Chicago-Kent Magazine Fall 2020

Dear Alumni,

I had hoped that by the time the fall issue of this magazine reached you the world would be further along in its recovery from the COVID-19 crisis. Alas, here we are, still socially distancing and living with great uncertainty. I know the scientific community is hard at work developing effective treatments and vaccines. Although we still have many difficult days ahead, I hope that, like me, you will find inspiration in the perseverance of our faculty and students.

It’s an academic year like no other, but we’re still here, pressing onward and focused on our mission—and doing what we can to be leaders at this time while creating opportunities for our students. This issue of the magazine spotlights efforts across the Chicago-Kent College of Law community to respond to the pandemic with impactful legal scholarship and legal services. We highlight the work of our COVID-19 Collective, as well as faculty and students who have studied myriad legal issues that have arisen amid the pandemic. We also share the stories of three alumni: Michelle Green ’11, Conor Malloy ’12, and Rachel O’Konis Ruttenberg ’11, who are working tirelessly to serve their clients and address community needs during the crisis.

The coronavirus is just one challenge we’re all facing together. Our nation’s ugly disease, racism, is ubiquitous and has gained more widespread public acknowledgment with the tragic recent deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, among others. I want to reaffirm that Chicago-Kent stands united with all members of our Black community: united in disgust about the horrific treatment of Black communities at the hands of racist officials and other individuals; in outrage that, after years and years, so little has been done to change the pattern of racism and violence against these communities; in grief for the loved ones of those who have died from it and for others who have endured it and the lingering pain it causes; and in regret and frustration that the

A Letter From Dean Anita K. Krug

anger that recurrent episodes of racism and hatred trigger is sometimes expressed in destructive ways when more peaceful means are perceived not to be effective.

There is clearly much work to be done. Chicago-Kent has launched new initiatives for building a more inclusive, equitable, and diverse world, starting within our walls. We are conducting a racial equity audit of our programs, systems, and policies, with a view toward identifying and addressing systemic racism or bias embedded within them. Every relevant law school committee is tasked with analyzing the areas they oversee and will propose changes to promote racial equity and inclusion. It is our hope that this institutionwide initiative will help us address our deficiencies and empower us to find new ways to promote racial equity in our intellectual life and community leadership. I look forward to sharing our findings next year.

In this issue of the magazine, we present an op-ed from Assistant Dean Marsha Ross-Jackson on having brave conversations in our workplaces and organizations to advance diversity and inclusion. We also reflect on the history of our Institute for Law and the Workplace as it approaches its 25th anniversary and celebrate Professor Martin H. Malin’s incredible career.

I wish you all safety and good health in the days ahead. Thank you for your continuing commitment to and support of Chicago-Kent.

Anita K. Krug Dean and Professor

CHICAGO-KENT MAGAZINE

Dean and Professor of Law ANITA K. KRUG

Associate Vice President for Major and Planned Gifts SUSAN M. LEWERS

Senior Director of Constituent Engagement JOSEPH VOLIN

Produced by the Illinois Institute of Technology Office of Marketing and Communications

Content Director CHELSEA KALBERLOH JACKSON

Senior Graphic Designer SCOTT BENBROOK

Communications Manager and Contributing Writer JAMIE LOO

Contributing Writers KIRAN WEBSTER, ANDREW WYDER

Marketing Manager DEIRDRE CRIMMINS

Photography David Ettinger, Olivia Dimmer

Illustrations JOESEPH GOFORTH

Adrian Delgado ’21 and Dominica Puglise ’20 Receive 2020 Fleischman Family Awards

Adrian Delgado ’21 and Dominica Puglise ’20 are the recipients of the 2020 Fleischman Family Awards for Excellence in Criminal Clinic.

Delgado, who will graduate from Chicago-Kent College of Law in December 2020, earned a B.A. in philosophy and a minor in criminology, law, and justice from the University of Illinois at Chicago. During law school he worked in the Criminal Defense

Litigation Clinic as a law clerk. While working at the clinic, he obtained his 711 license, which allows law students to represent clients in court under the supervision of licensed attorneys. Additionally, Delgado is an executive board member for the Hispanic/Latino Law Students’ Association and a Chicago-Kent trial advocacy team member.

Puglise graduated magna cum laude from Oakland University with a bachelor’s degree in international relations. During law school she worked as a law clerk for the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office for criminal appeals and later, as a 711 licensed law clerk for the felony division. Puglise was a member of the Chicago-Kent Law Review, the Chicago-Kent Asian Pacific American Law Students Association, and the Kent Justice Foundation. She received CALI Excellence for the Future Awards in Criminal Procedure: Investigative Processes, Trial Advocacy 2, and Legal Writing 4 courses.

Puglise has accepted an offer to work as an assistant state’s attorney at the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office post-graduation.

The Fleischman Family Awards for Excellence in Criminal Clinic were established by Chicago-Kent alumni and criminal defense attorneys Jack and Sidney Z. Fleischman ’87 in 2008 to recognize outstanding students in the criminal defense section of the Chicago-Kent Law Offices.

Monica Pechous ’20 Wins 2020 Willis R. Tribler Law Student Writing Competition

Monica Pechous ’20 has won the Illinois Institute for Continuing Legal Education 2020 Willis R. Tribler Law Student Writing Competition for her article titled “The Impact of Technology on Home Rule Power in Illinois.” This is her third writing competition win over the past year.

In the paper, Pechous examines home rule power

in Illinois and its relationship to emerging technology. Since new technology such as streaming services and cloud-based service platforms have no physical location where transactions occur, there is some confusion about the scope of home rule power for municipalities. Pechous covers existing law in the paper and offers specific tips and guidelines to practicing attorneys on how they can adapt as home rule power changes and shifts over time.

Pechous earned her bachelor’s degree in business administration and marketing and communication studies from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She worked remotely as an intellectual property litigation clerk for Tucker Ellis LLP in St. Louis this past summer, and has accepted an offer to work as an associate attorney at the firm upon bar passage. Pechous is graduating early and will receive her degree this December.

Amy Cortez ’20 Receives 2020 Sandra P. Zemm Labor Law Prize

Amy Cortez ’20 is the recipient of the 2020 Sandra P. Zemm Labor Law Prize. Cortez graduated in May with a J.D. degree, a J.D. certificate in labor and employment law, and a certificate from the Praxis Program. Cortez was a student editor for the Employee Rights and Employment Policy Journal and a member of the competitive Alternative Dispute Resolution team (2018–19).

Cortez received a bachelor’s degree in political science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

The prize was established in 2009 at Chicago-Kent College of Law by the law firm of Seyfarth Shaw LLP to honor the memory of Sandra P. Zemm, who died in September 2008 after a lengthy battle with cancer. Zemm Prize winners receive $2,000 along with the award.

Bryant Roby ’20 Named Among Finalists for Law Student of the Year by National Jurist Magazine

and Black Law Students Association (2018–19).

Bryant Roby ’20 was named among six finalists for Law Student of the Year by National Jurist Magazine The announcement was made in the spring 2020 issue of the publication.

Roby was actively involved in extracurricular activities at Chicago-Kent College of Law, including serving as president of Chicago-Kent’s Moot Court Honor Society (2019–20)

He also worked tirelessly on initiatives to benefit the local community, including assisting Chicago-Kent Adjunct Professor William Kling in establishing the Black Community Provider Network. As Midwest regional director of career and professional development for the National Black Law Students Association in 2018–19, Roby helped organize and run a job fair and a career expo. Roby was the only student selected for a 2019 Hinshaw Diversity Scholarship from the law firm Hinshaw & Culbertson LLP.

Roby graduated in May and has accepted an offer to work as an associate attorney at Hinshaw upon bar passage.

Enrique Espinoza ’22 Receives 2020 Gary Laser Professionalism Award

Enrique Espinoza ’22, recipient of the Gary Laser Professionalism Award, is a member of the Immigration Law Society, the American Immigration Lawyers Association, and the Hispanic/ Latino Law Students’ Association. He graduated from Universidad Veracruzana with a degree in tourism business administration.

Espinoza worked in the Immigration Law Clinic at Chicago-Kent College of Law on family petitions, removal proceedings, asylums petitions, bond proceedings, credible fear interviews, and voluntary departure. Espinoza also received a mediator certification and worked at the Mediation/ADR Clinic at Chicago-Kent. He was

Shaunagh McGoldrick ’22 and Zachery Taylor ’21 Receive 2020 Justice John Paul Stevens Public Interest Fellowships

Chicago-Kent College of Law students Shaunagh McGoldrick’22 and Zachery Taylor ’21 received 2020 Justice John Paul Stevens Public Interest Fellowships to support their public interest work this past summer.

Stevens Fellowships are open to first- and second-year Chicago-Kent students who have secured public-interest legal positions at either not-for-profit organizations or governmental entities for the summer. Stevens fellows are selected based on their commitment to public service and their potential for excellence throughout their legal careers.

awarded a fellowship to attend the Diversity Student ADR Summit: Roadmap to a Career in ADR in New York in November 2019.

Created in 2017, the endowed prize recognizes students working in the C-K Law Group: The Law Offices of Chicago-Kent who have best exemplified promise as practitioners as well as the highest standard of ethics.

