remained for eight years, then entered public service in 2012 at the U.S. Department of Transportation before moving to USAID. A few years later, she began supporting the agency’s global health work, including programs focused on HIV and AIDS prevention, maternal and child health, nutrition programs, and eventually, COVID-19.

The work was grueling but rewarding.

“In the international development space, often you’re working on issues that you aren’t living through, like water and sanitation or girls’ education,” she says. “But the pandemic is something that we were living through and working on.”

As she was reassessing her career, Johnson Billips applied for and was accepted into the White House Leadership Development Program, where she spent the next year as a fellow, learning about herself and the inner workings of the center of the federal government. Towards the end of the program, FHI 360 contacted her. She was hesitant to leave the government, but followed a mentor’s advice to go on the interview before ruling it out. When she found that the people there shared her passion for helping people around the world improve their lives, she was convinced it was the right move.

“In your career, there’s not necessarily one destination,” she says. “Your career is this journey. Thinking about this as the next step in my career journey, it seems like a good one.”

Nichelle Johnson Nichelle Johnson Billips Billips JD/LLM ’03 JD/LLM ’03Finding new outlet for Finding new outlet for foreign aid expertise in foreign aid expertise in nonprofit sector nonprofit sector

42 Duke Law Magazine • Spring 2023

Athul Acharya ’14 relocated to Portland, Ore., from the Bay Area in May 2020, retaining his position as an impact litigation associate with a boutique firm. But just before his move, George Floyd was murdered by a Minneapolis police officer, sparking protests against police brutality across the United States, including months of protests in Portland, and accelerating Acharya’s own move into civil rights law.

Acharya recalls that “basically all hell broke loose” as police began tear-gassing demonstrators in the city’s downtown.

On behalf of his firm, he subsequently identified a class of journalists and legal observers who had been targeted by local law enforcement for reporting on aggressive treatment of protesters. His team won a preliminary injunction against local authorities and federal agents, then successfully defended an appeal, allowing reporters to remain at the scene of a protest following an order to disperse.

“I think that really made concrete for me that fighting these law enforcement abuses was what I wanted to do with my career,” says Acharya, a former software engineer who initially practiced patent litigation.

In May 2021, he left private practice to found Public Accountability in Portland, a civil rights nonprofit dedicated to reforming rules like qualified immunity, sovereign immunity, and the Monell doctrine that help to shield police officers and other public officials and entities from civil litigation. Noting that his interest in anti-accountability doctrines started a decade earlier in his Federal Courts course taught by Alston & Bird Professor Ernest Young, he sees Public Accountability as filling a neglected niche.

“Most civil rights nonprofits, like the ACLU, take a generalist Fighting to ensure public approach,” Acharya says. “No one was laser-focused on these specific accountability of police, threshold doctrines that keep cases from being heard on their merits.” public officials In the past year Acharya has won an appeal involving excessive use of force by a deputy against a protester in Portland and secured a $750,000 excessive force settlement for a man beaten by prison guards in El Paso County, Colo. He also successfully opposed a motion for summary judgment based on sovereign immunity in a Colorado inmate’s discrimination claim; a $3.5 million verdict was awarded in January.

As Public Accountability’s executive director, Acharya’s current caseload includes representing a prisoner in a Bivens claim seeking damages for excessive use of force by federal marshals and others involving journalists’ right to cover protests without retaliation, parents’ right to criticize school board members, the right to sue federal agents in the Ninth Circuit, and compensation for inmates infected with COVID-19.

“I started having conversations with people about doing this back in 2018,” Acharya says. “Would those conversations have reached fruition without the events of 2020? That’s unclear.”

Athul Acharya ’14

Ryan Sheen JD/LLMLE ’18 always had an entrepreneurial bent. He worked for Duke Capital Partners (formerly the Duke Angel Network) while in law school and began his legal career as a startup and venture capital attorney at a lean, tech-forward law firm.

But when that firm began to expand practice areas and shift its focus away from startup work, Sheen and colleagues from his practice group decided to launch their own law firm. In October Sheen became a founding senior attorney at Optimal Counsel, a boutique focused on emerging companies and venture capital that is fully remote.

Now Sheen is part of a startup himself.

“After advising clients over all these years on their new ventures, it’s been fun to put on the founder hat and see things from their perspective,” he says.

Optimal Counsel’s distributed model allows its 15 attorneys, which include other Duke Law alumni, to work from wherever they choose to live. For Sheen, that meant moving from Boston to Washington, D.C. Sheen says Optimal’s remote-first model materially decreases overhead, allowing the firm to offer partner-level legal services at billing rates similar to the rates of less experienced associates at large law firms — a significant advantage, he says, especially with the recent downturn in VC financing and M&A transactions. Optimal Counsel was profitable in its first quarter and services more than 125 clients, most of which transferred with Optimal’s launch. Because Optimal’s founders had largely worked as a remote practice group at their previous firm, the transition has been seamless, Sheen says.

Ryan Sheen JD/LLMLE ’18

Co-founding a fully remote firm to aid entrepreneurial clients’ bottom line “Most of our clients are startups and tech-based, so they just get it. A lot of them are working from co-working spaces themselves, and they are familiar with and confident in using software for videoconferencing, for example, in lieu of meeting in person. So we’re on the same page.”

The decentralized structure also eliminates a concern that Sheen and many of his colleagues found at their previous firm: an uneven playing field between remote and in-person attorneys.

“When you have only one practice group that’s remote, office politics do come into play and remote workers are at a disadvantage because they’re not in the office building relationships in person every day,” Sheen says.

“If everyone’s remote-first, that eliminates a lot of anxiety and attorneys can focus their energy on producing quality work and being an advocate for their clients as opposed to worrying about things like their commute and finding childcare.”

“I think COVID has shown us that remote work is realistic and attainable and it’s a practical way to work. It’s my hope that the legal industry in general will move in that direction.”

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Shanna Rifkin ’17 says her heart always called her to a public interest career, yet she never gave herself permission to listen. Instead, she followed advice she had once been given to pursue jobs “that will open doors,” advice that led her to district court and First Circuit Court of Appeals clerkships and then practicing general litigation at Jenner & Block in Chicago.

That is, until the pandemic. Isolated from coworkers and friends by the lockdown and struggling to achieve any work-life balance, Rifkin began to feel “untethered” from the firm and the path she had worked so hard to forge. She kept gravitating towards the part of her caseload she cared about the most, her pro bono cases, which were primarily criminal defense, and marveled at a fellow associate’s decision to leave practice, without another job lined up but with the confidence she’d secure one.

“Once she left, I started to seriously question what I was doing, and that the only cases I truly wanted to work on were my pro bono cases,” Rifkin says. “Watching her leave gave me the confidence that I could leave too.”

In April 2021, after a year-and-a-half in private practice, Rifkin quit, deciding that success on her terms lay elsewhere. She spent the summer working on clemency matters on behalf of incarcerated youth with Northwestern Law School’s Children and Family Justice Center, while applying for a range of public interest jobs and secretly second-guessing her move. Then, in a single week in September, she received three offers, including one from FAMM (formerly known as Families Against Mandatory Minimums), a nonprofit focused on sentencing reform.

Having been fascinated by the complex federal sentencing issues she encountered during her district court clerkship, Rifkin says working with FAMM was a dream, although one she assumed would be unattainable. Since accepting the position of deputy general counsel, she has helped expand the organization’s amicus practice in appellate courts and the U.S. Supreme Court, engaged in regulatory advocacy with the U.S. Sentencing Commission on such matters as amendment of compassionate release guidelines, and screened incarcerated people’s requests for compassionate release motions and connected those who present viable claims with pro bono counsel.

“It’s the best job I’ve ever had,” she says, relieved to have let go of that early career advice, and followed her gut instead. “Being able to do work that reflects your heart and your passion is the most empowering thing.”

Mila Trezza LLM ’03

Career coaching for lawyers represents natural next step

44 Duke Law Magazine • Spring 2023

Shanna Rifkin ’17

Working for sentencing reform helps redefine success

After informally counseling countless friends and colleagues on their professional paths, in 2020 Mila Trezza LLM ’03 saw a natural next step for her legal career: a coaching practice that leveraged her people skills and deep knowledge of the corporate legal environment.

“I had all these people asking, ‘Can we have a talk? What do you think? What should I do?’” she recalls. “I find it very fulfilling, and I have been passionate about helping people ever since.”

Early in her legal career, Trezza remembers being “universally discouraged” from moving in-house, but she wanted to work closely with businesspeople and ultimately manage a team of lawyers. After earning her LLM at Duke, she spent 17 years with Italian energy company Eni, the last 10 as vice president and general counsel for Europe and Oceania. “I was the first woman in that role and a mother of three,” she says. “In many ways, I felt like I was living life at double speed. I said to myself, ‘I will do this until I’m 45 and then it’s my time to do something that is more my vision of legal talent and less with a corporate script.’”

After leaving the post at the end of 2020, Trezza earned her executive coaching certification and launched her practice. Her clients so far have included partners and associates at major law firms, general counsels, and heads of legal departments in both the public and private sectors. She is also coaching international students at Duke Law in a new program launched this fall called “Beyond the LLM.” The individual, confidential sessions are tailored to the specific needs of the student, and Trezza helps them explore their options, arm them with insight, and build a strategy for careers that often have a multi-jurisdictional dimension.

Like many coaches, Trezza finds clients, whomever they are, need help gaining clarity and building confidence to progress to their next career move. But she says a key aspect of her practice is helping lawyers who want to advance and succeed in leadership roles: “Lawyers play a vital role for the organizations they serve. Yet no jobs, and in fairness, not even legal education fully prepare them for their self-management and leadership challenges.” She also specializes in helping law firms and in-house lawyers communicate and understand each other better.

“I try to encapsulate my experience and offer it in a manner that is hopefully meaningful for people,” she says. “When people reconnect with their strengths and see their challenges from a new perspective, it’s just wonderful to see how far they can go.”

As the pandemic entered its second year, Abby Dennis ’08 decided it was time for a sabbatical. For four-and-a-half months, she and her partner traveled around the United States, visiting loved ones, seeing natural wonders, and testing themselves on grueling mountain hikes. A month after returning home to Washington, D.C., she set out on another adventure: leaving a successful litigation practice at Boies Schiller Flexner in Washington for a new position at the Federal Trade Commission, her first job change in 12 years.

