W&L Law - Summer 2014

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Winning Arguments BLSA sets the bar high for moot court and trial competitions

Recaps Graduation and Law Alumni Weekend

Dejure

26 Class Notes

DEPARTMENTS

2 In Brief

Law Alumni Weekend, alumni news and profiles

By the numbers

3 Dean’s Message

FEATURE

4 Discovery

Privacy and the Law: Big Data Means Big Questions

18 Cybersecurity,

Testing Our Character

Commencement, Professor Ann Massie’s farewell, moot court competitions, Q&A with Cliff Jarrett ’91L and faculty books and accomplishments

—> By St e ph a n i e Wi l k i n s o n

This page: The Class of 2014L. Photo by Patrick Hinely ’73 Cover art by Rebecca Logan

by the

In Brief

Numbers

© Washington and Lee University

Volume 14 No. 2 Summer 2014

Louise Uffelman ED ITO R

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Professors David Bruck and Judy Clarke are part of the defense team representing alleged Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. This is not the first time that Bruck and Clarke, who attended law school together at the University of South Carolina, joined forces on a high-profile death penalty case. They served as co-counsel for Susan Smith, who was convicted of drowning her two small children in South Carolina in 1995. Smith eventually received a life sentence.

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Jennifer Mero CL A S S N OTE S ED ITO R

Patrick Hinely ’73, Kevin Remington U N I VER S IT Y PH OTO G R APH ER S

Rebecca Logan, Mary Woodson G R APH I C D E S I G N ER S

Published by Washington and Lee University, Lexington, Va. 24450. All communications and POD Forms 3579 should be sent to Washington and Lee, Law Alumni Magazine, 7 Courthouse Square, Lexington Va. 24450-2519.

Periodicals postage paid at Norfolk, Va.

University Advancement Dennis W. Cross

The Class of 2014 secured seven federal clerkships, with placements in New Jersey, Kentucky, Indiana, West Virginia, Virginia and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit.

VICE PRESIDENT FOR UNIVERSITY ADVANCEMENT

Brian Eckert EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR OF COMMUNICATIONS AND PUBLIC AFFAIRS

Elizabeth Outland Branner DIRECTOR OF LAW SCHOOL ADVANCEMENT

Peter Jetton

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Summer renovations to the Law School include knocking down some exterior walls and adding 56 windows to bring natural light into a few of the clinics and the lower-level stacks of the library.

DIRECTOR OF COMMUNICATIONS FOR THE SCHOOL OF LAW

Julie A. Campbell ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR OF COMMUNICATIONS AND PUBLIC AFFAIRS

L AW AL U M N I A S S O CIATI O N

William M. Toles ’92, ’95L President (Dallas) J. Alexander Boone ’95L Vice President (Roanoke) Eric A. Anderson ’82L Immediate Past President (New York) Meg Moore Executive Secretary (Lexington)

WASHINGTON AND LEE UNIVERSITY

SCHOOL OF LAW Lexington, Virginia

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L AW CO U N CI L E M ER ITI Blas P. Arroyo ’81L (Charlotte, N.C.) Stacy D. Blank ’88L (Tampa, Fla.) Benjamin C. Brown ’94, ’03L (Washington) Katherine Tritschler Boone ’06L (London) T. Hal Clarke Jr. ’73, ’76L (Charlotte, N.C.) John A. Cocklereece Jr. ’76, ’79L (Winston-Salem, N.C.) Thomas E. Evans ’91L (Bentonville, Ark.) James J. Ferguson Jr. ’88L (Irving, Texas) David K. Friedfeld ’83L (Dix Hills, N.Y.) Betsy Callicott Goodell ’80L (Bronxville, New York) Rakesh Gopalan ’06L (Charlotte) M. Peebles Harrison ’92L (Kill Devil Hills, N.C.) Christina E. Hassan ’98L (New York City) Nathan V. Hendricks III ’66, ’69L (Atlanta) John Huss ’65L (St. Paul, Minn.)

Wyndall Ivey ’99L (Vestavia Hills, Ala.) W. Henry Jernigan Jr. ’72, ’75L (Charleston, W.Va.) The Hon. Mary Miller Johnston ’84L (Wilmington, Del.) The Hon. Everett A. Martin Jr. ’74, ’77L (Norfolk) Andrew J. Olmem ’96, ’01L (Washington) Diana Grimes Palmer ’07L (Des Moines, Iowa) Lesley Brown Schless ’80L (Greenwich, Conn.)

W. Hildebrandt Surgner, Jr. ’87, ’94L (Richmond) Stacy Gould Van Goor ’95L (San Diego)

Write

Now!

By Mail:

Elizabeth Outland Branner Director of Law School Advancement Sydney Lewis Hall Washington and Lee University School of Law Lexington, VA 24450-2116

By E-Mail:

brannere@wlu.edu

By Phone:

(540) 458-8191 All letters should be signed and include the author’s name, address and daytime phone number. Letters selected for publication may be edited for length, content and style. Signed articles reflect the views of their authors and not necessarily those of the editors or the University.

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Testing Our Character

Nora V. Demleitner, Dean

Difficult times bring out the true character of people and an institution. The challenges our Law School has experienced in the past few months were most aptly encapsulated on graduation day—from clouds, to a sprinkle, to a veritable downpour as our graduates received their diplomas, and yet more rain throughout our outstanding graduation speaker’s address. The Class of 2014 persevered through it all.

Together, with their parents, friends, family and our faculty and staff, they sat in the rain intently listening to Chris Wolf ’80L. Yet one more time they proved themselves resilient, mature, dedicated, composed and compassionate.

They are the modern version of the Washington and Lee gentlemen, which they proved after their classmate Lara Gass passed away so tragically. Intent on honoring her memory, they rose to recognize her when her brothers accepted the Memorial Presidential Degree from President Ken Ruscio ’76.

In addition to the tragic deaths of two students—one a college senior, the other Lara—our Law School has been facing the same challenges that are impacting all law schools today. Applications to law schools nationwide have yet again dropped this year, now amounting to a 45 percent drop since 2004, and about a 35 percent drop over the last five years. Law school admissions have become much more competitive as law schools have been trying to protect the quality of their incoming class and their budgets.