This past summer McGoldrick completed a virtual internship with Legal Aid Chicago’s Housing Practice Group on eviction defense and housing conditions issues. She assisted with client intakes and drafting discovery documents, letters to landlords, and funding applications for clients who needed to move. She also had an opportunity to draft a complaint, a petition for certiorari, and a motion to seal.

During law school, McGoldrick has been a volunteer and co-manager of the Self-Help Web Desk and worked for the C-K Law Group’s Plaintiff’s Employment Clinic. She is a 2L representative for the Chicago-Kent Lambdas and the Chicago-Kent National Lawyers Guild, a junior associate for the Chicago-Kent Law Review, and a member of Moot Court Honor Society. McGoldrick is currently a judicial intern for Cook County Circuit Court Judge Eve Reilly.

McGoldrick earned her master’s degree in social work from the University of Montana and holds a bachelor’s degree in political communication from Emerson College. Prior to attending law school, she was a full-time social worker who worked as an advocate and counselor for victims of sexual assault and domestic violence.

Taylor completed his summer internship with Sargent Shriver National Center on Poverty Law. During law school, he has been active with the National Lawyers Guild, Kent Justice Foundation, and was president of the Chicago-Kent Lambdas (2019–2020). He is also a research assistant to Chicago-Kent Professor Bernadette Atuahene. Since January, Taylor has been a 711 intern with Legal Aid Chicago’s Housing Practice Group. He earned his bachelor’s degree in geographical studies, comparative race, and ethnic studies from the University of Chicago.

Noah Smith-Drelich Joins Chicago-Kent Faculty

Noah Smith-Drelich has joined the law school as an assistant professor of law. Smith-Drelich’s research interests center on tort law including the use of torts in civil rights and civil liberties litigation. Smith-

Drelich also does experimental research on food taxes and subsidies, and he is currently collecting data from all 50 states for a research project that analyzes the public health impacts of past changes to restaurant and grocery taxes. In addition to his research, Smith-Drelich is lead counsel for Thunderhawk v. County of Morton, an ongoing civil liberties suit related to the Standing Rock-led opposition to the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline. Prior to joining academia, Smith-Drelich was a staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union’s North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wyoming office. He is a graduate of Stanford Law School and holds a bachelor’s degree from Williams College and a master’s degree in environment and resources from Stanford University.

Marsha Ross-Jackson Inspires Aspiring African-American Lawyers in New Book

Assistant Dean Marsha Ross-Jackson shared her tips on navigating law school and professional life in Lessons from Successful African American Lawyers: Practical Wisdom for Those on the Path to Lawyerhood (Volume 1). The

Stephanie M. Stern Co-Authors Book on Psychology and Property Law

Professor Stephanie M. Stern has published a book that explores how empirical, psychological research can inform our understanding of property law. The Psychology of Property Law, which Stern co-authored with Daphna Lewinsohn-Zamir, dean and Louis Marshall Professor of Environmental Law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, examines the intersection between people’s perceptions and values of ownership and

Bernadette Atuahene Wins the 2020 John Hope Franklin Prize

Professor Bernadette

how these interact with property law systems. Using key findings from psychology, the authors consider whether the goals inherent in property laws can be achieved more successfully with different rules and suggest potential property law reforms. The book was published by NYU Press.

book features the personal and professional stories of 55 successful Black lawyers from around the country who attended law school from 1970–2010 and pursued various career paths in the legal industry. Ross-Jackson hopes that readers will “see themselves in us and realize that if we were able to get into and survive law school, and become successful attorneys, they can too.”

Atuahene received the 2020 John Hope Franklin Prize from the Law and Society Association for her article titled “Predatory Cities.” The annual award recognizes exceptional scholarship in the field of race, racism, and the law. Predatory cities are urban areas where public officials systematically take property from residents and transfer it to public coffers, intentionally or unintentionally violating domestic laws or basic human rights. Atuahene introduced this new sociolegal concept in her paper, which was published in the California Law Review in February.

Graeme B. Dinwoodie Inducted into IP Hall of Fame

Global Professor of Intellectual Property Law

Graeme B. Dinwoodie has been inducted into the IP Hall of Fame, which honors

of Fame includes living and deceased individuals such as Thomas Jefferson, Victor Hugo, and Giles Rich, one of the principal authors of the

Roger Rozanski Named New Director of the Chicago-Kent Patent Hub

Roger Rozanski has joined Chicago-Kent College of Law as the new director of the Chicago-Kent Patent Hub. Launched by the United States Patent and Trademark Office in 2011, the Patent Hub is one of 21 patent hubs around the country that were created under the America Invents Act to assist low-income inventors with the patent process and in securing patent protection.

Rozanski is an experienced attorney who focused his private practice on patent prosecution and intellectual property strategies. He was also a pro bono volunteer attorney with the Patent Hub.

In addition to overseeing the Patent Hub, Rozanski will teach the Patent Practicum course, in which students participate in the screening interviews of the inventors, prior art searches, patentability reports, and other aspects of application preparation. Rozanski became the second director of the Patent Hub when founder Mary Anne Smith retired this past summer.

The Chicago-Kent Patent Hub has matched qualified, under-resourced individual inventors and small businesses with volunteer patent attorneys in Illinois since 2015. It currently has 78 attorneys from 21 law firms providing pro bono assistance to inventors. Through June 2020, attorneys have donated more than 5,500 pro bono hours and have facilitated the granting of 45 patents.

Virtual Commencement Features

Illinois Supreme Court Chief Justice

Anne M. Burke as Keynote Speaker

Illinois Supreme Court Chief Justice Anne M. Burke ’83 delivered the keynote address for Chicago-Kent College of Law’s 2020 virtual commencement, which was streamed on the law school’s website on Sunday, May 17. In her address, she spoke about the uncertainty that comes with graduation as new graduates look to take the first steps in their careers and acknowledged the added stress that the pandemic has brought to everyone. Burke said the future is unpredictable, and that she hopes as new attorneys they will follow their hearts and carve their own unique paths. President Abraham Lincoln understood that our lives are judged not by one single decision, she said, but rather “our responses to thousands of moments of risk and truth we face.”

“Lincoln said it this way: ‘The best thing about

the future is that it comes one day at a time.’ It is my hope that his words will strengthen and inspire you as you look to your future, no matter how uncertain it may be at this moment,” Burke said. “Embrace each new challenge that comes your way with gratitude and appreciation. Help others and I think you will find that when you give your best for others, you receive tenfold in return.”

Chicago-Kent Launches New Equity Talks Series

Chicago-Kent College of Law

kicked off its new Equity Talks Series on June 30 with a panel discussion on race,

law, and policing issues. The June 30 event featured David A. Harris, a nationally recognized expert on police,

race, and criminal justice, who discussed his book A City Divided: Race, Fear and the Law in Police Confrontations in context of recent events. Other panelists included Jeanette Samuels, a civil rights attorney, activist, and a partner at Shiller, Preyar, Jarard & Samuels, and Karen Sheley, director of the Police Practices Project at the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois.

Organized by the Office of Diversity and Inclusion and the Office of Continuing Legal Education, the Equity Talks Series brings together law students, lawyers, and the community to discuss ways to dismantle systemic

racism created by the law. Since its launch, the Equity Talks Series has held three additional events—The Impact of Systemic Racism on the Health and Well-Being of Communities of Color, Systemic Racism and the Disproportionate Impact of Environmental Risks and Harms on Communities of Color, and The Impact of Racial Inequities in Housing on Communities of Color. Recordings of the events may be available at a later date.

COVID-19 Collective Brings

Together Faculty and Students to Research Coronavirus Legal Issues

As Chicago shut down in March in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, more calls started coming into the C-K Law Group from people seeking legal help. Meanwhile, Chicago-Kent College of Law students and soon-to-be graduates were watching their summer internships, summer associate positions, clerkships, and job offers disappear as the legal industry braced itself for the pandemic.

Chicago-Kent faculty and staff quickly mobilized to give underemployed students the opportunity to develop legal skills and expertise in emerging legal issues related to COVID-19 through the COVID-19 Collective. The C-K Law Group’s Entrepreneurial Law, Immigration Law, and Plaintiffs’ Employment clinics were also included in this effort and handled cases and projects related to COVID-19.

Twenty-four faculty members and 65 students on 15 research teams were involved in COVID-19 Collective research projects this past summer. The projects covered a variety of legal topics such as privacy implications for contact tracing and potential antibody testing, courts and jury trials, constitutional rights and mandatory lockdown restrictions, corporate governance, and the history of quarantines and epidemics in the United States including governmental authority to establish quarantines. Research groups also looked into criminal justice issues, such as compassionate release, world trade and global value chains, school district obligations and compensatory education for special education students, enforcement authority under international law for public health organizations such as the World Health Organization, and property law issues.

Students had the option to volunteer to be part of the collective or to earn a single pass/fail credit for their work over the summer.

“We could have instead put together a summer class to provide a broad overview

of the legal landscape in light of COVID19. This dynamic partnership between our faculty and students to take a deep dive into an array of topics allows us to do more— to be conversation and policy leaders on emerging issues,” says Chicago-Kent Dean Anita K. Krug. “I anticipate that many of these projects will yield scholarship and other guidance that will be helpful to legal practitioners and help us all better understand the impact of the pandemic on our laws and rights.”

Heather Harper, clinical professor of law and chair of the Vocational/Career Services Committee that spearheaded the COVID-19 Collective, says COVID-19 has unleashed countless legal questions and is a burgeoning area of the law that will need newly trained lawyers for years to come. When the law changes, everyone is learning together from the same spot, Harper says. The faculty and students were learning alongside each other.