“I always wanted to take some time to travel,” Dennis says.

“You’re working very hard, you love your job, and then life’s a little bit in upheaval with the pandemic and you realize what’s important to you. COVID gave me a chance to be away from work, physically and also mentally, and helped with changing the direction I wanted to go in with my life.”

A partner at Boies Schiller, Dennis had worked on two major trials in 2019 (her ninth and 10th since joining the firm following a federal clerkship), run the New York City Marathon, and turned 40. She loved her job and her firm. But the next spring, as she and her colleagues dispersed to their homes and high-stakes litigation ground to a halt, she began to reflect on her career.

“I was very fortunate to get fantastic experience as an associate and a junior partner, but it’s very hard to crack into the next level of being the lead trial lawyer, which is something I really wanted to do,” she says. “There’s a chicken-and-egg situation in Big Law, which is to be the lead lawyer you need to bring in the clients, but to bring in the clients you need to be the lead lawyer.”

One former colleague who had navigated the same challenge encouraged her to consider moving into government to get the lead trial lawyer experience she craved. Despite spending her career in Washington, Dennis hadn’t envisioned a role for herself in public service, but she returned from her sabbatical ready to make the leap. A year later, she was preparing to go to trial leading one of the government’s highest-profile antitrust cases, the FTC’s challenge to Meta’s acquisition of VR software company Within Unlimited.

“It’s hard to make changes when you really, really love something and you’re a little bit older,” she says. “You get in a certain safe place in life and sometimes it takes something like COVID to jar you out of that. Sometimes it’s good to challenge yourself and do things that might be a little bit uncomfortable to advance yourself as a human being, advance yourself as a lawyer.”

Abby Dennis ’08

Making the leap from private practice to public service at the FTC

A technology transactions attorney at Perkins Coie, Michael Herrera ’16 was based in its San Diego office in March 2020 when news of the pandemic hit and the entire firm went remote almost overnight. He credits enlightened firm practices and policies for making the transition seamless and successful.

“We represent a lot of technology clients so we are a very tech-focused firm and our systems were advanced already,” Herrera says, adding that many of his colleagues worked in different offices or at different hours. “I don’t think anything really fell through the cracks.”

In fact, once his San Diego home office was set up Herrera found himself to be “significantly more productive.” A partner even noted how well he had adjusted, with no visible impact on his work or ability to communicate with or train colleagues.

So it was easy for the firm to say yes when Herrera asked to move to Raleigh for family reasons under its new tiered hybrid policy. Since relocating in spring 2022 he hasn’t missed a beat, conducting business much as before, with occasional trips to the West Coast for client and firm meetings.

“That’s the nature of how I developed my practice, so I was already used to being on calls a lot,” Herrera says. “In my life sciences and biotech practice, there was no in-person communication because that team is very remote or hybrid anyway, so we’ve noticed no drop-off in training or ability or production or anything.

I call people all the time on video chat. I still train folks. I treat it like I’m still in the office, and people seem to appreciate that.

“I miss the casual drop-ins with folks, and there’s something to be said about getting away from home for work. But even before the pandemic our office wasn’t always at 100% capacity.”

Herrera is active in the firm’s diversity and inclusion initiatives as well as recruiting, and says his firm’s flexibility has attracted attorneys looking to make lateral moves.

“The firm has been unbelievably supportive,” Herrera says.

“Perkins has always been very progressive and forward-looking. I think the pandemic highlighted how much so.”

He predicts that most law firms will eventually implement similar policies, with most workers in the office two or three days a week.

“The pandemic showed us that working remotely is not a detriment,” he says. “I think fully remote work will still be on a case-by-case basis. I just don’t think convincing a firm will be as difficult as it was pre-pandemic, if you’re capable or if you have a practice conducive to it.”

Michael Herrera ’16

Taking the office across the country without missing a beat

Duke Law Magazine • Spring 2023

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46 Duke Law Magazine • Spring 2023

Profiles

Mandisa Maya LLM ’90

Deputy Chief Justice of South Africa

I

N LATE JANUARY, Mandisa Maya, the Deputy Chief Justice of South Africa, celebrated the launch of a new publication that will give women lawyers and judges opportunities to write early in their careers and prepare those who join the country’s bench to produce high-quality judgments from the outset of their terms.

Justice Maya and her team spent four years developing The Journal of the South African Chapter of the International Association of Women Judges and she is its editor-in-chief.

“The journal is owned by women, run entirely by women, and publishes articles written by women,” says Justice Maya, who is also president and a co-founder of the chapter. “We established it primarily to give women lawyers and judges a platform where they can finesse their writing skills so that we can create a pool of women thought leaders who will document their jurisprudential contributions and write also on all the issues that affect women in society.”

It’s an opportunity she would have welcomed before she was appointed as a judge of the superior court for South Africa’s south-central Eastern Cape province in 1999 and began her own pathbreaking career as a jurist. In 2006 she became the first Black woman appointed to the country’s Supreme Court of Appeal (SCA), the highest appellate court of general jurisdiction, and in 2016 she became the first woman to be appointed as that court’s deputy president. A year later, she set another milestone as the first woman to lead the SCA as president, and in 2022 became the highest-ranking woman judge ever in South Africa when she was named deputy chief of the Constitutional Court.

When he appointed her as deputy chief justice, President Cyril Ramaphosa predicted that her position of leadership on the country’s highest court would be inspiring and empowering for women and girls.

“Justice Maya will contribute to the ongoing transformation process of the judiciary,” he said in a statement on July 25. “Her ascendency to the apex court will serve as a beacon of hope for scores of young women and make them believe that South Africa is a country of possibilities, regardless of gender, social, or economic circumstances.”

Diligence, determination, democracy

Justice Maya credits her parents, both teachers, with modeling the values of hard work, honesty, service, and caring for others, as they raised their six children in the rural Eastern Cape in a home filled with love, books, and, frequently, relatives who needed their assistance. “My parents didn’t have much money, but they always made room for those who had less,” she says.

As the eldest, she helped care for her siblings from a young age, but all were expected to help run their home with no separation of labor between boys and girls, she says. Most importantly, they all received a far better education than did most Black children during the racially segregated apartheid era because their parents supplemented it with instruction at home.

Because she excelled in school, Justice Maya seemed headed for a career in medicine — “the best you could be in those days” — which was even predicted by the Anglican bishop in his blessing over her first communion at age 9. When squeamishness ruled that out,

“Her ascendency to the apex court will serve as a beacon of hope for scores of young women and make them believe that South Africa is a country of possibilities, regardless of gender, social, or economic circumstances.”

— South African President Cyril Ramaphosa

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Profiles law seemed the “next best” career option, she jokes. But there was another reason for its appeal.

“In South Africa in those dark days, lawyers — very few of them women — were crucial in getting some justice for Black people,” she says. “I quite fancied joining the ranks of these heroes, these Black lawyers who were our saviors.”

After completing a four-year undergraduate BProc degree, then a precursor to becoming an attorney, Justice Maya earned her LLB in 1988 at the University of Natal. A part-time job with a local attorney during a law school break led her to set her sights on becoming an advocate — a legal practitioner who is admitted to the Bar and presents cases in court — in spite of the fact that almost all members of the field at the time were white and male. Only one Black woman advocate was then in practice in the Eastern Cape.

“One of my duties was delivering instructions to advocates in their chambers,” she says. “By interacting with them, I got a peek into this rarified world that was sort of closed off to Black lawyers, and it appealed to me.”

First, though, she knew she wanted to broaden her education.

Encouraged to apply by one of her law professors, Justice Maya secured a Fulbright scholarship to attend Duke, which she selected for its prestige and quiet, green locale, and also for the fact that Lawrence Baxter was then a member of the research faculty. She knew Baxter, who recently retired as the David T. Zhang Professor of the Practice of Law, to be South Africa’s foremost expert on administrative law whose 1984 text remains seminal in the field.

It was an enriching year on many levels, she says, made more so by the support afforded by Judy Horowitz, then the associate dean of International Studies, and Donald Horowitz, the James B. Duke Professor of Law and Political Science Emeritus, who “doted” on the international students who came from all over the world.

“You can imagine a Black South African girl, who’d never been outside the borders of this small country, starting to find herself in this big world,” Justice Maya says. “At Duke I was exposed for the first time to the Socratic method of teaching — we were taught very differently. But I found my rhythm fairly quickly and made friends.”

And her Duke experience stood her in good stead when she returned home after working at the Women’s Legal Defense Fund in Washington, D.C. “When I came back and was applying for teaching and other jobs, everybody wanted to snap me up,” she says. “And I knew that was because I had come from Duke.” She worked at the State Law Adviser’s Office and taught law part-time at the University of Transkei, her undergraduate alma mater, following her return.

By then apartheid was being dismantled and the country was preparing for its first democratic election, slated for April 1994. But rampant violence, including the assassination of anti-apartheid leader Chris Hani, threatened to derail it. “We were on the brink if not in the heart of a civil war,” she says. “There were all sorts of things that were mediating against the attainment of this freedom that we were so excited about.”

Justice Maya signed on as an investigator for the Independent Electoral Commission, charged with investigating, documenting, and sometimes mediating complaints relating to election campaigns. These were primarily allegations that right-wing white farmers were destroying campaign materials from Black political parties like the African National Congress or preventing their workers from 48 Duke Law Magazine • Spring 2023

joining political organizations and attending campaign events, she says. But even if they had the courage to lay complaints, farmworkers often were reluctant to speak with her and her fellow investigators, for fear of losing their jobs and their homes.

“So it was difficult, but nothing was going to deter us,” she says.

“We ended up having peaceful elections — everybody was able to vote for the first time — and it counts among the very best days of our lives.”

An ascendant jurist

But even in the exhilarating aftermath, Justice Maya could not establish a practice in Johannesburg where she did her training because attorneys weren’t willing to direct briefs to a Black, female advocate.

“Being a woman at the Bar was and is hard,” she told the members of the Judicial Service Commission during her June interview for her current post. “People who have the work and can brief counsel do not have sufficient confidence in women.”

Even after she relocated to the Eastern Cape she “survived” mainly on briefs sent to her by a friend who was the instructing attorney for her municipality and local bank, while male advocates landed the more lucrative work from banks and government. But the state attorney gradually took note of her courtroom skill, and by 1999 her practice was finally flourishing.

