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UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI SCHOOL OF LAW
TRANSFORMING
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MAKE Your CAREER PIVOT INCREASE Your PROSPECTS Post Graduate Law Studies can work with your schedule— Part-time, Full-time and Online Study Options available ¡¡ Entertainment, Arts and Sports Law ¡¡ Estate Planning ¡¡ International Arbitration ¡¡ International Law ¡¡ Maritime Law ¡¡ Real Estate/Property Development ¡¡ Tax Law ¡¡ Taxation of Cross-Border Investment
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MIAMI LAW MAGAZINE VOL. 6
PATRICIA D. WHITE Dean and Professor of Law STEPHANIE COX Assistant Dean for External Affairs LAUREN BEILEY Director of Online Communications and Marketing ELIZABETH ESTEFAN Senior Graphic Designer and Project Manager PATRICIA MOYA Senior Graphic Designer and Magazine Designer CATHARINE SKIPP Director of Media Relations and Public Affairs
Photographers JENNY ABREU GREG DOHLER JOSHUA PREZANT ANDY SHELTER Miami Law Magazine is published by the University of Miami School of Law Copyright © 2018 University of Miami School of Law Address correspondence to Miami Law Magazine University of Miami School of Law 1311 Miller Drive Coral Gables, Florida 33146 externalaffairs@law.miami.edu www.law.miami.edu
MICHELLE VALENCIA Director of Publications
Miami Law Magazine is mailed free of charge to Miami Law alumni and friends of the University. Opinions expressed in these pages are those of the individuals and do not necessarily reflect official positions of the University. The University of Miami is an equal opportunity/affirmative action institution. Please accept our sincerest apologies for any errors or omissions.
02 NEWSBRIEFS See what’s happening in and around Miami Law.
09 STUDENTS We shine a spotlight on some of Miami Law’s remarkable students.
20 FACULTY Read about Miami Law’s faculty and their scholarship.
44 FEATURE Miami Law alumni, faculty, and students are helping to transform lives and communities.
51 ALUMNI We highlight some of our outstanding alumni and their impact on the community and beyond.
60 PHILANTHROPY We recognize the generosity of our alumni and friends.
68 ON THE BASS BRICKS Miami Law hosts a myriad of events throughout the academic year.
71 LAST WORD Bill VanderWyden makes a difference in the lives of Miami Law students.
NEWSBRIEFS JAMES VALENCIA, 3L
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Microsoft/Hispanic National Bar Association Choose 7th Miami Law Student as IP Law Institute Scholar
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hird-year law student James Valencia was chosen this summer to participate at the Microsoft/Hispanic National Bar Association Intellectual Property Law Institute in Washington, D.C. The IPLI was the brainchild of Horacio Gutierrez, J.D. ’98, former general counsel at Microsoft and now general counsel at Spotify, who was concerned that so few Hispanic law students were pursuing careers in IP law. Now in its fifth year with Hispanic law students from around the country competing for the highly selective 25 slots, Valencia is its seventh Miami Law attendee. Past students from Miami Law who participated are Luiz Miranda, J.D. ’17,
Trish Ojea, J.D. ’13, Lauren Gonzalez, J.D. ’15, Dalisi Otero, J.D. ’16, Jose Vasquez, and Antonio Hernandez, J.D. ’15
“After the IPLI program, I am much more equipped to more selectively target where I apply, whereas before I was more likely to apply for any open IP position,” says Valencia. “Now I know to look for representation, to see whether their emphasis is on litigation or prosecution—if they even have prosecution opportunities. I feel much more prepared and know better what to expect now.”
Investor Rights Clinic Advocates for Seniors on Capitol Hill
1,200 Clients & 400 Law Students: Children & Youth Law Clinic Turns Twenty
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rom humble beginnings—seven students in a cramped off-campus office—the Children & Youth Law Clinic has fought for scores of foster children and teens aging out of the foster-care system. In twenty years, over 1,200 of Miami’s most vulnerable young people have been helped and given a voice; more than 400 law students have provided zealous and ethical advocacy and many have gone on to careers in social justice.
Over the years, the clinic has tackled big impact cases and policy projects. It brought a class action lawsuit to reform the broken child welfare system, filed amicus briefs to halt the indiscriminate practice of shackling children in courtrooms, and fought for appropriate care of LGBTQ youth, as just a few examples. They earned the adage “CYLC interns don’t just learn the law; they make the law” through their appearances in trial courts, all the way to the Florida and United States Supreme Court, as well as legislative and administrative arenas. “In the clinic, we learned to use our legal knowledge to innovate, we learned how to advocate, and we learned how to care,” says Yates.
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nvestor Rights Clinic Fellow and 2L O. Jean Strickland had the unique opportunity to represent investors—not in arbitration or court—but before Congressional staffers this past spring. Strickland joined IRC’s Director, Teresa Verges, on Capitol Hill as part of the annual Hill Day sponsored by the Public Investors Arbitration Bar Association. PIABA members are counsels who represent investors harmed by broker misconduct. Strickland helped prepare materials and talking points for Hill Day presentations in support of the Senior$afe Act of 2017, which offers financial firms a safe harbor for reporting suspected financial abuse of the elderly. “PIABA’s Hill Day allowed me to advance the interests of investors through active participation in our country’s legislative process,” said Strickland. “I was gratified to share insights with policymakers based upon our clinic’s directservices work with clients…Not the least of which is because our policy makers seemed genuinely interested in the clinic’s perspective. I highly recommend participation in Hill Day to any law student with the opportunity to do so, and I greatly appreciated the opportunity to participate this year.”
“Cases come to life when you are in the clinic. They become more than words or theories,” says Jessica Yates, J.D. ’11, who is now an attorney with the Miami Guardian ad Litem Program. “Our clients were real young people, often the most forgotten in society, who need things that others take for granted.”
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NEWSBRIEFS Professor Susan Haack Awarded Ulysses Medal
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n ardent defender of the ability of science to advance the pursuit of human knowledge and inquiry, Law Professor Susan Haack was awarded the Ulysses medal by the University College Dublin. Haack received the Ulysses medal in recognition of her outstanding contribution to the arts, in particular, philosophy and law. She is a distinguished professor in the Humanities, Cooper Senior Scholar in Arts and Sciences, professor of philosophy, and professor of law at the University of Miami. Born in England, she received her Bachelor of Philosophy degree at the University of Oxford, and Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge. Her scholarship focuses on the philosophy of logic and language, epistemology—theory of knowledge—philosophy of science, philosophy of law, feminism, and philosophy of literature.
Photo courtesy of the University College Dublin
Billboard Names University of Miami
Leading Music Law School
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illboard Magazine recognized the University of Miami School of Law as one of the nation’s leading schools for music law programs. Two alumni, Horacio Gutierrez, J.D. ’98, of Spotify and Leslie José Zigel. J.D. ’95, of Greenspoon Marder, made the list of top music industry lawyers. Recognizing the presence and influence of a rapidly evolving international music industry, Miami Law offers both an LL.M. and a J.D./LL.M. Degree in Entertainment, Arts and Sports Law. In partnership with the Frost School of Music at UM, the Law School also offers a J.D./M.M. Degree (a master's degree in Music Business and Entertainment Industries) and a J.D./M.A. degree (a master's degree in Arts Presenting and Live Entertainment Management).
Leading these programs for Miami Law is Harold Flegelman, who came to Miami Law from Los Angeles where he was chair of the Corporate, Media and Entertainment Practice Group at Loeb & Loeb LLP, representing music management firms, music publishers, and music production companies. Besides Gutierrez and Zigel, other recent graduates working in the entertainment industry are Brian Oliver, J.D. ’15, Legal and Business Affairs, Rolling Loud Music Festival, and winner of THE GRAMMY Foundation’s 2015 Entertainment Law Initiative; Lauren Spahn, J.D. ’13, an associate at Shackelford, Bowen, McKinley & Norton, LLP, in Nashville; and Michael Gaid, J.D. ’16, associate counsel for the Ultra Music Festival.
Best in Americas at The Hague International Criminal Court Moot was a great accomplishment. I was humbled by being named one of the best oralists, but all the credit goes to the team. I certainly would not have been half as good without their continuing support and drive to make us all better.” The team started practicing in September 2016 on a case about genocide and crimes against humanity committed by members of a military regime. The team qualified for the international round at The Hague when they placed third at the ICC regional round in March of this year. PAULA ARIAS, LETICIA MORA, ANDREA MATEUS & JAVIER ROLDAN CORA
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iami Law’s International Moot Court team of Javier Roldan Cora, 2L, Alejandra Chinea, 2L and Leticia Mora, J.D. ’17, placed sixth out of 65 teams from around the world at the International Criminal Court Moot Court Competition at The Hague, Netherlands. They were the highest ranked team from the Americas, and Cora, who played the role of prosecutor, was named best oralist in the competition. “Our experience at The Hague was incredibly rewarding,” said Cora. “I am extremely proud of the amazing work our team did, and getting to the semifinals
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NEWSBRIEFS 3L Wins Prestigious Burton Award; Finalist for Brown Writing Award
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PROFESSOR BERNARD OXMAN
“These awards were a high honor,” said Shami. “I am happy to see that others appreciate my paper and find the information within it valuable to a greater conversation on the Affordable Care Act. I hope that these recognitions bring light to the paper and allow others to use it to beneficially influence American health policy.”
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Newly Renamed Maritime Law LL.M. Launched at Port of Miami
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oyal Caribbean Cruises and its Chairman and CEO, University of Miami Board of Trustee Chairman Richard Fain, hosted a celebration of the launch of the newly renamed Master of Law’s program in Maritime Law on the cruise ship Enchantment of the Seas. “The event encapsulates our desire to shape the new program to reflect the many facets of maritime law in the modern world,” said Professor Bernard Oxman, faculty chair of the Maritime LL.M. program and holder of the Richard A. Hausler Chair. The event included brief talks by Tony Faso, associate vice president of Guest and Legal Services at Royal Caribbean, about how current developments in maritime law are affecting the cruise business, and by Professor Daniel Suman of the Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science on the PortMiami Deep Dredge project. Oxman moderated the panel and spoke about the South China Sea. The Maritime Law LL.M. program aims to prepare attorneys to deal with these and other such issues surrounding the use and protection of the marine environment. The one-year program offers a rigorous and practical curriculum taught by renowned scholars and practitioners in the field.
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hird-year law student Jean Phillip “J.P.” Shami was named a 2017 Law360 Distinguished Legal Writing Award winner. Shami, who served as executive editor of the University of Miami Law Review, was one of ten law students from across the country to receive the prestigious award. The award is presented by The Burton Foundation, in association with the Library of Congress and Law360. Now in its 18th year, the Burton Awards reward great achievements in law, with a special emphasis on writing and reform. The winners are selected by law school professors and judges, including professors from Harvard Law School, Stanford Law School, and University of California Berkeley Law School. Shami’s paper, “A Promise Realized? A Critical Review of Accountable Care Organizations since the Enactment of the Affordable Care Act” was also one of five finalists for the 23rd annual Brown Award for Excellence in Legal Writing, sponsored by The Judge R. Brown Scholarship Foundation. He was the first-ever finalist from Miami Law in this distinguished competition, and the only person to win both the Burton Award and to be a finalist for the Brown Award.
Immigrant Youth Benefit as Miami Law Professors Prevail in Florida Supreme Court
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he Florida Supreme Court ruled recently that juvenile courts cannot reject the dependency petitions filed on behalf of immigrant children without an evidentiary hearing. Professors Bernard Perlmutter and Rebecca Sharpless wrote amicus briefs in the case, brought by a Guatemalan teenager who had entered the United States without a visa and who was seeking permanent residency by securing special immigrant juvenile status.
“I welcome the opinion,” Perlmutter, director of Miami Law’s Children & Youth Law Clinic, said in an interview with the Daily Business Review. “I think the law should apply equally whether this is an immigrant child or a U.S. citizen child, and we have a very strong statutory basis for these cases to go forward and not to be dismissed before facts can be presented.”
Sharpless, director of Miami Law’s Immigration Clinic, added, “This opinion sends a strong message to judges to apply the law as written and to not succumb to the antiimmigrant politics of the day.” TRA N SFO RM ATIV E N E WS B RIE FS
THE FLORIDA SUPREME COURT
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High Ranking for Miami Law: One of the Top Performing Schools for Moot Court Teams of Decade
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he University of Miami School of Law was ranked as the 14th best law school of the decade for moot court teams out of all 200 ABA-approved law schools in the Pre-Law Magazine Fall 2016 article “Best Schools for Moot Court” and National Jurist’s Winter
2017 issue. Members of the Law School’s Charles C. Papy, Jr. Moot Court Board have consistently won or placed high in competitions across the United States for years, and many members say moot court competitions are the highlight of their law school career.
How has Miami Law maintained its strong record of success over so many years?
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Current Papy Board president Matt Keilson attributes the legacy of wins to the symbiotic support and dedication of both students and alumni. “Our success stems from the dedication of our members and alumni. The competitors work very hard, and our alumni are eager to coach, judge, and assist,” he said.
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Moot Court Team Wins Best Oralist and Runner-Up Awards in 1st Amendment Competition
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ut of twenty-eight teams, Elise Haverman, J.D. ’17, and 3L Erik Tarrash were named best oralist and runner-up best oralist, respectively, in the 23rd Annual Burton D. Wechsler First Amendment Moot Court Competition in Washington, D.C. Moot court competitions are about both written and oral advocacy and awards for best briefs or best oralists are an impressive honor. “It was humbling winning best oralist,” says Haverman, who served as SBA President and as a member of the Charles
C. Papy, Jr. Moot Court Board last year. “I would not have won this award without my teammate Erik, pushing me to do better each practice round and being there with me every step of the way.”
It was an honor representing the University of Miami [School of Law] and bringing back some hardware for the Moot Court Team,” said Tarrash. “Working with my partner, Elise Haverman, made the experience enjoyable and memorable. Special thanks to our coaches Bill Dean and Michael T. Davis for all of their hard work. We couldn’t have done it without them.”
STUDENTS
Photo by Andy Shelter
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Brittany Thomas Crusades for JUSTICE for the Underserved in the Bronx
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By Catharine Skipp
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n high school, 3L Brittany Thomas thought she had it all figured out. She loved singing and dancing in school productions—she played Tina Turner in The Wedding Singer—and thought she had found her passion. Then her father was arrested, convicted, and sentenced to almost eight years of federal time.
“It seemed like he didn’t understand a lot of what was happening to him,” says Thomas. “There was a lack of concern for both his well-being and comprehension. He had a minimal education, and no one took that into account. I realized, through his ordeal, that there was so much more I could be doing.” When Thomas got to the University of Missouri-Kansas City, she
left the theater behind and went into the criminal justice and criminology track. She became president of the Criminal Justice Honor Society and joined the Mock Trial Team. As a junior, senior, and for most of a gap year, she volunteered at the Missourians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty. “At that point, Missouri was killing someone every month,” she says. “It seemed like everything we did
executive intern to the Miami-Dade Public Defender Carlos Martinez, J.D. ’90. There, she worked on a project examining why so many juvenile defendants were targeted by prosecutors to have their cases transferred to adult court. “They do it to force a plea,” Thomas says, still unsatisfied by the practice. “There is no reason a 14 year old should be targeted.” This past summer, Thomas split her time between social justice work in Miami and legal aid in New York. “The Community Justice Project in Miami grew out of Legal Services,” she says. “Their motto of success is to give low-income communities of color more power. It’s similar to work in the Environmental Justice Clinic, but much bigger. We would gather 100 community members and go to everything from commission meetings to immigration rallies. “It showed me how to advocate without the legal system; how to make a huge impact on a whole community— experience things in people’s lives that I could not in my legal life. You find someone a home, and that is a real impact. It is really the best thing,” she says. Later in the summer, she moved to New York to work with The Legal Aid Society in the Bronx, preparing motions
and working on misdemeanor cases. She fell in love with the city in a few short weeks.
“When I came to Miami, I loved it and thought ’I’m there forever,’” Thomas says. “Now I don’t know. I made friends in New York with random people— people I’ve met in the park or the bakery. I love running along the Hudson. And I had never been on a subway; I’ve never even been anywhere with public transportation! So I love it there, too.”
With graduation from Miami Law on the near horizon, Thomas is focusing her final semesters advocating for the low-income communities of Miami-Dade County as a fellow with the Environmental Justice Clinic. By next fall, she sees herself working with a public defender’s office to expand the impact through community advocacy, though the venue is yet to be determined.
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was going unnoticed. It was hard on everyone. But then the advocacy took a different turn. We started doing backup research for groups in other states attacking the drugs used for lethal injection and outing the sources. “None of the suppliers wanted to be known as the seller. It was like Whack-a-Mole. Every time the states would find a new supplier, someone in one of the groups would find them and call them out publicly,” she says. “The work there solidified my decision to go to law school.” Thomas applied to law schools that “were anywhere but Missouri” since she had never really been out of the state and Miami Law gave her the best scholarship. Once here, “the Environmental Justice Clinic just changed my life,” she says. “It taught me how I could advocate for my communities.” At Miami Law, Thomas and her advocacy skills have only grown. She was appointed the secretary of the Black Law Students Association, tapped Phi Alpha Delta, wrote for the Race and Social Justice Law Review, received an award from the HOPE Public Interest Center for Innovative Service in the Public Interest Field, was awarded the Kozyak Minority Fellowship, and worked as a HOPE Fellow over her first two summers. And she has made the Dean’s List several times. As a rising 2L, she served as the
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Veteran Lawyer Lands in New Sea with Maritime LL.M. By Catharine Skipp
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awn breaks quietly in the Atlantic Ocean on the edge of the warm and swift Gulf Stream current off the coast of Lighthouse Point, Florida. Wavelets slap at the sides of Doug Gaston’s Game On!, a 40foot Cabo Express, as bait joins hooks and rigs fly off the stern in hopes of fish flirtation. Boats figure in many of Gaston’s happiest memories: fishing with his grandfather in the Delaware Bay, landing a 160-pound tarpon off Marco Island, Florida, and coming into a school of king mackerel in the Florida Keys, having them hit as fast as he could get a line in the water. As Gaston’s career grew, first as a television producer then as general counsel for Comcast, both his time on the water and the fish stocks in his favorite spots were on the decline. Rarely seen were striped bass, and Delaware’s state fish—the weakfish—had virtually disappeared. Effective fisheries’ management helped the striped bass make a comeback, but years of failed conservation show that weakfish populations are still depleted, and Gaston wants to understand why. Gaston even completed his PADI open water diving certification, “so I can get a firsthand look at what is happening under the water.” Now, with two careers in his wake, Gaston is on the cusp of the career equivalent of a treble hook. Whether it will be as a lawyer or in the policy world advocating for conservation efforts with his newly minted LL.M. in Maritime Law, it will assuredly involve water and fish. The Maritime Law LL.M. has its core in admiralty, law of the sea, and coastal law. Electives span interests from marine insurance law and maritime personal injury law to oil and gas contracts and negotiations to marine ecology, environmental law, and climate change. Courses such as ocean policy and coastal zone management are taught at UM’s Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science, one of the leading academic oceanographic and atmospheric research institutions in the world. “Pursuing an LL.M. at Miami Law was a very fulfilling experience. The ability to take classes at the Law School and at RSMAS provided me with a balance of law, policy, and science,” Gaston says. “That combination gave me a broad perspective on the issues I’m concerned with—such as sustainable fishing, marine protected areas, and the effects pollution and rising sea temperatures are having on our oceans and fisheries.”
