ALUMNI ASSUME FEDERAL EXECUTIVE, JUDICIAL ROLES

In recent months, President Joe Biden chose several alumni to fill highprofile positions in the executive branch and in the courts, in roles that require Senate confirmations.

ROBERT STEWART BALLOU ’87 (COL ’84) was confirmed to the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Virginia in March. He had served as a magistrate judge for the Western District of Virginia since 2011. Prior to joining the bench, Ballou was a partner at Johnson, Ayers & Matthews in Roanoke, Va., from 1992 to 2011.

M. TIA JOHNSON LL.M. ’02 was confirmed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces in December—the first Black woman to serve on the court. She had been a professor of law and former director of the National Security Law LL.M. Program at Georgetown University Law Center, where she had taught since 2017. Johnson was also a visiting fellow at Georgetown’s Center on National Security and the Law, and a Distinguished Fellow at the Center for National Security Law at UVA. In 2002, she became the first Black woman to be selected to the rank of colonel in the U.S. Army Judge Advocate General’s Corps.

PETER D. LEARY ’05 (COL ’00) was sworn in as U.S. attorney for the Middle District of Georgia in December, after serving in acting and then interim capacities since 2020. Leary serves on two Attorney General Advisory Committee of U.S. Attorneys subcommittees: Violent Crime, and Cyber and Intellectual Property. He has worked for the Middle District of Georgia as a prosecutor since 2012 and as its first assistant U.S. attorney since 2018.

VIJAY SHANKER ’99 was confirmed to the D.C. Court of Appeals in December. He formerly served as deputy chief of the appellate section in the Criminal Division of the U.S. Department of Justice since 2005. Shanker was previously counselor and acting deputy chief of staff to the assistant attorney general for the Criminal Division and senior litigation counsel in the Criminal Division’s fraud section at the DOJ. In 2017, Shanker won the Law School’s Shaping Justice conference award for prosecution.

JAMAR WALKER ’11 (COL ’08) was confirmed to the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia in February, succeeding Judge Raymond A. Jackson ’73, for whom he clerked. Walker had served as an assistant U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia since 2015. From 2012-15, he was an associate at Covington & Burling in Washington, D.C. Walker is the first openly gay Article III judge to serve in Virginia.

including those whose lives have been affected by the unpredictable challenges of MS.

MARY NASH KELLY RUSHER, managing partner of McGuireWoods’ Raleigh, N.C., office, can claim more than a century of family ties to UVA. Her daughter, Kelly, graduated as an undergraduate in 2016 and works in Raleigh as a social worker, but Rusher’s ties to the Law School stretch far back. She wrote that her father, Joseph Kelly ’35, “was a ‘real’ lawyer who argued in the U.S. Supreme Court in one of his last cases before retirement.” His father, Joseph Luther Kelly, was a member of the Class of 1889 and twice served as a Supreme Court of Virginia justice. The law roots go back even further: “His dad, John A. Kelly, rode the circuit in southwest Virginia in the 1800s. It was a good run of Kellys practicing law while it lasted!”

WILLIS P. WHICHARD LL.M. ’84, S.J.D. ’94 of Chapel Hill, N.C., wrote “A Consequential Life: David Lowry Swain, Nineteenth-Century North Carolina, and Their University,” published by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Library. Swain was the state’s 26th governor and served as president of UNC for more than three decades.

1985

Donelson’s Baltimore office, was recognized as a leading practitioner in the 2022 Chambers High Net Worth Guide, which covers the private wealth market. Mace earned Band 1 ranking in private wealth law.

CHRISTOPHER J. WINTON teaches estate planning as an adjunct faculty member at the University of Charleston in West Virginia.

1986

ANN PELDO CARGILE was elected president of the American College of Real Estate Lawyers. ACREL is the preeminent association of commercial real estate lawyers in the United States, focused on service to clients, colleagues and the profession. The college gathers lawyers distinguished for their skill, experience, and high standards of professional and ethical conduct in the practice of real estate law, who will contribute substantially to the accomplishments and achievements of the college, and to the best interests of the bar and the general public.

BRUCE HAMILTON retired from Teague Campbell in Raleigh, N.C., at the end of last year and has since started a mediation firm. His wife and classmate, JENNIFER WEISS, writes poetry and is a highimpact literacy tutor at a local Title I elementary school. Their son, Max, recently joined Davis Graham & Stubbs in Denver, and their daughter, Anna, is working on a Ph.D. in counseling psychology at Boston College.