She flatly and repeatedly rejected the invitation to become a judge of the Western Cape High Court when it was extended, feeling that she was too inexperienced and, at 35, too young.

But the judge president of the court was persistent and, eventually, persuasive, impressing on her the importance of having well-qualified women on the bench who believed in the constitution.

When she finally agreed, she found that she loved it.

“I enjoyed the intellectual rigor — the art of analyzing legal concepts and trying to balance the competing interests to achieve a fair result for all the parties, even those who lose,” she says. “I found it thrilling.” In Justice Maya’s first term on the bench she got “a huge boost of confidence” when two of her judgments were published in a single volume of reports; she remains one of only two judges to be recognized in that way. And as the mother of two young children — a third would soon follow — she also liked that the job kept her close to home.

The significant record of judgments she amassed over five years on the Eastern Cape High Court earned her an invitation to join the SCA, which she did in 2006, after serving for a year in an acting capacity on the Labour Court. She was one of only three women on what was then a 16-member bench when she joined, and while numbers had improved somewhat by the time she took the helm in 2016, she set improving its gender diversity as a key goal.

“I went about scouring the high courts for possible women candidates and found good women judges,” she says. “I believe that if you look for people, you find them. And if they don’t have the necessary experience, you mentor and assist them.”

Along with a racially diverse cohort of male jurists, six women of color were appointed to the SCA during Justice Maya’s tenure as president of the court; as of late January, 11 out of 23 judges were women, with interviews for vacancies pending, she says. “And we have been able now to establish a steady stream of women candidates for the court.”

“My aim always is — and I make no apologies for this — to set an example that will encourage young women and girls to reach for the stars.”

Justice Maya says the true test of her presidency came with the COVID-19 lockdown in late March 2020, near the end of her court’s first term. In addition to ensuring that judgments were finalized remotely, she spent the court’s April recess putting together a plan for the term slated to begin May 2, instructing her assistant to research what senior courts in other countries were doing. “I felt that if there was one court in the world that was sitting during that time, so could we,” she says.

Using directives from an appellate court in the United Kingdom as a starting point, Justice Maya secured laptops with webcams for all SCA judges, set up training so that each was capable of presiding over hearings virtually, and got “buy-in” from attorneys who had cases on the docket. Getting colleagues who were dismissive of the effort on board was harder.

“That meeting was the defining moment of my leadership, because I managed to cajole them to try it out on the first day of May and see how things went,” she says. The test case went smoothly, as did the entire term, she reports. “We were able to sit as many as six courtrooms in a day on the virtual platform, whereas the SCA actually only has three [physical] courtrooms. In terms of output, we were the best performing court in the country.”

Leading on language

Another “first” from Justice Maya’s tenure on the SCA was her decision, in 2021, to write an opinion in isiXhosa, her ancestral language, as well as English. While the constitution enjoins the development and protection of all of South Africa’s 11 official languages, only two of them, English and Afrikaans, had ever been used in recorded judgments of the senior courts. She identified a case with official language policy at its core as appropriate for carrying out a long-simmering goal.

Her opinion in AfriForum v. Chairperson of the Council of the University of South Africa took six months to write. Faced with the challenge of crafting legal terms in isiXhosa which, like most other official languages, hadn’t had an opportunity to develop in that context, she eventually engaged the assistance of a professional translator and her deputy. But it was essential to write her initial opinion in isiXhosa, as opposed to just having an English ruling translated, she told the Judicial Service Commission in June, both as a matter of personal cultural pride and constitutional imperative.

When another case came before the SCA that involved parties who spoke another of South Africa’s official languages, she asked a colleague to write it in their language. And her effort has resulted in an invitation from an academic institution to help revive all of South Africa’s languages and bring them into more mainstream use.

“It has started a positive movement, I hope,” Justice Maya says.

Continuing to inspire

As Deputy Chief Justice, her responsibilities, beyond hearing and deciding cases en banc with her colleagues on the Constitutional Court, are statutorily defined as helping the Chief Justice achieve his goals for the court and the South African judiciary. At his behest she now chairs the Judicial Services Commission that oversees judicial appointments, among other duties with which she assists him.

When she was interviewed by the commission prior to her appointment, she was asked how she might use the position to “make women feel the law is working for them” in a country where violence against women is common and often dismissed by authorities. She spoke about the need for standardized training to sensitize all stakeholders in the justice system, including police and judges, on gender-related matters. Any judicial officer “faced with any case that has to do with the violation of girls and women should have the proper understanding of what is at play and what needs to be done,” she said.

Justice Maya called, too, for the creation of meaningful policies on such matters as maternity leave for judges — still lacking since she was the first pregnant judge on the Eastern Cape High Court — and for dealing with sexual harassment within the judiciary, noting that she has a proposal ready for presentation to a meeting of the heads of courts. And she stressed the importance of improving gender diversity in the institution.

“No country will thrive if one half of its citizens are downtrodden,” she said. “It has been proven across the world that when you put women in leadership positions who have empathy and understand the issues that affect women, things begin to change. And that gives women greater confidence in the judiciary.”

Since 2021, Justice Maya has served as the second chancellor of the University of Mpumalanga (UMP), which she calls her “fun portfolio,” because she enjoys interacting with students. In late fall she delivered the Archbishop Thabo Makgoba Development Trust’s annual lecture on ethical and moral leadership to UMP students, which is intended to inspire and impress upon them the importance of servant leadership to build a prosperous and equitable society. Noting that the university’s vice chancellor, another woman, introduced her, she viewed it as an opportunity to demonstrate what leadership can look like for the university’s male and female students alike.

“Seeing these two women at the pinnacle of our university is, I think, important,” she says. “I thought that any young person watching these two women lead this institution would surely be encouraged to do better, to be better.

“But my aim always is — and I make no apologies for this — to set an example that will encourage young women and girls to reach for the stars.” — Frances Presma Duke Law Magazine • Spring 2023

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Profiles

Mark Uyeda ’95

W

HEN MARK UYEDA ARRIVED for his first day as a member of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission last June, he was in a familiar place. He had been on the SEC staff since 2006 in a variety of positions, including senior advisor to Chairman Jay Clayton, senior advisor to Acting Chairman Michael S. Piwowar, and counsel to Commissioner Paul S. Atkins. At his nomination hearing before the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee, the committee’s then-ranking member, Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) had lauded him as “exceptionally well-qualified” and his expertise “unrivaled,” and noted that seven former commissioners publicly supported his confirmation.

But as Uyeda points out, being commissioner is a different job than any he’s had in the past.

“It’s much different when you’re just not advising someone how to vote, but it actually is your vote,” says Uyeda, who is the first Asian Pacific American to serve on the SEC. “I want to make sure that I’m doing everything to uphold my obligations as a commissioner to make fully informed decisions.”

Uyeda has spent more than three decades familiarizing himself with the inner workings of the capital markets and securities regulations, first as a business major and Capitol Hill intern, then as a law student at Duke. In practice at Kirkpatrick & Lockhart (now known 50 Duke Law Magazine • Spring 2023

as K&L Gates) and O’Melveny & Myers, he advised public companies and investors. And immediately prior to joining the SEC staff, he served as chief advisor to the commissioner of the California Department of Corporations, which regulates both securities laws and non-bank financial lending laws in the state.

“Mark is a dedicated public servant and an extremely talented securities lawyer,” Toomey said. “He has over 25 years of experience in securities and corporate law. That includes experience of regularly preparing prospectuses and 10-Ks for public companies filed with the SEC, which I am told is something that no other current SEC commissioner has done.”

Uyeda stepped into the role at a challenging time for the SEC. Activism around environmental, social, and governance (ESG) issues, a surge in social media-driven retail investing, and the rise and fall of cryptocurrency players have crowded the agency’s regulatory agenda and enforcement docket. One of two Republicans on the five-member commission, Uyeda is already fighting an uphill battle in some debates, and the term he was chosen to fill expires June 5, though President Joe Biden could choose to leave him in place for up to 18 more months.

“Being in the minority is an experience that I have gone through before,” Uyeda says, noting his time advising Piwowar during the

“I very much welcome having Mark at the table at the SEC as it undertakes numerous decisions that are unrivaled in its history. His calm question of limits and the foundations for moving forward will not just salve regulatory zeal but likely will move the end product of these regulatory initiatives to a better place.”

— Professor James Cox

Obama administration. “But I don’t view it through a partisan lens.

I’m not a politician and I’m not accountable to the voters, and I think that affects my philosophical approach to being a federal financial regulator. We have a degree of independence and insulation from political forces.”

As a child in Orange County, Calif., Uyeda worked summers in his family’s produce delivery company, helping haul cartons of fruits and vegetables to restaurants and stores. His grandfather had first started the business to support his five siblings after their parents died, but had to rebuild it after World War II, when the U.S. government sent him and his family, including Uyeda’s mother, to an internment camp for Americans of Japanese descent. (At the same time his uncle was serving in the U.S. Army and earning a Bronze Star).

“Finding startup capital was difficult for my grandfather, particularly in an era where racial discrimination was common,” Uyeda said at his nomination hearing. “Yet he persevered and accomplished the American dream.”

Certain that he wanted a career in either finance or law and enticed by the excitement of Washington, D.C., Uyeda studied business at Georgetown University. As a sophomore, he landed an internship with Rep. Christopher Cox, then newly elected from Southern California, who had practiced corporate transactional law as a partner at Latham & Watkins and clerked on the Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals, a path Uyeda found appealing. He maintained the internship through his junior and senior years and Cox, who served 17 years in Congress and later chaired the SEC, would become a key mentor and supporter.

Other influential figures awaited Uyeda at Duke, where he enrolled just a few months after graduating from college. Jonathan Wiener, the William R. and Thomas L. Perkins Professor of Law, Professor of Environmental Policy, and Professor of Public Policy, gave him a grounding in the Administrative Procedure Act and notice-and-comment rulemaking in his Environmental Law class that he relies upon in his work today. And frequent conversations with Brainerd Currie Professor of Law James Cox, who taught him Business Associations and Securities Regulation, offered opportunities to debate the role of regulation in America’s economic life with a renowned expert on the topic.