Professor Bernard Oxman, who recently represented The Philippines in the arbitration of the South China Sea dispute, chairs the Maritime Law LL.M. program. Professor Daniel Suman of RSMAS, whose work focuses on coastal management, teaches Marine Affairs and Policy. “Professor Oxman is a walking encyclopedia on the law of the sea,” Gaston says. “His lectures breathed life into the text of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea by sharing details from his experience negotiating the treaty on behalf of the United States. It gives a unique insight in helping students understand the legal, policy, and political challenges that come about in connection with the negotiation of an international, multinational treaty.” Gaston has never before tried to meld his professional life with his personal passion for fishing and the water. After graduating from Temple University in 1983 with a bachelor's degree in Radio, Television, and Film, the Pennsylvania native went into television production and programming. In 1989, Gaston entered the J.D. program at Villanova University’s Charles Widger School of Law. Before graduation in 1992, he wrote for the Law School’s publication The Docket, made the Villanova Law Review, and was chair of the Villanova Black Law Students Association. After clerking for a federal judge, he spent his next few years out of law school negotiating and drafting documents for multi-million dollar debt and equity securities offerings, public merger and asset purchase, and sales transactions as an associate at Morgan Lewis and Bockius in the Business and Finance Practice Group. In 1996, Gaston joined Comcast Cable Communications, first as assistant deputy general counsel and, over the next two decades climbed to senior vice president and general counsel, where he directed a team of attorneys supporting the company. For the past six years, he has taught as an adjunct professor at Villanova, developing and teaching a curriculum for a 2L and 3L course on principles and practice points for the in-house counselor. Gaston says his year spent at Miami Law was invaluable. “All of my professors were excellent—knowledgeable and personable—they challenged students to not only analyze and understand the legal issues but to consider the issues within the context of the real world we live in,” he says. “Our oceans and fisheries are under stress from multiple sources. The issues are complex and intertwined. The solutions will have to be multifaceted and nuanced as well."
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“I absolutely feel that the program has provided me with the tools I need to pivot back into the professional world and use my skills and experience to engage in challenging and meaningful projects.�
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Practicums Enhance Students’ Legal Experience By Catharine Skipp
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racticum: a course of study designed especially for the preparation of teachers and clinicians that involves the supervised practical application of previously studied theory. ("Practicum." Merriam-Webster.com. Merriam-Webster, n.d. Web. 1 Dec. 2017.)
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Miami Law remains on the training forefront, adding relevant areas of focus every year, always reflecting current trends in legal practice. In the Larry Hoffman/Greenberg Traurig Startup Practicum, students represented 42 different clients on a total of 76 matters involving entity formation, financing, talent, intellectual property, risk, regulation, and other legal issues that arise as entrepreneurs launch and grow their new businesses and organizations, in just its first full year of operation. In January 2018, Miami Law became one of only 26 law schools (and the only one in five southern states) in the country certified by the United State Patent and Trademark Office in both patents and trademarks prosecution. Students in Miami Law’s Startup Practicum have assisted clients in closing more than $3 million in investments, negotiating and drafting joint venture and software reseller agreements, and helping with filing trademark and patent applications. Several Miami Law Startup Practicum students continue to work with clients they were assigned through the practicum, and at least one student has taken a full-time position with one of his clients. The reviews from both clients and students have been excellent. The director, Dan Ravicher, has represented both startup companies and investors since the 1990s dot-com boom when the internet was in its infancy and cell phones were a novelty. Ravicher has also been an entrepreneur himself, founding businesses in various industries and serving on the boards of both for-profit and not-for-profit companies. “Getting real world experience working with startups while still in law school is a great opportunity for me,” said Todd Green, J.D. ’16, who worked with Taxfyle, a Miami-based on-demand tax preparation service, through his enrollment in the Startup Practicum. “There is just no substitute for the learning that comes from dealing hands on with all of the various legal needs entrepreneurs have.” “Working in the Startup Practicum has been a precious resource for gaining actual legal experience,” said Dan Lader, J.D. ’17, who helped Unyted, a Miamibased startup that has developed a unique team learning technology platform, with preparing a patent application through his participation in the Startup Practicum. “Being able to help promising companies like Unyted afford legal services early in the business cycle is very rewarding and an excellent way to help spur innovation outside of traditional large corporations.” The Startup Practicum is supported by a gift made to the Law School by individuals at Greenberg Traurig in honor of one of the firm’s founders Larry Hoffman. Housed at Miami Law, the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative Practicum gives students the opportunity to work for a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization that advocates for social, technological, and legal innovation to fight online abuse. The practicum is jointly advised by Professor Mary Anne Franks and Dr. Holly Jacobs,
DR. HOLLY JACOBS AND PROFESSOR MARY ANNE FRANKS
Photo by DonnaVictor
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director of CCRI, and offered in conjunction with Franks’s course, Law, Policy, and Technology. Since its official founding in 2013, CCRI has become an internationally recognized authority on the protection of intimate privacy. Its model legislation, drafted by Franks, on the unauthorized distribution of private, sexually explicit visual material (commonly referred to as “revenge porn”) has served as the template for the laws of 38 states and the District of Columbia, and for the proposed federal Intimate Privacy Protection Act. Following CCRI’s collaboration with tech industry leaders including Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Microsoft, the companies banned the abusive practice in 2015. CCRI continues to work closely with legislators and tech companies on nonconsensual pornography and other forms of online abuse. CCRI also collaborates with locally based organizations such as the K&L Gates law firm and the Jewish Community Services of South Florida. Its newest campaign, the FactFinder Project, brings together experts in law, technology, journalism, and social science to identify and counter destructive misinformation trends, including factual errors, propaganda, and conspiracy theories. Students work in either legislative and tech policy or communications. Potential projects include legislative drafting; amicus briefs, legal research, and testimony on relevant legislation and significant cases; collaboration with tech industry leaders on anti-abuse policies; community and media outreach; training programs for law enforcement and educational institutions; and fundraising efforts, such as auctions and karaoke nights. “The practicum not only enriched and enhanced my education and overall life but helped me build up the courage and strength to improve the lives of others by using my legal education for the greater good,” said Amber Dawson, J.D. ’17. “It provided me with hands-on experience involving real-world legislative drafting and extensive legal research in a thankfully evolving area of law.” In Fall 2016, Professor Donald Jones launched a practicum in Civil Rights Litigation. “The overarching goal is to assist in the training of a new generation of civil rights lawyers,” said Jones. Through the new innovative program, Miami Law provided an opportunity for students to work at nationally renowned civil rights firms including Rasco Klock, the Florida Justice Center, and the Florida ACLU. Students worked on timely issues including immigration, police misconduct actions, and voting rights. Each student enrolled in the practicum took a two-credit course, "Civil Rights Litigation" in which the student wrote a mini-thesis on a particular issue of constitutional theory related to the civil and political rights of urban minorities. "Minorities" is broadly defined and include race, ethnicity, women, gays, and transgender individuals. “This was one of the best courses I’ve taken in law school,” said Anta Plowden, J.D. ’17. The Affordable Housing Practicum provides a deep overview of issues to consider in affordable housing development. They include the
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most important areas of applicable laws and regulations on affordable housing; the sources of financing and the role of public/private partnerships and non-profit/ for-profit developers’ joint ventures; and the emerging trends in affordable housing development within urban communities. Students are placed in the Affordable Housing Unit of Legal Services of Greater Miami and work on a variety of documents which are part of an actual affordable housing transaction. They meet clients, attend public hearings, and nurture a further understanding of the affordable housing arena. “We introduced the practicum into the Robert Traurig/Greenberg Traurig Real Property Development LL.M. curriculum so students can learn practical and essential skills for real property practice—drafting, negotiation, government interaction— in an important and technically complicated area,” said Associate Dean Raquel M. Matas, who currently directs the LL.M. program. “The skills are transferable, but the students will develop expertise in an underserved area of real estate practice.” “This Practicum has provided me with hands-on experience in drafting In the 17 years since Miami Law started
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the STREET Law program at two area high
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schools, more than 400 Miami Law students
and understanding transactional documents. No other course has provided me with these kinds of practical tools I can use for a summer job and later in real life,” said J.D./LL.M. student Cristian Arango. The Death Penalty Practicum is a two-part course developed to provide an introduction to capital case litigation as well as hands on experience for a limited number of students. One part focuses on the recent developments in the law, emphasizing the unique Florida constitutional issues that have dramatically changed the course of capital litigation in Florida over the past two years. Students can elect to take just the introductory course or to be placed with practicing capital defense attorneys in the second semester. An optional second semester counts as a threecredit course that includes at least 10 hours a week in the placement, regular contact with the professor, and a final summary work product with evaluation by the supervising attorney. Adjunct Professor Edith Georgi, J.D. ’81 leads the program based on her over thirty years of experience in trials of capital cases in Florida. “The past two years have been historic for death penalty litigation in Florida," said Georgi. "Now we
are starting anew with new law, an enhanced motion practice, and a complete change in the landscape for the death penalty in Florida. Studying the evolution of the law in this particular area not only teaches the substantive law but also illustrates how law in other areas evolves. Thus, this course gives students a unique insight into theory as well as practice.” “The Death Penalty Practicum was, by far, one of the most rewarding experiences I have had at Miami Law,” said Alexandra Hoffman. “The practicum uniquely allowed me to transition from my classroom studies into the localized practice, enhancing and applying prior academic knowledge in the area to real clients facing stateinduced death. Given the volatility of the death penalty in the state of Florida, especially in the wake of Hurst v. Florida, working as a student in this practicum is uniquely exhilarating because there is a feeling of change and of the opportunity to help create new law. Through the practicum, I was able to assist with the response to Attorney General Pam Bondi’s Petition for Writ of Certiorari to the United States Supreme Court in Hurst v. Florida. The state’s petition was denied!”
Community Center serving at-risk youth with
have started working with the high school
unstable home lives.
students to help inform them with the college
“I am blown away by the students and
application process and paths to careers.
have taught over 15,000 South Florida teens at over 30 schools, juvenile diversion programs,
their earnest interest in the world, how their community can be improved and their role in
“Being a part of STREET Law at Youth of Distinction has given me the opportunity to
and community outreach organizations.
it,” said STREET Law Director Jessi Tamayo.
serve as a teacher, and more importantly, as
The STREET Law program is currently in
“The impact we can have on these students is
a mentor for the students,” said 3L Agustina
15 different sites, and students commit to
endless, and I am profoundly impressed and
Kloosterboer. “Through this program, we
teaching a full class period once a week, every week, for the course of an academic year.
grateful to be a part of it.” Law students approach each school and
have shown the students that a wide range of possibilities await them in the future.”
STREET Law is a legal outreach program
class of students individually to assess the
The impact of Miami STREET Law is
that uses students at over 90 law schools to
interests of the particular students, and any
being felt across the Miami-Dade community
teach law, public policy, and ethics to local youth. Miami Law’s program expanded even
needs that they might have. The law students then prepare lessons that incorporate elements
and continues to expand in scope and access every year.
further this year, partnering with Youth of
of federal, state, and local law, current events
Distinction, a pilot program at the Overtown
and the legal impact of those, and increasingly
Get Social Law ’Canes!
@MiamiLawSchool
@MiamiLawSchool
MiamiLawOfficial
miamilawschool
University of Miami School of Law
www.law.miami.edu
A Year in MOOT COURT CHARLES C. PAPY, JR. MOOT COURT BOARD NATIONAL MOOT COURT COMPETITION (Regionals) Atlanta, Georgia
Quarterfinalists
JEROME PRINCE MEMORIAL EVIDENCE COMPETITION Brooklyn, NY
Quarterfinalists
CIVIL RIGHTS AND LIBERTIES MOOT COURT COMPETITION Atlanta, Georgia
Octo-finalists
Quarterfinalists
DUBERSTEIN BANKRUPTCY MOOT COURT COMPETITION New York, NY
2nd PLACE out of
THE EVAN A. EVANS CONSTITUTIONAL LAW MOOT COURT COMPETITION Madison, WI
2nd BEST Petitioner Brief
46 teams
BEST and Second-BEST ORALISTS (preliminary rounds) BEST BRIEF, Runner-Up
JOHN J. GIBBONS CRIMINAL PROCEDURE MOOT COURT COMPETITION Newark, NJ Third-best brief and
BEST Oralist Award
NATIONAL APPELLATE ADVOCACY COMPETITION Brooklyn, NY & Chicago, IL BURTON D. WECHSLER FIRST AMENDMENT MOOT COURT COMPETITION Washington, D.C.
THE E. EARLE ZEHMER NATIONAL MOOT COURT COMPETITION Orlando, FL
Semifinalists BEST BRIEF (Brooklyn region)
ROBERT ORSECK MEMORIAL MOOT COURT COMPETITION Boca Raton, FL
Semifinalists
NEW YORK WASHINGTON, D.C.
the Life of COMPETITIONS INTERNATIONAL ICA UBA MOOT COMPETITION Montevideo, Uruguay
MOOT COURT PROGRAM HNBA MOOT COURT COMPETITION Miami, Florida
Semifinalists out of 32 teams
INTERNATIONAL and EUROPEAN TAX MOOT COMPETITION Leuven, Belgium
6th place out of 18 teams
FDI MOOT COMPETITION Buenos Aires, Argentina
7 67
th out of TEAMS
MOOTMADRID COMPETITION Madrid, Spain
ORALIST AWARD for Prosecutor's role
3rd place
Honorable mention:
Claimant's Brief BEST Oralist Award
7 65 th out of TEAMS
ICC MOOT COMPETITION REGIONAL QUALIFYING ROUND OF AMERICAS White Plains, NY
3rd place out of 16 teams Honorable mention (Defense Brief)
WILLIAM VIS MOOT COMPETITION Vienna, Austria & Hong Kong
Oralist Awards in Moot Shanghai
ICC MOOT COMPETITION The Hague, Netherlands
HONG KONG
ARGENTINA
FACULTY
FACULTY PUBLICATIONS Selected list from September 2016 to October 2017
ALFIERI, ANTHONY Rebellious Pedagogy and Practice, 23 Clinical L. Rev. 5 (2016). BARTON, JILL So Ordered: The Writer’s Guide for Aspiring Judges, Judicial Clerks, and Interns (Aspen/Wolters Kluwer 2017). Supreme Court Splits…on Grammar and Writing Style, 17 Scribes J. Legal Writing 33 (2016-17). CAMPOS, SERGIO The Class Action as Trust, 91 Wash. L. Rev. 1461 (2016). CLAUSSEN, KATHLEEN Trading Spaces: The Changing Role of the Executive in U.S. Trade Lawmaking, 24 Ind. J. Global Legal Stud. 345 (2017). COKER, DONNA Crime Logic, Campus Sexual Assault, and Restorative Justice, 49 Tex. Tech L. Rev. 147 (2016). Domestic Violence and Social Justice: A Structural Intersectional Framework for Teaching about Domestic Violence, 22 Violence Against Women 1426 (2016). Introduction: Pedagogies of Domestic Violence, 22 Violence Against Women 1419 (2016) (with Madelaine Adelman).
COPELAND, CHARLTON Criminalization as Governance in the American Racial State, 52 Tulsa L. Rev. 643 (2017). CORBIN, CAROLINE MALA The First Amendment: Cases and Theory, 3rd ed. (Wolters Kluwer 2017) (with Ronald J. Krotoszynski, Jr., Christina E. Wells & Lyrissa Barnett Lidsky). Justice Scalia, the Establishment Clause, and Christian Privilege, 15 First Amendment L. Rev. 185 (2017). Secularism and U.S. Religion Jurisprudence, in Oxford Handbook of Secularism 467 (Phil Zuckerman & John Shook eds., 2017). DAWSON, ANDREW Beyond the Great Divide: Federalism Concerns in Municipal Insolvency, 11 Harv. L. & Pol’y Rev. 31 (2017). Better than Bankruptcy?, 69 Rutgers U.L. Rev. 137 (2016). FENTON, ZANITA Disarming State Action; Discharging State Responsibility, 52 Harv. C.R-C.L. L. Rev. 47 (2017). FRANKS, MARY ANNE Democratic Surveillance, 30 Harv. J. L. & Tech 425 (2017). How Stand-Your-Ground Laws Hijacked Self-Defense, in 3 Guns and Contemporary Society: The Past, Present, and Future of Firearms and Firearm Policy 141 (Glenn Utter ed. 2016).
FROOMKIN, MICHAEL Lessons Learned Too Well: Anonymity in a Time of Surveillance, 59 Ariz. L. Rev. 95 (2017). HILL, FRANCES Taxation of Exempt Organizations (Thomson Reuters, Supp. 2016 & 2017) (with Douglas Mancino). JACOBOWITZ, JAN Legal Ethics and Social Media: A Practitioners Guide (American Bar Association 2017) (with John G. Browning). Finding Calm in the Storm: Cultivating Mindfulness to Cope with Stress in the Legal Profession, 80 Tex. B. J. 299 (2017). Ending the Pursuit: Releasing Attorney Advertising Regulations at the Intersection of Technology and the First Amendment, Prof. Law., Spr. 2017 at 1. JONES, DONALD A Bronx Tale: Disposable People, the Legacy of Slavery, and the Social Death of Kalief Browder, 6 U. Miami. Race & Soc. Just. L. Rev. 31 (2016). LEVI, LILI The Weaponized Lawsuit Against the Media: Litigation Funding as a New Threat to Journalism, 66 Am. U. L. Rev. 761 (2017). A “Third Way” Out of the Copyright Thicket?, 29 Intell. Prop. J. 33 (2016).