“It’s a collaboration,” she says. “It’s an exciting environment to learn and work together for good, and an opportunity for students to do something that is impactful and meaningful to their careers.”

The research teams gave presentations on their research in August, and some of the teams continued to meet in the fall to finalize papers, guides, law review articles, and other materials. A handful of the projects are highlighted here.

Historical Parallels in Polio Response

Major outbreaks of polio first became routine in the early twentieth century in the United States. Professor Felice Batlan

and students Amanda Mehr, Mary Goers, Monica Vizconde, Rogelio Delatorre, Scott Simpson, and William Tyler Dallas researched this time period, with a focus on primary source accounts of U.S. residents, to look for parallels to COVID-19 response. The team found that the federal government was unresponsive to addressing the polio crisis, which led to a patchwork of state and local measures. Cities closed or restricted access to schools, places of worship, public places, and businesses such as movie theaters and pools to try to limit disease spread.

Political rhetoric and media outlets emphasized individual responsibility in preventing the spread of the illness, and Black, immigrant, and poor families were often blamed for causing outbreaks. When it came to life-saving treatments such as the iron lung, the team found rampant inequalities based on race, class, and immigration status. Communities often had to fundraise to buy iron lungs for their local hospitals, and those who could not afford the equipment resorted to building their own with alcohol barrels and vacuum cleaner parts.

In April 1955 the first successful polio vaccine was announced. A shortage led to calls for congressional action, and it took until August of that year for Congress to provide $35 million to states to get the vaccines on their own. Every plan discussed on the federal level for vaccine distribution became ensnared in ideological debates over whether it was socialized medicine. Despite these issues, polio declined rapidly in the years that followed for middle- and upper-class households that had access to quality health care and the vaccine. Vaccination rates for urban and poor communities lagged drastically, which changed public perception of polio from a disease that affected everyone to only certain social groups and communities. During the 1960s the federal government passed laws that laid the foundation for modern-day vaccine policies. The team is working on a law review article on their findings.

Jury Trials in a Pandemic

How will juries proceed in the time of the pandemic? Professor Nancy Marder and students Harleen Saroya, Natalie Holman, and Sarah Albert found that courts are using a range of approaches, including in-person proceedings with masks and social distancing, virtual jury trials, hybrid trials with virtual jury selection and socially distanced courtroom trials, and in some places no jury trials at all. The Idaho Supreme Court created daily preliminary health status questionnaires for jurors and

installed plexiglass around witness boxes and judges. Jury boxes were expanded, and in some cases jurors were moved to the public seating area. In the San Francisco Superior Court, jurors and witnesses were given transparent plastic face masks to keep their facial expressions clear for attorneys. In Florida, Zoom was used for jury selection but the trials took place in person. Some jurisdictions in Texas went fully remote and used technology such as Dropbox and Google documents for jurors to access evidence.

While virtual juries have opened up the courts to innovation and technology that may make jury trials more efficient, virtual juries raise constitutional and fairness issues, particularly with criminal trials. For example, research shows that body language or other nonverbal cues play a significant role in how jurors analyze what is being presented to them. With social distancing in courtrooms or a virtual trial environment, attorneys and their clients cannot easily confide in each other during the course of a trial, and a party could claim they didn’t have access to effective counsel. Socioeconomic factors such as lack of access to technology could mean jury pools will not be an accurate representation of the community. The team created a bibliography of its research and shared this information with the Illinois Supreme Court’s Court Operations During COVID19 Task Force, the Illinois Supreme Court Committee on Jury Instructions in Civil Cases, and the Law and Society Association’s International Research Collaborative on Lay Participation.

Compensatory Education with School Disruptions

The closure of schools and move to online learning due to the pandemic disrupted the lives of countless families, particularly those with children who are disabled or require special-needs education. Students covered under the Individuals with Disabilities Education (IDEA) Act are entitled to compensatory services when the school

district fails to provide appropriate services and students don’t make expected progress.

Nancy Krent, adjunct faculty member, and students Gabe Kahn, James O’Brien, and Shaista Sharf researched what compensatory services relief could look like given the circumstances of a pandemic. The team researched previous circuit court decisions and found that there wasn’t a uniform approach to compensatory education cases. It did find a qualitative trend among the courts, where courts were trying to place students in the same educational position if not for the IDEA violation, rather than a quantitative approach such as an hour-forhour substitution to make up for the loss of education time. In Endrew F. v. Douglas County School District, the U.S. Supreme Court held that an educational program must be reasonably calculated to enable a child to make progress relative to the child’s circumstances.

With pandemic IDEA violations, the team suggests that one potential approach that courts could take with individual cases is to examine how other students with disabilities are faring or how the general population is doing compared to the same population in a hybrid or online-learning setting. This means that students would be compensated only for losses that are greater than would be expected for all students in the school district due to the pandemic. The team is finalizing a compilation of the court cases that it hopes will help students and parents navigate these challenging IDEA issues.

Labor and Employment COVID-19 Guides

Institute for Law and the Workplace faculty members Martin H. Malin, Marsha Ross-Jackson, and Emily Aleisa, and clinical professors Richard Gonzalez and Heather Harper led teams that researched federal, state, and local laws and other agency-recommended guidance on labor and employment issues. Students Tyler Sprague, Rawan Hishmeh, Katherine Hanson, and Laura Bradley-Hufford spoke with business owners and workers about their challenges and concerns related to work and COVID-19, which led to the creation of comprehensive employer and employee rights handbooks. Harper’s team from the Entrepreneurial Law Clinic— Emily Shanley-Roberts, Aries Druckenbrod, Shelby Thordarson, Artur Moskala, and Nicholas Agate—also developed infographics to provide easy-to-use visual guides to help small business owners. The infographics cover the Paycheck Protection Program and Families First Coronavirus Response Act, and how to safely reopen businesses. The teams anticipate that state and federal regulatory guidance will continue to evolve. One thing they noted is that the Illinois Human Rights Act and Chicago Human Rights Ordinance offer worker protections that are often overlooked, including broader definitions of disability and parental status discrimination. —Jamie Loo

Lori Andrews and Institute for Science, Law, and Technology Students Examine Gender Gap in COVID-19 Clinical Trials

Until 1995 most medical research was conducted on men, leading, in some cases, to the development of diagnostics and treatments that were harmful to women. Harm often occurred because men and women differ in their immune systems and hormones. In 1995 the United States Congress enacted a statute requiring the director of the National Institutes of Health to ensure that women are included in medical research and that research studies analyze the differences between men and women in their reactions to both diseases and treatments. When discrimination persisted, the NIH promulgated its 2016 guidelines, underscoring the need to disaggregate research data by sex.

Research on COVID-19 provided Distinguished Professor of Law Emerita Lori Andrews and students Bora Ndregjoni, Monica Pechous, Andrew White, and Kelby Roth with the opportunity to determine whether the policy guidelines for analyzing sex differences in response to diseases and treatments have been met. By May 13,

Richard Kling Appointed to Illinois Supreme Court Task Force, Leads Students in Compassionate Release Petition

Clinical Professor

2020, there were more than 23,000 papers published on COVID-19, with the number of articles doubling every 20 days. The team analyzed the burgeoning medical research literature about COVID-19 and found that the historical failure to take women’s symptoms and needs into account continues to this day. Even though tens of thousands of studies of COVID-19 have been undertaken, only a few analyze the difference in symptoms between men and women. By failing to disaggregate symptoms by gender, Andrews says, researchers are failing to comply with existing policies. More importantly, she says, they are missing out on the opportunity to better understand—and better treat and prevent—the further spread of the global pandemic. Men are twice as likely to die from COVID-19 than women. As a few researchers are beginning to belatedly realize, notes Andrews, understanding the unique aspects of women’s immune systems and hormones can provide a key to treating COVID-19, thereby contributing to both men’s and women’s health outcomes.

Richard Kling and students in the Criminal Defense Litigation Clinic have been working on compassionate release petitions, succeeding in getting one client released from prison since this past March. Many people who didn’t previously meet the requirements for compassionate release became eligible during the COVID-19 pandemic, Kling says, because of age or pre-existing medical conditions such as diabetes that made them high risk. Kling and students Benjamin Jambois, Isabella Romano, Hailee McKie, and Monica Pechous worked on a petition for a 65-year-old man who was in prison for nonviolent, white-collar crimes. As part of the petition, they presented his medical records and statistical data on COVID-19 cases within the correctional facility and surrounding county, since prison staff can become infected and bring the virus to work. The judge ruled that there were no immediate extraordinary circumstances to warrant release but recommended that the Bureau of Prisons consider early release on home confinement. Their client was released within two weeks. Kling, Jambois, and McKie are currently working on two more compas sionate release petitions.

In June, Kling was appointed as a consultant on constitutional issues to the Illinois Supreme Court’s Court Operations During COVID-19 Task Force, which is analyzing and making recommendations to address the continuing challenges of court operations during the pandemic. Kling is on a subcommittee researching criminal courts, and one of the biggest dilemmas is how to ensure speedy trials with juries. Kling says that many people may be hesitant about coming to a courthouse for a prospective 40- to 50-person jury pool, and since the pandemic has disproportionately affected minorities, it could be difficult to get juries who are representative of their communities. The subcommittee is researching models from other states to see how in-person trials or virtual trials are functioning. Among the defense bar, Kling says one advantage of the virtual environment is the ability to take care of status or preliminary hearings in multiple places without having to travel between county courthouses.

