Student, Faculty & Law School News

Chicago-Kent College of Law students Alyssa Yoshino ’23, Connor Larson ’23, and Keaton Smith ’23 finished in first place and won best brief in the Chicago regional of the Saul Lefkowitz Moot Court Competition. The group advanced to nationals, where they won best oral arguments in March 2023.

Alexis Endres ’24, Nic Zito ’23, Rana Salem ’23, and Jack Debacker ’24 won best closing argument at the 2022 National Civil Trial Competition in November 2022.

Justice Student Advocacy Competition after winning all 15 ballots in the regional competition in March 2023. Brittany Dushman ’24, Ben Sheinbein ’24, and Aaron Thompson ’24 finished as the champions of the 2023 virtual McGee Civil Rights Moot Court competition in March 2023.

Marisa Gelabert ’24, Helen Gustafson ’24, and Nell Riordan ’24 scored a secondplace finish in the Frank A. Schreck Gaming Law Moot Court Competition hosted by UNLV’s William S. Boyd School of Law in March 2023. Jay Castillo ’24 and Charlie Johnson ’24 made it to the quarterfinals of the competition. Johnson took home the award for best oralist.

Two Chicago-Kent College of Law teams finished as regional semifinalists in the American Bar Association Law Student Division National Appellate Advocacy Competition. Paul Ansani ’24 and Manuela Burek ’24 comprised one team, while Elizabeth Weber ’24 and Hannah Wiese ’24 made up the other.

Elizabeth “Lizzie” Horwitz ’23 and Kaitlyn Kloss ’23 started the season strong at the Hunton Andrews Kurth Moot Court National Championship at the University of Houston Law Center in January 2023. The Kurth Championship is an invitational, with only the top 16 teams from the prior year allowed to compete. Kloss earned second-best oralist.

Cole Gunter ’23, Jack DeBacker ’23, Paige Bareck ’24, Nic Zito ’23, and Emanuel “Manny” Centeno ’24 finished as semifinalists in the American Association for

Clarice Fisher ’24 and Evelyn Tarnovsky ’24 earned first place in the virtual UCLA School of Law Cybersecurity Moot Court Competition in March 2023.

Erin Gallagher ’24 and Kaitlyn Watkins ’24 finished as semifinalists in the University of Wisconsin Law Schools’ Evan A. Evans Constitutional Law Moot Court Competition.

Christopher Romero ’23 and Hani Salameh ’23 finished as runners-up at the Midwest regional of the Giles Sutherland Rich Memorial Moot Court competition in March 2023.

Alyssa Yoshino

Connor Larson

Keaton Smith

Cole Gunter Nic Zito

Paige Bareck

Emanuel Centeno

Jack DeBacker

Kaitlyn Kloss

Patent scholar and equity issues expert

Jordana Goodman will join the faculty at Chicago-Kent College of Law in fall 2023. Goodman is an expert on gender and race equity issues in STEM fields. Her research explores intellectual property ownership and diversity in terms of how attorneys are recognized for their work. She spent six years as a patent prosecutor after passing the United State Patent and Trademark Office’s patent bar. In that role, she wrote patent applications to develop portfolios for a variety of clients.

During her time as a practicing attorney, Goodman encountered many problems, such as “a lack of diverse client acquisition, high prices, lack of diversity of attorneys.” She turned to academia to “teach my students how to be more equitable attorneys.”

Goodman joins Chicago-Kent from Boston University School of Law where she works as a lecturer. She also acts as an innovator in residence at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Nicole Jansma ’23 was named a 2023 Law Student of the Year by National Jurist and preLaw magazines. The honor recognizes students “who have made outstanding contributions to their law schools and their communities” in 2022. While pursuing her concentration in public interest law, Jansma secured competitive internships in public defender offices across the country—first with the Federal Defender Services of Wisconsin in Milwaukee and then with the Illinois Office of the State Appellate Defender, the Federal Defender for the Northern District of Illinois in Chicago, and the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia in Washington, D.C. Her work was funded by a John Paul Stevens Public Interest Fellowship.

Jansma was the 2022 president of the Kent Justice Foundation, a Chicago-Kent College of Law student organization that

FACULTY/LAW SCHOOL NEWS

Professor of Law

Daniel Martin Katz released explosive research in March 2023 that showed that OpenAI’s latest artificial intelligence software, GPT-4, is capable of passing the Universal Bar Examination, including the essay and performance sections. Katz and his co-authors graded the essay and performance portions. Katz says that they did their best to try to grade it fairly, but the computer scored so well on the multiple-choice portion that there was a lot of room for error in the essay and performance sections.

The program’s performance on the essay section was notable. Katz says the only indicator that the essays were written by computers and not humans was an absence of typos and grammar that was “near perfect.”