Diminished entry-level employment prospects, especially in high-paying —Nora V. Demleitner, Dean corporate law positions, have fueled negative publicity about law schools, leading prospective students to question the value proposition for a J.D. degree and ultimately triggering the drop in applications.

Despite these challenges, our alumni have been most supportive and contribute greatly to our strength. Often it is an alumna whose stories about her time at W&L have intrigued a potential applicant. Alumni have provided job leads and hired our students time and time again. Our alumni have put us in the position to fund scholarships for our students to lessen their debt burden. We are deeply grateful for this support, which is even more important in a time of challenges. It has helped make us the institution we are and allows us to nurture the values for which a W&L legal education stands.

Dean’s Message

L AW CO U N CI L Margaret H. Campbell ’81L (Atlanta) John R. Clark III ’80L (Bethesda, Md.) Malinda E. Dunn ’81L (Alexandria, Va.) Courtney Camp Enloe ’97L (Atlanta) Sally Pruett Falck ’80L (Phoenix, Ariz.)

Fred K. Granade ’75L (Bay Minette, Ala.) Nanette C. Heide ’90L (New York City) Herman J.F. Hoying ’03L (San Francisco) Bruce H. Jackson ’65, ’68L (San Francisco) Lauren Troxclair Lebioda ’06L (Charlotte) Susan Appel McMillan ’89L (Boise, Idaho) Val S. McWhorter ’66, ’69L (Vienna, Va.) Samuel A. Nolen ’79L (Wilmington, Del.) Douglas A. Pettit ’92L (San Diego) W. Brantley Phillips Jr. ’97L (Nashville, Tenn.)

Colin V. Ram ’08L (Washington) Moira T. Roberts ’93L (Washington) J. Andrew Robison ’02L (Birmingham, Ala.) Thomas L. Sansonetti ’76L (Greenwood Village, Colo.)

James S. Seevers ’97L (Richmond) Gregory N. Stillman ‘74L (Norfolk) Richard T. Woulfe ’76L (Fort Lauderdale, Fla.) Joseph S. Zasa ’92L (Dallas)

Our alumni have been most supportive and contribute greatly to our strength. Often it is an alumna whose stories about her time at W&L have intrigued a potential applicant. Alumni have provided job leads and hired our students time and time again.

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Discovery

2014 Commencement O

n May 10, Christopher Wolf ’80L, recipient of the Law School’s 2010 Outstanding Alumnus Award, delivered the commencement address. Wolf first urged the graduates to be ready for the professional opportunities that will present themselves, as they can have a profound impact on a legal career.

“You may have some idea what your life as a lawyer will look like, but if you are lucky your career will evolve in ways you cannot imagine today at the starting line.”

A civil litigator turned Internet data and privacy expert, Wolf used the path of his own career to illustrate this point.

He also extolled the importance of pro bono work and applying legal skills to fight for a cause as critical to developing a rewarding career as a lawyer.

Wolf’s final comments might seem strange coming from one of the world’s top technology lawyers. He expressed concern about the overuse of technologies like e-mail, texting and social media and how these tools may be

eroding personal relationships in our society. While recognizing that technology is an imperative for today’s practicing lawyers, Wolf reminded the graduates that the legal profession is defined by personal service and social interaction.

“All of you have a head start in this. What makes Washington and Lee really special is its emphasis on personal relationships and the importance of community,” he said.

“If you want to love your career as a lawyer, I urge you to take the culture of caring and of community and of personal relationships with you as you leave Lexington. I hope this for you because it will make you happy personally and will help you thrive professionally.”

“You may have some idea what your life as a lawyer will look like, but if you are lucky your career will evolve in ways you cannot imagine today at the starting line.”

—Christopher Wolf ’80L 4

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John W. Davis Prize for Law highest cumulative grade point average Kyle Adam Dolinsky Randall P. Bezanson Award outstanding contribution to diversity in the life of the Law School community Brian G. Buckmire and Dominik Jermaine Taylor

Casey Coleman, Patrick Bolling and Brian Buckmire, 3L Pledge Project co-chairs, presented Dean Nora Demleitner with a check to support the Lara D. Gass Memorial Fund and the Law Annual Fund. Read the story on the back inside cover.

Stats

☛ 159th Commencement ☛ 126 juris doctor degrees awarded ☛ 1 L.L.M. to Hussain Moin, a student from Afghanistan who

attended W&L through a U.S. State Department initiative promoting justice reform in Afghanistan ☛ 9,924 hours of volunteer service during this academic year, with 47 students completing 100 hours or more of service ☛ 0.5 inches of rain

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Awards

Virginia Bar Family Law Section Award excellence in the area of family law Jan May Fox American Bankruptcy Institute Medal excellence in the study of bankruptcy law Roman Brusovankin Barry Sullivan Constitutional Law Award excellence in constitutional law Kyle Adam Dolinsky and Lucas Russell White James W. H. Stewart Tax Law Award excellence in tax law Virginia Dawson Lane Thomas Carl Damewood Evidence Award excellence in the area of evidence Marcus Alexander Lasswell A. H. McLeod-Ross Malone Advocacy Award distinction in oral advocacy Brian G. Buckmire

From l. to r.: Samantha BrewsterOwens, Adrienne Adkins, Kathryn Humphrey, Matney Rolfe.

From l. to r.: Hussan Moin and Kyle Dolinsky getting ready to process.

Student Bar Association President Award recognition for services as president of the Student Bar Association Katherine M. Coleman ALI CLE Scholarship & Leadership Award best represents a combination of scholarship and leadership Laura Elizabeth Erdman Meghan Elizabeth Flinn Jan May Fox David James Knoespel Thomas Launceston Short Clinical Legal Education Association Award outstanding clinical student Heryka Rodriguez Knoespel

Commencement speaker Chris Wolf ’80L (left) with President Ken Ruscio ’76.

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Discovery

Fond Farewell “Tonight is bittersweet,” said Professor Brian Murchison at the retirement party of Ann McLean Massie. “It’s hard to accept that she has retired.”

On Massie’s final day of teaching, Murchison and others stood outside her classroom and applauded as she finished her last class. “I remember thinking, ‘She has been one of the great ones here, one of the truly great,’ ” he noted.