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ABRAHAM, DAVID Book Review, 76 Slavic Rev. 221 (2017) (reviewing Jewish Honor Courts: Revenge, Retribution, and Reconciliation in Europe and Israel after the Holocaust (Laura Jockusch & Gabriel Finder eds., 2015)).
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NEWMAN, JONEL A Tale of Two Clinics: Similarities and Differences in Evidence of the Clinic Effect on the Development of Law Students’ Ethical and Altruistic Professional Identities, 35 Buff. Pub. Int. L.J. 1 (2016-17) (with Donald Nicolson). NICKEL, JAMES Two Models of Normative Frameworks for Human Rights During Emergencies, in Human Rights in Emergencies 56 (Evan J. Criddle ed., 2016). OSOFSKY, LEIGH Simplexity: Plain Language and the Tax Law, 66 Emory L.J. 189 (2017) (with Joshua D. Blank). PARKER, KUNAL Writing Legal History Then and Now: A Brief Reflection, 56 Am. J. Legal Hist. 168 (2016).
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How Law Should Avoid Mistakes: Alexander Bickel’s Modernist Jurisprudence of “Mood,” in Law’s Mistakes 44 (Austin Sarat, Lawrence Douglas & Martha Umphrey eds., 2016).
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Law and Regime Change: The Common Law, Knowledge Regimes, and Democracy Between the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, 3 Critical Analysis L. 362 (2016). Modernist Forms of Thinking and Their Critics in Mid-Twentieth Century America, 51 Tulsa L. Rev. 209 (2016). PAULSSON, MARIKE The 1958 New York Convention from an Unusual Perspective: Moving Forward by Parting with it, Indian J. Arb. L., Jan. 2017, at 23.
PERLMUTTER, BERNARD “Letting Kids Be Kids”: Youth Voice and Activism to Reform Foster Care and Promote “Normalcy”, 72 Stud. L. Pol. & Soc’y 121 (2017).
STOTZKY, IRWIN Affirmative Action in Action, in 32 Civil Rights Litigation and Attorney Fees Handbook 283 (Steven Saltzman ed., 2017).
Advocacy for Foster Youth in Mental Health Commitment Proceedings, in Child Welfare Law and Practice: Representing Children, Parents, and State Agencies in Abuse, Neglect and Dependency Cases, 3rd ed., 575 (Donald N. Duquette, Ann M. Haralambie & Vivek S. Sankaran, eds., 2016).
Let’s Send Those Poor, Black, Sureto-be-Persecuted Refugees Back to Haiti, in 31 Civil Rights Litigation and Attorney Fees Handbook 679 (Steven Saltzman ed., 2016).
PORRAS, ILEANA The Doctrine of the Providential Function of Commerce in International Law: Idealizing Trade, in International Law and Religion: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives 313 (Martti Koskenniemi, Mónica García-Salmones Rovira & Paolo Amorosa eds., 2017).
VALDES, FRANCISCO Sexual Minorities in Legal Academia: A Retrospection on Community, Action, Remembrance, and Liberation, 66 J. Legal Educ. 510 (2017). Kindling the Programmatic Production of Critical and Outsider Legal Scholarship, 1996-2016, 37 Whittier L. Rev. 439 (2016) (with Sarudzayi M. Matambanadzo & Sheila Velez).
SAWICKI, ANDRES The Problem of Creative Collaboration, 58 Wm. & Mary L. Rev. 1793 (2017) (with Anthony J. Casey).
VERGES, TERESA The Broker-Dealer’s Role in the Detection and Prevention of Elderly Financial Exploitation, 23 PIABA B. J. 231 (2016).
Risky IP, 48 Loy. U. Chi. L.J. 81 (2016).
A 360 Degree View of Roles and Responsibilities Concerning Diminished Capacity: Financial Advisors’ Obligations to Clients, Lawyers Representing Clients, and Lawyers Preparing Their Practices, 23 PIABA B. J. 225 (2016) (with Elissa Germaine & Nicole G. Iannarone).
SHARPLESS REBECCA Cosmopolitan Democracy and the Detention of Immigrant Families, 47 New Mex. L. Rev. 19 (2017). Finally, a True Elements Test: Mathis v. U.S. and the Categorical Approach, 82 Brook. L. Rev. 1275 (2017). STEWART, KELE Collaboration Between Schools and Child Welfare Agencies in Florida to Address the Educational Needs of Children in Foster Care, 17 Fla. Coastal L. Rev. 241 (2016) (with Vanessa Thorrington).
WILLIAMSON, RICHARD Verwaltung in föderalen Systemen—Ein Vergleich USA Deutschland (Administration in Federal Systems: A comparison of the USA and Germany), 131 Deutsche Verwaltungsblatt 1443 (2016).
Professor Andrew Dawson:
ADVANCING THE UNDERSTANDING TRA N SFO RM ATIV E F AC ULTY
OF BANKRUPTCY
Photo by Joshua Prezant
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PROFESSOR ANDREW DAWSON: ADVANCING THE UNDERSTANDING OF BANKRUPTCY By Richard Westlund
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major commercial bankruptcy has ripple effects that extend far beyond the company’s shareholders and creditors. “People lose their jobs, landlords lose tenants and vendors lose a customer,” said Professor Andrew Dawson, a Miami Law faculty member since 2011. “Bankruptcy courts oversee a process that on its face is about financial restructuring, but that also touches on deep and challenging political questions.” As a scholar who has studied the U.S. Bankruptcy Code as applied not only to businesses but also to cities, Dawson says federal judges are being asked to resolve challenging financial problems in the public as well as the private sectors. “The bankruptcy courts today are being tasked with handling politically untouchable subjects,” he said. “Along with mass tort cases, we are seeing the courts used for restructuring public entities like the City of Detroit or the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico,” he said. “No politician wants to take up questions like who should bear the brunt of these bankruptcies or how governments should resolve their problems. The bankruptcy code gives judges the ability to force deals that no one will like, but these cases can be very contentious every step of the way.” In studying the case of Detroit, Dawson said the code doesn’t provide answers regarding the payment of claims. “Do you force financial cuts on employees and retirees, making it harder for the city to hire and retain good workers, and causing a negative impact on the tax base? Or do you cut payments to the bondholders, with
ramifications for tapping into the capital markets in the future? Because the code doesn’t spell things out— deliberately—cities and states can use bankruptcy as they see fit.”
A NATURAL TEACHER
Teaching and the law come naturally to Dawson. A native of Dallas, Texas, Dawson earned his bachelor’s degree from Williams College in 1999, majoring in Spanish. He spent four years teaching at a Dallas high school and coached freshman and junior varsity football.
“By my fourth year of high school teaching, I knew I wanted to do something else,” Dawson said. “I started talking with the parents of my students and felt a sense of connection to the lawyers. My former English teacher had also been a lawyer, and I could see similarities between the two professions. For instance, if you have a general litigation practice, you have to do research, learn things, and then have to educate your client, colleague, jury, or judge.”
Exploring a career in law, Dawson worked for a year as a paralegal in a Dallas law firm and then enrolled at the University of Texas School of Law intending to be a litigator. But he was still drawn to teaching and transferred to Harvard Law School after his first year. It was at Harvard that Dawson discovered his passion for bankruptcy law. “I took a course from Elizabeth
Warren [now U.S. Senator from Massachusetts],” he said. “Her problemsolving approach to bankruptcy cases really grabbed me, and I felt this would be the right field for me.” In 2008, Dawson earned his J.D. from Harvard Law, where he was a Kauffman Legal Fellow, senior editor of the Harvard Negotiation Law Review, and recipient of the American Bankruptcy Institute Medal of Excellence and the Irving Oberman Memorial Award. Afterward, Dawson clerked for the Hon. Jane R. Roth, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, and for the Hon. Peter J. Walsh, U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware. He and his wife Lauren came to Miami in 2011 with their three young children. At Miami Law, Dawson teaches contracts, commercial law, business association, and bankruptcy. “Understanding the law is essential, but being a business lawyer is all about problem-solving,” he said. “Most of my students come in with little business background, but they all have experience solving complex problems. My aim is to direct them to apply that experience to address clients’ needs.”
A RESIDENT SCHOLAR
This problem-solving approach informs Dawson’s scholarship as well as his teaching. “Bankruptcy law,” he said, “is ultimately about solving complex problems that may cut across various legal fields as well as political boundaries.” Part of Dawson’s research focuses on such cross-border insolvency matters. “If a multinational files for bankruptcy, what is the appropriate venue?” he said. “What happens if you also have arbitration agreements? These are issues that need to be considered in the business world.”
After studying State of Florida court records on business insolvencies from Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach Counties for the past three years, Dawson has come up with some surprising findings.
“Conventional wisdom has been that the owners would use the state courts as a way to liquidate their businesses since the federal courts have a monopoly over reorganization,” Dawson said. "But in practice, you do see owners using some reorganization features, such as an assignment for the benefit of creditors.”
Instead of being liquidated, which occurs about half the time, many businesses are sold as a going concern to another entity, Dawson said. “My research suggests that the new entity could also be operated by the prior ownership, basically achieving a reorganization without the public necessarily being aware of the difference.” For instance, a small Florida business like a yoga studio, restaurant, or clothing boutique would stay open with the same employees without any interruption in service. The ownership structure has changed, but not the people. “The owners may have shed some of their liabilities, such as a bad supplier deal, but continue to have the same lender and landlord,” Dawson said. “This is a way to make the problems go away, and the decisions are rarely challenged. It’s a creative solution without the time and costs of a formal bankruptcy.”
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After the U.S. adopted the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law’s Model Law on Cross-Border Insolvency in 2005, Dawson conducted the first empirical study of this new chapter 15 of the Bankruptcy Code. In addition to his international research, Dawson has served on the advisory board of the Caribbean Insolvency Symposium and is a graduate of the International Insolvency Institute’s NextGen Leadership Program. In the Spring 2017 semester, Dawson was invited to serve as the Robert M. Zinman American Bankruptcy Institute Resident Scholar. “ABI is a nonprofit that focuses on education for lawyers, judges, paralegals, and others involved in bankruptcy matters,” Dawson said. As resident scholar, Dawson prepared articles, podcasts, and webinars on developing issues in bankruptcy, including legal analyses. “This was like being a journalist, interviewing the lawyers and judges handling big issues,” he said. Dawson has also served as the reporter for the Labor and Benefits Subcommittee of ABI’s Commission to Study the Reform of Chapter 11. The commission spent three years studying ways the code should be modernized to take into account the significant changes in corporate finance and corporate governance since the code was last revised in 1978. For example, the federal code doesn’t work very well for small businesses, so many companies in financial distress are turning to state laws for remedies, Dawson said. “Bankruptcy is just too expensive for small businesses, so they find new and creative ways to deal with financial distress,” he added.
Photo by Joshua Prezant
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Professor
Sergio Campos:
FRESH PERSPECTIVES
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ON CIVIL PROCEDURE
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Photo by Joshua Prezant
By Richard Westlund
P
rofessor Sergio J. Campos enjoys challenging the accepted wisdom. “I like to take something that is considered common sense and take a fresh look at the concept,” he said. “I’m also a great believer in the power of creativity—in students, lawyers, and the courts—to find appropriate remedies for civil disputes.” Since joining the School of Law faculty in 2009, Campos has focused his teaching and research on civil procedure, federal courts, and remedies. “It’s so important to know procedure to be an effective attorney,” he said. “The best intentions of the law don’t work unless you implement the right procedures. One of my favorite quotes is from U.S. Rep. John Dingell in 1983: ’I’ll let you write the substance… you let me write the procedure, and I’ll screw you every time.’” Campos says the U.S. Supreme Court has been paying more attention to procedure in the past decade since John Roberts became Chief Justice. “For instance, the Court has ruled on how much you have to say in a complaint to go to the next step, making it harder for civil rights and class action plaintiffs." In recent years, Campos has contributed several guest articles to the SCOTUSblog, including a 2011 discussion of Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. v. Dukes—one of the court’s most significant class action decisions in decades. “In WalMart, the court rejected a class action that alleged that WalMart deliberately looked the other way while local store managers discriminated against female employees in ’literally millions of employment decisions,’” Campos wrote. “A majority concluded,
among other things, that the proposed class had failed to show a common ’glue holding the alleged reasons for all those decisions together,’ apart from ’the bare existence of delegated discretion.’ The court found an absence of a ’general policy of discrimination’ in part because it rejected expert testimony that WalMart fostered a ’strong corporate culture’ that could instill gender bias in all of its managers.” Although the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals had credited this expert testimony without the need for a Daubert hearing at the class certification stage, the court said such a hearing on expert testimony would have been appropriate, potentially adding another step to a plaintiff’s procedure, Campos said. “We will now see whether the court’s rejection will have an impact on class actions.”
A DIFFERENT PATH
Campos grew up in a MexicanAmerican family in Galveston, Texas. His father Francisco was an immigrant who worked as a longshoreman, and his mother Helen was a librarian. As a high school student, Campos didn’t take part in student government or debate—two traditional extracurricular activities for future lawyers. In fact, Campos did not consider law as a career until Dan Morales was elected attorney general of Texas in 1991. “Seeing a Mexican-American in such a high position inspired me to go into law,” he said. After earning his bachelor’s degree at Harvard College and his Juris Doctor from Yale Law School, Campos worked for three years as a commercial litigator in Boston. “When I was practicing law, I would enjoy working the cases,
developing legal strategies and battling wits with the other side,” he said. “But there were many times when I would take a step back and wonder, ’Why do we have this rule?’ I could imagine different rules that could come into play, and I would write them down so I could think about them in the future. Eventually, I had a big file of halfbaked ideas, some of which have now developed into academic articles and papers.” As a scholar, Campos is a strong believer in the power of the subconscious to come up with creative answers to problems in law. “There’s been a lot of research on cognitive psychology that shows the benefits of taking time to reflect, to go for a walk or just relax and think about something other than school or the job.” After practicing as a litigator, Campos became a Charles Hamilton Houston Fellow at Harvard Law School and then clerked for the Honorable Juan R. Torruella of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit and the Honorable Patti B. Saris of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts. While in Boston, Campos met his now wife, Nicole Gastineau Campos, a health policy researcher at Harvard University’s Center for Health Decision Science. Along with helping to raise their two children, Campus enjoys reading books like Den of Thieves about the Michael Milken junk bond scandal in the 1980s. “Truth is often more fascinating than fiction,” he says. Campos draws on those lessons from Wall Street in teaching Miami Law students about finance, accounting, and economic theory in his courses. “You have to know about financial incentives in order to understand settlements and be responsive to your clients’ needs,” F OR MOR E
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PROFESSOR SERGIO CAMPOS: FRESH PERSPECTIVES ON CIVIL PROCEDURE he said. “If you represent businesses or non-profits you have to be careful about how you settle a suit, considering issues whether a lump sum or a series of payments makes sense, as well as interest rates and the ability to use financial leverage.”
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A DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVE
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In reflecting on civil procedures, Campos takes a different perspective on the due process principle that “everyone is entitled to a day in court” to tell their side of the story, present evidence, and defend their position. “This is certainly true in most cases, such as criminal prosecution and defense or civil litigation,” he said. “But when I was practicing commercial litigation, I realized that a day in court may be counterproductive when there is a wide disparity between the resources of an individual plaintiff and the other party.” In products liability, toxic torts or other types of class actions, a manufacturer might be worried about hundreds or thousands of people with the exact claim, Campos said.
Photo by Joshua Prezant
“If you are worried about losing $100 million on 100,000 claims of $1,000 each, you have a great incentive to hire the best possible expert and most expensive law firm,” Campos said. “But if you give each plaintiff a day in court, it will be hard for that individual to hire an attorney and an expert with commensurate experience, even if the case is handled on a contingency fee.”
In that situation, it’s likely that many plaintiffs agree to a modest settlement, and the defendant can succeed with a divide-and-conquer strategy, Campos said. “By bundling the claims, class actions can level the playing field between plaintiffs and defendants. We need to protect this type of civil procedure to ensure that defendants face significant financial consequences if they manufacture and distribute unsafe products in our society.”