KIM BOYLE was named in Benchmark Litigation’s 2022 Top 250 Women in Litigation, marking her fourth year on the list. The guide also recognized Boyle as a local litigation star and labor and employment star (see p. 92). Boyle has been a leader in both the legal field and the community for more than 30 years. In addition to serving on the boards of Touro Infirmary, Greater New Orleans, New Orleans Business Alliance, Amistad Research Center, Tulane University and Dillard University, she’s the vice managing partner of Phelps Dunbar’s New Orleans office.

JOHN BRIDGELAND is one of a bipartisan group of former directors of the White House Domestic Policy Council from the last three presidential administrations who joined together to co-chair Dignity.us, a bipartisan citizens’ initiative to address hate-fueled violence in America. The initiative invites citizens to be a part of addressing the country’s violence crisis by sharing their ideas and testimonials to uncover and spread insight and solutions.

CALVIN W. (WOODY) FOWLER JR. was recognized in Virginia Business magazine as a “legal elite” in civil litigation. Fowler practices with Williams Mullen in Richmond.

MICHAEL KUN is the national co-chair of Epstein Becker & Green’s wagehour practice group. He and his classmate SUSAN MULLEN have sold the film rights to their novel, “We Are Still Tornadoes,” and hope to see the story on screen before their 40th reunion.

DAVID L. DALLAS JR. was recognized in Virginia Business magazine as a “legal elite” in business law. Dallas practices with Williams Mullen in Charlottesville.

STEPHEN “STEVE” PERSHING joined Kalijarvi, Chuzi, Newman & Fitch in Washington, D.C., after a long career in civil rights litigation. From the late 1980s to the mid-1990s, Pershing developed and litigated civil rights and liberties cases as legal director of the Virginia ACLU and has served on its legal panel ever since. From 1996-2005, he was a senior attorney in the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, litigating for minority voting rights across the nation. After leaving the DOJ, Pershing served for four years as senior counsel at the Center for Constitutional Litigation, in Washington, D.C., a boutique firm aligned with the plaintiffs’ trial bar that litigates civil justice issues nationwide under the U.S. and state constitutions. For more than 20 years, Pershing has taught voting rights law as an adjunct professor at the George Washington University Law School, William & Mary Law School and American University’s Washington College of Law. From 2009-11, he was the first full-time director of the UCDC Law Program, an intensive Washington semester program for the law schools of the University of California, and in 2011, he founded a similar program of his own as a nonprofit consortium of law schools. Before joining KCNF, Pershing was a solo practitioner.

After 25 years of leading impact litigation and advocacy at the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, JONATHAN LOWY launched a new nonprofit, Global Action on Gun Violence. GAGV works with the international community to stop gun violence around the world, with a focus on preventing gun trafficking from the U.S. into other countries. GAGV is representing the government of Mexico in the first lawsuit by a national government against the U.S. gun industry and is counsel in a class action pending in Canada for victims of a mass shooting in Toronto. Lowy welcomes classmates to visit him in the Washington area. Email him at jlowy@actiononguns.org.

CATHERINE RINALDI has served as president of the Metropolitan Transpor- tation Authority’s MetroNorth Railroad since 2018, after serving in multiple executive positions since joining the authority in 2003. She is the first woman to hold the position of president. In early 2022, Rinaldi was named to serve concurrently as interim president of the MTA’s Long Island Rail Road. Rinaldi has overseen the final expansion of the LIRR’s service to Grand Central Terminal in New York City, an $11 billion project that opens new options for the region’s commuters.

1990

Though SCOTT CROSBY and GEORGE NOLAN ’91 were good friends at UVA Law, they had not seen each other in years before recently teaming up on a case. Together they successfully blocked the construction of the Byhalia Pipeline across a poor, mostly African American neighborhood in South Memphis, Tenn. Crosby is a member with Burch Porter & Johnson in Memphis, while Nolan is a senior attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center in Nashville. The story is chronicled in an episode of SELC’s podcast, “Broken Ground.”

JOHN P. EDGAR, a shareholder in Baker Donelson’s Baltimore office, was recognized as a leading practitioner in the 2022 Chambers High Net Worth Guide, which covers the private wealth market. Edgar earned a Band 1 ranking in private wealth law.

SEAN D. GERTNER was confirmed as a judge of the New Jersey Superior Court in November. Gertner was nominated by Gov. Phil Murphy and confirmed by the New Jersey Senate. Throughout his career, Gertner has worked in real estate law in addition to serving in multiple New Jersey governmental positions. He previously served as the municipal attorney for Lakehurst Borough and the zoning board attorney for Jackson Township. He has also served as the municipal attorney for Point Pleasant Beach, and as a public defender and conflict public defender in several Jersey Shore municipalities.