Pandemic

Pivot

COVID-19 HAS TESTED ALL CORNERS OF THE LEGAL PROFESSION.

In their own words, Chicago-Kent alumni share how the pandemic has challenged them and how they have responded for the betterment of their clients and their communities.

AROUND THAT PERIOD in late March [2020], there was just a lot of uncertainty. Rentervention saw a huge uptick in the period between the end of March and end of April. We saw about a 500 percent increase in people coming [to the website], just hungry for information. It still didn’t translate into a whole lot of people talking to attorneys, because that’s one of the things that Rentervention is designed to help address. Rentervention has the chatbot side of things and can help answer some of those questions and have the information on point to be able to help people through. Staff attorneys still provide assistance to people with a virtual clinic component.

“What we saw over the next couple of months after that was the numbers still were increasing. But then there’s one moratorium and there’s an extension of the moratorium, and then there are different projects and courts that are effectively on hold to a large degree. The usership on Rentervention has started to come down a little bit. I think that’s just a byproduct of how things are working, where it just seems like nothing was getting done and people may not feel they’re really at the risk of eviction proper. They aren’t really hungry for that information anymore because they don’t feel like there’s something coming right around the corner. And I think people are getting the wrong impression. We [Rentervention and Lawyers’ Committee for Better Housing] don’t want to meet you in the emergency room. We want to meet you well ahead of that if it’s ever going to happen and to not turn the emergency room into a probability, but more of a possibility.

“I used to represent small mom-and-pop-style landlords across Chicago. And, for a lot of them, if they weren’t getting rent, and without diving deeper into their books, there are aspects of their life that would suffer. They might have a

Conor Malloy ’12 Project Director for Rentervention

Conor Malloy ’12 is the project director for Rentervention, which offers Chicago tenants online information and an interactive chatbot to help tenants independently navigate common housing issues and seek help from a pro bono attorney, if necessary. Rentervention is housed within the Lawyers’ Committee for Better Housing and is a joint project of the Lawyers Trust Fund of Illinois and other advocates.

note on the property. If you’re not paying the note on it, now everybody’s in trouble. This whole economy in and of itself needs a cash injection. There have been some housing programs, but we haven’t seen a whole lot about how effective they are because it’s all so fresh and seems to be an uncoordinated patchwork. It’s hard to advise people. The fact that we can no longer reliably consult with clients about what something might look like prospectively, it really does a lot to frustrate everybody involved.

“Lawyers’ Committee for Better Housing just started a new program called the Eviction Prevention Project. They doubled our attorney staff, and through a grant from the City of Chicago we will be able to help with a lot of things like lockouts and eviction notices and really try to move people upstream to avoid court and provide other means of assistance.

“There has been pivoting with courts being effectively closed in a couple of ways. It’s still open where you can do Zoom court, but there are no final orders and evictions right now. It seems like the virtual clinic was matched for something like this pandemic. It’s great to have something in place where you could continue to help people outside of the normal processes of saying to a client, ‘Alright, you're invited for intake, come on down to the office.’ That client might have to take three buses to get here and drag all the documents with them instead of a tenant just snapping a picture of their five-day notice with their phone and texting it over to you and dealing with it that way. It’s just how you conducted business every day. In so many segments of society, we hear about this longing for returning to normal. But I hope that as we come out of this going forward, we can keep continuing to provide these types of assistance and virtual assistance in finding people where they're at.” —As told to Jamie Loo

Photo: Olivia Dimmer

THE POLICY SOLUTIONS and research that are tied to how people exit poverty really ground us in what we are championing at any given time. And so, before the pandemic, we were just chugging along on reforms that we were looking to achieve in economic, health, and criminal justice policy.

“We were working with our coalitions and partners to move initiatives forward, drafting and filing new legislation, and understanding where the support was in the political window for achieving those reforms. And then COVID hit, and nobody wanted to talk about any of the things we were talking about. But they did—all of a sudden—need bold solutions to stem the crisis and mitigate millions of more people either getting sick or falling into poverty. And we were very much ready. We just kind of shifted and pulled out research and other ideas that the team had shopped around in prior years. And we were able to basically draw from all of that experience to repackage solutions to meet the moment.

“At the beginning of the pandemic, we would go to sleep one night and wake up the next day, and suddenly, for example, the Medicaid churn rate was fixed; Governor [J. B.] Pritzker’s office just decided we’re not going to kick people off of Medicaid and have them reapply every year because we’re in the middle of a pandemic. That was something we’ve literally been trying to fix for years. The speed at which people were jumping on board with being ready and able to put solutions in place was pretty crazy, like finding housing or offering hotels for people experiencing homelessness or putting an eviction moratorium in place. We were really, at the beginning of March and April and even the beginning of May, drinking from a fire hose of requests and jumping on opportunities to insert our ideas and shape the response to help the most vulnerable people, especially low-income

Rachel O’Konis Ruttenberg ’11 Director of Policy for Heartland Alliance

In September 2019 Rachel O’Konis Ruttenberg ’11 began her position as the director of policy for Heartland Alliance, a Chicago-based nonprofit organization composed of five entities that work to serve those who are homeless, living in poverty, or seeking safety by providing a comprehensive array of services in the areas of health, housing, jobs, and justice. Seven months later COVID-19 hit, and while Ruttenberg has continued to advocate for the same people and solutions that Heartland has always served, her job took on new meaning in the midst of a pandemic.

communities of color who were being hit the hardest by the pandemic and economic crises.

“I will say that, as the months have gone on, some government bodies have acted more swiftly and more progressively, and some have not. Congress has completely fallen behind, especially in getting people the economic help they need. Our city and state have stepped up as much as they could, in many ways. In the early days there were assumptions that federal funding would come through in order to be able to implement many of the solutions we knew were necessary to mitigate the crisis and make sure things did not get so much worse. In fact, the Illinois legislature passed its budget this year totally based on that assumption.

“We need state and city aid to ensure we can continue all of the social services people rely on, and we need to be getting cash to people so that they can keep their housing and have access to health care. We need to start looking toward recovery. Once it’s safe, how can we get people back to work so they can be spending money in our local economy? How can we invest in subsidized employment and transitional jobs strategies for people hardest hit by the pandemic and the economic crisis? How can we expand health care in a way that will serve us better during the next public health crisis? At this point, all eyes are pointed to the federal government because there’s no money or political will to do any of those things. Things have sort of ground to a halt. It’s looking pretty bleak in this moment, and I don’t see a lot happening until we have a change in leadership.” —As told to Andrew Wyder

Photo: Olivia Dimmer

THE VERY FIRST clients that called us were clients in the event space, for example, wedding planners. They knew this was going to hit really hard for a long time, and they were wondering what they could do about their contracts. Another type of client is business owners who are trying to get out of their leases. For some businesses, it’s impossible to make those rent payments, and so I’ve had more calls about trying to get out of leases than I ever have before in my career.

“Also, in that two-week to one-month period, I had the hardest conversations about employment issues of my career. Clients were having to lay off staff or at least wanting to think through the options, and this was before the Paycheck Protection Program. They’re crying, and this is really hard for me, too, because I’m a business owner. I’m taking a financial hit in March, and I had four attorneys and an assistant at the time. The responsibility that business owners feel for their employees is heavy. They know their families, their kids, their employees’ kids’ names. They know that this job is what is keeping that household afloat. And there’s a relationship built over time, and loyalty. We ended up having to let a couple of attorneys go, which was really sad. The hard decisions that had to be made were very emotionally draining. But it’s also nice to be able to be there. It’s rewarding to be able to help clients through that.

“Since we are on this mission to make legal services accessible to small businesses, my team felt we have the

Michelle Green ’11 G&G Law, LLC

Michelle Green ’11 is the founder and owner of G&G Law, LLC, which serves small business clients and startups with transactional legal services. Green launched her firm right out of law school and during a recession, and as a business owner herself, has felt the pain many of her clients are experiencing during the COVID-19 pandemic.

legal knowledge to help people deal with this while these business owners don’t have any money to pay for lawyers. I’m really proud of what our team produced. We produced a coronavirus resource page on gglawoffices.com that has tons of articles and videos. And then when the PPP information started coming out, we put out tons of information and videos about that. It keeps changing, and we're still trying to put up updates.

“We did have clients that broke through that first PPP funding round. I was going through the application process myself, so I knew firsthand how stressful it was. Small business owners are awesome. I can’t think of anybody who hasn’t reopened or pivoted and found another way to provide services or products.

“I have started to see more people making this switch or the big leap into starting a new business. I knew that was coming. I started my business in the middle of a recession. At that time, I talked to a lot of business owners who had left previous jobs or were laid off because of the recession, so that's an opportunity to start a new business. Businesses that can be successful during this time are the ones coming to us for services now. It’s stressful, though, because it’s really hard for small businesses in general—like it is for everybody— to project what’s going to happen in the future. There’s just no way to look at the revenues and the numbers from last quarter and then try to predict what’s going to happen next quarter. It’s just a lot of unknowns.” —As told to Jamie Loo

Photo: Olivia Dimmer

Photo: David Ettinger

Beyond the headlines and union picket lines, and company spokespersons and union leaders in Chicago, an unsung group of people help hammer out contracts behind the scenes.