FACULTYRETIREMENTS DAVID ABRAHAM
Family Holocaust Story Prompts Lifetime of Interest and Scholarship
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avid Abraham’s interest in immigration and migration started even before he was born. Olga and Samuel Abraham had lived through the worst of times. As their country, Czechoslovakia was plunged into World War II, they were stripped of their citizenship by Germany’s allies and sent to various work camps, including Auschwitz, until the end of the war. At the end of 1945, they fled along with tens of thousands of refugees, wandering thousands of kilometers across a devastated Europe. They returned to their home district in the Carpathian mountain region only to find nothing left—no homes, no families. They made their way across Europe by foot, by boxcar, hitchhiking, sometimes even in the back of Soviet Jeeps. With the help of smugglers and Jewish charities, they ended up in Antwerp, Belgium, where they married and where their son, David, was born. “I was stateless until I was eight years old when I became a naturalized American citizen,” says Abraham. “Belgium had jus solis, meaning birth in a country makes you a citizen, but that was only for those who had legal permission to be there, which my parents didn’t. They retained their Czech citizenship, but they didn’t want to chance going back to register me.” Abraham benefitted from the first post-war refugee act at the end of 1949, which allowed him and his family to use immigration quotas to come to the United States. They landed in a working-class neighborhood in the Bronx, filled with a mix of immigrants: Jews, Greeks, and Afro-Caribbeans,
planting another seed for his later scholarship surrounding labor and working people. Abraham’s father, an apprentice diamond cutter by trade, found a depressed gem industry in New York City, so the family moved again. In Buffalo, New York, the Abrahams found a vibrant and thriving industrial city with a top shelf public education system. “I was very fortunate to benefit from the high tide of American working class life,” says Abraham. “My father joined a union and my family was able to buy a house and a car. I was reading Shakespeare and taking advanced classes in Latin and Greek. “My high school was about one-third black, a third Jewish, and a third Catholic. We watched the civil rights struggles of the mid-60s unfold before our eyes in ways that were both very satisfying and rewarding and quite ominous,” he says, “especially, as deindustrialization began soon to savage the city.” Abraham attended the University of Chicago on a full scholarship where his own scholarship began to bloom. He focused on the pre-World War II turmoil in Europe as well as the class struggles and racial conflicts unfolding in the U.S. at that very time. “There were National Guard troops on the roof of my apartment building after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination,” Abraham says. “I was gaining a sense for how intertwined and obdurate America’s economic and racial conflicts were. Optimism and anxiety were two sides of the same coin.” F OR MOR E
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By Catharine Skipp
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FACULTYRETIREMENTS: David Abraham & Sally Wise With a bachelor’s in social sciences from Chicago, Abraham switched gears and became a rabbinical student in Israel, where he would meet his wife, Sandy. He studied politics and history at Hebrew University before returning to Chicago to complete a master’s and Ph.D. in history. His dissertation on the welfare state and Nazism in interwar Germany led to a faculty appointment in the history department at Princeton. He added law to his repertoire when he graduated from the University of Pennsylvania Law School in 1989, and he joined the faculty at Miami Law in 1992. Throughout his career, Abraham’s work has delved into the connection between liberal democracy and social democracy—how do we move from formal equality to substantive equality? The subject consumes him still and was the focus of the 2017 symposium the Law School held in his honor: “Crises of Liberal Democracy: Political Economy, Social Integration, Law, and Identity,” The Spring event brought together scholars in the fields of German and European history, labor law, contemporary
By Catharine Skipp
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n the book of Sally Wise’s life, it will start out all Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys adventures, move into a Renaissance period of educational enlightenment, go through a Clarice Starling phase before coming to Miami Law to continue her lifetime of discovery. Wise is nothing, if not curious, always driven by the power of books and information. Growing up in Evanston, Illinois, Wise was always surrounded by ideas. Her father, who spent his entire business career at the headquarters of Sears Roebuck in downtown Chicago, often talked about the law. Her grandfather had been a lawyer. Encyclopedias and the Great Books series— stretching from Aquinas to Darwin, Shakespeare to Plato— filled the shelves of her home. What she couldn’t find there, could likely be had down the street at the local library. Her first books, though, are still favorites: “The Dick and Jane and Sally books, of course,” Wise says, “But I don’t know why everyone always drops the Sally.” (To be fair though, “Sally” never did make it into the titles.)
“When I became a professor at Miami Law, I quickly realized that property law represented the connection between power, politics, and personhood,” Abraham says. “Citizenship, in turn, is a form of property and is the basis for claim-making. Citizenship is a way of saying, ’I belong and I matter.’ But the question of who gets to be here, who should be here, who should be one of the us that we worry about is neglected and underestimated in most philosophical theory.”
Abraham’s origin story, similar to that of millions of survivors of the horrors of a world at war, gave birth to a lifetime of curiosity that continues to grow and add context for him and his scholarship. SALLY WISE
The Wise Book of Sally
politics, and immigration law from elite institutions from Harvard to Berlin to Japan to Rome for insightful debate and trenchant discussion.
Evanston, despite its 12-mile proximity to Chicago, had its own symphony and hosted touring companies of Broadway shows. Wise and her younger sister Lucinda spent an idyllic childhood there. When it came time for college, Wise, in part because of her love of Lake Michigan, ventured 17 miles from home, landing at Lake Forest College. There, she majored in politics and minored in Russian and Soviet Civilization. For graduate school, she truly shook off the flatlands and forged west to the University of Puget Sound (now Seattle University School of Law) where she earned a J.D., with distinction. She was part of one of the first classes to graduate from the new law school. “The school was so new and so small that everyone knew everyone else,” she says. “As I was learning to do legal research, I got to know the librarians and thought to myself, ’I really like this part of the law,’ and I didn’t really want to be a litigator.
the prison; some of the inmates who worked there were allowed to join.” Professor Mary Coombs was chair of the committee that lured Wise to Miami Law. On a visit to Miami, they lunched which led to her hiring by then Dean Dennis Lynch. “It was a larger law school, and I had been in Nebraska for 15 years; I was ready for a change," Wise says. At Miami Law, Wise was co-principal, with Professor Stephen Urice, on a $50,000 grant from the Mellon Foundation. The grant allowed the planning, execution, and long-term sustainability of the International Cultural Heritage Law Index, the first online, fully-abstracted bibliographic
“I always thought the law was fascinating,” Wise says. “I love books, and I was always in the library. I thought ’why not put the both together?’”
associate director at the Underwood Law Library at Southern Methodist University (learning a lot about football at the home of the Mustangs). Next, she developed an affinity for the Cornhuskers, at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where she was director of the Marvin & Virginia Schmid Law Library and rose to professor of law. She also was elected and served as faculty senate president. While there, Wise worked on a prison program where she gave research training to prisoners sentenced to the death penalty. “You are in the room with death row inmates,” she said. “I was a little nervous, of course. They had a legal library at
MIAMI LAW LIBRARY
The University of Washington had a top shelf Masters of Law Librarianship run by a well-known law librarian, Marian Gallagher (the library is named after her). “That was the place to go to get a Masters in Law Librarianship,” she says. “There were five of us in the class, and we all became great, great friends, until this day.” With her degree in hand, Wise would stay at the University of Puget Sound for a few years, moving from assistant law librarian to associate. Then she went to Texas, ending up as an
Photo by Joshua Prezant
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resource for the field of cultural heritage law and policy. “It was a unique, exciting, and fun opportunity. Robin Schard and Helen Wohl also worked on the project,” she says. “Also I was the first faculty member here to teach a J.D. course online.” Wise was also elected to the executive board of the American Association of Law Libraries, while at Miami Law. After a very successful career, Wise is ready to start focusing on some new projects. “I would love to learn another language. French, I think,” she says. “And, even though I love the Pacific Northwest, my sister and I are moving to Evanston to see: Can you go back home again? I don’t know. We are renting until we are sure.”
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Photo by Joshua Prezant
Democracy and the Detention of Immigrant Families By Rebecca Sharpless
Professor of Clinical Legal Education & Director, Immigration Clinic
crying, headaches, nightmares, and aggression. Women have alleged sexual assault and the denial of medical care. Some have tried to take their own lives.
UNIVERSALITY VERSUS TERRITORIALITY
The United States’ detention of children and their mothers raises the issue of human dignity in stark terms, as it overrides humanity’s usual protective stance towards children. But rather than read family detention as exceptional, we should regard it as reflecting a constitutive tension of liberal democracies—a tension between adherence to principles of universal application, like respect of dignity and freedom of movement, and concerns about a country’s self-determination and the practical necessity of maintaining a territorial border. While democracies may need to exclude to exist, this exclusion poses a paradox for democracies. Most insiders have not consented to the social contract and outsiders have no voice in determining the rules of exclusion. Democratic principles thus have little to do with determining who is a member and has a voice. Universality collides with territoriality because the rights and privileges of membership exist only within a bounded community with arbitrary borders. Democracy’s false claim to the universality of its principles leads some to question the morality of territorial boundaries. The inequality of opportunity that flows from the mere fact of one’s place of birth appears arbitrary and unjustifiable. For others, however, the paradox at the heart of democracy does not compel open borders, a position many reject as utopian and as denying the pluralistic value of bounded, selfgoverning communities. But the paradox requires that the balance between the competing democratic commitments of F OR MOR E
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here’s nothing like walking into a prison and the first thing you hear is a crying baby. Two things that should never go together. Never ever.” These are the words of Human Rights Watch’s Antonio Ginatta after he visited an immigration prison for families. In late 2014, the United States heralded the opening in Dilley, Texas of a 2,400-bed immigration detention center—the largest in the nation—to incarcerate women and children who had unlawfully crossed the U.S. border with Mexico, the majority of whom were fleeing escalated gang and intimate partner violence in Central America. In just one year, the U.S. had increased the detention of immigrant families by over 30-fold. Many of the detained women and children were seeking asylum, a protection for people facing persecution in their home countries that is based on international law. Over half of the detained children were age six or younger. The response of U.S. officials to the increase of unauthorized arrivals of women traveling with their children was swift and unequivocal. Vice President Joe Biden told the entrants, “[W]e’re going to send the vast majority of you back.” Although advocacy and political pressure softened the Obama Administration’s position over time, the Trump Administration has returned to a hard line on family detention, vowing to increase detention beds for asylum seekers—including families—to 20,000. Today, over 2,000 women and children are detained. The family detention facilities near the U.S.-Mexico border operate like prisons, with heavy security, limited visitation, body counts, and strict rules and schedules. Detainees sleep eight to a room and have little opportunity for exercise or stimulation. Women report a range of negative effects on their children, including weight loss, inconsolable
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SMARTTAKES By Rebecca Sharpless DEMOCRACY AND THE DETENTION OF IMMIGRANT FAMILIES self-determination and universality be refigured over time. Outsiders can, and should, become insiders.
REFUGEE LAW AND ITS LIMITS
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The law of asylum places limits on the U.S. policy of “send[ing] the vast majority” of the families back. In 2014, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson chose his words carefully when he tempered his message that the women and children would be deported with the assurance that the U.S. would “adhere to domestic and international law, due process, and the basic principles of charity, decency, and fairness.” Although the Secretary characterized his message as “simple,”
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his statements belied an underlying tension. If the detained families were entitled to raise legal claims like asylum, what made the Secretary so sure that the families would be deported? Although the government’s initial expectation was that the rule of law would largely be used to send the families back, this prediction was incorrect, as many of the women have compelling asylum claims. The United States’ message to poor Central American families invoked law to both exclude and protect, and many women and their children will, in fact, prevail in their legal bids for asylum. But a more radical suggestion is that asylum law is not the only way to resolve the tension between sovereignty and universality. If territoriality sometimes gives way to universality, this balance could be struck differently to recognize a fuller range of outsider rights and protections, as discussed below. Not all of the detained women and children qualify for asylum. Poverty and a desire to reunite with family in the U.S. are powerful and understandable drivers of migration. While broader frames exist, they typically focus on unauthorized entrants already within a country’s borders. Many in the DREAMer movement, which was originally focused on undocumented youth, have expanded their mission to include a wide range of undocumented immigrants. As is typical of claims by outsiders, these movements are defined beyond the bounds of existing domestic law. These movements encourage ruptures in the law, such as
amnesties for undocumented people. Human rights norms also recognize limits on sovereignty beyond the principle
of asylum. Increasingly, human rights tribunals and bodies have interpreted human rights standards—such as the right to a family—as restricting the sovereign power to deport, at
least with respect to immigrants already within a country’s borders. Law is thus an enforcer of the border, the creator of
illegal people and bounded nations. At the same time, the law is malleable and dynamic. It provides opportunities for a more forgiving border through amnesties and expanding conceptions of human rights. The possibilities permit reimagination of the U.S. reaction to the arrival of the Central American families. In a more inclusive society, the families would not be detained or required to meet the standard for asylum. They would be understood as having asserted their human dignity by fleeing violence and poverty, or as simply
seeking a better life by exercising their right to move freely. While some amount of border control may be inevitable, the enforcement of territoriality requires neither detention nor the limitation of deportation defenses to asylum. But the trajectory toward a more open society is far from inevitable. The hard work of realizing this goal falls to politicians, advocates, and immigrants themselves, employing the full range of social, political, and legal strategies. The specter of failure looms large. Any optimism that the U.S. is trending toward a more receptive immigration policy is tempered by the reality that the rebalancing of territoriality and universality sometimes involves regression, even descent into xenophobia. The hostile reaction to the plight of the Central American families, the continued growth of immigration detention, and the rise of Donald Trump to the presidency signals that, for the moment, the U.S. is moving away from a politics of inclusion. Only history will tell whether our iterative attempts to resolve the constitutive tension between universality and territoriality are bending toward more humane border policies. Professor Sharpless joined the faculty in the Fall of 2009, directs Miami Law’s Immigration Clinic, and teaches immigration law. She researches and writes in the areas of progressive lawyering, feminist theory, and the intersection of immigration and criminal law.
SMARTTAKES By Caroline Bradley, Professor of Law Photo by Joshua Prezant
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n Miami, to the extent that we focus on climate change, we mostly worry about sea level rise, illustrated recently by king tides that have flooded streets, and about extreme weather events such as hurricanes. The U.S. Conference of Mayors
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Climate Change and Financial Regulation
met in Miami Beach in June 2017 and discussed climate change in the wake of the Trump Administration’s announcement that the United States would withdraw from the Paris Climate 35 F OR MOR E Agreement.
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CLIMATE CHANGE AND FINANCIAL REGULATION
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At the meeting, the Mayors adopted resolutions “Supporting a Cities-Driven Plan to Reverse Climate Change.”1 But the Mayors are not the only actors to react to the proposed reduction of interest in climate change by committing to local action: New York, California, and Washington State formed the U. S. Climate Alliance “to convene U.S. states committed to achieving the U.S. goal of reducing emissions 26-28 percent from 2005 levels and meeting or exceeding the targets of the federal Clean Power Plan,” and Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Oregon, Puerto Rico, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Virginia joined the Alliance.2 In Miami, we do not typically think about connections between climate change and financial regulation, except to the extent that weather-related risks have an impact on the housing and insurance markets. Hurricane Andrew in 1992 alerted insurance companies to the enormous potential costs of large storms and created disruptions in the insurance markets in Florida that are still felt today. However, climate change involves risks not just to insurance companies, but also to other firms exposed to climate-related risks plus to other financial firms that lend to and invest in climateexposed businesses. Climate-related risks, therefore, belong conceptually, and practically, in a category of risks to financial stability that includes risks relating to cybersecurity, terrorism, refugee crises, and political disruptions such as the UK’s referendum vote to leave the European Union “Brexit.” A decade ago, in response to the global financial crisis, financial regulators and central bankers from the G20 countries announced new measures to control risks to financial stability. Initially, this meant improving capital adequacy standards for banks and addressing risks to the financial system from non-bank firms such as insurance companies, financial market infrastructures, and even asset management firms. But, over time, “financial stability” moved from being conceived of primarily as involving risks originating inside the financial system to involving risks that might have an impact on the financial system, whatever their source. Climate change is an example of the sort of risk to the financial system which originates outside the financial system.
Regulators who worry about being accused of not preventing the next financial crisis, are necessarily concerned to identify all possible contributing factors to financial instability. But, for politicians who worry about whether financial regulators are interfering in matters of politics, the expanding construction of financial stability is an irritant. And, as the Trump Administration focuses on financial deregulation (for example, in the Presidential Executive Order on Core Principles for Regulating the United States Financial System [Feb. 3, 2017]) it is not clear to what extent U.S. financial regulation will address climate change risks to financial stability in the near future. But, just as cities and states in the U.S. are talking about climate change, private sector entities are involved in discussions about climate change in the context of financial disclosure. The Financial Stability Board, the G20 body which coordinates action relating to financial stability at the international level, encouraged the creation of a Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures, chaired by Michael Bloomberg, and included a mix of private providers of capital, issuers of securities, accounting firms, and rating agencies. The task force published a final report in June 2017 in which it encouraged firms to think carefully about climate-related financial disclosures, identifying a number of different ways that climate change could affect reporting entities: litigation risk, technology risk, market risk, and reputation risk. The report notes that some climate related risks are material under existing securities laws but also urges firms to use scenario analysis, assessing how they would be affected by different climate change scenarios. If the federal government does not take effective action to address climate change, can cities, states, and the private sector fill the gap? New York has already suggested it could counteract federal financial deregulation. The task force’s report suggests a way for the private sector to address the financial stability aspects of climate change. In the past, selfregulation has not always worked. Is climate change urgent enough to make it work this time?
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Professor Caroline Bradley has written widely on matters of British and European financial law. At the University of Miami, she teaches courses in European Community law, United States securities regulation, international finance, contracts, and business associations.
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http://legacy.usmayors.org/resolutions/85th_ Conference/proposedcommittee. asp?committee=Environment http://governor.wa.gov/news-media/united-statesclimate-alliance-adds-10-new-members-coalitioncommitted-upholding-paris
(L TO R) SHAKIRA PLEASANT, KATHLEEN CLAUSSEN & MARCIA NARINE WELDON
Three New Faculty By Catharine Skipp
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hree new professors—Kathleen Claussen, Shakira Pleasant, and Marcia Narine Weldon—join the faculty of Miami Law. Kathleen Claussen comes to Miami Law from Washington, D.C., where she served as associate general counsel at the Office of the United States Trade Representative in the Executive Office of the President. At USTR, she represented the U. S. in international dispute proceedings at the World Trade Organization and before international arbitral tribunals established under U.S. trade agreements. She also served as a legal advisor for the U.S. in international trade negotiations. Claussen was previously legal
counsel at the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague, where she supported the work of arbitral tribunals resolving diverse types of disputes between countries. Her principal research and teaching areas grow out of her practice in international economic law and dispute settlement. In Spring 2018, she will be one of the three co-chairs of the American Society of International Law’s Annual Meeting. Claussen’s interest in international law has taken her to dozens of countries around the world for research and study. Whether abroad or at home in the U. S., Claussen can also be found on the Ultimate Frisbee field. She first played competitively as an undergraduate at Indiana University and has continued to pursue the sport
while living in South America, Europe, and now, Coral Gables. Claussen received her master’s from Queen’s University Belfast where she was a Mitchell Scholar, and her J.D. from Yale Law School. She is teaching Civil Procedure this Fall and will teach International Economic Law in Spring 2018. Also new to Miami Law in the Fall of 2017 is Professor Shakira D. Pleasant who joined the LComm faculty and will be teaching Legal Communications I and II during the 2017-2018 academic year. Pleasant, a former government attorney in the Office of the Attorney General for the District of Columbia, is a California native and comes to Miami Law from the Savannah Law School where she taught Legal Writing, F OR MOR E
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THREE NEW PROFESSORS JOIN MIAMI LAW Research and Analysis as well as Pretrial Advocacy, and Client Interviewing and Counseling. On a personal note, Pleasant loves any occasion to have a potluck with her students, especially Halloween costumed affairs. She played soccer while an undergraduate at California State University—Chico and was president of the Black Law Students Association at the University of the Pacific, McGeorge School of Law, in Sacramento, California. Marcia Narine Weldon joins the LComm faculty from St. Thomas University School of Law where she was an assistant professor. In addition to LComm, she teaches Corporate Compliance and Social Responsibility. She has taught civil procedure, business associations, professional responsibility, employment law,
business and human rights, and legal issues for startups, entrepreneurs, and small businesses. In addition, Weldon had a varied and distinguished career in practice. After graduating from Harvard Law School, she clerked for the Supreme Court of New Jersey, worked as a commercial litigator with Cleary, Gottlieb in New York, and then as an employment lawyer with Morgan, Lewis and Bockius in Miami. She spent several years in-house as the vice president and deputy general counsel, chief compliance officer, and chief privacy officer of Ryder, the publiclytraded Fortune 500 company. In 2012, the Secretary of Labor appointed her to the Whistleblower Protection Advisory Committee. She also served on the Miami-Dade Commission on Ethics and Public Trust from 2014 until 2017.