Uyeda was “an excellent foil,” well-versed in capital markets and private enterprise but naturally skeptical of moving away from Adam Smith’s “invisible hand,” says Cox. “Our discussions, really interchanges, that occurred immediately after class or more extensively in my office, were typically focused on whether regulatory provisions covered in class work,” he adds.

“More often, we talked through where to locate the reasonable boundary of government action into private markets.

“As a student of the SEC now for over 50 years, I can say with confidence that his appointment should not be surprising to anyone who knew Mark.”

Uyeda believes that many actions the agency might be tempted to take would be better left to Congress and the president. As an example, he points to the push to enshrine ESG principles in SEC rulemaking, including a March 2022 proposal that would require corporate disclosure of risks related to climate change. In speeches since becoming commissioner, he has cautioned that the commission’s proposed rule would burden companies with additional expenses without necessarily improving investor returns. The same might be true of potential agency action on labor-management relations, governance, and other non-financial issues, he says. “I think we need to respect the narrow scope of our authority as regulators.”

At the same time, he’d like to see more opportunities for individual investors to participate in capital formation. He recently came out in favor of relaxing the requirement that only relatively wealthy “accredited investors” can participate in private offerings that have the potential to generate higher rates of growth than public companies. And he notes that despite the collapse of cryptocurrencies in 2022 and the SEC taking more than 120 enforcement actions against players in the crypto markets for misleading investors and other violations, guidance or rulemaking related to crypto was “conspicuously absent” from the SEC’s fall regulatory agenda.

While many cryptocurrencies involve investment contracts and thus constitute securities subject to existing rules, others are not so clearly labeled, he says. But there are market participants that want to stay within the law but may not know how to do so.

“We need to make sure that our rule book can properly apply to cryptocurrencies. If there are amendments or guidance that need to be given to say when you custody these cryptocurrencies that are securities, here’s what you need to do, we need to spell out what those are. What would not be acceptable to me is to put you in a catch-22 and say it’s impossible for you to comply.”

Cox says his former student’s thoughtful approach will ultimately benefit investors and the public, especially at a time of political polarization and economic uncertainty.

“I very much welcome having Mark at the table at the SEC as it undertakes numerous decisions that are unrivaled in its history,” Cox says. “His calm question of limits and the foundations for moving forward will not just salve regulatory zeal but likely will move the end product of these regulatory initiatives to a better place.” — Andrew Park Duke Law Magazine • Spring 2023

51

Profiles

DUKE LAW MAGAZINE: What was your argument against implementation of Arizona’s personhood law, and what was at stake?

ALUMNI Q & A

Jessica Sklarsky ’09

J

UST WEEKS AFTER the U.S. Supreme Court eliminated federal abortion protections with its June ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, Jessica Sklarsky, a senior staff attorney with the Center for Reproductive Rights, secured a preliminary injunction against a personhood law in Arizona that ostensibly would grant full rights of citizenship to fertilized eggs. Sklarsky also worked with the Center on June Medical Services v. Russo, a 2020 case in which the Supreme Court ruled a Louisiana abortion restriction was unconstitutional, among other cases.

The diversity of thought she found at Duke Law helped prepare her to work on impact litigation in a field in which “people are hugely divided,” Sklarsky says. And deferring the start of her postgraduate job in the banking group at Skadden to work at the Sargent Shriver National Center on Poverty Law proved pivotal. There she observed firsthand the impact of the 2007-2009 global recession on people, and the difficulties they had accessing public benefits. “It was an eye-opening experience for me, and I think really informed where I ultimately ended up,” Sklarsky says.

After honing her litigation skills during four years at Kirkland & Ellis, Sklarsky moved to the U.S. Attorney’s office in the Eastern District of New York, where she was on a special team investigating European banks’ practices securitizing mortgages leading up to the global financial crisis. In 2017 she joined the New York office of the Center for Reproductive Rights, which engages in worldwide litigation and advocacy to ensure that reproductive rights are protected in law as a fundamental human right.

Sklarsky recently spoke with Duke Law Magazine about her recent case and the fallout from Dobbs, as well as her career path and commitment to advocating for individuals’ control over decisions regarding their reproductive life and health.

52 Duke Law Magazine • Spring 2023

JESSICA SKLARSKY: Personhood laws are not a new tactic. They have been used to criminalize pregnancy and pregnancy outcomes long before Roe was overturned.

But in the absence of Roe, laws like Arizona’s present a real threat to abortion and other reproductive health care. This is, in part, because it is impossible to predict their ramifications. That is a huge issue with Arizona’s law, and that’s why we challenged it on vagueness grounds.

The Arizona law mandates that all of Arizona’s laws be interpreted and construed to “acknowledge” the equal rights of ‘unborn children,’ which is defined to include fertilized eggs, embryos, and fetuses. And “acknowledge” is the word that’s actually used in the statute. I don’t know what that means. I don’t think anybody knows what that means. And indeed, the defendants — those who are charged with actually enforcing this Arizona law — said in a brief that it was anyone’s guess. That was literally their response: “It’s anyone’s guess.” And that’s a problem.

The lack of clarity in these laws is, in many ways, by design, and it’s also the harm. Because pregnant people, people with the capacity for pregnancy, and healthcare providers don’t know how these laws are going to be used against them, it creates a climate of uncertainty and confusion, and it has a profound chilling effect on the provision and receipt of reproductive health care, which includes abortion care and other assisted reproductive care. It also raises the specter of criminalization of pregnancy outcomes and criminalization of pregnant people’s conduct. And it opens the door for prosecutors to arbitrarily and discriminatorily enforce the law.

At issue in our case at the hearing this summer was the very real concern that Arizona’s personhood law could be used to effectively create a ban on all abortions in the state, without any exceptions, even for the life of the pregnant person. So, quite literally in our case, people’s lives were on the line.

DLM: Why do you think the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs seemed to catch many people off guard?

JS: While states have always passed abortion bans, for decades they were always enjoined immediately because they were clearly unconstitutional under Roe. And so in May of 2021, when the Supreme Court granted cert in Dobbs, it definitely foreshadowed a very bad outcome, because the law at issue in Dobbs was plainly unconstitutional under Roe, and there was no reason for the Court to take the case if they were just going to reaffirm settled law.

For those who have been keyed into this, I don’t think it is surprising that Roe was overturned. Organizations like the Center, reproductive justice organizations, state-level advocates, and others have been sounding the alarm regarding abortion rights and access for decades. I think the surprise more speaks to our society’s general failure to listen to the voices of marginalized communities.

In all practicality, Roe has not existed for a lot of people for a long time. For decades preceding the Dobbs decision, states employed this extremely cruel but effective strategy of eliminating abortion care by basically depleting access. And they did that through TRAP (Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers) laws requiring a clinic, for example, to have hallways that are a certain width for no medical reason or requiring people to make multiple trips to the clinic unnecessarily. The purpose of these laws is to restrict access and to make it very, very difficult to access care. States hostile to abortion passed literally thousands of these laws in the past two decades.

The right to abortion is only worthwhile if you can access care, and for people who lived in these restrictive states — particularly low-income women, women of color, and other marginalized communities that already struggled to access health care — these laws put abortion out of reach for far too many, and that’s been true for a very long time.

DLM: Polls show most Americans disapprove of the Dobbs ruling.

Could public opinion eventually restore or preserve access in states that have banned or restricted abortion?

JS: The harsh restrictive abortion bans that are now in place in many parts of the country are not in line with public sentiment. Kansas is a pretty good example of that. Just a few years ago, in a case that was brought by the Center, the Kansas Supreme Court determined that the state constitution independently protects the right to abortion.

Even before Dobbs, there was an effort to undo that ruling and to amend the Kansas constitution in response. This summer, there was a direct vote on that question and the amendment was resoundingly rejected by Kansas voters, so the constitutional protection there remains. So I am definitely hopeful, but at the same time, I don’t want that hope to make anyone complacent.

It’s really imperative that people care about this issue, and everybody should care. There is no one who is not going to be affected by this. Abortion bans, including a national abortion ban, are a real threat. Travel restrictions are a real threat. And this is really a public health crisis. There are now studies coming out of Texas that are looking at health outcomes following SB 8, the “vigilante law.” [The Texas Heartbeat Act is a six-week abortion ban that relies solely on

private individuals to enforce it through civil lawsuits.] These studies just confirm how restrictive abortion bans are deepening the maternal health crisis in this country. We are starting to hear stories of people with severe pregnancy complications being denied care, being forced to travel to get care, hearing stories of rape victims, even some who are minors, being turned away. And these are not one-off stories. The extreme harms of these laws are only beginning to be realized, and this is the reality that we live in now. It is imperative that people understand this and that they keep caring.

DLM: How did you make the career transition from Big Law to impact litigation?

JS: Something that became clearer and clearer to me over time was that I did my best work and was most motivated and happiest when I was doing something that I felt good about. After the election in 2016, like a lot of people, I just looked at my life and thought, “Wow, the world is shifting. The world’s different than I thought it was. Is this the best use of my time? Are there other things that I could be doing?”

At the same time, I was really beginning to piece together a lot of different things. Being a working woman, particularly in law, trying to manage a lot of different things, I began to understand how important it was to have control over my reproductive choices and over my own body. I grew up extremely privileged, and because of that I was naive to a lot of things. I never worried about having access to birth control, being able to access an abortion. I didn’t understand the struggles that a lot of people face in accessing reproductive health care.

So right around this time I started to understand that my experience was just not the experience of many other people, whether they lived in Mississippi or whether they lived even just 30 minutes away from me. I was also just beginning to have exposure to the reproductive justice framework, the idea of intersectionality, how different forms of oppression come together and compound, and to understand that restricting people’s choices in this way has a deep-seated element of racism to it that I never fully appreciated before. All of those things coming together made the desire to do something in this area very potent for me.

I had always thought I could never do impact litigation because I didn’t have some of the credentials I thought I needed. But as I reflected more critically on my experiences, I realized I actually did know how to do the kind of litigation being done at places like the Center. At Kirkland I had done a number of pro bono prisoners’ rights cases, and all were brought under section 1983, the federal statute that allows you to challenge unconstitutional state activity.

Almost all of our federal litigation at the Center is brought under section 1983. I knew how to take a deposition. I knew how to write a brief. I could work with experts and knew how to piece together a complex, factual narrative and make it digestible. I had practical litigation skills. And so I said, “I’m just going to apply to these jobs.