Massie graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Duke University with a B.A. in psychology and attended the University of Michigan for an M.A. in English language and literature. She worked at the Yale University Press as an editorial assistant before attending the University of Virginia Law School, receiving her J.D. and graduating first in her class. She was inducted into the Order of the Coif and received the DAR Award for Outstanding Student in Constitutional Law. A few years ago, she added a master’s in theological studies from Candler Divinity School at Emory University.

Massie practiced at Alston Miller and Gaines (now Alston and Bird), the Federal Trade Commission and Long and Aldridge. After a brief hiatus to raise her children, she became an adjunct professor of business law at Mary Baldwin in 1983. The next year, she clerked for her former law school classmate the Hon. J. Harvey Wilkinson, U.S. Court of Appeals, Fourth Circuit, who has reportedly said that from where he stood in the class rankings, he needed a telescope to see her.

So how did she end up at W&L Law? Massie wrote a letter inquiring about teaching law-related courses in the College, and the letter was forwarded to the Law School.

“I was on the Appointments Committee that year,” said Murchison. “We read her letter and C.V., and everyone in the room said, ‘Whoa—get her over here now!’ ”

Massie joined the law faculty as an adjunct, teaching Constitutional Law II and Criminal Procedure Investigation. In 1988, she moved to full-time tenure-track status and taught courses on Law and Religion, Constitutional Law, Constitutional Law Seminar, Health Law and Law and Medicine. She became a full professor in 1998. As well as serving as president of W&L’s Order of the Coif, as faculty advisor to the Journal for Civil Rights and Social Justice and on numerous committees, Massie also helped put together two events

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that are a shining example of the scholarly contributions she has made to the Law School.

In 1995, she collaborated with the Frances Lewis Law Center on a conference focusing on the bioethics of reproductive technologies. More recently, she spearheaded the Violence on Campus symposium. “I think it’s important to say how consistently and well she contributed to the intellectual life of the School,” said Murchison.

Massie has been equally devoted to her students. Her close friend and colleague, Professor Sally Wiant ’78L, said, “On our walks we would often talk about our students, and we would talk about writing. Not only is her own writing strong, but she also understands how to immerse students in their writing, forcing them to re-organize their papers or notes and to be more precise in their choice of language—and to say something. Like the rest of us, she despairs when students have not mastered the basics of grammatical construction, so she developed a two-page guide called ‘Some Writings Do’s and Don’ts.’ ”

Professor Mark Grunewald agreed. “When you think of Ann, the image that comes to mind is seeing her at her desk with a student, carefully critiquing that student’s paper.”

Massie is known for her aversion to technology, only recently mastering e-mail and printing cases from Westlaw.

She is an excellent cook and has thrown fabulous dinner parties with her husband, Kent. And she always seems to be looking for something—her glasses, a book, an article.

“Who would think that she could find exactly what she is looking for in her office among the piles of papers, often balanced precariously on top of each other, or in the stacks of papers in books, in chairs, on the floor?” asked Wiant.

“And yet, she does. When she is looking for something in her mind’s eye—it is always there. Her mind is anything but cluttered.”

Luckily for W&L Law, Massie’s run isn’t completely over. She’ll return this fall to teach a bioethics seminar and a constitutional law-religion class. Perhaps we will also hear her once again begin the Coif ceremonies with “in merry olde England.”

BY LAURE STEVENS -LUBIN

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he Journal for Civil Rights and Social Justice (JCRSJ) debuted in 1992 as the Racial and Ethnic Ancestry Law Digest (R.E.A.L. Digest), under the guidance of Professor Louise Halper. Over the years, its focus has expanded, providing a space to discuss issues concerning not only race, but also all underrepresented populations, and highlighting the intersections of ethnicity, religion, race, gender and the law. “These are very broad topics,” said Hernandez Stroud ’15L, next year’s managing editor. “We look for different pieces that speak to today’s most complicated social issues.”

JCRSJ is the oldest journal at W&L after the W&L Law Review and is a student-run publication. Second-year law students compete in the Write-On for JCRSJ and, if they are accepted, become staff writers responsible for checking that citations are accurate, up to date and in Blue Book form. Under the guidance of a faculty advisor, they also write a student note, a 25-page in-depth exploration of a topic that hasn’t been thoroughly covered in other law periodicals and that fits JCRSJ’s mission to introduce dialogue in the legal community on civil rights and social justice.

“As a staff writer, I got to write something I really cared about and focus on the argument I wanted to make,” said executive editor Ellen Marks ’14L. “I enjoyed the research and read about the California homeless population and the laws targeting them.”

Four student notes are published in each issue. “The third-year editorial board chooses which articles and notes will be published, which provides a strong incentive for students to do their best, since they are being evaluated by their peers and a faculty member,” said faculty advisor Ann Massie.

“The students have a lot of autonomy. They are in control of their budget. Basically it is theirs to run—the students are not micromanaged, nor are they meant to be.”

In the spring, the outgoing editorial board determines the new editorial board, which is composed entirely of thirdyear law students. “There is a quick turnover between boards, so there is not a lot of time for guidance,” observed Marks.

“But, there’s room for a lot of freedom. I voted on every single article published and voted on the symposium topic. Every voice is heard.”

Discovery

Addressing Socially Relevant Issues at the Intersection of Minority and Majority Culture

She added, “The Journal for Civil Rights and Social Justice brings forward progressive and ground-breaking ideas. The mission of the journal will always be of interest to me, and I plan to subscribe to it after I graduate. It can be a lot of work— you might have a 48-hour deadline and a 500-page issue to edit, but the topic is interesting. Law school is busy, but adding in something like the journal is always worth the time.”

“It is a big-time commitment for everyone involved,” said this year’s editor in chief, David Knoespel ’14L. “We owe it to our subscribers and the authors to make sure that every issue is of extremely high quality. In our most recent issue, we published six articles and three student notes. That issue exceeded 460 pages.”

JCRSJ generally publishes two issues a year, one of which consists almost entirely of papers from a yearly symposium that the journal sponsors. “From this scholarship, I am encouraged that we raise consciousness about societal issues, and we provide solutions to practitioners, academics and policy makers dealing with these issues,” Knoespel said. “This year, my staff completed three issues instead of the two that we normally do. Given how small our staff is, this is something that really makes us proud.”