Martin H. Malin, director of the Institute for Law and the Workplace (ILW) at Chicago-Kent College of Law, is often one of them. Malin has been called upon to arbitrate or mediate some of the largest labor and employment negotiations in the city for the past 40 years, including the 2015 and 2016 Chicago Board of Education and Chicago Teachers Union contract negotiations, for which one of Malin’s former students was the fact-finder. He was asked to be a fact-finder for the 2019 negotiations, which included contracts for Chicago Public Schools employees.

“It was really cool because the mediator for both sets of negotiations for the CTU and with SEIU [Service Employees International Union] was another one of my former students, Emil Totonchi, who is a mediator with the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service,” he says. “During the mediation stage of the fact-finding, Emil was actually co-mediating with me. That was so much fun to be tag-teaming with my former student in this mediation.”

Malin is always delighted to come across former students in his practice. It happens frequently in Chicago, where for the past 24 years the labor and employment law program he built has graduated hundreds of lawyers. ILW has also brought thousands of public- and private-sector labor and employment lawyers and professionals through the doors for conferences at Chicago-Kent.

“We bring the practicing professional and academic communities together; we bring the student community together with the practicing professional community; and of course, we bring the labor, the management, and the employee-advocate communities together,” Malin says. “I like to think of our program as a bridge across different worlds that brings everyone together for everyone’s benefit.”

An Intellectual Home for Labor and Employment Law

In the 1970s the late Lawrence F. Doppelt founded and directed Chicago-Kent’s labor and employment law LL.M. program. His death in 1979 left the program without a leader. Malin, a junior faculty member at The Ohio State University business school, came to Chicago-Kent as a visiting professor for a one-year appointment in fall 1980. Afterward, Chicago-Kent offered him a full-time position to teach labor and employment law.

Malin’s original mission was to slowly wind down the LL.M. program, but the law school continued to receive inquiries. Chicago-Kent kept the labor and employment law courses and expanded them for juris doctor students. A new labor lecture, the Kenneth M. Piper Memorial Lecture in Labor Law, became an endowed lecture series with its own advisory board.

Around this time, one of Malin’s students, Frank Fucile ’83, who was an inspector for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and president of the local American Federation of Government Employees, approached him with an idea. Fucile said that although Chicago is a federal government hub, there were no regional professional-development opportunities for federal-sector labor law professionals. Malin and Fucile worked together to launch the first Federal Sector Labor Relations and Labor Law Conference in 1982.

“It was a rousing success. With Frank’s contacts we put together a program advisory board with basically every major constituent of that conference having a representative on it and with the regional directors of the relevant federal agencies on it,” he says. “It just exceeded our wildest expectations.”

Today the conference remains the largest annual conference on federal sector and postal labor relations and labor law held outside of Washington, D.C. A virtual edition of the conference in 2020 attracted more than 450 attendees from 38 different states.

In 1984 the Illinois Public Labor Relations Act and Illinois Educational Labor Relations Act went into effect, establishing a statewide framework for collective bargaining. It led to the creation of the Illinois Public Sector Labor Law Conference, which has become the state’s largest conference on public sector labor law, drawing upwards of 600 lawyers and labor relations professionals to the law school each year.

The conferences brought together members of the labor and management community in a neutral, academic space to learn and discuss workplace issues. Malin says ILW started hearing stories about grievances and unfair labor practice charges being settled at the conferences.

By the early 1990s Chicago-Kent had developed a strong reputation for labor and employment law, and former law school dean Richard A. Matasar suggested the creation of a certificate program. Malin says the law school needed another labor and employment professor to help with this, so Rafael Gely, a lawyer and labor economist, was hired. Malin, Gely, and Matasar consulted with leaders in law firms, companies, and unions to find out what skills they were looking for in new labor and employment lawyers. Along with the certificate program, the law school also wanted to see if there was support for creating a larger institute. Every dollar from members of the institute, Malin says, would go to scholarships for the next generation of labor and employment lawyers.

In 1996 ILW was officially established. The Piper and Distinguished Labor Leader lectures and ILW conferences have brought national leaders in labor and employment to Chicago-Kent. These include AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten, Sara E. Rix of the AARP Public Policy Institute, and Equal Employment Opportunity Commission Commissioner Victoria Lipnic, to name a few.

ILW publishes the Employee Rights and Employment Policy Journal, the only faculty-edited, peer-reviewed employment law journal in the country focused on legal issues related to the workplace. It also publishes the Illinois Public Employee Relations Report. Under Malin’s leadership, ILW has established four endowments and several student scholarships. In 2019 preLaw Magazine ranked ILW the #1 employment law program in the country.

“The Institute for Law and the Workplace’s programs provide an invaluable forum to discuss today’s most important labor and employment issues through an academic and pragmatic lens,” says Jorge Ramirez ’97, managing director of labor and government strategies for GCM Grosvenor and former president of the Chicago Federation of Labor. “The opportunity to connect with others outside of an adversarial setting has had a positive impact on building collegiality among our regional workplace law community. We are fortunate to have a place like ILW here in Chicago.”

The Bridge Builder

Collective bargaining is in Malin’s roots. Born and raised in the New York City borough of the Bronx, he still remembers “the euphoria in our household when my father

landed a job with the New York City Sanitation Department as a mechanic’s helper.” As a member of Local 32BJ SEIU, Malin’s father had access to good wages, health insurance, and a pension plan. It enabled the family to have a good life, and for Malin and his sister to be the first generation in their family to graduate from college.

As a student at Michigan State University, Malin worked a minimum wage job in the kitchen at the university’s conference center, the Kellogg Center. During his sophomore year, Malin discovered that management wasn’t honoring raises set by the student employment office. He and a fellow student worker filed a complaint and won. Afterward, they proposed establishing a grievance committee for student workers, which management declined.

“We said, ‘The regular employees have their grievance committee,’” Malin says. “And local management said, ‘Yeah, because they have a union.’ And so the light bulb went off for both of us. We need a union!”

Malin says they had no idea what they were doing. Over the course of the next year, he and his co-workers, a ragtag group of undergraduate dishwashers from the Kellogg Center and a non-lawyer Michigan State labor relations professor, fought for a union all the way up to the Michigan Employment Relations Commission. In 1973 MERC ruled in their favor. It was an amazing victory, Malin says,

Photo: David Ettinger

because up until that point “the National Labor Relations Board, with respect to private universities, had held that students employed by the universities were not employees under the National Labor Relations Act.” Although the efforts at unionization at Michigan State later failed, the experience was the spark that led Malin to specialize in labor and employment law.

Malin has been active with several state and national organizations throughout his career, including serving as the chair of the Section on Labor Relations and Employment Law of the Association of American Law Schools, secretary of the American Bar Association’s Labor and Employment Law Section, and member of the board of governors and vice president of the National Academy of Arbitrators. He has published more than 80 articles and seven books, including Public Sector Employment: Cases and Materials and Labor Law in the Contemporary Workplace. In 2016 the ABA honored Malin with the Arvid Anderson Public Sector Labor and Employment Attorney of the Year Award for lifetime contributions to public sector labor law.

One his career highlights was his appointment by former President Barack Obama to the Federal Service Impasses Panel in 2009. Malin was reappointed in 2014 and served until 2017. The panel’s seven members resolve impasses in collective bargaining between federal agencies and unions that represent the agencies’ employees. Malin handled a wide range of cases, including a worldwide U.S.

The EEOC partnered with the Institute for Law and the Workplace for an event to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act, which included a panel discussion with two flight attendants who were among the first women to use Title VII and the Equal Pay Act of 1963 in the courts to fight workplace sex discrimination. Pictured here are [left to right] Mary Celeste Lansdale Brodigan, plaintiff in Lansdale v. United Air Lines, Inc.; Chicago-Kent Professor Mary Rose Strubbe, former ILW assistant director; and Mary Pat Laffey, plaintiff in Laffey v. Northwest Airlines, Inc. During her time in privacte practice, Strubbe handled one of the early sex discrimination cases in the airline industry.

Customs and Borders Protection agents’ contract and a work shift dispute between the U.S. Army and civilian security guards tasked with watching over a former chemical weapons stockpile in Utah.

Malin says his proudest achievement from ILW is the “small army of graduates who have gone out and done amazing things in the field.” ILW alumni include equity partners at big law firms, union lawyers, management firm lawyers, and top labor counsel for corporations across various industries. They can also be found in government positions, including state labor relations boards and the EEOC.

Although he is retiring from ILW in 2021, Malin plans to stay active in the workplace law community and to continue to mediate and arbitrate. He will undoubtedly run into more of his former students. Chicago-Kent Assistant Professor Emily Aleisa, who is an ILW alum and who will become assistant director in fall 2021, says Malin cares deeply about his students. He has always modeled a sense of community and inclusion, she says, facilitating thoughtful discussion and meaningful connection on potentially divisive topics.

“As a result of Malin’s influence in the classroom and beyond, the Chicago workplace law community definitely is more collegial than competitive,” she says. “He not only inspired generations of practitioners to continue shaping this crucial legal landscape, he also made them feel up to the task.”— Jamie

Loo

Ready Or Not, It's Time To Talk

For decades organizations have been trying to create and maintain diverse and inclusive workplaces, while also trying to avoid disrupting the existing culture and creating discomfort for those in power. As we grapple with our current reality, it is clear that we cannot reach next-level inclusion without having the “Talk.” The “Talk” in the Black community is when you teach your Black children, especially Black sons, how to survive when confronted by the police. It is when you discuss the history of Blacks in the United States, the systems that were intentionally designed to exclude them, and the stereotypes and prejudices that continue to impact Black lives today.