Maybe I’ll get one, maybe I won’t.” And I was really lucky I got a job at the Center as a staff attorney. I just had my five-year anniversary.

It is definitely the most rewarding job I’ve ever had by far, and I feel very, very fortunate to be here. — Jeannie Naujeck

Duke Law Magazine • Spring 2023

53

Profiles

Nicole De Brigard ’23

N

icole De Brigard was surprised when Dean Kerry Abrams opened the first meeting of her Dean’s Advisory Council in April 2022 by asking each of the group’s student members to name two things they’d like to see at Duke Law School. As an undergraduate at the University of Florida, an institution with an enrollment of 61,000, De Brigard wasn’t used to administrators soliciting her opinion so directly.

But if she was caught off guard, De Brigard, a first-generation American who grew up in South Florida, had a ready answer: improving diversity. She had been pleased with the Law School’s efforts during her first year, but she hoped for still more investment in making the community welcoming to all. The question from the dean and the discussions that followed made her feel that her involvement was valued. “And where your involvement is valued, you can really make a difference,” she says.

De Brigard has worked hard to make that difference happen. In addition to serving on the Dean’s Advisory Council, she is a student representative on Duke University’s Racial Equity Action Council 54 Duke Law Magazine • Spring 2023

and the Law School’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee this year. She also worked on two initiatives to increase the pipeline of law students of color nationally, as a teaching assistant for Duke’s PreLaw Fellowship Program during her 1L summer and a law school prep coach for a deferral program sponsored by the AccessLex Institute since August. And as vice president of external affairs for the Latin American Law Students Association (LALSA) during her 2L year, she led the group’s outreach to admitted applicants last spring, helping the Admissions Office recruit the highest percentage of Latinx students in the school’s history.

“The school has made a lot of efforts towards diversity, and being able to be hands-on in that and in genuine and practical rather than performative ways — has been so rewarding,” she says.

As a kid, De Brigard gave little thought to diversity. Her parents, Colombian immigrants, spoke Spanish at home and took her and her siblings to South America nearly every summer. Home was a two-acre farm outside the Everglades where she and her three siblings cared for chickens and livestock they took in from other

“I am very passionate about leaving Duke Law in a better place than I found it because I know students and alums above me did the same.”

farmers. She says she never planned on leaving the Latinx “cultural bubble,” which extended to college, where she majored in political science and criminology, served as junior class president, and was a member of the student conduct committee; at UF 21% of the student body identifies as Hispanic or Latino.

Her path to law school was set early on, though, as she watched her parents go through a protracted divorce that took 15 years to resolve and involved matters of family law, immigration law, and the family’s finances — all while her mother fought breast cancer. “I was fascinated from a young age to see how my mother’s lawyer was such an advocate and played an advisory role for my mom, who was so unfamiliar with a legal system that was just not hers,” she says.

She applied as a college senior, and when she was accepted to Duke in early 2020, she pushed past her fear of culture shock and her plans to stay put in Florida.

As it turned out, though, a bigger worry soon arrived: In July, in response to COVID-19, the Law School announced it would begin the fall semester with no in-person events and mostly remote instruction. An extrovert, De Brigard now worried she was going to miss out on the thing that had made her choose Duke in the first place — the community. She moved to Durham anyway and during a virtual LEAD Week, began to get to know her classmates through their Zoom screens.

“I didn’t know them in person or how tall they were, but to this day I can describe what their bedrooms look like and what’s on their walls and what their cats look like,” she says.

She appreciated the extra efforts made by her professors to get to know her class, the first in Law School history to take their 1L courses online. Her legal writing instructor, Clinical Professor Jeremy Mullem, invited her section to weekly “walking office hours” on the Al Buehler Trail, during which they could talk to him about anything except legal writing. A similar rule applied in weekly coffee chats hosted by Charles L. B. Lowndes Professor of Law Sara Beale, who taught De Brigard Criminal Law. LALSA, which had grown rapidly in recent years and won the 2022 D.O.N.E. Award for Greatest Role in Building Relationships, was another critical source of support. The group had connected De Brigard with its president, Arturo Nava ’21, through its outreach to admitted applicants the previous spring, and also hosted Zoom sessions focused on housing and other issues. Early in the fall semester, the group assigned her a mentor, Erodita Herrera ’22, who would help her through her first-year courses and summer job search, and she was selected to be a 1L representative. Frequent online events included opportunities to network with Latinx alumni.

Like the conversations with her professors, the interactions gave her a well-rounded 1L experience, she says.

“It was very easy to get caught up in thinking my whole life is law school, especially when I was doing it all in my room,” she says.

“Having these professors and upperclassmen and student organizations pull you out of that and be like, ‘No, at the end of the day, you are a person and you’re at Duke because you are valued as an individual, not just a student,’ that was a big thing.”

The next year, De Brigard returned the favor. She served as a LEAD Fellow, advising new students and giving them tours of the Law School building — despite having just become acquainted with it herself during a “Welcome to Duke 2.0” orientation for 2Ls. She also spearheaded the LALSA outreach program that had played a part in recruiting her to Duke as a college senior. Through the program, group members are paired with admitted applicants with a similar background or interest to answer questions and offer advice as they make their law school decision. Its effectiveness is reflected in the record diversity of the current first-year class — 44% of 1Ls are students of color — and the record Latinx enrollment.

As a 3L, De Brigard has served as a student member of the search committee recruiting the Law School’s first associate dean for diversity, equity, and inclusion.

“Being trusted as a student to contribute to these tangible diversity efforts has been really meaningful,” she says.

De Brigard marvels at her and her classmates’ growth both in and out of the classroom since starting law school in the middle of a pandemic. Despite tearful meetings with Mullem as she struggled to write memos, he would go on to help her secure a federal clerkship.

“Legal writing was very hard for me, and he wrote my letter of recommendation knowing that it was hard for me and showing how I progressed and had grown in that course,” she says. “He always believed in me. I did not believe in myself, but I wouldn’t have cared about that class if he didn’t care about me succeeding in it.”

Says Mullem: “When a student is smart and hardworking and engaged — as Nicole certainly was and is — it’s easy to have more faith in them than they may have in themselves.”

After graduation in May, De Brigard will go to a large law firm in New York for a year and then clerk for a judge on the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida starting in 2024.

She hopes to practice cybersecurity and privacy law and, inspired by a 1L summer internship in the FBI’s National Security and Cyberlaw Branch, eventually work in the federal government. But, she says, she plans to stay connected to her alma mater.

“My positive experience has been built up by students and alums before me,” she says. “I am very passionate about leaving Duke Law in a better place than I found it because I know students and alums above me did the same.” — Andrew Park Duke Law Magazine • Spring 2023

55

Alumni Notes This section reflects notifications received April 1, 2022 to September 30, 2022

W

illiam “Gerry” Hancock ’68 received the 2022 Peabody Award from the School of Education of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in October. The award recognizes extraordinary contributions to the field of education and “sustained and significant commitment to improving education in North Carolina and/or across the nation.”

Gerry is a partner at Everett Gaskins Hancock in Raleigh where his practice includes a wide range of services for nonprofits and businesses. A former state senator, Gerry was founding chair of the NC Public School Forum, Education NC, and the NC Center for Public Policy Research. As general counsel of the Low Wealth Schools Consortium, he was instrumental in the initiation of the Leandro v. N.C. litigation that led to the North Carolina Supreme Court’s landmark ruling guaranteeing every child’s right to a sound, basic education. He also led the lobbying effort to increase the annual supplemental appropriation to the state’s low wealth school systems from $6 million to $225 million and helped lead the legislative and referendum campaigns for the 1996 $1.8 billion public school bond.

1957

tained and preserved. Copies of the portrait will also hang in the courthouse in Atlanta and in Judge Tjoflat’s chambers in Jacksonville.

1965 Gerald Tjoflat, senior judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, has been honored by 190 of his former law clerks with a portrait that was unveiled on Oct. 14 at the U.S. Courthouse in Jacksonville, Fla. The portrait, by Kari Rajkumar, depicts Judge Tjoflat during his term as chief judge of the Eleventh Circuit from 1989 to 1996, and was gifted to The Eleventh Circuit Historic Society to be main-

Robert Sink received the 2022 North Carolina Bar Association’s H. Brent McKnight Renaissance Lawyer Award in June. The award recognizes “attorneys who inspire others through their trustworthiness, respectful and courteous treatment of all people, enthusiasm for intellectual achievement, and commitment to excellence in work, and service to the profession and community while leading a multifaceted, accomplished life.”

Bob, whose practice at Robinson Bradshaw in Charlotte concentrates on commercial real estate, is a civic leader and has served as president of both the Mecklenburg County Bar and the North Carolina State Bar.

56 Duke Law Magazine • Spring 2023

1968

Michael Angelini, senior counsel at Bowditch & Dewey and based in Worcester, Mass., was named as one of Worcester Business Journal’s 2022 Power 50. Mike, who served as Bowditch’s chairman from 1997 to 2022 after serving as managing partner, serves as an advisor to public and private companies in Massachusetts and the northeastern U.S. and as a trial lawyer who concentrates in the resolution of business disputes. A profile published May 2 described Mike’s “unique ability to make deals happen, arrange connections between powerful people, and mentor up-and-coming leaders in the community.”

1971

Christine Durham, former justice and chief justice of the Utah Supreme Court, has joined the Salt Lake City office of Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati as senior of counsel in its appellate practice.

She served on the Utah Supreme Court for 35 years, including 10 years as chief justice, retiring in 2017. She previously practiced at Zimmerman Booher.

1972

Jim Ummer, of counsel at Rothman Gordon in Pittsburgh, has been honored by the Allegheny County Bar Association for 50 years of practice. Jim is a fellow of the American College of Trusts and Estates Counsel, and frequently lectures on topics of wealth preservation

and financial planning. His practice focuses on planning for privately-owned businesses and families of substantial net worth.

Durwood Zaelke, founder and president of the Institute for Governance & Sustainable Development, was named to Washingtonian Magazine’s 2022 list of “500 most influential people,” experts and advocates outside government who play significant roles in policy debates and development. Recognized in the area of climate and environment, the magazine noted his pioneering work on the need to cut greenhouse gases aside from carbon dioxide.