Planning for the symposium begins as soon as the new editorial board is in place. “The symposiums are often interdisciplinary,” noted Massie. “Last year’s topic was Muslims in America and this year’s was Emerging Issues in Child Welfare.” The 2014 symposium will focus on the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

For the last symposium, Dominik Taylor ’14L was responsible for the travel and logistical arrangement for the panelists, who came from all over the world. Panels centered on The Boundaries of Abuse and Neglect; The Child Welfare System’s Response to LGBT Parents; Children and Immigration: The Need for Reform; and Lunch and Conversation: Practice in the Field of Child Advocacy.

“The symposium is a way to put ourselves out there for the undergraduate college and town to see,” said Taylor. “In law school, there is generally so much focus on the corporate side of law practice. For me, it was cool to bring people together to think about family law and child issues.”

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On the Job

law.wlu.edu/career

Cliff Jarrett ’91L joined W&L Law in February as assistant dean for career planning, overseeing a staff of five career-planning professionals and support staff. We asked him to bring us up to date on the Office of Career Planning and the legal job market.

Tell us a bit about yourself.

I graduated from W&L Law in 1991 and started my law career at the Charlotte office of Kennedy Covington Lobdell & Hickman (now K&L Gates), where I practiced for nearly 16 years in commercial and intellectual property litigation.

I then moved on to open the North Carolina office of Major, Lindsey & Africa, a legal recruiting and placement firm. I have a wife, Amy, and two children, Ella, 14, and Luke, 12.

I never imagined I’d be back at W&L, but it has been a great transition so far. As an alumnus, I know W&L Law is a special place with exceptional students, and I look forward to using my experience and relationships to make that even more evident to the legal market.

When you graduated from W&L Law what was the job search process like?

It was so much easier. Obviously the market is quite different now— if you look back just five or so years to the recession of 2008, you see a significant contraction of the legal market. Where I notice the biggest difference is in the number of employers that used to reach out to students, either through on-campus visits or other channels. Now, it’s the other way around—students have to be a lot more proactive.

We still have a good number of employers who want to interview our students, but, more than ever, it’s up to the students to proactively approach their job search, establish relationships and contact prospective employers.

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What’s the market like for summer internships?

Summer internships that pay are difficult to find. With the demand for legal services being so flat, law firms are hiring fewer 1L or 2L law students over the summer. So instead of summering at law firms, students are turning more to other alternatives, such as working for judges, public interest organizations or in-house departments.

Those venues offer great experiences and networking opportunities, but don’t necessarily translate into job offers immediately after graduation.

How has the Third-Year Program impacted employment opportunities?

From the outreach to employers I have done so far, the response to our curriculum is quite positive. In the current market, employers have higher expectations of law school graduates, and our Third-Year Program is viewed as doing a good job of meeting those expectations. It used to be that students were expected to be able to think and write like a lawyer and also to know at least some substantive law. Now students need to have all of that, plus practical professional skills, such as teamwork, leadership, cultural competency and rainmaking—to name a few. W&L’s third-year is seen by employers as better preparing its students in those areas.

Where are the best employment opportunities?

Geographically, markets that are strong in areas like energy, healthcare and real estate are growing markets (Houston, Nashville, Birmingham, Atlanta, parts of Florida). We’re also seeing an uptick in more non-tra-

ditional legal fields, such as finance, compliance, health care and regulatory sectors. Those are areas that are growing—and hiring.

What changes are you bringing to the office?

A goal we are working toward for both the employer and students is a more targeted and focused approach.

From the employers’ standpoint, they want our office to help with the matchmaking—assistance in helping to target students that are a good fit for them. Similarly, students are interested in certain geographies and practice areas, and they shouldn’t have to send out hundreds of résumés to see if an employer is interested. Historically, it’s been a bit of a haphazard approach for both sides. We’re working to bring more of an executive search model to the process, where our office will be able to help employers and students more efficiently find the right match.

How can law alumni help students?

You mean other than hiring all of them for summer and permanent position?! In all seriousness, in addition to any employment opportunities, students have a strong desire for real-world mentoring, and that’s where alumni can contribute a great deal. We want to encourage that and want alumni volunteers to be involved in those relationships.

We could use more direct help from alumni and are working to engage them both in direct job opportunities, but also in mentoring and networking relationships so that our students are prepared for life after graduation. As more alumni participate, those relationships will pay off for our alumni and for our students.

Jan Fox ’14L received

a prestigious fellowship from the Skadden Foundation. These highly coveted post-graduate fellowships provide funds to law students who want to devote their professional life to providing legal services to the poor, the elderly, the homeless and the disabled, as well as those deprived of their civil or human rights.

The Skadden Fellowship Program, often described as a “legal Peace Corps,” provides fellows with a salary and benefits consistent with the public interest organization sponsoring the law student’s fellowship application.

In Fox’s case, this organization is the Delaware Community Legal Aid Society (CLASI). She will work with the organization to expand services to immigrant victims of domestic violence, representing them in custody matters, protection orders and housing issues.

Fox’s interest in immigrant populations and domestic violence issues evolved over time. During college, she tutored ESL students in English, and while in law school, she has worked for Project Horizon, Lexington’s domestic violence shelter and prevention organization. She often helped staff Virginia’s statewide domestic abuse hotline, where she spoke with immigrant victims of abuse from across the commonwealth.

“I have always admired the tenacity of immigrant populations in the face of such huge obstacles,” says Fox. “Immigrant victims of domestic violence have a special vulnerability because they don’t know who to trust. They are often afraid if they call the police that immigration authorities will be contacted or that they will lose custody of their children.”

Fox sought out a summer externship with CLASI in her home state of Delaware after her 2L year, working in the agricultural regions near Georgetown in the southern part of the state. There she saw a growing population of mostly Hispanic immigrants with very little access to legal services.

“There is a scarcity of financial support from the state to expand legal aid services to the immigrant population,” says Fox. “That is why Skadden is so essential. My project would not be possible without them.”

Discovery

W&L Law Student Wins Prestigious Skadden Public Interest Fellowship

Two New Accolades for W&L Law The School of Law received two accolades recognizing

its program and faculty.

W&L Law ranked second nationally in a student satisfaction survey conducted by Above the Law, the popular blog that takes a behind-the-scenes look at the world of law. According to the site, the ratings are a “function of how schools were rated by current students in the areas of academics, financial aid advising, career services, practical/clinical training, and social life.”