She has been admitted to the bars of New York, New Jersey, Florida and the U.S. Supreme Court, and is often interviewed by The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, NPR, and other news outlets. She has served as a mentor for UM’s LawWithoutWalls since its inception, and blogs weekly for the "Business Law Professor Blog." Weldon earned her undergraduate degree in political science and psychology from Columbia University. She has served as a Cub Scout Pack chairperson, even though she doesn’t like camping, and was a founding board member of the NGO Footprints Foundation, which focuses on maternal health and infant mortality around the world.
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Renee Schimkat and the Art of Translation
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efore joining the full-time faculty at Miami Law two years ago teaching international LL.M. students, Renee Schimkat practiced law for more than 17 years.
Most recently, Schimkat was of counsel to the law firm of Carlton Fields, focusing her practice on insurance coverage analysis, claim investigation, and coverage litigation in federal and state courts. She also practiced law in New York City and worked in-house at an international insurance company where she managed high-profile claims against directors and officers of Fortune 3000 companies and developed and implemented strategies for the resolution of securities and employment class actions. Schimkat now teaches two core writing courses to international students enrolled in Miami Law’s LL.M. programs: Legal Communication and Research Skills, and Introduction to Legal Communication and Writing. She also
teaches an upper-level writing course on electronic discovery to J.D. students.
“I love teaching the international LL.M. students,” Schimkat says. “They bring unique perspectives to the Law School and have such varied backgrounds from their respective countries. It is incredibly rewarding to see these students enter their LL.M. programs in August and then watch them learn and, at times, truly master, by the end of the Spring semester, legal writing and reasoning for the United States legal system.”
Illustration/Bill Latham
Legendary Professor and Pioneer
M. Minnette Massey Leaves Her Mark By Catharine Skipp From Massey, Copeland inherited the role of faculty advisor for the Florida Supreme Court Internship program. He fondly remembers that in a conversation with Massey a few years into his advising, she complained that he had seemingly picked the students with the best academic record, forgetting the impact that the program could have on the lives of students whose promise could be seen despite less than stellar grades. She reminded him that teachers are empowered to imagine futures for students that they don’t yet see, and sometimes teachers are best equipped to help them achieve such futures.
“Our dear friend and colleague Minnette Massey was a remarkable person and genuinely one of a kind. Minnette was more than a pioneer for women as a tenure track faculty member; she was even more of a pioneer as a law dean. She does not get the national credit she deserves for the fact that she was the second woman to serve as a dean of a law school in the country,” said Patricia D. White.
Massey, whose first name was Maria—a name she never used—was born in 1927 in Stratford, Connecticut, one of five sisters and a brother. In her six-page vita, it notes that she first arrived at the University of Miami in 1944 as a freshman, class of 1948. She would graduate from Miami Law in 1951, and join the faculty in 1958, while simultaneously earning an LL.M. as a Kenison Fellow at New York University. A consortium of Miami Law alumni and friends generously established the M. Minnette Massey Chair in Law. “In life, you occasionally have the opportunity of meeting someone whose impact on her world was unique,” said Joseph P. Klock, Jr., J.D. ’74, who chaired the fundraising committee for her Chair. “Dean Massey fought all the fights. Dean Massey gave of herself and her personal career to serve UM and never looked back. She made such a difference to so many of our alums. I suspect that she and Janet Reno will make quite an impact in their new home. A life touched by Dean Massey was a life changed for the better. God bless her.”
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Minnette Massey, a leading advocate for diversity, and an original glass ceiling shatterer decades before the word entered the popular vernacular, died in November, 2016 at the age of 89. The fair-haired, green-eyed spitfire was one of the “first wave” of fourteen woman pioneers who elbowed their way into the male-dominated world of American law school professors. (Miami Law supplied two others: Soia Mentschikoff and Jeanette Ozanne Smith.) Massey began teaching legal research as an assistant law librarian but rapidly asserted her dominance in the machinations of Florida civil procedure. Massey caught the attention of U.S. Supreme Court Justices Hugo Black and William O. Douglas, who admired her dazzling intellect and skills as a raconteur. (Think Shirley MacLaine, only loads smarter.) She ascended to assistant dean, then first woman dean, all the while imprinting armies of young lawyers as masters of the intricacies of litigation and the rightful leaders of their profession. She was a force to behold and used her powers to lead the Law School into the integration of both the faculty and student body. “The University of Miami Law School has lost perhaps its greatest champion,” said Professor Charlton Copeland, holder of the first M. Minnette Massey Chair in Law. “She believed in the excellence of this Law School. She believed in the excellence of her students. She believed that together they might build a more excellent future. “But she was not taken with nostalgia or bygone days. Her commitment was a commitment to a more inclusive, more relevant excellence. If that is not the mark of a great institutional and civic champion I don’t know what is. I mourn Minnette’s passing, but I also mourn something of the passing of Minnette’s vision for Miami Law, for our law students, and for our collective civic lives,” Copeland said. In 2015, Massey, who has been described as indomitable, outspoken, adorable, irascible, deeply decent, and a little salty, formally fulfilled a promise she made to Copeland in 2008. As Massey—former acting dean of Miami Law, half a century on the faculty, early adopter of diversity, and the undisputed queen of civil procedure—exited her final class, she turned to Copeland— still a new professor with only a year under his belt—and delivered the scepter. “It’s up to you now,” she bequeathed.
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Dean Emerita Mary Doyle: Opened Windows to the World at Miami Law By Patrick Gudridge
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aw school deans have no choice, really, but to make choices—to set priorities, especially about their own time and effort, to develop a sense therefore of what it is they would most like to make happen. They can’t declare agendas in a vacuum, of course. Everyone else who has a stake in the success of a law school holds views, too, often strong views, and deans of necessity work within and around these visions also. Even so, deans who matter find a way to leave a mark—we look back and recognize their imprint, and think (and maybe argue about) the ways forward they mapped. Mary Doyle, who died last December, was dean of the University of Miami Law School from 1986 through 1994. (She also stepped in as acting dean in 1998 – 99.) She welcomed the chance to come to this university. She thought that Miami was an inevitably visible city, a place of accumulating great occasions— vertiginous, over and over a scene of triumph or crisis, of glory, but also visits of outrage or sadness or loss: history pausing its march, setting itself here remarkably often. She wanted to be caught up in all this, and she wanted the Law School to be too. At every opportunity, Doyle seized chances to open doors and windows, to make the world at large part of the Law School, to act in the world within the Law School. No cloister: She rejected isolation.
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Already committed to building a substantial African American student population, the Law School was only beginning its efforts all the same. Doyle did not just affirm the goal; she committed real resources. More remarkably, she supported Robert Waters’s institute claiming James Weldon Johnson for the Law School, and persuaded Derrick Bell, at the height of his career, to appear regularly at black law student functions. His presence and his conversations immediately put students amid the national debate. She embraced equally the dramatic upsurge in students and alumni of Cuban heritage, aided by remarkable administrators making the Law School a regular participant within the emergent new legal culture. She recognized that the Law School was preparing a distinctive cohort of local, national, and international leading actors. Dean Doyle enthusiastically supported Irwin Stotzky and Bruce Winick and their colleagues, fighting all the way to the Supreme Court to free Haitian arrivals from mass detention at the edge of the Everglades. So too, she opened the way for Stotzky to make the Law School a recurring center for exploring complex transitions from dictatorship to democracy within the hemisphere, bringing to campus remarkable leaders and theoreticians. Much, much more—no clear time line, all just pin-point impressionism: Thomas Foley, newly become Speaker of
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the U.S. House of Representatives, appears as law school homecoming speaker. Supreme Court Justices giving Cole Lectures annually—extraordinary and usual somehow at the same time. Justice Antonin Scalia and Doyle depart for the airport, after one of these talks, in a startlingly pink limousine. Justice William Brennan returns to the Law School for two years following his retirement, to teach a compressed course, a remarkable list of all-star guests joining in. Janet Reno teaches a day-long course to the entire first-year class and finds herself a while later moving to Washington to become Attorney General, law school graduates following her to the Justice Department, beginning distinguished careers of their own. All the great long rush was within Doyle's perspective business as usual: mad gallop as a matter of course. It was no surprise therefore that what might be thought of as routine, the ordinary processes of university administration to which deans are obliged to attend, was head-long too. Doyle did not sit still—she regularly encamped to the Ashe building to talk at length with administrators immediately involved in all sorts of matters, to find out their worries and to ask their advice in framing solutions. As ideas rose higher up, proposals figured not as law school doings but as an already university work-in-progress. Trustees and visiting committee members were treated too as inside the Law School already, pulled in as participants in sometimes fierce conversations, as colleagues in search for the Law School’s good. (There is no need here to pause more than momentarily in this quick march to notice Hurricane Andrew’s assault and Doyle’s rapid counter-storm to re-start the Law School’s own whirl. Or to notice the large chunk of law school buildings put under construction around the same time. Or to remember the very large group of new faculty who were hired just in time to work within these maelstroms. It was all of a piece.) It is a great challenge for those of us caught up in the Law School to come to grips with the questions Mary Doyle’s deanship posed: Do we really stop and catch our breath? Or do the winds do the work for us?
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Professor Fred S. McChesney, J.D. ’78: A Man of Indomitable Spirit & Scholarship
By Catharine Skipp
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red S. McChesney, a leader in applying economics to the study of law, and the holder of the de la CruzMentschikoff Endowed Chair in Law and Economics at the University of Miami School of Law, died October 12 in Washington, D.C., after battling an extended illness. He was 68. Before the launch of an academic career, McChesney joined the Bureau of Consumer Protection at the Federal Trade Commission as associate director for policy and evaluation during the Reagan Administration. He would go on to become a significant figure in the confluence of business, finance, and law, with teaching positions at the law schools of Cornell, Emory, and Northwestern, where he held a joint appointment in the schools of law and business and was the holder of the James B. Haddad Professorship. After receiving his law degree from the University of Miami in 1978, the Maryland native received a Ph.D. from the University of Virginia in Economics in 1982. He was
the author or co-author of five books and scores of articles, monographs, and scholarly works on antitrust, business and economics in leading academic presses and journals. His book, Money for Nothing: Politicians, Rent Extraction, and Political Extortion, from Harvard Press, 1997, on public choice economics, argued that political actors behave according to private incentives instead of the public good. “No legal scholar could have been better suited than Fred McChesney to be appointed the first recipient of the de la Cruz-Mentschikoff Chair in Law and Economics at the University of Miami,” said Carlos de la Cruz, Sr. , J.D. ’79. The Miami Law alumnus and entrepreneur established the chair in former Dean Soia Mentschikoff’s honor in 2009. “Fred’s appointment at UM was hailed as a coup. He brought back to the School of Law his vast experience practicing law, his work at the FTC as associate director of Policy and Evaluation, and his scholarship and academic career,” said de la Cruz. “Fred kept up his scholarly output throughout his tenure at UM, editing two well-received textbooks on anti-trust law and teaching very popular classes on the same subject. This tremendous scholarly legacy would be incomplete without celebrating Fred’s best qualities: his eternally sunny outlook and indomitable spirit. He will be missed.” The concept of integrating law and economics began at Miami Law in 1974 under Professor Henry Manne, when a young Fred McChesney was among the first students here to explore the links between the two disciplines. Returning to the Law School in 2011, McChesney focused on topics such as corporate finance, business transactions, and antitrust issues. He was the first Miami Law alumnus named to a chair at the school.
“As those of us who had the privilege of knowing Fred as a friend, colleague or teacher know, he was a kind and generous person with a remarkably good nature,” wrote Miami Law Dean Patricia D. White, in an email to the community.
“He was also a very distinguished scholar and exceptional teacher. We are all the poorer for losing him and all the richer for having had him among us,” she wrote. At McChesney’s investiture, Timothy J. Muris, a former chairman of the FTC, friend, and fellow lover of baseball, said, “Fred is a world-class scholar. He is also a world-class individual. Fred makes friends easier than anyone. To eat at
Shorty’s with Fred is to become engaged in a conversation with the entire picnic-style table, most of whom you have never met.” Always the Renaissance man, McChesney was a Francophile who spoke fluent French and German, and had an encyclopedic knowledge of the music of the 1950s and 1960s, according to friends and family. His love of music was genetic: his father worked as a big band drummer and his daughter, Mary Elizabeth “Lizzy,” is the professional musician Lissy Trullie. Born in Washington, D.C., McChesney grew up in Montgomery County, Maryland, the oldest of seven. He attended Catholic schools starting at Our Lady of Lourdes School in Bethesda through his undergraduate years at the College of the Holy Cross. In addition to his daughter, McChesney is survived by his father, Robert William McChesney, Jr., and sisters, Kathleen, Mary Woodchek, and Louise Forte, and brothers Robert, Michael, and David; children, Madeleine McChesney Wisbrun, Robert William, IV, Edward, and two grandchildren, Thomas and Nicolas Wisbrun. He was predeceased by his wife Elaine, and mother Louise Sanderson McChesney. Donations may be made to the University of Miami School of Law in memory of Fred S. McChesney, 1311 Miller Drive, Coral Gables, FL 33146. The UM School of Law will hold a memorial for McChesney in February 2018.
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PROFESSOR FRED MCCHESNEY, J.D. ’78, WITH CARLOS DE LA CRUZ, J.D. ’79
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FEATURE
By Carlos Harrison
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he room is filled with possibility, and promise. Ten soon-to-be ninth-graders, members of the University of Miami’s inaugural First Star Academy, are being taught to envision a future most of them would never have thought possible, and to seize their own potential to make it happen. The instructor has scrawled a message on the white board at the front of the room. “If you chase two rabbits,” it reads, “you won’t catch either.” Ramis Emmanuel Mercado, a “Teaching Artist” with the community group Motivational Edge, moves animatedly before the group, strutting and waving his hands for emphasis— like a hip hop artist performing for a rapt audience. “How does that apply to life? You’ve got to be focused,” he says. “You’ve got to pick a direction and you’ve got to go for it…You’ve got to have decisiveness. You’ve got to choose. You got to say, ’This is what I want for my life. So anything that doesn’t align with that I’m not going to do.’” The academy is an interdisciplinary collaboration between Miami Law and the School of Education and Human Development aimed at helping children in Florida’s child welfare system to overcome the obstacles created by their circumstances, and to shape better tomorrows despite their turbulent pasts. It is just one of the many ways Miami Law faculty, students, and alumni are transforming communities, lives, and careers. Some, such as 2017 Miami Law graduate Sawyeh Esmaili, have found a calling in tackling reproductive rights issues on a national and international level. Others, such as Miami Law
alumnus David Humphreys, are stepping up to rebuild communities devastated by natural disasters, and investing in educational opportunity in his local community. Others, such as Professor and Associate Dean for Experiential Learning Kele Stewart and others involved with the First Star Academy, are working directly with the most vulnerable and disadvantaged in our society, and helping them build ladders to success.
Statistically, once kids like those in the Motivational Edge session get caught up in the foster care system, they face daunting odds. Nearly a fourth of the ones who “age out” of foster care at 18 and are sent out in the world end up homeless. Almost two-thirds of the males and a third of females get incarcerated. Barely 3 percent will earn bachelor’s degrees.
The First Star Academy aims to change that. It is, fundamentally, a college prep program built, says Stewart, on three pillars: academics, life skills, and caregiver engagement. “The philosophy behind First Star has two simple foundational principles,” she explains. “One is bring kids to a college environment so that they can start seeing and believing and dreaming about being on a college campus and see themselves here. “The second one is build a support network around kids that stays with them and provides some level of consistency, as well as all the technical stuff—the academics, the tools to help
with the college applications. But the more important thing is a support system that’s going to actually be there that’s focused on helping them get to high school graduation and then to college.” Stewart is no stranger to making a difference. She also is co-director of the Children & Youth Law Clinic, which serves as both a practical training ground for Miami Law students and a real-life law firm representing foster care children in a variety of civil legal matters including dependency, health care, mental health, disability, independent living, education, and immigration issues. “I like to say we amplify their voices,” Stewart says. It’s a “holistic model,” she says, with an impact “that you can’t really capture by listing a bunch of cases. It allows us to really develop strong relationships with our clients, to problem solve for our clients, and to help our clients to feel as though there’s somebody rooting for them, fighting for them, and sharing their perspective in the child welfare proceeding.” The mission of the First Star Academy seemed like a natural match. Founded by Hollywood film producer Peter Samuelson, the on-campus academy model rolled out initially at seven colleges including UCLA in 2011. Samuelson doesn’t take credit for the inspiration for First Star, but the selfmade, British-born serial philanthropist says the founding principle matched the vision that drew him to the United States in the first place. “I came to America because I felt that the American Dream was the most wonderful thing. There’s no German Dream or British Dream or Spanish Dream. But there is an American one. And it F OR MOR E
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IMPACT:
Changing Lives, Careers, and Communities
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FIRST STAR ACADEMY STUDENTS AT MIAMI LAW
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says we don’t care about your parents. We don’t care even if you’ve got parents. We care whether you will work hard. Because if you will, we’ll get you educated. You will have a worthwhile job…You too, can be happy.” And foster kids, he felt, deserved that chance, too. So does the University of Miami. Beginning this past summer, the first contingent of 21 kids on their way to ninth grade spent a month living in a UM dorm. They studied language arts, math, and science, along with instruction such as the Motivational Edge coaching designed to make them better equipped to handle life on their own. They also got to participate in onand off-campus activities such as a field day on the Edward T. Foote II University Greens, a visit to the Frost Science Museum, a service project at Historic
Virginia Key Beach Park, a dance performance at South Dade Cultural Arts Center, a tour of Wynwood murals, and bowling at Splitsville. The hope is that they’ll return every summer until they graduate high school and that the skills they acquire will lead them on to successful college careers. “It’s going to impact far fewer kids than, sadly, are in the system, but it was my way of trying to create change in a way that felt like I had more control over at least the inputs,” says Stewart. “And, hopefully, we’ll get the outputs that other places that have done First Star Academies have seen.” Miami Law alumnus David Humphreys, J.D. ’83, had been making a difference in his hometown of Joplin, Missouri, long before an EF-5
tornado cleaved a mile-wide path of destruction through more than 22 miles of the city on May 22, 2011. It was, according to the federal government, “the deadliest single tornado on record in the U.S. since official records were begun in 1950.” It was also the costliest. It killed 161 people, left another 1,000 injured. It damaged 553 business structures, half of the district’s school buildings, the St. John’s Regional Medical Center, and nearly 7,500 homes—more than 3,000 of them severely or completely destroyed. Total losses approached $3 billion. For hours after the storm, Humphreys pulled people from the debris of their wrecked homes. He got home with a nail in his foot and shoeless because he gave his to a man who didn’t have any.