1973

James Garrison’s third novel, What Seems True (TouchPoint Press, 2021), was the winner of the 2022 NYC Big Book Award in the cross genre category. The novel was inspired by the unresolved 1979 murder of the first Black supervisor of a Texaco asphalt plant in Port Arthur, Texas.

1974

Charles Sharbaugh, of counsel at Carlton Fields in Atlanta, is the second recipient of the Kathy Bernhardt Volunteer of the Year Award, bestowed annually by the Alliance Theatre, a division of the Woodruff Arts Center. Charles was honored for his crucial pro bono legal support of the theatre’s work in the Atlanta community. At Carlton Fields his practice focuses on the representation of private equity funds in acquisitions, dispositions, and joint venture arrangements with respect to real estate assets.

1976

Arlinda Locklear received a Legal Legends of Color Award in June from the North Carolina Bar Association.

Arlinda, who was featured in the Summer 2022 issue of Duke Law Magazine, is a member of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina and one of the nation’s foremost attorneys in federal Indian law. She was the first Native American woman to argue before the U.S. Supreme Court.

1977

Michael Wald has authored Why Didn’t You Call? A Peace Corps Panama Exposé (Dorrance Publishing Co., Inc., 2022). The book offers an account of his experience in the Peace Corps, which he joined after practicing business law for more than 35 years, and is written with a view toward making systemic improvements to its operations.

earlier specialized in complex civil litigation over more than 30 years of practice in Columbia, S.C. He is the author, most recently, of Unexampled Courage: The Blinding of Sgt. Isaac Woodard and the Awakening of President Harry S. Truman and Judge J. Waties Waring (Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2019).

Mark High, a member in the Detroit office of Dickinson Wright, received the 2022 Stephen H. Schulman Outstanding Business Lawyer Award from the State Bar of Michigan’s Business Law Section. The award honors lawyers who consistently exemplify the highest qualities of professionalism and practice, and unwavering dedication to service, ethical conduct, and collegiality within the practice of law. Mark specializes in business transactional matters including mergers and acquisitions, private equity, and corporate governance.

1980

Rodney Smolla became president of Vermont Law School on July 1. He previously had served as dean and professor of law at Delaware Law School since 2015. Rodney earlier served as president of Furman University and as dean of the law schools at Washington and Lee University and the University of Richmond.

Bill Brown, co-founder, executive chair, and chief technology officer of 8 Rivers Capital, was appointed in August as a strategic adviser, Strategic Public-Private Partnerships, at the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). In that capacity Bill is working with NREL to develop high-impact, multi-year, multisector collaborations that drive transformation of domestic and global energy landscapes.

1979

1983

1978

Richard Gergel, U.S. district judge for the District of South Carolina, received an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters degree from the University of Charleston on May 7, when he also delivered a commencement address. Judge Gergel, who was nominated to the federal bench by President Barack Obama in December 2009 and confirmed by the U.S. Senate in a unanimous vote in August 2010,

Nora Jordan has been appointed as an independent director on the Board of Directors of Allspring Global Investments, an independent asset manager. Nora is senior counsel at Davis Polk in New York where she headed the investment management practice for more than 20 years.

1984

Audrey Moran has been elected as a judge of the Duval County Court in Florida and assumed office on Jan. 3.

She is a former assistant state attorney and served respectively as director of legislative affairs and chief of staff for two former Jacksonville mayors. She also served as senior vice president for social responsibility and community advocacy at Baptist Health and as president of Moran Mediation Group.

1985

Allan Capute has retired, after 32 years of service, from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission where he was an appellate lawyer.

He is now a student at the Virginia Theological Seminary.

1987

Scott Cammarn has joined the Portland, Maine office of Pierce Atwood as senior counsel. He previously was a partner with Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft in Charlotte, N.C., where he was the firm’s lead bank regulatory attorney and co-chair of their financial services department.

Wendy Beth Oliver has been appointed senior vice president and chief legal officer at OnPoint Community Credit Union, a community financial institution in Oregon and Southwest Washington, after earlier serving as vice president and general counsel. Before joining OnPoint she held general counsel and chief compliance officer positions at Grit Financial Inc. and Aven, a California-based fintech startup.

Duke Law Magazine • Spring 2023

57

Photo: Forney Independent School District

Alumni Notes

J

udge Don Willett JD/MA’92, MJS ’16 of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit (above, center), helped dedicate a new Forney, Texas, elementary school named in his honor in September. Judge Willett, a native of Talty in Kaufman County, attended public schools in the Forney Independent School District (ISD).

In a video tribute to Judge Willett, U.S. Chief Justice John Roberts praised his lifelong commitment to the rule of law and the cause of justice. “But he also recognizes that our system of government depends not only on those in full-time public service, but on the whole community’s commitment

1988

Paul Aguggia has been appointed to the Board of Directors of Dime Community Bancshares, Inc. He is a corporate services attorney and partner at Holland & Knight’s Washington, D.C. and New York offices.

1989

Ken Murphy has joined Tucker Law Group in Philadelphia as as counsel to the firm. He specializes in complex civil litigation. Ken previously was a partner at Faegre Drinker.

1990

James Hoctor has joined the Orlando office of GrayRobinson as a shareholder, with a business practice focused on corporate, M&A, and taxation issues. He previously was a partner at Lowndes, Drosdick.

Michele Mobley, a partner at Dubois, Bryant & Campbell, an Austin-based firm, joined the Texas A&M Foundation Board of Trustees on July 1 for a seven-year term.

Pete Murray has been elected a judge of the Superior Court of San Diego County and was sworn in on Jan. 2. From 2011 to 2022 he served

58 Duke Law Magazine • Spring 2023

to civic education and civic participation,” said the chief justice. “It is a fine honor to Judge Willett that the students of Forney begin their own personal journey of education, accomplishment, and good citizenship at a school that bears his name.”

Speaking at the dedication ceremony, Judge Willett said: “My deepest wish for the precious students at this school is that seeds are planted here for them to be engaged citizens and lifelong learners, to have an insatiable curiosity and wonder about the world. To dream audacious dreams and be catapulted toward achieving them.” as a deputy in the California Attorney General’s Office and earlier as a private practitioner in the state and federal courts and, for 10 years, a deputy district attorney.

Peter Roberts, a member of the bankruptcy, insolvency, and restructuring practice at Cozen O’Connor in Chicago, has authored a chapter, titled “Asset Sales Under the Bankruptcy Code,” in the 2022 edition of Business Bankruptcy Practice, an annual handbook published by the Illinois Institute of Continuing Education.

Larry Silverman has joined Sidley Austin as a partner in the Miami litigation group. He is a member of Sidley’s office of general counsel and chairs the firm’s pro bono and public interest law committee in Miami.

1991

Kelly Mancini has joined Arnall Golden Gregory’s Atlanta office as of counsel in the firm’s real estate practice and a member of the retail industry team. Her practice focuses on commercial real estate development and retail leasing. She was previously of counsel with Parker Hudson in Atlanta.

1992

Sean Andrussier has joined Womble Bond Dickinson in Raleigh as of counsel. He focuses his practice on constitutional law, appellate practice and procedure, and strategic counsel for clients involved in complex commercial litigation. Sean previously was a clinical professor of law at Duke and, for 13 years, the director of

J

Photo: Jim Krause

acinda Townsend’s ’95 sophomore novel, Mother Country (Graywolf Press, 2022), received the $15,000 Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence. The award, which is presented annually by the Baton Rouge Area Foundation to emerging Black fiction writers, honors the late Ernest Gaines, a Louisiana native whose stories gave voice to African Americans in rural areas. Described as “a transnational feminist novel about human trafficking and motherhood,” the novel was selected for the prize by a national panel of judges.

Jacinda is also the author of Saint Monkey, which won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize and the James Fenimore Cooper Prize and also was the 2015 Honor Book of the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and teaches in the MFA program at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

the Law School’s Appellate Litigation Clinic. He also taught Appellate Practice. He earlier co-chaired Womble’s appellate group.

for eight years as partner, president, and general counsel at The Dilweg Companies, a real estate investment firm based in Durham.

Amy Batten, partner and chair of the management committee at Smith Anderson in Raleigh, has received a 2022 Women in Business Award from the Triangle Business Journal. She counsels public and private companies on complex securities laws and co-leads the firm’s public companies practice group and corporate team.

1994

Paige Reese Whitaker has been re-elected as a judge on the Georgia 5th Superior Court District Atlanta Circuit. She was originally appointed to the court in 2017.

1993

Jeff Benson has been named executive vice president — North Carolina and commercial market development at Investors Title Company, leading the state’s residential and commercial market development teams. Prior to joining Investors Title, Jeff served

Ruth Dowling has been named executive vice president, chief administrative officer, general counsel, and secretary of American Tower Corporation, a real estate investment trust. Since joining the company in 2011 she has held several posts, most recently that of general counsel for Latin America, Europe, and Africa.

Natasha Marcus has won re-election as a member of the North Carolina Senate from the 41st district, which includes northern, western, and southwestern portions of Mecklenburg County. First elected in 2018, she serves as deputy leader of legal matters for the Senate Minority.

Laurie Sanders has joined Fox Rothschild as a corporate partner in the firm’s San Francisco office.

She previously was a partner at Wendel Rosen.

1995

Mark Uyeda was sworn into office as a commissioner on the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on June 30, after his appointment to the post by President Joe Biden and confirmation by the U.S. Senate. He had been an attorney and a high-level advisor to the SEC since 2006, most recently serving on detail to the U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs as a securities counsel to the committee’s minority staff. (Read profile, page 50.)

1996

Erik Moses has joined the Fiesta Bowl Organization in Scottsdale, Ariz., as executive director and chief executive officer.

He previously served as president of the Nashville Superspeedway. Erik also has been elected a member of the Cumberland University Board of Trustees.

1996

Jennifer Slone Tobin, a partner in the Orlando office of Shutts & Bowen and co-chair of the firm’s real estate practice group, has been elected to the firm’s executive committee. She joined the firm in 2002.

1997

Kris Moldovan has been named chief financial officer at Vistra Corp.

He joined the company in 2006, and has served as its senior counsel, assistant treasurer and, most recently, senior vice president and treasurer.

1999

Donna Cochener has been named general counsel and senior vice president legal at biopharmaceutical company Neoleukin Therapeutics, Inc., based in Seattle. She most recently served as senior vice president and deputy general counsel at HomeStreet, Inc., the parent company of HomeStreet Bank.