Failure to engage in a version of the “Talk” at work is preventing genuine and lasting workplace inclusion. Conversations about the “why,” the “how,” and the “now” regarding racial inequities cannot be avoided if companies want to survive and thrive.

Diversity has gone through several phases. At its inception, it was embraced primarily for legal compliance. Companies found themselves searching for a few token Blacks in order to avoid lawsuits. Shortly thereafter, as the clientele of many businesses became more diverse, companies grew concerned about their ability to meet the needs and interests of diverse customers. Subsequently, smart business leaders realized that diverse employees could add value in ways beyond providing diverse customer service. As research began to confirm the business benefits of a diverse workforce, organizations began seeking out diverse employees, primarily to hire the best talent and gain a competitive edge.

Although organizations were hiring more diverse talent, they were struggling to retain them. Thus, “inclusion” became the buzz word. Efforts began to create a culture where all employees would feel as though they belong, be motivated and empowered to bring their authentic selves to work, and be positioned to reach their full potential. Diversity professionals began heralding the quote by Vernã Myers, “Diversity is being invited to the party. Inclusion is being asked to dance.”

Sticking with the dance analogy, what happens when your style of dance is different than that of other guests? What happens when the music being played doesn’t align with your taste in music? What happens when everyone, except you, is bonding over similar dance moves and singing lyrics in unison? What about when you can’t afford fancy party clothes? In summary, what happens when people are invited to the dance and asked to dance, but when they start dancing in their own authentic way, there is laughter, whispering, disregard, or efforts to teach them how to dance like the others? I’ll tell you what happens: they leave the party. They go to another party where they feel they belong. A study by BetterUp found that employees who feel a sense of belonging demonstrate a 50 percent reduction in turnover risk, a 56 percent increase in performance, and a 75 percent decrease in sick days

than their counterparts who feel excluded.

So how do we retain and reap the benefits of having diverse employees? Start with the “Talk”—that often uncomfortable conversation that forces everyone to engage in honest reflection about their lived experiences, how such experiences differ from those of others, and why such differences matter.

During the “Talk,” be open to learning about how your traditional, well-established, well-intentioned “dance parties” can lead to exclusion, isolation, oppression, and missed opportunities for those with different styles, perspectives, experiences, and resources. It is impossible to create an inclusive culture if you don’t know what causes individuals to feel like they don’t belong. It is difficult to create inclusive programs, policies, and practices without understanding the specific needs, interests, and challenges of those whom you seek to include. Inclusion must move beyond inspiring statements to understanding, respecting, and utilizing differences.

The “Talk” helps to uncover societal barriers that have contributed to employees’ perceived limitations, as well as their strengths. It helps to reveal new ways of leveraging strengths and addressing limitations. Perceived limitations may be merely differences; however, it is difficult to distinguish between the two without eliminating language like the “right way,” “the best way,” or the “only way.”

When you engage in the “Talk,” display genuine curiosity, practice active listening (listen to understand and not to defend), exercise empathy (try on perspectives of others), and commit to using information learned for future planning. Then re-examine well-established, well-intentioned, long-standing processes, and be prepared to change the party planning/employee retention system.

Chicago-Kent College of Law is not afraid of the “Talk.” We are having brave conversations through our community dialogues, Equity Talks series, and antiracism initiatives. These are difficult but necessary discussions. I hope you will join us in having the “Talk” in your workplaces and organizations.

—Marsha Ross-Jackson, assistant dean for student professional development and head of the Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

Class Notes

1972

Burton S. Odelson, Frankfort, Ill., was featured in a CBS Sunday Morning story on nationwide medical examinations in police-related deaths in June. Odelson is the founding partner of Odelson, Sterk, Murphey, Frazier, & McGrath, Ltd.

1975

Francis Patrick Murphy, Riverside, Ill., partner at Corboy & Demetrio, was selected as a 2020 Lawdragon 500 Leading Lawyers in America and a 2020 Lawdragon 500 Leading Plaintiff Consumer Lawyers for a second consecutive year.

1979

Gail P. Bley, Northfield, Ill., was named to the Chicago 2020 Notable Women in Law list by Crain’s Chicago Business. Bley is a partner at Gould & Ratner and has extensive experience in representing real estate and investment partnerships, limited liability companies, and other entities from their inception through the sale, exchange, or other disposition of their holdings.

1983

Carol V. Gilden, Lake Forest, Ill., was named to the Chicago 2020 Notable Women in Law list by Crain’s Chicago Business. Gilden is a partner at Cohen Milstein’s Securities Litigation & Investor Protection practice group.

She represents public pension funds, Taft-Hartley pension and health and welfare funds, and other institutional investors in securities class actions, transaction and derivative litigation, and individual actions, as well as in foreign securities litigation.

Cynde Munzer, Highland Park, Ill., was named to the Chicago 2020 Notable Women in Law list by Crain’s Chicago Business. Munzer is a member of Dykema Gossett’s Chicago office and represents clients in business and transactional matters.

1984

Anne L. Alonzo, Washington, D.C., joined Corteva Agriscience as senior vice president, external affairs, and chief sustainability officer. A widely recognized global food and agriculture leader, Alonzo is responsible for setting strategy and leading external affairs, which includes corporate communications, global corporate responsibility, government and industry affairs, and product advocacy. In August she was featured in Successful Farming magazine.

1986

James L. Adelman, Bel Air, Md., was hired by the Maryland Office of the Attorney General and is now assigned to the Maryland Health Benefit Exchange, a public corporation and independent unit of the state government established in April 2011 in accordance with the Patient Protection

and Affordable Care Act of 2010. It is responsible for the administration of the Maryland Health Connection and the state’s health insurance marketplace, and works with the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, Maryland Insurance Administration, the Department of Human Resources, and stakeholders statewide.

1989

Amy R. Blumenfeld Bogost, Madison, Wis., was appointed by Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers to the University of Wisconsin-Madison Board of Regents. Bogost is the owner of Bogost Law LLC and most recently focused her practice in the area of Federal Title IX representation of victims of sensitive crimes. She also started a pro bono training for attorneys to help aid survivors of sexual assault on campuses during their grievance process.

Laurence M. Landsman, Glenview, Ill., joined Latimer, LeVay Fyock LLC as a partner. Landsman’s practice covers securities litigation, and he has successfully represented brokers and financial advisers in disciplinary actions involving the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Certified Financial Planner Board of Standards, Inc., and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority.

1992

Frances P. Kao, Chicago , was re-elected to the Cornell College Board of Trustees, where she has served since 2010. Kao is the managing member of PH2 Square LLC, a design firm committed to designing, developing, and building dwellings based on universal design principles to create thoughtful home environments for families with young children, individuals with

disabilities, seniors, and multi-generational families living under one roof.

1993

Rachel B. Cowen, Chicago, was named to the Chicago 2020 Notable Women in Law list by Crain’s Chicago Business. Cowen is a partner at McDermott Will & Emery and focuses her practice in various employment discrimination and wrongful termination cases in federal and state courts. Her experience includes prosecuting and defending employee mobility and trade secret litigation on an emergency injunctive basis. She also counsels employers facing union organizing activity and picketing, and has successfully tried numerous cases before the National Labor Relations Board.

Lesley A. Wallerstein, Highland Park, Ill., is celebrating nearly a decade of running her own patent and trademark law boutique, the Law Office of Lesley A. Wallerstein, LLC. She has offices in Chicago at the Merchandise Mart and in Lake County, Illinois. Wallerstein was recognized as a 2019 Illinois Super Lawyer.

1994

Susan Meyer, Chicago, was named to the Chicago 2020 Notable Women in Law list by Crain’s Chicago Business. Meyer was also selected by Best Lawyers for 2021 for her work in franchise law. She is the leader of the Trademark, Copyright, Media, and Advertising group at Greensfelder, Hemker & Gale, PC.

Kathleen McDonough Mundo, Chicago, published the book Badger State: A Wisconsin Memoir. Mundo is of counsel at Wilson Elser Moskowitz Edelman & Dicker.

Larry R. Rogers Jr., Chicago, was installed as president of the Illinois Trial Lawyers Association. Rogers is a partner at Power Rogers, LLP

with more than 25 years of experience advocating for victims and helping people.

1996

Daniel R. Dosenbach, West Grove, Pa., was promoted to senior vice president of labor relations for Albertons Companies, an American grocery company that is the second-largest supermarket chain in North America.

Shannon N. Hassler, Sandy Springs, Ga., was named a principal consultant for Yardstick Management, recognized globally as a leading Black-owned consulting firm and for acting as a strategic partner for Fortune 500 corporations, charter schools, and not-for-profit organizations. Hassler has more than 20 years of executive talent acquisition and management advisory experience.

Scott S. McDowell, Los Angeles, was included in Billboard’s 2020

Top Music Lawyers. McDowell is the executive vice president of legal and business affairs for Warner Chappell Music.