IMPACT: Changing Lives, Careers, and Communities he says, “culturally, ethnically, and I think was a very important place for me, frankly, in terms of just growth generally by being in such a different environment.” After graduation, he took a job with the largest firm in Joplin, doing medical malpractice defense work. A couple of years later he “decided at the end of it that I just didn’t like trials.” He moved to New York to pursue a graduate degree in tax law. He wound up staying in New York after he finished, joining the Wall Street firm of Davis Polk & Wardwell as a corporate tax attorney. A year later, the firm sent him to France. “The only French I knew I learned in Berlitz in six weeks,” he says. "It was a grand adventure.” When he got back from France, he says, “My father came through town and asked me if I’d ever thought about coming home.” That was in 1989. Humphreys worked as TAMKO’s general counsel for a couple of years, then in various operations and finance roles for a few more. In 1994, after his father died, Humphreys stepped in to run the company and continue its expansion into additional products. He also became increasingly involved in philanthropic causes. “It evolved over time,” he says. “Not in the sense of giving back because I always say that I didn’t take anything. But in terms of a sense of duty by being blessed with certain wealth and skills that I want to try to make the world a better place. At least to make my own community or where I’ve been a better place.” He is a major donor to Miami Law and donated $1 million to establish scholarships at Missouri Southern State
University. But the project he says he’s the proudest of is also one of the oldest of his endeavors—the private school he started with his wife 25 years ago, the Thomas Jefferson Independent Day School.
“There was no private, independent non-sectarian school, which was important to us,” Humphreys says. “To me, in terms of the impact that we’ve had, in any case, is providing that kind of resource for kids with talent to do exceptionally well and go on to really great things —from our community—that otherwise would not have had that sort of launching pad that you would find in a bigger city.
Sawyeh Esmaili, J.D. ’17, started having an impact while she was still at Miami Law. A Miami Scholar and Public Interest Leadership Board chair, she interned with Planned Parenthood Global’s Latin America Regional Office during her 1L summer. “I’ve always been interested in pursuing a career that would serve systematically silenced populations,” she says. “My experience with Planned Parenthood Global exposed me to the reproductive justice movement in Latin America, which feels much more grassroots than the movement in the United States. The human rights framework that it operates under permits more flexibility and, arguably, creativity when compared to the way reproductive rights are legally treated in the U.S. That framework serves as a useful guide in channeling the same creativity in other aspects of U.S. law.” F OR MOR E
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Then he gave $1 million to the local Red Cross through his company. “We don’t normally do that sort of thing publicly,” he says, “but we did it very publicly to try to encourage other businesses in the area to maximize what they would give also to the recovery effort.” In addition he, with his wife, gave another $500,000 to the Salvation Army. On top of that, he says, he gave about $1 million to help his company’s employees get back on their feet. He didn’t stop there. He and his family took in three victims to live with them and offered a house he owned for another family to live in. “At the end of the day I think we should feel some sense of duty to help out other people, however you accomplish that,” he says, “and to help other people out with our own resources and time and money and whatever else, as opposed to helping other people out with other people’s money and time and resources.” Humphreys grew up in Joplin. His grandfather founded TAMKO in 1944, a roofing company that took its name from the first initials of the five states it expected to comprise its sales territory. Humphreys’ father took the reins in 1960 and guided the company as it expanded, adding manufacturing plants in five states—as far away as Texas and Maryland. It may have seemed like destiny, but Humphreys insists that taking over the family business was “the furthest thing from my mind. My father always said, ’Go find a job.’” First, though, Humphreys got a degree. At Miami Law. He chose it, he says, because it offered him a chance to get an education that extended outside of the classroom. “Miami was a very different place,”
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DAVID HUMPHREYS, J.D. ’83, DONATES $1 MILLION TO HIS LOCAL RED CROSS
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Born in California to an Iranian father and Colombian mother, Esmaili moved to South Florida after her parents separated. Her background shaped her and, in many ways, informs her areas of concentration. “I’m interested in areas where the law intersects with identity. For example, in issues regarding the criminal justice system, reproductive
rights, or immigration, the law chooses over whom it exerts control. The extent of this control is based on various factors, including but not limited to, race, class, gender, sexual orientation, or gender identity.” As a 2L, she interned with the Florida Justice Institute and participated in the Immigration Clinic. During her 2L summer, she interned
at the Miami-Dade Public Defender’s Office, working on policy and direct service matters. As a 3L, she helped in drafting an amicus brief in the Florida Supreme Court in the case of Gainesville Woman Care, LLC, et al. v. State of Florida, et al. The amicus, filed in support of the ACLU/Center for Reproductive Rights’ lawsuit challenging the state’s
IMPACT: Changing Lives, Careers, and Communities mandatory 24-hour delay for abortions, focused specifically on exemptions for victims of human trafficking and domestic violence. It also noted the difficulties the act imposed for poor and immigrant women by requiring them to make two appointments with an abortion provider. That same year, Esmaili was selected to present her paper, “An Incarcerated Woman’s Right to a Nontherapeutic Abortion: A Human Rights Framework,” at the LatCrit South-North Exchange conference in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. The paper argues that denying an abortion to an incarcerated woman constitutes torture and a violation of
“I learned a lot about how the law is created and developed, but more importantly I learned about the ways in which the law fails us,” she says. “A law degree is an incredible privilege, but I also view it as a way of trying to help voices that are being silenced. There’s so much that you can do with a law degree. You don’t have to be in a courtroom every day. You can engage
in policy reform. There are so many other things. It doesn’t just have to be direct service. I think that’s kind of the cool thing about a law degree. It allows you a lot of flexibility to do whatever work you’re passionate about or interested in. “It’s hard to say what direction my legal career will take because there is a lot of work to be done.”
the Eighth Amendment.
Now, she’s beginning a yearlong policy-focused program as a Reproductive Justice Federal Fellow at the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health in Washington, D.C. The program, by its own description, gives fellows “hands-on policy advocacy experience and work on cutting edge reproductive health, rights, justice issues, particularly as they affect people of color and other marginalized communities.” And, that, fits perfectly with what Esmaili sees as the “most important lesson I learned in law school.
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Depriving a woman of an abortion as a result of her incarceration links the denial of legally available healthcare to her punishment,” she wrote. “A woman is, therefore, forced to carry an unwanted pregnancy as a part of her sentence.”
SAWYEH ESMAILI, J.D. ’17
Photo by Joshua Prezant
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By Carlos Harrison
BLACK A LIVES MATTER
s the debate over the Black Lives Matter movement raged across the country, Miami Law brought the discussion into the classroom. The goal: understanding. “There were a lot of critiques of the movement, some of which were legitimate, but there also seemed to be a lot of people who were just completely unknowledgeable about why black people in the United States would be protesting or marching or trying to disrupt political activity,” says Vice Dean and Professor of Law Osamudia James who came up with the idea for a course on the highly controversial movement. “I kept hearing, ’What do they have to complain about?’
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SIDEBAR
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Seeking Understanding in the Classroom
“So, I started thinking, ’I want to have a conversation both about the movement as a movement, but also about the social factors that might be animating such a movement, that might prompt people to say we need to talk about police brutality, about mass incarceration, about discrimination.’ Leaders of Black Lives Matter tried to address many issues. It wasn’t just about police brutality.”
Neither was the interdisciplinary course that she finally developed. James put out a call to faculty across the University asking for proposals on what subjects to discuss and inviting them to participate in teaching those sections. The response, she says, was “overwhelming.” Topics included everything from discussions of identity, the criminal justice system, and police brutality, to health care, child welfare, and the role of religious institutions in civil rights movements. Speakers addressed radical black/queer feminist traditions in the Black Lives Matter movement, education reform, reproductive freedom, and other subjects informing racial justice. Alicia Garza, a co-creator and founder of Black Lives Matter, led a class session explaining the social issues that gave birth to the movement. Another segment examined African-American vernacular English and its impact on understanding and perception during the murder trial of George Zimmerman, the neighborhood watch volunteer accused of murdering Trayvon Martin. Tarell Alvin McCraney, the playwright and actor whose autobiographical work inspired the Oscar Award-winning movie Moonlight, led an eye-opening class session titled “A Safe Space for Dangerous Ideas.” “It taught students that Romeo & Juliet, in its time, dealt with ’provocative and politically disruptive’ themes," James says, “and asked students to think about how the humanities help us navigate these tensions in society, and how literature and the arts gives people—as he described it—a safe space to grapple with issues that can be very difficult to discuss.” About 40 students took part in the inaugural course. James says it will be offered again in Spring of 2018, and will include some classes on new subject areas. “Like last year, the course is neither a defense nor a promotion of Black Lives Matter, but rather a survey of the many issues animating and informing the Movement. “Ultimately, the course did what I wanted it to do,” she says, “which is give the faculty and students an opportunity to sit and think critically about the movement and what is animating it—with some information, with some literature, with some expertise—so they could better evaluate it.”
ALUMNI Suggestions for Class Notes may be emailed to notes@law.miami.edu or submitted to www.law.miami.edu/alumni/submit-class-note
Couple Continues Public Interest Work
in Civil Rights & Environment By Richard Westlund
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oy Purcell, J.D. ’08, and her husband Kevin Roach, J.D. ’08, have many things in common. Both found their legal calling while earning their degrees at Miami Law. Now, both attorneys work for the federal government and are committed to making a difference through public service. “I believe lawyers have a responsibility to help people,” said Purcell, who is a senior compliance team attorney for the U.S. Department of Education. “That can take many different forms, including educating individuals about their rights, going into a public service career, or taking on pro bono cases in private practice. Lawyers have a unique set of skills they can use to make the world a better place.”
Roach, who is a senior attorney at the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, is also dedicated to service. “My wife is an inspiration to me,” he said. “Joy devotes a huge amount of time and energy to helping vulnerable people. As for me, I feel very gratified to play a part in improving environmental outcomes for our country.”
GROWING UP TOGETHER
Purcell and Roach grew up in Marietta, Georgia. They met in middle school and shared the same homeroom in high school, where they attended senior prom together and began dating. But they waited until 2012, when they were settled in their legal careers, to get married. In 2001, Purcell and Roach applied separately to New York University as undergraduates and were both
Photo by Andy Shelter
accepted. “I was a dancer and always wanted to go to the big city,” Purcell said. “I was also very interested in world affairs, and earned a double major in politics and Latin American studies.” While taking a class on Caribbean politics, Purcell began studying Cuba and became interested in human rights. “That was the genesis of my desire to go to law school, and the University of Miami was a natural step,” she said. Like Purcell, Roach became interested in politics and Latin American studies at NYU. “No one in either of our families had been lawyers,” he added. “But I was always more interested in words and arguments than in mathematics. I also recognized that the legal profession allowed you to gain access to the levers of difference-making in the world.” After earning their bachelor’s
SUPPORTING CIVIL RIGHTS
After graduation, Purcell joined the Children’s Law Center in Washington, D.C., where the majority of her caseload involved helping families access special education programs. For instance, she used her knowledge of the law to obtain an appropriate special education placement for a 17-year-old student who had been improperly served for years. When he enrolled in a vocational education program, he learned practical skills that helped him obtain employment and build self-esteem.
Three years ago, Purcell was hired by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights as a compliance attorney, and she and her husband relocated to New York. “My experience with health and education issues at Miami Law helped me get the job,” she said. Today, Purcell investigates civil rights complaints by individuals against schools, colleges, universities, and trade schools that allege discrimination based on race, color, national origin, gender, age, or disability.
“We strive to remedy compliance issues so students can receive the services they are entitled to under federal law,” Purcell said. “But something that can be a challenge is addressing compliance issues within school districts facing fiscal difficulties. We recognize that a school district can’t just create a speech therapist out of thin air, so we need to try to come up with creative solutions to resolve issues.”
FOCUSING ON ENVIRONMENTAL LAW Roach’s interest in a pubic service career also began at Miami Law. “Both of my summer fellowship positions were in public interest organizations, and I developed a deep interest in environmental law issues,” he said. While a student, Roach joined the Environmental Law Society and served as president, spending one summer
with the Environmental Defense Fund. “Those experiences in law school definitely helped me when applying for jobs in the public sector,” he added. After earning his J.D., Roach joined the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, where he is now a senior attorney for new reactor programs in the Office of the General Counsel. “Our mission combines both engineering safety and environmental protection,” he said. For the past several years, Roach was lead attorney on a licensing review for a proposed nuclear power plant in Levy County on Florida’s Gulf Coast. Florida Progress Energy had filed the initial plans to build and operate the two-reactor project, and the NRC’s review continued after Duke Energy acquired Progress Energy. In October 2016, the NRC approved the issuance of two licenses for the estimated $20 billion Levy County plant, although Duke Energy has not yet made a decision to move forward with the project. “It was very gratifying to complete the regulatory work, ensuring that the NRC was satisfied from a legal and safety standpoint before granting a license,” Roach said. Reflecting on the formative role of his Miami Law experiences, Roach advised today’s students to pursue their legal passions, wherever it takes them. “Find a field that calls to you, take the relevant courses, and get involved in student and professional organizations,” he said. “For me, it was an interest in science, as well as the law, that let to a rewarding career in public service.”
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degrees, Purcell and Roach enrolled at Miami Law in 2005 to study in the de facto capital of Latin America. They realized quickly that it was the right choice. “I applied for the Summer Public Interest Fellowship Program after my first year,” Purcell said. She interned with the Dade County Bar Association Legal Aid Society and began to focus on public interest law. “That was my first experience in providing direct legal services to people in poverty,” she said. “I loved working with my clients there and knew I was doing important work, even as a student. It helped me understand the chronic issues facing our community, and I knew I wanted to take my career in that direction.” The following summer, Purcell served as a HOPE Fellow with the Harlem Community Law Office of the Legal Aid Society in New York. Back on campus, she also volunteered at the school’s Community Health Education Clinic, the precursor of the Health Rights Clinic. “This was a medicallegal partnership with Jackson Health System,” she said. ”I worked with clients from the HIV/AIDS clinic and represented them in a variety of issues.”
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Photo courtesy of United States Navy
Vice Admiral James Crawford III: Mastering the Law of the Sea By Richard Westlund
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ice Admiral James W. Crawford III, LL.M. ’92, understands the importance of the law of the sea. “Many nations desire to extend their sovereignty over offshore waters,” said Crawford. “There are issues over fishing rights, oil and gas drilling and other matters. More than 90 percent of the world’s commerce moves by sea, including tankers carrying fossil fuels, and any obstruction could have a tremendous impact on the global economy.” Two decades before he became the 43rd Judge Advocate General of the Navy, Crawford spent one year at the University of Miami School of Law earning a Master of Laws degree in Ocean and Coastal Law, newly rechristened as the LL.M. in Maritime Law. “I wanted to learn from the best and was fortunate to be accepted to the Miami Law program,” he said.
Crawford’s interest in the field grew after the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea concluded in December 1982. The convention defined the rights and responsibilities of nations using the world’s oceans, established business and environmental guidelines, and included a commitment to management of marine natural resources. “The law of the sea was at the forefront of international legal thinking in the mid-1980s,” Crawford said. “This was a successful effort to determine how the nations of the world would treat the seas, which are primarily used for peaceful purposes, and address critical issues, such as freedom of navigation.” The U.S. delegation to the convention included two Miami Law professors, the late Thomas A. Clingan and Bernard H. Oxman, a leading expert
on the law of the sea, and now the Richard A. Hausler Professor of Law. “I have the deepest respect for my professors and fellow students at the School of Law,” said Crawford, who is one of a handful of Navy JAGs to complete the UM program. “I enjoyed being a ’Cane and appreciated the school’s commitment to excellence.”
JOURNEY TO THE LAW
Crawford’s journey to the law started at an early age. Growing up in Charlotte, North Carolina, he told his family that he wanted to be a lawyer when he was still in elementary school. “I was a child of the 1960s who saw how the law was wielded by individuals of character like Justice Thurgood Marshall. I was not driven by personal satisfaction, but by seeing how the law can be a great equalizer when correctly used.”
earned a Master of Arts in National Security and Strategic Studies from the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. “During my time in the Navy I have been exposed to important men and women of character who modeled great examples for me,” he said. “They also gave me an opportunity to participate in momentous events for our country.” Crawford was serving in the Pentagon as deputy legal counsel to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on 9/11 when Al-Qaeda terrorists seized a passenger jet and crashed it into the headquarters of the Department of Defense. “I was an action officer when the event happened,” he said. “I worked on our watch team to understand the situation and determine what steps to take. It was an opportunity for me to make a contribution to our country at a time when it was needed. People often focus on being the best. But I appreciate UCLA coach John Wooden’s approach: “Don’t worry about being better than someone else. Instead, be at your best when your best is needed.”
LEADING THE NAVY’S LEGAL TEAM
From 2007-2011 Crawford served as the legal counsel to the Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff, and then spent one year as Commander, NATO Rule of Law Field Support Mission/Rule of Law Field Force-Afghanistan. “My wife Elizabeth and I have twin 9-year-old boys, Nicholas and Alexander,” Crawford said. “They were only three when I was deployed to Afghanistan, and I know personally what a hardship it is for military families when a parent is serving abroad. My wife is a strong woman and a great mother, who helps keep me grounded.”