W&L trailed only the University of Virginia School of Law in the survey.

Other law schools in the top 10 included Stanford, Vanderbilt, Berkeley, Michigan and Northwestern.

Also, for the second time in as many years, the faculty of W&L was included on the National Jurist’s list of the 25 most influen-

tial people in legal education. Joining some of the most prominent voices from law schools around the country, the W&L faculty was recognized for their visionary leadership in adopting the School’s third-year curriculum reform.

The National Jurist requested nominations from every law school in the nation. Its editorial team narrowed the list down to 50 and then asked 350 people in legal education, including every law school dean, to rate each nominee based on how much they influenced them in the past 12 months.

W&L has led the way on law school curriculum reform since announcing the third-year reform in March of 2008. After several years of partial implementation, the program is now in its third year of full operation.

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Study Abroad

Three Law Faculty Receive Fulbright U.S. Scholar Grants

Johanna Bond Johanna Bond will study access to

legal aid in criminal proceedings in Africa, with her research focused on mainland Tanzania and Zanzibar.

Bond will conduct her research January through June 2015 in partnership with scholars at the University of Dar es Salaam. She will also teach a course in human rights at the university while in residence there.

Bond says that within the past three years, there have been significant advances in the United Nations’ articulation of standards for the provision of legal aid around the globe, which in turn has led to an increased focus on implementation at national and regional levels.

“My project will assess the important work that is already occurring in Tanzania concerning access to legal aid in criminal proceedings,” explained Bond. “I will also seek to highlight remaining challenges to the implementation of the international standards, offer insights and strategies from other successful regional efforts to improve the provision of legal aid, and explore the role that academic institutions in the U.S. and Tanzania might continue to play in improving access to legal aid.”

A distinguished scholar in the area of international human rights law and gender and the law, Bond was a Senior Fulbright Scholar in 2001 and traveled to Uganda and Tanzania to conduct research that later resulted in her edited book, “Voices of African Women: Women’s Rights in Ghana, 10

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J.D. King

Jill Fraley

Uganda, and Tanzania.” Her recent publications include “Honor as Property” in the Columbia Journal of Gender & Law, “Victimization & the Complexity of Gender in Armed Conflict” in the Santa Clara Journal of International Law, and “A Decade After Abu Ghraib: Lessons in ‘Softening Up The Enemy’ and Sex-based Humiliation” in the Journal of Law and Inequality.

defender system, leading scholars have examined the motivations, challenges and goals of lawyers occupying these positions in order to improve indigent criminal defense,” said King.

“In Chile, I will explore the extent to which the structural changes have led to corresponding cultural changes in the nature of criminal defense and in the attitudes and practices of Chilean public defenders.”

J.D. King, director of W&L’s Crimi-

During the 2014-15 academic year, Jill Fraley will be at Trinity College in Dublin conducting research on the development of property law in colonial Scotland and Ireland.

A legal historian who focuses her research on property and environmental issues, Fraley is currently at work on a book manuscript titled “The Tragedy of the Wastes: A History of LeastValued Properties and the Making of Nation-States in Eighteenth Century North America.” Her research on England’s colonization of Scotland and Ireland will explore how Great Britain transported its own property law system as it expanded to other territories, including North America.

“By uncovering a history of how English colonists employed the concept of waste within Ireland and Scotland prior to the colonization of North America and other distant lands, this project will elucidate the evolution of their strategy for land claiming, particularly as European powers increasingly competed for territory,” said Fraley.

nal Justice Clinic, will travel to Chile to study the evolving role of public defender there. He will work on his project during fall 2014 at the Universidad Viña del Mar in Chile.

“Nowhere have the structural changes to the criminal defense system been more pronounced than in Chile over the past quarter-century,” said King. “The 1988 plebiscite ending the Pinochet dictatorship and allowing for the restoration of democracy ushered in a new movement to modernize and reform many aspects of the functioning of the judicial system.”

King noted that in a relatively short period of time, Chile undertook a radical overhaul of its criminal justice system, reforms that were just one part of the broader transition toward a restoration of democracy in Chile. His research will also explore the culture of criminal defense within this rapidly evolving system and compare this with public defender organizations in the U.S.

“In studying our own public

On April 2 the School of Law hosted the U.S. Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims in the Milhiser Moot Court Room.

During the session, the court heard arguments in the matter of Juliet T. Tagupa v. Secretary of Veterans Affairs. Mrs. Tagupa filed a claim for benefits in 2008, contending that her husband, who died in 1993, had served with the Filipino guerillas in the service of the Armed Forces of the United States during World War II. The Manila, Philippines, VA regional office (RO), acting on information from the National Personnel Records Center (NPRC), denied the claim because there was no record of Mr. Tagupa’s service in the Philippine Commonwealth Army, including the recognized guerillas in service of the U.S. Armed Forces.

After the RO’s denial, Mrs. Tagupa submitted her husband’s identification card for the Anderson Fil-American Guerillas that noted that he had active participation in the anti-Japanese resistance movement. She also submitted affidavits from comrades testifying to his service and informed the VA that

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May It Please the Court

L. to r.: Judge William Moorman, Judge Bruce E. Kasold, Judge Robert N. Davis and Associate Dean Sam Calhoun.

the previous requests for service verification sent to the NPRC used the wrong service number for her husband. The VA then submitted another request to NPRC that included Mr. Tagupa’s Fil-American Guerilla identification card and affidavits from his comrades.

The NPRC responded that this information did not warrant a change of its previous determination. On appeal, the Board of Veterans’ Appeals determined that Mr. Tagupa did not have the requisite active military service for status as a veteran and denied Mrs. Tagupa VA benefits.

W&L Tax Clinic Receives IRS Grant for Seventh Straight Year

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or the seventh straight year, the Tax Clinic at W&L Law received a matching grant from the Internal Revenue Service’s Low-Income Taxpayer Clinic program (LITC).

The grant of $75,000, the largest in the clinic’s history, will help fund the clinic for the 2014 calendar year.

“It is an honor to continue in the LITC program along with a nationwide network of clinics that provide low-income taxpayers access to pro bono legal representation before the Internal Revenue Service,” said Michelle Drumbl, associate clinical professor of law and director of the Tax Clinic. “The clinic provides an excellent opportunity for our students to advocate for members of our community and make a meaningful difference.”