Sherry Knutson Vaughan, Chicago, was named in bond 4 Chambers and Partners U.S.A. rankings in product liability and mass torts. Vaughan is a trial lawyer and partner at Tucker Ellis LLP who has more than 20 years of experience in product liability and toxic tort cases, with an emphasis on defending pharmaceutical and medical device companies.

1997

Georgia Loukas Demeros, Park Ridge, Ill., was named to the Chicago 2020 Notable Women in Law list by Crain’s Chicago Business. Demeros is a partner at Thompson Coburn LLP and draws on her background as a certified public accountant to give businesses and individuals a holistic assessment of

their assets, tax liabilities, estate planning, and general corporate legal needs.

Andrew P. Fox, Chicago, was named the City of Chicago’s first-ever director of labor standards in February. Fox is implementing Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s groundbreaking worker-protection platform by managing the enforcement of Chicago’s landmark labor laws, including minimum wage, paid sick leave, and fair work week.

Brian A. Friedman, Deerfield, Ill., joined William Blair’s Equity Capital Markets Investment Banking team as managing director. Friedman will lead the origination and execution of late-stage private placement and crossover financings across all growth industries.

Jennifer L. Ashley, Libertyville, Ill., was named to the Chicago 2020 Notable Women in Law list by Crain’s Chicago Business. Ashley is a partner at Salvi Schostok & Pritchard and focuses on the

areas of personal injury and wrongful death law, including cases that involve car accidents, premises liability, and products liability.

Kathryn B. Ashton, Oak Park, Ill., was named to the Chicago 2020 Notable Women in Law list by Crain’s Chicago Business. Ashton is a partner at Dentons and leader of the Global Health Care group and co-chair of the Cannabis group. She concentrates her practice in health care transactional matters with an emphasis on finance.

Jamie H. McDole, Southlake, Texas, joined Thompson & Knight as a partner. McDole has more than 20 years of experience as a trial lawyer in high-profile intellectual property cases and has successfully represented a wide array of Fortune 500 clients in jurisdictions throughout the country. Before joining the firm, he spent 13 years at Kirkland & Ellis and eight years at Haynes and Boone.

2000

Amy C. Antoniolli, Chicago, contributed to the book Distributed Generation Law: A Guide to Regulations, Policies, and Programs. The book is the first to take an in-depth look at the history and regulatory journey of this developing technology. Antoniolli is of counsel in the Environmental Practice group at Schiff Hardin LLP and advises clients on compliance with the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, RCRA, CERCLA, and the Illinois Environmental Protection Act.

2001

Thomas T. Field, Chicago, was named a Top 500 Family Law Attorney in America by Lawdragon. Field is a partner at Beermann LLP and is the head of the Family Law Practice group.

Heidi Hennig Rowe, Naperville, Ill., was named

Spencer Schwartz [center] with his sister, Abby Schwartz Eisenberg, and father, Marc H. Schwartz, managing partner at Harrison & Held LLP. Spencer graduated from Chicago-Kent College of Law on May 17, 2020, and Marc and Abby graduated from Chicago-Kent in 1979 and 2007, respectively.

to the Chicago 2020 Notable Women in Law list by Crain’s Chicago Business. Rowe is a partner in Schiff Hardin’s Construction Law Group and has significant experience in contract drafting and negotiation, handling more than a billion dollars in contracts on an annual basis for projects throughout the country.

2002

Gina M. Arquilla DeBoni, Glenview, Ill., was named to the Chicago 2020 Notable Women in Law list by Crain’s Chicago Business. DeBoni also received the Illinois State Bar Association’s Elmer Gertz Award, which recognizes long-standing, continuing, and exceptional commitment by an individual or an organization to the protection or advancement of human rights. DeBoni is a managing partner at Romanucci & Blandin, LLC and is responsible for the overall management and quality assurance of legal and compliance services within client engagements.

Jeffrey B. Greenspan, Highland Park, Ill., was named to the board of directors of the Center for Enriched Living, a nonprofit organization serving teens and adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities. Greenspan is a member of Cozen O’Connor’s Litigation Department in Chicago and concentrates his practice in the areas of professional liability, general commercial litigation, and fee dispute litigation matters.

Thomas C. Wendt, Marathon, Wis., was appointed to a full-time professorship at Northcentral Technical College in Wausau, Wisconsin. Wendt is designing NTC’s new paralegal studies program and began teaching in fall 2020. Wendt previously worked as the legal director at the Center for Disability and Elder Law from 2007–2020.

2003

Thomas Posey, La Grange, Ill., joined Seyfarth Shaw as a partner in the Labor &

Employment Department and Labor Management Relations practice group. Posey was previously with Reed Smith LLP, where he was a partner in its Labor, Employment & Benefits practice. In his practice, Posey regularly handles labor relations and employment issues for businesses ranging from startups to Fortune 500. He often serves as chief labor negotiator for companies from a variety of industries, including hospitality, health care, manufacturing, and automotive.

Melissa K. Ventrone, Chicago, was named to the Chicago 2020 Notable Women in Law list by Crain’s Chicago Business Ventrone is a member of Clark Hill PLC, where she addresses her clients’ cybersecurity needs. As a leader of the Cybersecurity, Data Protection & Privacy team, she focuses her experienced group of first responders, including lawyers and forensic investigators, on around-the-clock management of a situation and minimizes damage by working to limit any public or regulatory fallout.

2004

William T. Gibbs, Chicago, was named to the 2020 Lawdragon 500 Leading Plaintiff Consumer Lawyers list. Gibbs is a partner at Corboy & Demetrio and concentrates his practice on cases arising from railroad negligence, automobile collisions, participation in sports, unsafe pharmaceuticals or medical devices, construction negligence, medical negligence, premises liability, product liability, and aviation litigation.

Jeremy R. Holbrook, Mount Prospect, Ill., was named general counsel at 1WorldSync Inc., a business management consultant company.

Holbrook previously served as deputy general counsel at Sears Holdings. In his 12 years with Sears, he guided litigation and led the legal teams responsible for store operations, ecommerce and mobile platforms, procurement contracts, marketing, privacy, and data security.

Jessica Kimbrough, Chicago, was named chief diversity equity and inclusion officer for United Airlines.

Molshree A. Sharma, Oak Park, Ill., was named to the Chicago 2020 Notable Women in Law list by Crain’s Chicago Business. Sharma is a partner and owner at Feinberg Sharma P.C., and her practice focuses on family law, adoption law, complex financial settlements, litigation, and custody, including international custody and the Hague Convention.

2005

Antonio Caldarone, Oak Park, Ill., was named to the Chicago Daily Law Bulletin’s 40 Under Forty. Caldarone regularly litigates substantial-exposure employment litigation matters as the lead attorney, with a particular focus on defending employers against singleplaintiff and class action wage and hour lawsuits under federal and state wage laws.

Linda S. Fine, Lake Zurich, Ill., was named to the Chicago 2020 Notable Women in Law list by Crain’s Chicago Business Fine also recently co-founded Buckley Fine, LLC , where she is the department chair of the Estate Planning group. She concentrates her practice in estate planning for high-networth clients, estate and trust administration, estate and gift taxation, guardianships, contested estates, and complex probate matters.

Tonya Gentry Newman, Chicago, was named to the Chicago 2020 Notable Women in Law list by Crain’s Chicago Business. Newman is a partner and co-chair of the Women’s Network Leadership Team at Neal Gerber & Eisenberg, LLP. Her practice includes defense of state and federal products liability matters and representation of policyholders in insurance coverage matters, as well as the defense and prosecution of complex commercial litigation.

Lilianna M. Kalin, Chicago, was promoted to general counsel

for the College of DuPage. Kalin was previously assistant general counsel for three years.

2007

Benjamin I. Edlavitch, Minneapolis, founded Edlavitch Law PLLC in March. Edlavitch Law is an intellectual property law firm located in Minneapolis that specializes in intellectual property strategy and electrical engineering patents. Edlavitch is a USPTO-registered patent attorney and electrical engineer concentrating in patent law counseling, as well as domestic and international patent prosecution.

Heather R. Kissling, Chicago, was named to the Chicago 2020 Notable Women in Law list by Crain’s Chicago Business. In June, Kissling was selected as one of Managing Intellectual Property’s Top 250 Women in IP. She is a partner and chair of biotech and life sciences for Marshall, Gerstein & Borun, LLP.

Julia R. Lissner, Chicago, was named to the Chicago 2020 Notable Women in Law list by Crain’s Chicago Business Lissner is a partner at Akerman LLP and represents public and private companies and individuals in a wide range of business disputes in state and federal courts nationwide.

Kristen E. Prinz, River Forest, Ill., was named presidentelect of the International Women’s Forum Chicago Board of Directors. Prinz will assume official duties as president of the International Women’s Forum in June 2021 and will serve for a one-year term. She is principal at the Prinz Law Firm, PC.

2008

Margaret Battersby Black, Elmhurst, Ill., was named to the Chicago 2020 Notable Women in Law list by Crain’s Chicago Business. Black is a partner at Levin & Perconti handling nursing home and medical malpractice cases.

Justin T. Nemunaitis, Dallas, was included as a Texas Super

Lawyers Rising Stars for 2020. A principal of Caldwell Cassady & Curry, Nemunaitis represents companies and individuals in high-stakes civil litigation, including patent infringement cases, trade secrets claims, fiduciary duty cases, class actions, and disputes involving company founders.