Jon MacDonald has joined the Orange County, Calif., office of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher as of counsel and member of the firm’s real estate practice group. He

Duke Law Magazine • Spring 2023

59

Alumni Notes previously was general counsel at Fairfield Residential, a multifamily and mixed-use investment and development company.

2000

Jenny Barket has been named chief of staff of Dallas Area Rapid Transit (DART), where she is a senior advisor to the president and CEO and leading strategic, tactical, and operational initiatives. She previously was a director at WSP USA, a multinational engineering and design firm, and served as a strategic advisor to projects across the country.

Patrick Roberts, founder of criminal defense firm Roberts Law Group in Raleigh, has been invited to join the Raleigh-Durham chapter of Entrepreneurs’ Organization, which offers leadership training, networking opportunities, and access to events.

Patrick’s firm has offices in Raleigh, Charlotte, and Wilmington.

2001

Chuck Larsen has joined the Boston and London offices of McDermott Will & Emery as a partner in the firm’s IP practice. A U.S. patent lawyer as well as an English solicitor, Chuck provides transatlantic counsel in patent portfolio strategy and transactions. He previously was a partner at White & Case.

Stephen Martin has been appointed chief legal officer and corporate secretary of Danimer Scientific, Inc., a bioplastics company focused on the development and production of biodegradable materials. He previously was general counsel and corporate secretary for Kaman Distribution Group, a national distributor of highly engineered products and services.

Matthew Rupp was appointed in June by N.C. Gov. Roy Cooper as a district court judge in district 24, which serves Avery, Madison, Mitchell, Watauga, and Yancey counties. Matt was unopposed in the general election after winning the

Republican primary for the seat in May. He was previously a partner at Angle, Rupp & Rupp, Attorneys at Law in Boone and earlier served as an assistant district attorney in the District Attorney’s Office for the 35th Prosecutorial District and the 26th Prosecutorial District.

Christy Kiely has joined Seyfarth Shaw as a partner in the firm’s labor and employment department and its people analytics practice group in Washington, D.C. She previously was a member of the labor and employment team at Hunton Andrews Kurth in Richmond, Va.

Jackie Sumer has joined Cullinan Oncology, Inc., a biopharmaceutical company, as chief legal officer.

Jackie previously served as chief legal and compliance officer at Genocea Biosciences.

Zak Thomas has joined Sitko Bruno in Pittsburgh as a partner.

Zak concentrates his practice in commercial real estate law, representing developers, lenders, borrowers, landlords, tenants, and other parties to commercial real estate, financing and restructuring transactions. He was previously at

Grant Garber joined Northern Kentucky University in July as its vice president for legal affairs and general counsel. He most recently served as a university counsel at Auburn University and as lead counsel for Auburn University at Montgomery.

Buchanan Ingersoll & Rooney.

Natalie Lamarque has joined Principal Financial Group as general counsel, with oversight over the law department, including government relations and compliance. She also serves as corporate secretary to the Principal Board of Directors. She most recently was senior vice president and general counsel for New York Life.

2002

2003

Nicola Di Giovanni has joined Skadden Arps as a private equity partner in the firm’s Paris office. He previously was a partner at Winston & Strawn.

Fatima Hassan was awarded the 2022 Calgary Peace Prize in May by the John de Chastelain Peace Studies Initiative at Mount Royal University in Calgary, Canada. The prize recognizes outstanding individuals from the global community who work towards making the world a more just, safer, and less violent place.

Fatima is the founder of the Health Justice Initiative in South Africa and is the former executive director of the Open Society Foundation for South Africa. She is well known for her longtime advocacy in South Africa for affordable antiretroviral treatment to people living with HIV and more recently against injustices associated with the coronavirus pandemic.

Adam Di Vincenzo has joined the Washington, D.C. office of Milbank as a partner and member of the litigation and arbitration group. He was previously a partner in the D.C. office of Gibson Dunn.

60 Duke Law Magazine • Spring 2023

Heather Olson has joined Tucker Law Group in Philadelphia as counsel. Her practice focuses on complex commercial and products liability litigation. Most recently, Heather was a member at Eckert Seamans Cherin & Mellott where she worked in the commercial litigation and products liability groups.

Jim Pelletier has joined Masonite International Corp., a global designer, manufacturer, marketer, and distributor of interior and exterior doors, as senior vice president, general counsel, and corporate secretary.

He previously was senior vice president, general counsel, and secretary at Barnes Group Inc., and earlier held corporate counsel positions with Pratt & Whitney and as compliance counsel for GE Aviation.

Adam Rogers has been named the managing partner of the Miami office of McDermott Will & Emery, where he represents clients in the health care industry. He is particularly experienced in transactions in the health care services and health information technology sectors.

2005

Amy Hooper Kearbey has joined the Washington, D.C. office of Winston & Strawn as a partner. She focuses her practice on health care regulatory counseling, compliance, and defense. From 2019 to 2022, Amy served as senior counsel in the Office of Counsel to the Inspector General at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

2006

Kristin Hester has been promoted from general counsel to chief legal officer at Apollo Investment Corp, which she joined in 2015. She also serves as the chief legal officer of several Apollo subsidiaries.

Aaron Lang has joined Brown Rudnick’s New York City office as a partner in the firm’s litigation and arbitration practice group and a member of the crisis management litigation and government response group. He previously was special counsel at Cadwalader Wickersham & Taft.

Arturo Le Blanc has been named CEO of Transelec, the leading power transmissions company in Chile. He has been with the company for 10 years and previously served as head of legal and regulatory affairs.

Jessica Bodack Millett has joined Hogan Lovells as a partner in the firm’s corporate and finance practice group in its New York City office.

She most recently served as chair of the tax practice at the boutique real estate law firm Duval & Stachenfeld in New York.

Natalie Prescott has been promoted to general counsel and vice president of legal at Fulgent Genetics, after joining the company in April as deputy general counsel. She previously practiced at Mintz Levin in San Diego.

2007

April Hathcock, director of scholarly communications and infor-

mation policy at New York University Libraries, has been elected chair of the SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) steering committee. She has served as a member of the committee, which provides oversight and guidance to the SPARC organization, since her election by its members in December 2021. Her term as chair will end in September 2025.

Blake Hudson became dean and professor of law at Samford University’s Cumberland School of Law on July 1. He previously was the Samuel T. Dell Professor and co-director of the Environmental and Law Use Program at the Levin College of Law at the University of Florida. Blake teaches courses related to property, environmental, and natural resources law. His research focuses on the intersection of land use law, policy, and planning with natural resource management, with particular emphasis on the role of forest management in combating climate change and the implications of land development for sustainable natural resource management.

Jonathan McKernan was sworn in as a member of the Board of Directors of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation on Jan. 5, after being nominated by President Joe Biden and receiving Senate confirmation. From 2021 to 2022 he served as a counsel to former Ranking Member Pat Toomey (R-PA) on the staff of the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs and also has served as a senior counsel at the Federal Housing Finance Agency, a senior policy advisor at the Department of the Treasury, and a senior financial policy advisor to former Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN).

Prior to entering government service focused his private practice on matters under the banking and consumer financial laws.

Julian Yap has been appointed by New York City Mayor Eric Adams as a member of the Mayor’s Advisory Committee on the Judiciary.

Members of the committee are entrusted to ensure that only candidates with the highest qualifications and from diverse backgrounds are nominated for judicial appointments to criminal and family courts, as well as interim appointments to civil court. Julian is co-founder and president of Realm, an audio entertainment startup. He earlier served as senior counsel in the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Policy.

Landon Zimmer was named a WilmingtonBiz 100 Influencer and profiled by WilmingtonBiz Magazine in March 2022. Landon is managing partner at Zimmer Development Co., a family-run business based in Wilmington, N.C., that specializes in commercial and multifamily development. He is also a partner at Zimmer and Zimmer and serves as a consultant for Reeds Jewelers, another family company.

2009

Jenny Brevorka has been named a partner at the Canadian litigation boutique Henein Hutchison Robitaille where she maintains a civil and criminal practice. She joined the firm as counsel in 2020.

2010

Adriana Rios Welton has been named head of legal and government affairs at UScellular. She previously was vice president external affairs and general counsel for AT&T Mexico.

Bill Dolan has joined Rule Garza Howley, a new antitrust boutique firm in Washington, D.C., as a partner. He previously was a member of the antitrust group at Debevoise & Plimpton.

Jonathan SkinnerThompson is now an associate professor at the University of Colorado School of Law where he previously was associate clinical professor and director of the Getches-Green Natural Resources, Energy & Environmental Law Clinic. He specializes in administrative and environmental law issues and is affiliated with the Graduate Certificate in Environmental Justice at CU Boulder.

He also is a member of the Colorado Department of Public Health & Environment’s Environmental Justice Advisory Board.

2011

carceral systems. Lauren is a nationally recognized leader in youth justice reform and the co-founder and immediate past co-director of the Youth Sentencing & Reentry Project, which works to keep children out of adult jails and prisons and assists young people and “juvenile lifers” as they return to the community.

Lauren Fine is currently serving as a Stoneleigh Visiting Fellow, in partnership with the Stoneleigh Foundation and the Quattrone Center for the Fair Administration of Justice, at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School. In this role, she is building will for alternative approaches to current youth and criminal justice practices by identifying and documenting community-based alternatives to

2012

Christina Brown has rejoined Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher as of counsel in the New York office, where she is a member of the firm’s business restructuring and reorganization practice group. She previously was a counsel at Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, where she served as a member of the financial restructuring group.

Sarah Eichenberger has joined Katten Muchin Rosenman’s New York City office as a securities litigation partner. She most recently was a commercial litigator at Amazon.

Jillian Schumacher, an appellate lawyer and partner at Daniels & Tredennick in Houston, was named the 2021-2022 Outstanding Young Lawyer of Houston by the Houston Young Lawyers Association and the 2021-2022 Outstanding Young Lawyer of Texas by the Texas Young Lawyers Association.

Corey Sheahan has been appointed general counsel of Acreage Holdings, Inc., a multi-state operator of cannabis cultivation and retailing facilities in the U.S. Corey returns to Acreage after an 18-month tenure as executive vice president of legal and chief legal officer at Ascend Wellness Holdings, Inc. Corey previously served as deputy general counsel at Acreage.