Law students working in the clinic provide free legal

representation to low-income taxpayers in resolving their controversies with the Internal Revenue Service. The clinic is not involved in routine tax preparation, but the students do help with audits and a wide array of collections issues. Students are responsible for their clients in every aspect of representation, an experience that helps prepare them for whichever field of practice they choose.

The Tax Clinic serves the entire state of Virginia. At least 90 percent of the clients represented by the clinic are low-income, meaning their incomes do not exceed 250 percent of the Federal Poverty Guidelines published annually by the Department of Health and Human Services. For example, a family of four making less than $57,625 per year is eligible to use the clinic’s services.

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The competitors, from l. to r.: Yasin Amba ’16L, Brian Buckmire ’14L, Markus Murden ’16L, Samantha Brewster-Owens ’14L, Teressa Campbell ’14L, Josh Laguerre ’14L, Tunde Cadmus ’15L.

Winning Arguments

in moot court and mock trial competitions, blsa sets a high bar

BY LAURE STEVENS -LUBIN

“The national competition was a whirlwind. It is really a test of stamina—it is just run, run, run—you have a two-and-a-half-hour trial, then a half-hour break, then another two-and-a-half-hour trial. We were there with schools like Harvard. When you beat them, there’s a great sense of satisfaction.”

—Samantha Brewster-Owens ’14L

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hree years ago, Kassandra Haynes ’13L and Curtis Wilson ’13L became the first W&L students to compete in the National Black Law Students Association’s Frederick Douglass Moot Court competitions, finishing as first runners-up in the mid-Atlantic regional competition (2011–2012). “They went on to nationals, making it to the quarter finals. It was an incredible first year,” recalled faculty advisor Brian Murchison. “They lit the fire for the moot court competition.”

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The following year, Brian Buckmire ’14L and Teressa Campbell ’14L were also first runners-up in the regionals, going on to the nationals and making it to the quarterfinals. This year, the duo helped coach the School’s two teams, which took first and second place in the regional competition. Bret Reed ’14L and Hernandez Stroud ’15L took regional championships, and Reed was named Best Oralist, besting Stroud by only two points. Hector DeJesus ’16L and Terence Austin ’15L finished as first runners-up. Both teams went

on to the nationals, where Stroud and Reed were eliminated after

Preparing for the moot court competition is grueling. In the the first round, but received the Best Respondent’s Brief award. fall semester, Murchison coaches the students in the fundamentals

W&L’s BLSA has made an equally strong showing in the Thurof writing an appellate brief. Then they receive the hypothetical good Marshall Mock Trial competitions. “Every year, the teams case, for which they choose a side to argue. During this period, have been more and more successful. That progression has been Murchison is not allowed to see their work or give any advice. They really exciting, particularly at a school with such a small minority have to meet deadlines and follow precise rules for the format of population as W&L,” said Maisie the brief. In the second semester, Osteen ’14L, who, along with they prepare for the oral advocacy Dominik Taylor ’14L, competed component. “Students don’t just “The competition is intoxicating and nerve-wrackthe first two years—making it to read a brief, they adapt the arguing. When it goes bad, it is traumatic; when it goes the national competition—and ment to the oral phase, preparing coached this year’s team. This to appear before a panel of judges,” well, it is thrilling.” year, W&L garnered the top two Murchison explained. “I schedule —Bret Reed ’14L spots in the regional competition: practice rounds before faculty who Joshua Laguerre ’14L, Christina have read the problem, and they Sacco ’15L, Markus Murden ’16L are given the briefs.” He noted that and Samantha Brewster-Owens ’14L were champions, and Tunde these rounds can last up to three hours. “The faculty pepper the Cadmus ’15L, Emelia Hall-Tuisawau ’16L, Ryan Redd ’15L and students with questions, interrupt them and press them to clarify. It Yasin Amba ’16L were first runners-up, trailing by only one point. is a rigorous and demanding process, but is a privilege to work with Both teams competed in the nationals. “Professor [Beth] Belmont them.” is amazing—a great coach and great mentor; she’s the reason we

Murchison also tries to bring in faces students won’t know, made it to the nationals three years in a row,” said Cadmus. such as University Counsel Leanne Shank and Executive Director of

BLSA’s strong showing is a direct result of the supportive Alumni Affairs Beau Dudley ’74, ’79L. coaching they receive from their advisors, Brian Murchison

“Brian is an icon at the Law School, and if he thinks I can help, (moot court) and Beth Belmont (mock trial), as well as other I’ll do it,” said Dudley. “That is the W&L story: we all pitch in where faculty and their own peers. “I consider it an honor to be asked to we can. Besides, it is thoroughly enjoyable and takes me back to the advise the students and was delighted to help with the coaching,” days when I competed in moot court as a student. The best part is said Murchison. being on your feet and being questioned by the judges. You either

After competing the last two years, Campbell appreciated love it or you want to flee,” he laughed. “keeping a foot in the moot court world, without taking on all the

“The competition is intoxicating and nerve-wracking,” Reed stress. For the first time, we had two teams arguing on opposite observed. “When it goes bad, it is traumatic; when it goes well, it sides go on to the nationals. It was my job to keep them tight, is thrilling. It is the ultimate challenge—you have to really know including coaching them on enunciation, clarifying their argument the law and be able to recall and articulate it in front of the judge and slowing them down when they spoke too fast. It was nice to be quickly and persuasively. And there is an endurance aspect to the on the other side, helping them to prepare.” competition, with three or four rounds in a day.”

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Members of BLSA celebrate their advancement to nationals in the regional moot court and mock trial competitions. They placed second and third in their respective competitions.

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The BLSA moot court and mock trial teams captured first and second place at regionals, once again advancing to nationals.

Reed’s teammate, Stroud, concurred: “The process is very intense and brings out the best in people.” Aside from the real-world experience, learning to construct sound arguments and respond to tough questions, Stroud appreciated getting to know his teammate.

“I didn’t know Bret at all before the competition,” he said. “We went to the moot court tryouts and were placed on teams. We have very different styles and approaches to our work, but ultimately it was a successful partnership. That in and of itself was valuable, the personal experience of working closely with someone who is very different from you. I think of him very highly.”