Edgar G. Rapoport, Minnetonka, Minn., was elevated to member at Cozen O’Connor. Rapoport focuses his practice on mergers and acquisitions, private equity transactions, corporate finance, and general business-related matters.

Emer L. Simic, Chicago, was named to the Chicago Daily Law Bulletin’s 40 Under Forty and to the Chicago 2020 Notable Women in Law list by Crain’s Chicago Business. As a partner at Green, Griffith & Borg-Breen, Simic focuses her practice on pharmaceutical patent litigation, post-grant review, opinions, and client counseling.

2009

Michelle Bugajsky, Elmhurst, Ill., joined SBK Law Group and focuses her practice on probate, estate planning, and family law.

2010

David R. Doyle, La Grange, Ill., joined Cozen O’Connor in September. He was included in the Best Lawyers, “Ones to Watch” list in Illinois for Bankruptcy and Creditor Debtor Rights, Insolvency and Reorganization Law for 2021. This year he was listed as a “Rising Star” in Illinois Super Lawyers for Bankruptcy.

Benjamin J. Wilensky, Beverly Hills, Mich., was elevated to shareholder at Sommers Schwartz, PC. Wilensky focuses his practice on representing railroad workers seeking compensation for injuries sustained on the job under the Federal Employers’ Liability Act.

2011

Alexis M. Crawford Douglas, Chicago, was named to the 2020 Chicago Notable Women in Law list by Crain’s Chicago Business. A partner at K&L Gates LLP, Douglas concentrates her practice in the area of intellectual property and handles a range of transactional and litigation matters related to trademarks, domain names, social media, and copyrights.

Katie C. Jahnke Dale, Chicago, was elevated to partner at DLA Piper. Dale concentrates her practice in the areas of land use and zoning, publicprivate financing, public incentives, and community and economic development, as well as general real estate.

Aura L. Lichtenberg, Chicago, was named to the Chicago Daily Law Bulletin’s 40 Under Forty. Lichtenberg devotes her practice to all aspects of family law, specializing in the litigation, negotiation, and alternative dispute resolution of divorce and post-divorce matters, parentage and support matters, pre- and post-nuptial agreements, and incidents involving domestic violence.

Erick J. Michel, Wilmette, Ill., was elected as a shareholder with McAndrews, Held & Malloy. Michel’s practice includes obtaining patent protection for clients by assessing the patentability of inventions and then drafting and prosecuting patent applications before the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

2012

Jessica T. Cooper, Bannockburn, Ill., was recognized among the “Ones to Watch” in the 2021 Best Lawyers award listings. Cooper is an associate at Firsel Ross, focusing her practice in all aspects of commercial real estate, including the acquisition, financing, leasing, disposition, and zoning of commercial, industrial, and multi-unit residential properties.

Christopher Griffin, Chicago, joined Swanson, Martin & Bell LLP as an associate. Griffin

focuses his practice primarily on the representation and defense of physicians, nurses, hospitals, and other health care providers in medical malpractice lawsuits. He also represents clients in toxic tort, product liability, and general tort litigation.

Bruno R. Marasso, Chicago, was named second vice president for the Justinian Society of Lawyers. Marasso is a senior associate at Romanucci & Blandin, where he focuses his practice in the area of construction negligence, automobile collisions, wrongful death, premises liability, police misconduct, sexual abuse, and institutional misconduct.

Bradley E. Puklin, Palatine, Ill., joined Swanson, Martin & Bell LLP’s Chicago office as an associate. Puklin practices in general civil litigation with an emphasis on the defense of attorneys, health care professionals, product manufacturers, and insurers.

Carlos Vera, Chicago, was named to the Chicago Daily Law Bulletin’s 40 Under Forty. Vera concentrates his practice in general and complex commercial litigation, particularly in the areas of business torts, professional liability, white collar defense, and contractual disputes.

2013

Sylvia Bokyung St. Clair, Los Angeles, is now licensed in California and works out of the Faegre Drinker Biddle & Reath LLP office in Los Angeles. St. Clair is an associate and counsels and defends employers in a broad range of labor and employment matters arising under both state and federal laws. In addition to her experience in employment matters, she represents clients faced with investigations and commercial litigation.

2014

Rob L. Kohen, Chicago, was included in the 2020 Best Lawyers “Ones to Watch” list. Kohen is an attorney at Salvi, Schostok

& Pritchard PC and focuses on personal injury, wrongful death, car accidents, truck accidents, bicycle accidents, construction negligence, and medical malpractice.

2015

Adam Orr, Washington, D.C., was awarded the American Bar Association’s 2020 Top 40 Young Lawyers Award. Orr is assistant counsel in the U.S. Department of the Navy’s Office of Naval Research, and his main practice areas include federal contracts and financial assistance, as well as civilian personnel law.

2016

Kenneth Matuszewski, LaGrange, Ill., joined Neal, Gerber & Eisenberg LLP as an associate counsel in the Intellectual Property & Technology Transactions practice group. A registered patent attorney, Matuszewski advises clients on patent prosecution for both utility and design patents. He also has extensive experience litigating software, electrical, and mechanical patents arts in district court and the Patent Trial and Appeal Board.

Benjamin S. Van Airsdale, Chicago, joined Carter & Tani as an associate.

2017

Bryce Hensley, Chicago, was named to the Crain’s Chicago Business 20 in Their Twenties list. Hensley is an associate at Romanucci & Blandin and works in the Complex Litigation group representing individual and classes of victims of toxic exposures, product defects, civil rights violations, fraud, sexual harassment, wrongful death, injuries from vaping and JUUL use, and other catastrophic personal injuries.

Kwanwoo Lee, Chicago, was elected to the Asian American Bar Association of Greater Chicago Board of Directors for a second term. Lee is an associate at Marshall, Gerstein & Borun LLP and registered

patent attorney who secures and protects intellectual property rights for Fortune 500 companies, universities, and other high-tech clients in the electrical and computer technology fields.

2018

Tiffany T. Tran, Chicago, joined Barnes & Thornburg LLP as an associate in June. Tran focuses her practice in the areas of mergers and acquisitions, private equity, corporate finance, and general corporate governance. She represents public and private companies, startups, and nonprofits across diverse industries, including automotive, food and beverage, and health care, in an array of corporate matters.

2019

Taylor Brewer, Chicago, joined Morici, Longo & Associates as an associate. Brewer recently won a $93,000 verdict against the City of Chicago for a sidewalk defect case.

Josh R. Denison, Naperville, Ill., joined Barnes & Thornburg, LLP. Denison assists clients with virtually every aspect of their intellectual property portfolios.

Wisu Sul, Chicago, joined Dinsmore & Shohl, LLP as an associate attorney in the Intellectual Property practice. Before moving to Chicago and earning his J.D. from Chicago-Kent, Sul worked as a patent attorney in Korea for multiple firms.

In Memoriam

and state antitrust law, the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, foreign direct investments, antiboycott laws, export control regulations, the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, and other unfair trade practice laws. Prior to entering private practice, he was an assistant district attorney in the New York County District Attorney’s Office.

William M. “Bill” Hannay III, Adjunct Faculty Member

William M. “Bill” Hannay III, ChicagoKent College of Law’s longest-serving adjunct faculty member, passed away on August 11, 2020. He was 76. Hannay taught Antitrust Law and International Business Transactions courses at the law school for 36 years.

“Bill was our longest-serving adjunct faculty member, but he was also one of our best,” says Stephen Sowle, assistant dean for academic administration and student affairs at Chicago-Kent. “He had a particular talent for inspiring in students the same enthusiasm he felt for the subjects he taught. Bill also served as an informal adviser and mentor to many of our students and graduates.”

Hannay was a partner at Schiff Hardin LLP who represented corporations and individuals in civil and criminal matters involving federal

Born and raised in Kansas City, Missouri, Hannay attended Yale University and upon graduation in 1966 served with commendation in the United States Army during the Vietnam War. He graduated from the Georgetown University Law Center in 1973 and went on to clerk for Judge Myron Bright of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit and retired Supreme Court Justice Tom C. Clark.

He was a former chair of the American Bar Association’s Section of International Law and served on the board of directors of the ABA’s Rule of Law Initiative. He was also a member of the American Law Institute. Hannay was active in many organizations throughout his lifetime, including the Chicago Literary Club, Yale Club of Chicago Foundation, Georgetown University Alumni Association, Great Lakes Dredge and Philharmonic Society, Master Singers, and Barrington Village Singers, among others.

Melissa B. Anderson ’11

Orville H. Copsey ’59

Joel T. Daly ’88

James R. Dowdall ’53

Susan K. Gordy ’81

Robin S. Greenfield ’79

Michael J. Griffin ’74

Kathleen C. Halpin ’95

Marvin P. Luckman ’61

Judith W. Munson ’76

Lawrence A. Poltrock ’66

Ronald H. Porzak ’66

Robert J. Rillie ’76

Sue Roberts-Kurpis ’92

Robert W. Soelter ’74

Peter F. Theis ’74

Robert S. Vihon ’77

Friedrich J. Weinkopf ’67

This Year, Give the Gift That Gives Back

“My degree from Chicago-Kent allowed me to secure a future for my family financially. I wanted to pay that forward. When I had investable income, I wanted to make a good investment, and I looked at a charitable gift annuity as good investment, but I also looked at it as a way to pay back the school.”

—Joel Weisman (LAW ’66), Former Host, WTTW’s “Chicago Tonight: The Week in Review”