Crawford’s personal decorations include the Distinguished Service Medal, the Defense Superior Service Medal (three awards), the Legion of Merit (three awards), the Defense Meritorious Service Medal, the Meritorious Service Medal (two awards), the Navy and Marine Corps Commendation Medal (three awards), and the Navy and Marine Corps Achievement Medal. From 2012 to 2015, Crawford was the deputy JAG of the Navy and Commander, Naval Legal Service Command, before assuming his current role. He is now the principal military legal counsel to the Secretary of the Navy and the Chief of Naval Operations and serves as the Department of Defense Representative for Ocean Policy Affairs. Today, Crawford leads the 2,300 attorneys, enlisted and civilian employees of the worldwide Navy JAG Corps community. “We are always seeking young lawyers with an interest in public sector law,” he said. “We have an outstanding organization that is dedicated to service and committed to excellence.” Crawford plans to complete his tour of duty with the Navy in the Summer of 2018. “At this point, I haven’t thought about my future beyond that,” he said. “One of the options might be going back to a college or university in administration.” Reflecting on his Naval career, Crawford said, “I have always tried to make contributions to others. For me, life is about my faith, my family, my friends and myself. The deepest rewards in life come from putting others first.”
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A lifelong Catholic, Crawford’s other role models included Sir Thomas More, the independent thinker who challenged England’s King Henry VIII, and Massachusetts attorney John Rock, who in 1865 became the first black lawyer to be admitted to argue before the U.S. Supreme Court. “These were brave men of faith who believed in doing what was right,” Crawford said. “I believe that being a great lawyer is not just a matter of intellect, but character and faith.” Crawford is also an advocate of the importance of teamwork in sports, business, and the military. He played basketball from age three through college and continues to enjoy staying fit. In 1979, Crawford graduated from Belmont Abbey College with a bachelor’s degree in political science. He was commissioned through the JAG Corps Student Program, and in 1983 graduated from the University of North Carolina School of Law at Chapel Hill. “I wanted to use the law in a way that would have a broad impact,” he said. “I saw the Navy as that opportunity. It is a tremendous place to grow leaders. We have an enduring sense of teamwork, with a great history of officers and practitioners.” Crawford began his legal career as a defense counsel at the Naval Legal Service Trial Defense Activity, Naval Air Station Jacksonville. He later served with the Navy Personnel Command; the Naval War College; the Commander, U.S. Naval Forces Europe; the Naval Justice School, and Cruiser Destroyer Group 8. Before his appointment to flag rank, he served as special counsel to the Chief of Naval Operations, the senior staff judge advocate for the Commander, U.S. Pacific Command, and as the fleet judge advocate for the Commander, U.S. Seventh Fleet. He also
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Patricia A. Redmond:
Passion for Bankruptcy and Giving Back to the U By Richard Westlund
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atricia A. Redmond, B.A. ’75, J.D. ’79, has stayed closely connected to Miami Law throughout her professional career. She enjoys teaching bankruptcy courses as an adjunct professor, coaching the bankruptcy moot court team, and helping students deliver life-changing legal services through the school’s bankruptcy clinic. “I owe my professional success and satisfaction to my education at the University of Miami School of Law,” said Redmond, a shareholder at Stearns Weaver Miller Weissler Alhadeff & Sitterson, P.A. in Miami. “I learned so much at UM from the excellent professors, and met students who became my colleagues later in life. It’s just natural for me to want to give back to the school.” As a business restructuring practitioner, Redmond has helped a wide variety of clients navigate the complex issues involved with insolvency and bankruptcy. She has extensive experience representing creditors’ committees, secured creditors and debtors in Chapter 11 cases. For example, when Philadelphia retailer Alfred Angelo filed for bankruptcy in July 2017, Redmond went above and beyond the call of duty to help hundreds of brides whose gowns, accessories, and bridesmaid dresses were locked behind closed doors. With a niece planning a wedding in October, Redmond understood what the filing meant to the Alfred Angelo customers. She was flooded with desperate emails from brides, bridesmaids and mothers-of-the-bride.
“I felt I had to do something to get the dresses to these women,” she said. After taking a close look at the company’s inventory on a store-bystore basis, Redmond moved quickly to help the brides and their families. Working with former store managers and employees at two dozen Alfred Angelo locations, as well as with several attorney friends and former Miami Law students, Redmond gained limited access to the closed stores, even though some landlords had already changed the locks. She then arranged for local customers to come in quickly and pick up the gowns and accessories they had already purchased.
“I’ve never seen another bankruptcy attorney go through such lengths for people affected by a chapter 11,” said Maryland-based lawyer Maria Ruark in a recent Wall Street Journal article about the case. A friend of Redmond, Ruark helped hand out gowns and dresses at the chain’s Baltimore location. “She’s making miracles happen.”
BECOMING A PROBLEM SOLVER A native of Philadelphia, Redmond was considering a career in nursing when she enrolled at the University of Miami as an undergraduate. “Several family friends had attended UM, and felt it was an awesome school,” she said. “I thought it would be a good fit for me, and that turned out to be the case—just not in nursing.” Redmond majored in psychology
with a minor in sociology, and found her interest shifting to business and the law. “Law school was a wonderful experience for me, from studying cases to reading the statutes to taking part in classroom discussions,” she said. “I found my passion in the field of bankruptcy. I like solving problems and having to think on my feet. As bankruptcy attorneys, we get businesses when they are in crisis and have to make quick decisions about how to resolve the problems.” Since law school, Redmond has practiced bankruptcy non-stop in South Florida. She was the first woman president of the bankruptcy bar for the Southern District of Florida. In 1992, Redmond decided to join Stearns Weaver and has been with the firm ever since then. “Florida is the ’scamology’ capital of the world with so many fraud cases,” she said. “On the other hand, the traditional restructuring and reorganization practice changes with economic conditions. It has been declining in recent years, in part because many businesses are filing to resolve their problems in state courts rather than go into bankruptcy.” Redmond has long been an active leader in the American Bankruptcy Institute, serving as president in 201314. She is currently leading the ABI’s “40 under 40” initiative to identify the “rock stars” of the younger generation. “We want to be sure they stay engaged in this practice area,” she added. Redmond is also a past chair of the American Bar Association’s Business Bankruptcy Committee and was honored with the ABA Business Law Section’s Jean Allard Glass Cutter
Award in April 2017. She has been active in other professional circles, including serving as chair of the Federal Bar Association’s Bankruptcy Section, and as a member of The Florida Bar, Business Law Section. In keeping with her “giving back” philosophy, Redmond was a board member and secretary for the American College of Bankruptcy Foundation. She has also received a long string of pro bono service awards from the Dade County Bar Association, the U.S. Bankruptcy Bar for the Southern District of Florida, and the Florida Bar President’s Award for the Eleventh Judicial Circuit.
TEACHING AND COACHING
Along with managing her busy
bankruptcy practice, Redmond has been a teacher and coach with the School of Law since the 1990s. “Bankruptcy Judge A. Jay Cristol asked me to co-teach a bankruptcy summer course with him in 1999, and I’ve been an adjunct instructor ever since,” said Redmond. “I have been able to invite leading practitioners from around the country to give guest lectures at UM that enhance the learning experience.” For many years, Redmond has also coached Miami Law’s bankruptcy moot court team. “Our students have won the national title twice and are always a contender,” she said. In 2003, she was tapped into the Iron Arrow Honor Society, the university’s highest honor. A year later, Redmond founded the school’s Bankruptcy Assistance Clinic, now known as the Eleanor R. Cristol
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and Judge A. Jay Cristol Bankruptcy Pro Bono Assistance Clinic, thanks to the generosity of Judge Cristol. The clinic provides hands-on experience for law students while meeting a need in the community. The clinic is also supported by the Bankruptcy Bar Foundation, the pro bono arm of the Bankruptcy Bar of the Southern District of Florida and by the Bar “Put Something Back” initiative of Dade Legal Aid. Since the clinic’s beginning, Miami Law students have helped hundreds of deserving clients, like a school janitor who defaulted on his mortgage when he was hospitalized for diabetes and missed a payment. “The mortgage sued to take his home, while he was suffering from complications that included having his legs amputated,” Redmond said. “Even when rolling into court in his wheelchair, he was very positive about his life and served as an inspiration to us. Our students made sure that he could stay in his home and protected him from predators seeking to refinance his loan. He would just tell them, ’Send your papers to my lawyer,’ and that would be the end of it.” As a valued contributor to the Miami Law faculty, Redmond has twice received the Richard Hausler Golden Apple Award as the outstanding teacher (2003 and 2011), as well as the Minnette Massey Moot Court Award in 2010 and the Thomas Davidson Outstanding Alumni Award in 2009. “I love teaching, and the students remind me of why I became a lawyer in the first place,” she said. “I’m at my best when I’m doing things for other people.”
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Appellate Judge Adalberto Jordan: By Richard Westlund
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udge Adalberto “Bert” Jordan, J.D. ’87, believes in the importance of lifelong learning. Throughout his distinguished career in private practice and public service, including his current role on the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, Jordan has shared his insights and experience with Miami Law students. “I really enjoy teaching,” said Jordan, who joined the school’s adjunct faculty in 1989 and has led courses and seminars since then. “I like the interaction with the students, and getting back into the course material. I learn from them, just as they pick up new information from me.” Through the years, Jordan has taught courses on federal courts, federal criminal practice, capital punishment, and judicial writing. For example, he was the instructor in a 2012 seminar on the death penalty that looked at different aspects of capital punishment, federal habeas corpus jurisprudence, and how a death sentence is appealed in state court and then reviewed in federal court. As a teacher, Jordan encourages law students to hone their writing skills, and to develop a broad understanding of the law. "Knowing business law, for instance, can help a student become a better litigator in the future," he said. “Law students today are wrestling with many of the same career issues and decisions that I faced 30 years ago,” Jordan said. “What’s different and challenging is their ability to navigate the world of technology and bring those skills to the classroom and later to their practice.”
BECOMING A LAWYER Born in Havana, Cuba, Jordan came to Miami with his family in 1968. He quickly learned English in elementary school. In the second grade, he met his wife Esther. He also began playing baseball. Growing up, he combined baseball with his academic studies, and graduated from St. Brendan High School in 1980. “I became interested in the law from watching shows like ’Perry Mason’ on television,” Jordan said. “In high school, I took a number of law-related classes and was fairly certain about my career.” After high school Jordan enrolled at the University of Miami, and made the varsity team as a freshman under legendary coach Ron Fraser. “I was primarily a reserve utility infielder,” he said. As an undergraduate, Jordan majored in politics and public affairs in the College of Arts & Sciences, taking classes on topics like constitutional and environmental law. “I was already reading and briefing cases before I went to law school,” said Jordan, who graduated magna cum laude in 1984. “I got a wonderful education at Miami, both as an undergrad and as a law student.” At the School of Law, Jordan excelled in his studies, earning his J.D. summa cum laude. He and Esther married in his first year, and went on their honeymoon during the Law School’s winter break. In his third year at the school, Jordan served as Articles & Comments editor for the University of Miami Law Review, where he polished his writing and editing skills. His paper, “Imagery, Humor and the Judicial Opinion” analyzed the use of literary allusions, imagery, and humor by judges in their opinions.
“Writing for a law review is a great experience, but it’s different from the work you do as a lawyer or judge,” he said. “It’s more expansive and theoretical than the ’nuts and bolts’ aspects of writing a brief or an opinion.”
PRIVATE AND PUBLIC SERVICE
From law school, Jordan served as a clerk for Judge Thomas Alonzo Clark on the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, followed by a second clerkship for Justice Sandra Day O’Connor on the United States Supreme Court. In 1989, Jordan returned to Miami as an associate for Steel, Hector & Davis, and began handling litigation and appellate matters. Soon after being named a partner in 1994, Jordan moved to the public sector, handling appellate matters as an assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida. “I had been thinking about public service for some time, and with the opening of a dedicated Appellate Division in the office, this was a good time to make the move,” said Jordan, who was named chief of the division in 1998. A year later, President Bill Clinton nominated Jordan to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, and he was confirmed by the Senate by a 93-1 vote. While serving as a trial judge, Jordan continued to teach and advise the School of Law as a member of its visiting committee. He also began coaching the girls’ high school soccer team at St. Brendan’s, as he and Esther raised their two daughters. Today, Diana Jordan Zamora, J.D. ’15, is teaching at the Business Law Department at the University of Miami School of Business after clerking for Federico A. Moreno, J.D. ’78, chief judge of the U.S. District Court for the
Southern District of Florida. Elizabeth Jordan is now in her second year at the UM Miller School of Medicine.
APPOINTED TO THE APPELLATE COURT
In 2012, President Barack Obama nominated Jordan to the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. After Senate confirmation, he became the first Cuban-born person to sit on that court, which has jurisdiction over Florida, Georgia, and Alabama.
At a celebratory reception in his honor, Dean Patricia White called Judge Jordan “one of our most extraordinary alumni,” and said the Law School is “incredibly fortunate” to have him serve on the adjunct faculty. “He’s a great teacher, who is beloved by his students.” Today, Jordan sits as one of 12 full-time active judges on his court, supplemented by several senior judges, who handle about 6,100 cases in a typical year. “That’s about 50 percent more
than the 3,900 filings we received when I was a clerk here back in 1987-88.” But Jordan clearly enjoys the fast pace as well as the wide range of appellate cases that come to the court’s attention. “We do a lot of criminal work, as well as civil rights and diversityrelated matters, and might have a fraud case, an admiralty case, and a state insurance case, on succeeding days,” he said. “We are always moving and always learning something new.” F OR MOR E
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A Lifelong Learner
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PHILANTHROPY
Message From the President of the Law Alumni Association Detra Shaw-Wilder, J.D. ’94
Partner, Kozyak Tropin & Throckmorton, LLP
Sincerely,
Detra Shaw-Wilder President, UM Law Alumni Association Partner, Kozyak Tropin & Throckmorton, LLP
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id U know? The University of Miami Law Alumni Association was formed over 75 years ago on October 17, 1941. At the time, there were only 20 members. While small in number, the LAA actively engaged with the Law School and legal community through initiatives such as the Law School Scholarship Fund, passage of the Legal Aid Bill, and providing air-conditioning for the Miami-Dade Courthouse, which was certainly needed to dispense justice during the Miami summers. There have been many changes in the LAA since it began in 1941. We have grown and evolved in several ways, not the least of which is the number and diversity of our alumni. The LAA’s commitment to the Law School and the legal community, however, stands firm. Today, the LAA continues to make a positive impact through the active engagement and giving of our network of over 24,000 alumni. Since the Law School graduated its first class in 1929, our alumni have contributed $198 million to support the University of Miami, its law school, and law students. In addition to their philanthropic support, our alumni tradition of involvement in the legal community also continues. The commitment to the bar has never been more evident as it is today with our alumni at the helm of major national, state, local and affinity bar organizations: ABA President Hilarie F. Bass, J.D. ’81; ABA House of Delegates Chair Deborah Enix-Ross, J.D. ’81; The Florida Bar President Michael J. Higer, J.D. ’85; Florida Association of Women Lawyers , Miami-Dade Chapter President, Katie S. Phang, J.D. ’00; American Association for Justice President Julie Braman Kane, J.D. ’93; Gwen S. Cherry Black Women Lawyers President Nikki Lewis Simon, J.D. ’99; Miami Dade County Bar Association President, Jordan A. Dresnick, J.D. ’08; and National LGBT Bar Association President Dale Noll, J.D. ’12. As LAA president, my goal is to build on the LAA achievements and continue to grow the LAA as an active, engaged, and connected network of Miami Law alums committed to the Law School and the legal community. We will continue to grow the LAA scholarships, the Coffee Connectors program (which connects law students to alumni for informal mentoring), and the Dean’s Circle, which provides unique and exclusive networking opportunities for alumni who contribute $1,000 annually. We will also continue high quality networking and CLE events that afford our alumni the opportunity to network and advance their legal careers. To further our goal of connecting alums, we have formed a technology task force to implement better uses of technology to improve LAA communication with our member network. Our Young Alumni Committee has developed a strong regional network of recent law graduates and created exciting events such as the “YAC Happy Hours” and “Tables of 8” that have engaged many more young alumni than ever. We look forward to having even greater participation by our alumni both— "young" and “experienced” in the coming year. We were excited about our hosting of Homecoming activities that provided alumni an opportunity to engage and connect including: Homecoming Golf Tournament, honoring Miami Law alum and legal legend H.T. Smith, J.D. ’73, and UM Athletic honoree Jonathan Vilma, B.B.A. ’04, ESPN analyst and former ’Cane football player; Morning Spirits and Homecoming Breakfast, and the Classes of 1992, 1997, Moot Court, and BLSA reunion receptions. Finally, as we look forward to celebrating the 100-year anniversary of Miami Law, the LAA is embarking on a history project to gather stories and memories from our alumni network in advance of the anniversary celebrations. We look forward to gathering and then sharing the stories that track the amazing growth and progress of Miami Law and our alumni. We want to hear from U. Get Active. Get Engaged. Get Connected.
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Scholarship Honors Man at Forefront of International Transactions: George Harper, J.D. ’70
By Michelle Valencia
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fter attorney George “Rocky” Harper passed away in early 2017, members of his firm, friends, and family established an endowed scholarship at Miami Law as a tribute to Harper’s deep commitment to his alma mater. Harper, who was a co-founder of the law firm Harper Meyer Perez Hagen O’Connor Albert & Dribin LLP, was a leading attorney in the areas of international business transactions, inbound and outbound foreign investments, aviation, and banking. He was born in Cuba to American parents and brought up on the island. He had a lasting affinity for Cuba and Latin America. A 1970 graduate of Miami
Law, Harper served as editor-inchief of the University of Miami Law Review and was a member of several honor organizations, including Iron Arrow. He also served in numerous volunteer roles at the University of Miami, including as president of the Law Alumni Association and of the University of Miami Alumni Association. “My family and I are hoping this scholarship will allow my father to continue helping the students of Miami Law after his death, just as he did during his life,” said Steven Harper, an attorney at Harper Meyer. “Miami Law always held a special place in his heart. While he can no longer serve as an adjunct professor, board member, alumni president, or in any of those other capacities in which he served throughout his lifetime for the
University of Miami, and Miami Law in particular, this scholarship is a way for my mother, my brother, and me, all of whom have ties to the University as well, to continue his good works well into the future.” The George R. Harper Endowed Scholarship will provide financial assistance to a qualified law student who plans to focus on a Latin Americanbased international transactional practice after graduation. “Our ultimate goal for this scholarship is simply to be able to assist as many qualified law students as possible,” said Harper. “We would like to raise $100,000, which would allow us to grant an annual partial scholarship to a qualified law student each year to help them defray some of the costs.”