“The experience of being a minority law student can be challenging, and finding community daunting,” said Belmont. “The work they do together builds a community for them.” BrewsterOwens added, “The mock trial team became a family with all the time we spent together.”

The sense of community coalesces in the fall, when the problem is published. From then until February, the students develop their case. Usually the problem is fairly sophisticated, raising significant issues related to pretrial practice. “They learn various techniques for direct examination, cross-examination, colloquy with the court and opposing counsel—they need to master a lot,” said Belmont.

“I think the students get an extraordinary amount out of it from a purely pedagogical standpoint—it demands that they achieve mastery of a wide range of substantive information. They need to be able to integrate that substance into a situation that is plastic and slippery, in which you can’t predict which witnesses will be called,” Belmont continued. Before the start of spring semester, she has her teams return to campus for a four- or five-day boot camp. “We order food in, and we have a period of focused attention,” she said. “They really bond during that time—as colleagues and friends. Students are absorbed in taking apart the problem.

They need to be ready to think about it carefully from both sides.”

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“At the competition, they let you know which side you will be arguing on, prosecution or defense, so you have to be prepared for both,” Cadmus elaborated. At the beginning of the spring semester, students practice every day, including weekends. “It is a substantial time commitment,” Belmont said. “My colleagues are terrific to the moot court teams—they are generous with their time in judging the moot court scrimmages. However, the students enjoy experiencing their own evolution into an effective, persuasive force. The teams become committed to one another, in a way that I hope will be models of close professional relationships going forward.”

After the regionals, the students had two weeks to prepare for a case that had changed 75 percent for the national competition.

“We had new witnesses and new charges,” explained Brewster-Owens, who was the defense attorney and gave the opening statement.

She had to be ready for any possible scenario, so she had prepared and memorized three different 10-minute speeches. “The national competition was a whirlwind. It is really a test of stamina—it is just run, run, run—you have a two-and-a-half-hour trial, then a halfhour break, then another two-and-a-half-hour trial,” she said. “We were there with schools like Harvard. When you beat them, there’s a great sense of satisfaction.”

Osteen and Taylor traveled with the teams as coaches to the regional and national competitions. “As a coach, it was cool to use the things I had learned in competition—tips on some of the pitfalls, how to use body language, how to really advocate, things you don’t learn in a classroom—and share them with the teams this year,” said Taylor. “We solved problems, worked hard, joked and laughed,” said Osteen. “We saw each other at our best and worst.”

“The gift I can give to them is the opportunity to connect with their colleagues,” Belmont added, “and in return they give me a gift in the form of their willingness to take risks and make themselves vulnerable. The experience of watching them evolve and grow and change into an effective group of young lawyers is irreplaceable.”

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he inaugural graduating class of the Virginia Tech Carilion Medical School received some special training from W&L Law faculty in how to be an effective witness.

The presentation, led by Black Lung Clinic director Tim MacDonnell, was titled “Law and Medicine: Physicians and the Courtroom,” and focused on the events most likely to bring a doctor into a courtroom. One of these is a malpractice suit, which most doctors are likely to face at some point in their career, but MacDonnell also addressed the role of doctors as expert witnesses in a variety of scenarios.

MacDonnell recounted the important role doctors have played in his experiences as both a prosecutor before joining W&L, and in his current work representing coal miners and their surviving spouses as they seek black lung benefits.

“I have been running the clinic for more than five years, and each case can be fairly described as a battle between doctors,” said MacDonnell. “Both as a prosecutor and a plaintiff’s attorney, I have seen how important doctors are in litigation.

Sometimes it does not matter who is the better doctor or which doctor knows more. A big part of a doctor’s effectiveness will turn on how well they perform as a witness.”

In his presentation, MacDonnell reviewed effective oral communication techniques involving eye contact, facial expressions and gestures. He also cautioned the medical students to avoid the use of medical terminology, as this often indicates that the doctor is uncomfortable. The expert witness’s primary role, MacDonnell told them, is to be a teacher.

Joining MacDonnell were Mary Natkin, Jon Shapiro and Dan Evans, who ran the students through direct and cross examination exercises.

Natkin said that the medical students were quick learners when thinking through the issues they will face in practice when asked to provide an opinion in a case.

“I think that doctors feel challenged when lawyers ask them questions about the foundations of their opinions, when it is an essential part of the litigation process,” said Natkin.

“This was a start to help them consider how to present themselves in a legal setting.”

Discovery

Preparing New Doctors for the Witness Stand

“Both as a prosecutor and a plaintiff’s attorney, I have seen how important doctors are in litigation. Sometimes it does not matter who is the better doctor or which doctor knows more. A big part of a doctor’s effectiveness will turn on how well they perform as a witness.”

—Tim MacDonnell, Black Lung Clinic director

W&L Law Student Returns Home to Afghanistan to Promote Human Rights Hussain Moin LL.M ’14L be-

lieves he has the chance to affect a whole country’s well-being.

Moin left his hometown of Kabul, Afghanistan, last year when he won a scholarship through the Public Private Partnership Program for Justice Reform in Afghanistan to pursue his master’s in U.S. law at W&L. He arrived eager to gain valuable experience to help the people of Afghanistan.

“My country needs a young generation of professionals to do something for them,” Moin said, pointing to development, peace, capacity building and protection of human rights as areas that need improvement.

Moin is no stranger to law or to bettering his country.

After graduating from law school at Kabul University in 2003, he worked as a journalist in Afghanistan, producing investigative reports. In 2007, he joined the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC), where he monitored human rights in Afghanistan, supporting victims while pressuring the government to respect and protect human rights.

After this year, Moin plans to rejoin the AIHRC in Afghanistan. He said that earning his LL.M. degree will help him “provide services for the Afghan people and protect and promote human rights in Afghanistan.”

Moin believes that higher education is crucial to capacity building in Afghanistan, and that to be a good citizen he must work to advance his country.

“A part of our life does not belong to us,” he said. “It belongs to our community.”

—Michael Agrippina ’15

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David Baluarte, director of the Im-

Faculty Accomplishments

migrant Rights Clinic, was named as affiliate faculty for the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program in the College. He was elected to the board of directors of the ACLU of Virginia.