As AI tools make their way into law offices across the country, Katz hopes that their influence will reach beyond that. He believes that AI could be a “force multiplier” that will allow more people to access legal services that may have been too expensive before.

is dedicated to increasing student awareness of public interest law issues and opportunities. At the 2023 Public Interest awards, she was honored with the 2023 Vivien C. Gross Pro Bono and Public Interest Leadership Award. She also earned the Dean’s Distinguished Public Service Awards for completing more than 250 hours of service, primarily with the John Howard Association, an Illinoisbased nonprofit prison watchdog group. Additionally, she serves as vice president of the Moot Court Honors Society and as a notes and comments editor for the Chicago-Kent Law Review. She also serves on the National Advisory Committee for Equal Justice Works, a highly regarded Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit that coordinates funding for public interest fellowships and is the country’s largest facilitator of opportunities in public interest law.

Cary Martin Shelby has been named the newest Ralph Brill Endowed Chair at Chicago-Kent College of Law. She joins the faculty as a professor of law from Washington and Lee University School of Law. Shelby specializes in corporate and securities law, and her research “scrutinizes the blurred distinctions between public and private investment funds resulting from financial innovation, systemic risk, and retailization.”

In the course of her research, Shelby began to see how financial systems can perpetuate inequality, particularly disadvantaging people of color and lower earners. Now she conducts her research through a critical race theory lens.

Shelby grew up in chronic poverty and entered the foster care system at 13. Now in her spare time, she works to help young people who have experienced foster care achieve their college goals.

Nicole Jansma

Jordana Goodman

Neil Richards, author of Why Privacy Matters (Oxford University Press 2022), won the 2022 Roy C. Palmer Civil Liberties Prize on Democracy, Civil Liberties, and the Rule of Law. The Palmer Prize was established in spring 2007 by Roy C. Palmer ’62 and his wife, Susan M. Palmer, to honor a work of scholarship that explores the tension between civil liberties and national security in contemporary American society.

Over the course of 200 pages, Richards breaks down what privacy is, dispels some common myths about privacy, and explains how the law governing our privacy could be strengthened. He says society needs “reasonable laws that protect us as consumers, as citizens, and as humans in the digital environments in which we have no choice but to live in the twenty-first century.”

Richards is the Koch Distinguished Professor in Law and the director of the Cordell Institute at Washington University in St. Louis School, where he teaches courses on privacy law.

Former United States Securities and Exchange Commission attorney James Tierney is joining the Chicago-Kent College of Law faculty as a professor of law in fall 2023. He currently teaches at the University of Nebraska’s College of Law. There, his research focuses on securities law, primarily on how people engage with the stock market and financial advice, which can “create a lot of traps for the unwary.”

Tierney says this research can also help us show whose interests the law is promoting “in an age of widening inequality.” He chose to conduct his research in securities law in the hope that it can help democratize finance, giving ordinary people the ability to meet their financial goals.

Some of Tierney’s recent research involves zero-commission stock trading apps such as Robinhood, which promotes that “investing doesn’t have

to be that hard.” In recent articles published in Duke Law Journal and Yale Law Review Forum, he examines how securities law might respond to “gamified” apps that use “behavioral psychology to encourage frequent and often maladaptive trading activity.”

Professor Edward Lee, who serves as co-director of Chicago-Kent College of Law’s Program in Intellectual Property Law, published a book, Creators Take Control: How NFTs Revolutionize Art, Business, and Entertainment, in March 2023. In it, Lee argues that non-fungible tokens (NFTs), despite being difficult for many to understand, will soon become ubiquitous in our lives.

An NFT is a computer code that creates a unique digital token. When that token is sold, the transaction is recorded in a virtual ledger, known as a blockchain. By owning the token, “people believe they own something, then it enables a vast number of uses.”

In the book, Lee examines the controversy that has arisen around the concept of NFTs. He compares it to the commotion surrounding the early days of modern art. Artists such as Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque completely changed the concept of what art is by “ignoring the artistic convention of the renaissance in which artists used a single linear perspective to perceive things as you would in a photograph.”

It took decades, but people eventually accepted “modern art.” Lee argues that as society’s definition of ownership evolves, NFTs will also be accepted widely.

The Chicago-Kent College of Law community continues to mourn the loss of Clinical Professor of Law Vivien C. Gross, who passed away on March 4, 2023, after a long battle with cancer. Gross was a beloved faculty member for 45 years, growing and overseeing the legal and judicial externship programs, and teaching courses on professional responsibility. Gross was fundamental in the growth of public interest opportunities for students. She established the Public Interest Resource Center, which tracked student community service hours, recognizing students who completed 50 or 250 hours. She also served as the longtime faculty adviser for the college’s public interest student organization, the Kent Justice Foundation. Aside from being an exceptionally dedicated colleague, brilliant attorney, and cherished mentor, Gross was fun and engaging to be around. She took immense pleasure in mentoring students.

“There’s no one like her. A unique personality. I can’t think of a bad thing to say about her. How many people can you say that about?” Clinical Professor Richard Gonzalez says. “When you first meet her, you think, this isn’t real, no one can be that good. But time goes on and you realize she is that good. Vivien was that kind of person.”