Endowed Scholarship Fund in Lit Skills Pays Homage to Ervin A. Gonzalez, J.D. ’85 By Michelle Valencia
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“This scholarship will ensure that Ervin’s memory will live on through the deserving recipients of this esteemed award,” said Zarco. “I encourage Ervin’s friends, colleagues, and students to join in supporting this scholarship.”
2012. He made a career representing individual homeowners against multinational corporations that sold toxic Chinese drywall, major oil companies that polluted the environment, and even the United States government that provided negligent medical care to members of the military. According to many, Gonzalez led some of the most significant personal injury class-action cases in Florida. “I would like to see the scholarship go to a student who has demonstrated not only exceptional trial skills but also the high ethical standards that Ervin exemplified,” said Guilford.
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iami Law alumnus Ervin A. Gonzalez, a partner at Colson Hicks Eidson in Coral Gables, was widely known for his trial advocacy skills. The litigation and trial skills adjunct professor died unexpectedly in June. “Ervin was one of the finest, most ethical trial lawyers that I have ever had the privilege of knowing,” said classmate Michael Guilford, J.D. ’85, a maritime and admiralty attorney in Miami. “He was always willing, if not eager, to give something back, whether to the community, the profession, or the University and was very giving of his time to help not only students but other lawyers.” To honor his memory and preserve his legacy at his alma mater, friends, colleagues, and classmates have established the Ervin A. Gonzalez Litigation Skills Scholarship to be awarded to an outstanding student in the Litigation Skills Program. “Ervin mentored, not only students in his classrooms but also younger and even older lawyers who did not possess the same level of technical trial skills as he,” said Robert Zarco, J.D. ’85, a commercial trial lawyer who concentrates in franchising, hospitality, and other complex civil matters. “He was a very confident, disciplined and proud man— dressed to a T, with a warm smile, and always focused on upholding the very high ethical bar required of lawyers.” In late July, Michael J. Higer, J.D. ’85, a former classmate of Gonzalez’s, and the Florida Bar Board of Governors, hosted a 5K Challenge run in his memory. Proceeds from the run were given to the Ervin A. Gonzalez, J.D. ’85 Endowed Scholarship. “I hope that this scholarship will instill in its recipient that same spirit of zealous, ethical representation of clients and a strong desire to give back to the community, the profession, and the University,” said Guilford. Gonzalez, a former president of the Dade County Bar Association, was named as Florida’s “Litigator of the Year” in
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Former Miami Mayor Looks to Future, Funds Scholarship for LL.M. Program FORMER UM PRESIDENT DONNA SHALALA WITH WITH FORMER MIAMI MAYOR MANNY DIAZ, J.D. ’ 80
By Carlos Harrison
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ormer Miami Mayor and Miami Law graduate Manny Diaz, J.D. ’80, is giving back to the school that helped launch his career—in the hopes of doing the same for others. It’s a gift based on personal experience, with a view toward the future. “The University obviously gave me the opportunity to do what I’ve done all my life and for that I am forever grateful,” he says. “I had to depend on financial assistance my first year, because we could not afford it. Had I not gotten the financial assistance, I can’t say if I ever would’ve been an attorney, but I certainly, at that particular time, I would not have been able to enroll. So that helped me and I want to help others that are sort of in the same position I was.” He has established the Manuel A. Diaz Scholarship Fund to support a student in the Robert Traurig/Greenberg Traurig Real Property Development LL.M. Program. “I’ve practiced real estate law since I started,” he says. “And urban design to me is an extremely critical area, I think for everybody, but I think more and more so for lawyers because whether you talk about transit issues or climate change, it’s just what our future is all about.” Diaz is a senior partner at Lydecker Diaz, a corporate and real estate law practice. He served as Mayor of the City of Miami from 2001 until he was forced out by term limits eight years later. He was president of the United States Conference of Mayors in 2008. During his two terms as mayor, Diaz gained national recognition, and praise, for bringing the city from bankruptcy to financial stability, and for successfully championing of several ambitious public and private projects that transformed Miami’s urban landscape. He is credited for rallying support for Midtown Miami, the Miami Marlins baseball stadium, the Port of Miami tunnel, new parks and museums. He is also responsible for historic preservation efforts that saw the creation of new historic districts and the preservation of the Bacardi complex of buildings, among others. He has received almost 100 awards and recognitions for his efforts, including being named as one America’s Best Leaders by U.S. News & World Report. As mayor, he was known
for traveling in a hybrid Toyota Highlander and for wearing a green tie to reflect his environmental consciousness. His hope is that the scholarship will help a new generation of lawyers to recognize, value, and promote comprehensive urban design. “Being able to use your expertise in the law to influence decisions regarding urban planning and how to make a city work, to make a city makes sense, to do things together outside of our cars, to do things that are going to help our environment I think are more and more important in terms of our social responsibility as lawyers,” he says, “not just drafting agreements and doing the typical lawyerly things but also sort of being involved and being an advocate in those areas.” Diaz has already given to the University in another way: His son, also named Manny, is the Hurricanes football team’s defensive coordinator.
Real Estate Expert and Former Reid Scholar Pays it Forward
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evin Dorse, J.D. ’87, recently created a scholarship at Miami Law to support the Robert Traurig-Greenberg Traurig Real Property Development LL.M. Program. The managing partner of the Theodora Oringher firm with offices in Los Angeles and Costa Mesa, California, has represented business and government clients for over 25 years, focusing on complex commercial and construction litigation. While at Miami Law, the Miami native, who received his undergraduate degree from Brown University, was on the editorial board of the University of Miami Law Review, a member of the Order of the Coif and graduated first in his class in 1987. “I had a great experience at the Law School and was fortunate to have a Reid Scholarship, so establishing a scholarship is a small way for me to give back and help the school attract and maintain the best students,” said Dorse.
“It was an invigorating and rigorous learning experience that gave me a strong foundation for my now 30 years of practicing law. I was fortunate to have that opportunity and am happy to help others get the same experience.” Dorse heads the firm’s Construction Disputes Group, specializing in heavy construction, tunneling, transportation, rail, highway, pipelines, and engineering disputes. He has been recognized as a Southern California Super Lawyer for each of the last 11 years. The Kevin A. Dorse Scholarship Fund supports deserving students pursuing an LL.M. degree in Real Property Development. The program offers an unparalleled faculty, which includes top professors and scholars in the field, as well as adjuncts who are partners in prominent law firms and general counsels of major real estate companies. “The very best students graduating from the Law School stack up against the best students from any school in the country, so I hope this scholarship will give those students the help and acknowledgment they deserve,” said Dorse.
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ark Raymond, J.D. ’83, the president-elect of the Law Alumni Association and member of the University of Miami’s Citizens Board recently established a scholarship at Miami Law. “My wife Arlys and I are very appreciative of all the Law School has done for my career,” said Raymond, managing partner of the Miami office of Broad and Cassel. Raymond is a member of the firm’s Management Committee and a co-chair of the Business Litigation department. He has been involved in complex commercial litigation for over 30 years and has experience in both state and federal courts, and in arbitrations before FINRA, ICDR, and AAA. His practice includes defending class actions, and he has been recognized as a Florida Super Lawyer for over ten years.
“My professors at the School of Law paved the way for my first four jobs: internships at Simpson Thatcher and Paul & Thompson, working with Roy Black during the school year and then joining, upon graduation, Tew Critchlow where I stayed for 20 years before joining Broad and Cassel LLP in 2005,” said Raymond. “Each of these opportunities was extremely rewarding, and I am most grateful for these opportunities, and the friendships forged at the Law School that continue today.” The Mark F. Raymond Scholar will be awarded each year at the discretion of the Dean to a worthy student at the Law School. “This scholarship is in appreciation for the School’s confidence in me and is a way of saying thank you, and hoping to make it a little bit easier for those coming behind me,” said Raymond. “We look forward to doing even more for our esteemed Law School in the future.”
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In January 2017, Miami Law’s Office of Law Development & Alumni Relations joined forces with the University of Miami Office of Annual Giving to launch an online Canefunder campaign in support of the Veteran Rights Project of the Health Rights Clinic. The Veteran Rights Project was created to address gaps in the legal aid community by providing pro bono management and direct representation for the homeless and disabled veteran population of South Florida. Gifts to this campaign contributed towards funding the project’s legal fellows who advocate for our most vulnerable veterans so they receive the benefits and access to care to which they are entitled.
LAW FIRM CHALLENGE
CANEFUNDER CAMPAIGN
Veterans Rights Project of the Health Rights Clinic
Launched in September 2017, the Law Firm Challenge will be an annual competition that seeks to strengthen the connection between Miami Law and its alumni. Its goal is to engage law alumni and create a spirit of friendly competition between law firms with multiple Miami Law alumni to compete for 100% participation giving to their alma mater. Donations to Miami Law from alumni at participating law firms in any amount, between June 1st and May 31, 2018, will count toward both the participation and total gift amount rankings. Gifts can be designated to any program, area, or scholarship at Miami Law. At the end of the challenge, the firms that reach 100% participation and raise the most funds will be recognized at a special ceremony and celebrated in Law Alumni Association publications, on its website, and in social media. If you would like your firm to participate in this year’s Law Firm Challenge, call the Law Development Office at 305.284.3470.
“The canefunder campaign was a great success. We surpassed the $10,000 goal thanks to the generosity of
many alumni and donors, including Dean’s Circle members Michael Diaz, Jr., J.D. ’86; Vincent Hennessy, J.D. ’71; Bruce Lyons, J.D. ’67; and Roberto Palenzuela, J.D. ’88,” said Anthony Stewart, director of Development & Annual Giving.
YOUNG ALUMNI SOCIAL
Alumni FUNDRAISING INITIATIVES For the fourth year in a row, the Young Alumni Committee successfully carried out its signature annual fundraising event. Event proceeds benefitted the Young Alumni Scholarship Fund, in support of student scholarships. Hosted at the chic Forge restaurant, which is owned by law alumnus Shareef Malnik, J.D. ’82, the event offers young alumni participants cocktails, hors d’oeuvres, a silent auction, and networking with old friends and classmates. The Young Alumni Committee continues to raise funds for this scholarship year-round. The event will be hosted once again February 16, 2018, so mark your calendars! Special thanks to the Young Alumni Committee Fundraising Chairs: David Chaplin, J.D. ’13, Brett Holland, J.D. ’14, Max Leinoff, J.D. ’13, and Kamal Sleiman, J.D. ’13.
MIAMILAW
ANNUAL PROGRAMS
Upgrade Your Knowledge and Get Your FL Bar Credits in Ethics, Technology, and More
FALL
• Ralph E. Boyer Institute Condominium and Cluster Development (CLE: General, Technology, Ethics/Certification in Real Estate and Condominium & Planned Land Development Law)
• Class Action & Complex Litigation Forum (CLE: General/Certification in Civil Trial)
SPRING • Heckerling Institute on Estate Planning
(CLE: General, Ethics, Technology/Certification in Wills, Trusts and Estates, Tax Law, Elder Law)
• Bankruptcy Skills Workshop
(CLE: General, Ethics, Technology/Certification in Business Litigation)
• Entertainment and Sports Law Society Conference
www.law.miami.edu/cle
(CLE: General, Ethics)
• University of Miami Law Review Symposium (CLE: General)
ON THE BASS BRICKS LL.M. students celebrate aboard Enchantment of the Seas during the Maritime Law LL.M. launch
International law expert JosĂŠ Enrique Alvarez gives the annual Henkin Lecture on Human Rights
UM employee Johnnie Mae Dawson receives a special award from the Law School student body
2017 Homecoming Golf tournament Unveiling of the Carolyn Lamm portrait in February 2017
Bar swearing in ceremony in September 2016 Miami Law student Jeffrey Mark Pierce performs the lead in UM’s The Drowsy Chaperone
Class of 1967 reunion with Dean White in May 2017 Bankruptcy Skills Workshop, June 2017
Mary Robinson receives an honorary degree during Law School commencement in May 2017
ON THE BASS BRICKS
Miami Law scholarship recipients at the Donor Scholarship Luncheon in November 2017
Professor Bernard Oxman after his lecture on the South China Sea
Professor Stephen Urice at the 2017 Artist Endowed Foundation Leadership Forum
President Julio Frenk, Professor David Abraham, Sandy Abraham and Dean Patricia White during Professor Abraham’s retirement symposium
THE LAST WORD BILL VANDERWYDEN AT PINECREST GARDENS
Photo by Jenny Abreu
By Catharine Skipp
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illiam P. VanderWyden III lives a blessed life. He has passion: in his shepherding of Miami Law students as assistant dean of Professionalism, in his work
in his church, with his family, in his travels, in music, and in engaging in political discourse. Even looking from the wrong end of the telescope, his passage makes perfect sense. The Miami native’s childhood is a sort of Moonrise Kingdom version. In 1936, his grandparents built Parrot
Jungle and Gardens, originally 40 acres of undomesticated hardwood hammock and cypress slough at the corner of Killian Drive and Red Road. Most of the family was involved in running the popular tourist attraction (once a nudist camp), and young VanderWyden grew up on the property, amid a F OR MOR E
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backdrop of pink flamingos and high wire performing parrots. Besides living in a cultural and ecological treasure, VanderWyden, and his three younger brothers, wandered both on and off property “getting into trouble,” riding bicycles all over Miami, exploring Matheson Hammock and the wildlands around Tahiti Beach (now Cocoplum). As a fourth grader, VanderWyden was a guest on “I’ve Got a Secret,” a 1950s and 1960s weekly game show. His “secret” was that the sulphurcrested cockatoo he was holding, named Butch, had kissed British Prime Minister Winston Churchill on his bald head during a visit to the park soon after World War II. Pinky, a salmon-crested cockatoo, was one of the several birds that young VanderWyden carried to the Florida exhibit at the World’s Fair in 1964 in New York. Pinky was (and still is!) a fair favorite as she rode a tiny bicycle across a high wire that ran from one end of the pavilion to the other during the multiple shows each day. Boating was a beloved family activity, even though his father had the ability to run aground in almost any part of Biscayne Bay as he didn’t believe in consulting navigational charts. They water skied and camped on Florida’s Ragged Keys. As if his home life weren’t interesting enough, VanderWyden was also a Boy Scout and stayed with scouting, achieving Eagle Scout status.
He commonly went on 25- and 50-mile hikes and camping trips with his scout troop. He and his brothers were part of the inaugural class at Epiphany Catholic School, less than two miles north of the VanderWyden home in the gardens. He still visits the church every morning before arriving at Miami Law by 7 a.m. After attending the parish school, he breezed through Palmetto High School and on to Gainesville for his bachelor’s and master’s degrees. At the University of Florida, the ever-curious VanderWyden indulged in an academic tasting menu—studying business and music, history and accounting, economics and political science. His interest in actively engaging in politics fell silent with the assassination of Robert Kennedy, for whom VanderWyden was campaigning, but music, history, and politics continued to stoke the slow burn toward law. “Constitutional law issues attract me,” he says, “especially as they relate to civil rights, voting rights, and equal protection.” He applied to law school during his senior year, and was accepted, but deferred. Instead, he chose to teach history, math, and music for three years on a military base in Germany, traveling the continent at every opportunity. “Ironically, I was very much against the Vietnam War,” he says, “but I gained a great appreciation for what those serving in the military do. These guys are our brothers and sisters, sons and
daughters. They deserve our support and respect as they do their jobs.” When he returned to Miami, he enjoyed teaching so much that he devoted most of the next decade to Miami-Dade County Schools. “I found it very rewarding,” VanderWyden says. “But, finally, I went to law school; it had been in my mind for so long.” For the next three years, VanderWyden taught by day, attending evening law classes, and studying, and helping his wife, Susan, rear their two daughters in between. In 1987, thenDean of Students Jeannette Hausler convinced VanderWyden to join the administration as the assistant dean of Students. Now 30 years and thousands of students later, he is still happy with his decision. He loves his work with Miami Law’s aspiring attorneys and with the alumni they become.
“I never imagined as a boy growing up down the street in a world filled with birds and tourists and adventure, that I would wind up four miles north,” says VanderWyden, “but it is every bit as interesting.”
what
YOUR
Legacy
WILL be?
A gift from your IRA will support Miami Law and provide special tax benefits for you. Help the Law School continue its vital mission well into the future by donating all or a portion of your retirement assets. It’s easy—just contact your IRA administrator to complete the beneficiary designation. 100% of your gift will go to Miami Law to support its goals. Naming your heirs as beneficiaries of your retirement assets can trigger taxes that may significantly reduce those assets. Consider making a gift of them to Miami Law and providing for your heirs in a more tax-wise manner.
If you are 70½ or older, a special tax provision allows you to donate up to $100,000 directly to the School from your IRA without income tax.
Thank you to these generous donors who have made gifts to Miami Law through their IRAs:
Be a part of our future!
THE HONORABLE A. JAY CRISTOL Judge Cristol, who received his A.B., J.D., and Ph.D. degrees from UM, is chief judge emeritus of the U.S. Bankruptcy Court of the Southern District of Florida. He has taught seminars and workshops at Miami Law on bankruptcy and was judicial director of the Law Alumni Association. Along with his late wife, he established the Eleanor R. Cristol and Judge A. Jay Cristol Bankruptcy Pro Bono Assistance Clinic at Miami Law, through gifts made through his IRA.
GARY GOMOLL, ESQ. Gary Gomoll, born and raised in Michigan, received a Masters of Laws in Estate Planning from UM. He was always grateful to UM for his degree, which was the basis of his career, and he gave back to the School by naming it as the beneficiary of his IRA. When he passed away, Miami Law received a significant gift, which will be used to fund scholarships.
If you have any questions, or to learn about other ways you can make a planned gift to Miami Law, please contact:
Cynthia L. Beamish
Executive Director University of Miami Office of Estate and Planned Giving 305.284.4342 cbeamish@miami.edu
or Georgina A. Angones
Assistant Dean for Alumni Relations and Development University of Miami School of Law 305.284.3470 gangones@law.miami.edu
University of Miami School of Law 1311 Miller Drive Coral Gables, Florida 33146
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