Duke Law Magazine • Spring 2023

61

Alumni Notes

J

udge Bernice B. Donald MJS ’18 of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit has received the National Judicial College’s (NJC) highest honor, the Sandra Day O’Connor Award. She is the first judge competitively selected to receive the award, which was presented on Nov. 10 at the Heard Museum of American Indian Art in Phoenix.

Judge Donald, who retired from the bench in January, became the first African American woman to serve on the Sixth Circuit after being nominated by President Barack Obama in 2011 and receiving Senate confirmation. Her other career “firsts” cited by the NJC in announcing the award included becoming: in 1995 the first African American woman to serve on the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Tennessee; in 1988 the first African American woman ever to serve as a U.S. bankruptcy judge; in 1982 Tennessee’s first-ever African American woman judge with her election to the General Sessions Criminal Court; in 2008, the first African American female officer of the American Bar Association with her election as secretary; and the first African American president of the American Bar Foundation, an empirical research organization. Judge Donald is now a member of the national dispute resolution team at Resolute Systems.

2013

Zack Kleiman, the Memphis Grizzlies’ general manager, was named, in May, as the NBA Executive of the Year. At 33, he was the youngest executive ever to receive the award.

Zack, who joined the team in 2015 as in-house counsel, was assistant general manager for the 2018-18 season before becoming general manager.

Alex Stout has joined the Washington, D.C. office of ZwillGen, a boutique firm focused on helping clients navigate emerging technology and data-related legal challenges.

A legal director at the firm, Alex previously was a member of the connectivity, privacy, and information practice at Latham & Watkins in Washington, D.C. Haley WardenRodgers has joined the Pittsburgh office of Fox Rothschild as a litigation partner. Prior to joining the firm, she was an assistant U.S. attorney, civil rights coordinator, and special emphasis program manager for the LGBT Program in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Pennsylvania.

2014

Eva Guzman has joined Wright Close & Barger, a Houston-based civil trial and appellate law firm, as a partner in the firm’s appellate practice. She returned to private practice after serving as a jurist for more than 20 years, most recently as a justice of the Supreme Court of Texas. She was both the first Latina on that court and the first to be elected to statewide office. Justice Guzman earlier served as a judge of the Harris County District Court and the Texas 14th Court of Appeals.

2015

Haniya Mir has been named a partner in the Raleigh office of Brooks Pierce.

A transactional lawyer, she represents businesses of all sizes on a variety of corporate matters including mergers and acquisitions, securities law, corporate governance, entity formation, and equity and debt financing.

2016

she had served as a judge on U.S. District Court for the District of South Carolina. Last April Judge Childs received the Outstanding Contribution to Justice Award from the South Carolina Association for Justice. The award honors individuals “who have demonstrated exemplary leadership from the bench and ongoing contributions to the legal profession.”

62 Duke Law Magazine • Spring 2023

Alex Lewis has joined Baker Donelson’s Nashville office as an associate. He advises clients in antitrust investigations and litigation and in matters related to other types of regulatory enforcement including health law and privacy issues. Alex previously was an attorney at the Federal Trade Commission.

2018

2021

Sarah Merriam became a judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit on Sept. 23 after being nominated by President Joe Biden and receiving Senate confirmation. She had served as a U.S. District Court Judge for the District of Connecticut since 2021 and as a U.S. Magistrate Judge for the District of Connecticut from 2015 to 2021.

Titus Willis has joined Baker Donelson’s real estate/finance practice in Birmingham, Ala., as an associate.

Matthew Lang is an associate in Hall Booth Smith’s recently opened office in Red Bank, N.J. He focuses his practice on complex construction and general liability matters.

Grant Michl has joined Morris Nichols Arsht & Tunnell in Wilmington, Del., as a corporate and commercial litigation associate after completing a clerkship in the Complex Commercial Litigation Division of the Delaware Superior Court.

2022

Shrayan Shetty has joined the staff of North Carolina Legal Aid as an Erwin Fellow in the Foothills Office in Morganton.

J. Michelle Childs became a judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit on July 25, after being nominated by President Joe Biden and receiving Senate confirmation. Since 2010

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2019

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

In Memoriam

Reflecting notifications received between April 16, 2022 and January 26, 2023

1945 Frances Fulk Rufty

1964 Girard E. Boudreau, Jr.

1951 Richard Sands Douglas

December 20, 2022

June 6, 2022

October 2, 2022

1952 Roy C. Sampley May 4, 2022

1953 C. Lee Butler January 5, 2023

1956 John Marshall Dillard June 11, 2022

David Tallant, Jr. May 12, 2022

1959 Daniel Joseph Park September 19, 2022

1960 Joel Ibert Keiler May 27, 2022

1961 George H. MacLean March 25, 2022

1962 David Mason Merchant October 2, 2022

1963 Daniel K. McAlister October 9, 2022

Marvin D. Musselwhite, Jr. January 26, 2023

Edgar J. Roberts Jr. November 23, 2022

John W. Wilcox January 1, 2023

November 8, 2022

Thomas S. Kale

Walter W. Pyper, Jr. May 31, 2022

1966 David B. Blanco

September 27, 2022

1967 George G. Guthrie November 15, 2022

1968 Paul Thomas (Tommy) Boroughs July 15, 2022

1969 Dudley Saleeby, Jr. May 15, 2022

1972 Glen Alan Payne January 3, 2023

1973 Bruce Edward Speidel June 15, 2022

Kenneth Winston Starr

1981 Neil Robert Tucker May 10, 2022

1982 David Thomas Holt November 5, 2022

Jean Swofford Terrien September 7, 2022

1984 Theodore William Wold July 2, 2022

1986 Patrick Joseph (Rick) Butler, Jr. July 13, 2022

1988 Martin Eric Edgington July 9, 2022

1996 Olin W. Thompson III July 18, 2022

2001 David W. Stephenson January 5, 2023

2008 Jonathan David Connell June 27, 2022

September 13, 2022

Ronald Joseph Weisenberger September 18, 2022

1975 Frederick Albert Brown July 25, 2022

Paul M. Wright April 29, 2022

1976 James Norman Finkelstein July 30, 2022

Duke Law Magazine • Spring 2023

63

From the Dean

Dear Friends: I hope you are finding the change you need to be effective in the work you do and in your life.

T

HE LAST FEW YEARS have disrupted some long-held assumptions about work.

Many people no longer see the daily commute to the office as essential to being effective at their jobs. For many others wellness and work-life balance are now non-negotiable — along with guarantees of respect, inclusivity, and meaningful professional development.

None of these ideas is completely new. But since 2020 — as the world has endured a pandemic, reckoned anew with our history of racism and sexism and other forms of discrimination, and experienced unsustainably high levels of stress and anxiety — they have taken on renewed urgency and import, including in the legal profession.

Our cover story in this issue of Duke Law Magazine examines how lawyers and law firms are addressing these workplace trends, whether it’s by expanding remote work and flexible hours, building more diverse, equitable, and inclusive teams, or recognizing the need to care for our well-being and mental health. We also highlight seven inspiring alumni who have “pivoted” over the past three years, transforming the way they work or the work they do and finding greater satisfaction in their careers.

Most of us have made changes in our professional lives of late, even if it’s just the occasional Zoom meeting or work-from-home day. Here at Duke Law School, even as we’ve returned to a normal schedule of in-person classes and events, we have held on to some of the adaptations we made in the teeth of the pandemic. For example, we continue to use technology to host

events for students that wouldn’t otherwise be possible, such as career-oriented conversations with alumni working abroad.

The legal profession has a well-earned reputation for being hidebound, so it is gratifying to see these changes take root, but they don’t come without risk. As convenient as remote work can be, we can’t lose sight of our need for community and collaboration. That’s why our Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee has invited faculty, staff, and students to join Community Discussion Groups in which they can meet regularly in person to build relationships across difference (see page 7).

As we strive to find better balance in our lives, we shouldn’t lose our spirit of ambition and innovation.

Our faculty has devoted considerable effort to renewing the intellectual life of the Law School since the pandemic, and I’ve been delighted by the energy that our 13 new faculty members this year have brought to the community (see page 21). They have introduced new ideas, fields of experience, and ways of thinking to the Law School while embracing our culture of close mentorship of students and collaboration among faculty.

I hope you are finding the change you need to be effective in the work you do and in your life. Thank you as always for your friendship and support.

Warm regards,

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

Sua Sponte

F

OR THE FIRST TIME since arriving at Duke in 2018, James B. Duke and Benjamin N. Duke Dean of the School of Law and Distinguished Professor of Law Kerry Abrams returned to the classroom during the fall semester, teaching Family Law to over 40 second- and third-year students.

A scholar of immigration, citizenship, family, and constitutional law, Abrams began her teaching career as an acting assistant professor in New York University Law School’s Lawyering Program, and she taught family law, immigration law, citizenship theory, advanced constitutional law, law and sexuality, law and literature, and feminist legal theory as a member of the University of Virginia law faculty for 13 years.

“Even after two decades of teaching, it’s still a thrill to be in front of a classroom, especially when you’ve got terrific Duke Law students,” she said.

64 Duke Law Magazine • Spring 2023

The Bolch Judicial Institute has awarded the International Association of Women Judges (IAWJ) the 2023 Bolch Prize for the Rule of Law in recognition of the organization’s remarkable efforts to evacuate, support, and resettle Afghan women judges who, because of their gender and work as jurists, have faced persecution and violence since the Taliban took control of the country in late 2021. The IAWJ was honored during a ceremony at Duke University’s Nasher Museum of Art on March 1.

Dame Susan Glazebrook, a justice of the Supreme Court of New Zealand and president of the International Association of Women Judges, speaks at the Bolch Prize ceremony on March 1.

At the Bolch Prize ceremony, L–R: Justice Mona Lynch, Nova Scotia Supreme Court; Judge Paul Grimm, director of the Bolch Judicial Institute; Judge Robyn Tupman, District Court of New South Wales; Justice Susan Glazebrook, New Zealand Supreme Court; Judge Patricia Whalen, Vermont State Court; and Judge Vanessa Ruiz, District of Columbia Court of Appeals

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Coleman honored as Lemkin Rule of Law Guardian by Bolch Judicial Institute Page 12