He spoke at Harvard’s Keeney School, where he debated the secretary of Human Rights of the Dominican Republic on the discriminatory effect of a recent decision of that country’s Constitutional Court; presented on the problem of statelessness in the U.S. at the Boston College School of Law to discuss a draft Convention on the Rights of Expelled Persons; and presented on his teaching innovations at the annual meeting of the Association of American Law Schools and the bi-annual Immigration Law Teachers Workshop.

Johanna Bond received a Fulbright

U.S. Scholar Grant to Africa (see p. 10).

She presented at the Law & Society conference on child marriage in subSaharan Africa, and she published “Feminist Approaches to International Law—The Legacy of Two Decades of Feminist Advocacy,” “Domestic Violence in Africa: Lessons for the Global North,” “Honour as Familial Value” and “CEDAW in Sub-Saharan Africa: Lessons in Implementation.”

Christopher Bruner presented on the

role of small jurisdictions in cross-border corporate and financial services at the American Society of Comparative Law’s Annual Comparative Law Workin-Progress Workshop at the UCLA School of Law. He also participated in a workshop discussion on corporate purpose sponsored by the Aspen Institute Business & Society Program and the Cornell University Law School, and spoke on competing theories of corporate governance and their implications for judicial review of director decisions at a conference sponsored by the Lowell Milken Institute for Business Law and Policy at the UCLA School of Law. His book, “Corporate Governance in the Common-Law World: The Political Foundations of Shareholder Power” (Cambridge University Press, 2013), has garnered praise in reviews published in the Texas Law Review and at PrawfsBlawg, which hosted an online book club on the book. He is a member of the Scholarship Advisory Group to the 16

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Younger Comparativists Committee of the American Society of Comparative Law and was elected to serve as a member of the executive committee for the Association of American Law Schools’ Section on Business Associations.

Mark Drumbl published book chap-

ters and articles on the criminality of mass violence, child pirates and due process rights in international law.

Drumbl gave lectures on international legal education at the Association of American Law Schools Annual Meeting; on sentencing in international criminal law at the American Society of International Law Annual Meeting; and delivered a keynote lecture on Polish post-war prosecutions of war criminals at a conference in Hong Kong. He served as external reviewer on a Ph.D. dissertation for the National University of Ireland and as a peer reviewer for the American Council of Learned Societies. Over the summer, he will participate in events at the University of Copenhagen Faculty of Law and serve as visiting senior fellow at Monash University School of Law in Melbourne, Australia to teach a course on Victims, Law and Mass Atrocity.

Josh Fairfield, along with Erik Luna,

published “Digital Innocence” in the Cornell Law Review. He joined the advisory board of the Future of Privacy Forum, was inducted into the American Law Institute and joined the Members Consultative Group for the Restatement, Third, of Information Privacy Principles. He presented at the Digital Asset Transfer Authority annual meeting on consumer protection in the bitcoin ecosystem and on ethics in transnational virtual worlds studies at the IEEE International Symposium on Ethics in Engineering, Science and Technology.

Jill Fraley received a Fulbright U.S.

Scholar Grant to Trinity College in Dublin (see p. 10). She published “Invisible Histories & the Failure of the Protected Classes” in the Harvard Journal on Racial & Ethnic Justice and contributed to the New York Times “Room for Debate” discussion on natural disasters and acts of god.

Susan Franck was elected to the

American Law Institute. She published “Using Investor-State Mediation Rules to Promote Conflict Management” and “Investor-State Mediation” in the ICSID Review. She presented at the University of Virginia on development and investor-state arbitration and at the World Trade Institute in Bern, Switzerland, on behavioral economics and international law.

Mark Grunewald served as an expert

researcher for the Administrative Conference of the United States, conducting a study of Freedom of Information Act requests and resulting litigation. The ACUS adopted Grunewald’s recommendations, which included developing better resources to resolve FOIA disputes through mediation rather than litigation.

Lyman Johnson published “The

Dwindling of Revlon” (with Rob Ricca ’06L) in the Washington and Lee Law Review; “M&A as One Component of a Business Planning Course” (with Sean Leuba ’97L) in the American University Business Law Review; “Dynamic, Virtuous Fiduciary Regulation” in Festschrift, in honor of Christian Kirchner; and “Hobby Lobby and Corporate Law in the Supreme Court” for an online symposium on “The Conglomerate” blog. He presented “Love and Corporate Theory” at the Pepperdine University conference on Love and Law; commented on a scholarly paper at the George Washington University C-LEAF Junior Scholars conference; and “The Law’s Relationship to Social Enterprise and Benefit Corporations” at the University of St. Thomas.

Timothy Jost continues to blog on

Affordable Care Act implementation issues at “Health Affairs,” where six of his posts were among the 15 most read posts for 2013 and four were among the top 10 for the first quarter of 2014. He published “Beyond Repeal—A Republican Proposal for Health Care Reform,” and “Obama’s ACA Delays— Breaking the Law or Making It Work?” (with Simon Lazarus) in the New England Journal of Medicine, and “SelfInsurance for Small Employers Under the Affordable Care Act Federal and State Regulatory Options” (with Mark

J.D. King received a Fulbright U.S.

Scholar Grant to Chile (see p. 10). He will spend the fall at the Universidad Viña del Mar in Chile, studying the evolving role of the public defender as the country’s criminal justice system continues its transition from an inquisitorial system to a more adversarial system like the U.S. Professor Jon Shapiro organized the symposium False Confessions, focusing on the Central Park Five and the Norfolk Four cases. “Dateline” NBC producer Carol Gable and anchor Keith Morrison were among the attendees.

In the wake of the NSA eavesdropping affair, Russell Miller has been a frequent commentator in the German media, discussing the impact of the Snowden revelations on European and American relations.

In addition, he appeared as an expert witness before the German parliament committee investigating the NSA activities. He has also organized a program at the University of Freiburg for further discussions on the NSA affair between German and American scholars.

case. He also lectured on the recess appointments case to the W&L Philadelphia and Wilmington alumni chapters, participated in the local Theology on Tap series with his talk, “On Magnanimity”; and lectured on 50th anniversary of New York Times Co. v. Sullivan for W&L’s Journalism Department’s Mass Media course.

of the Task Force on Third-Party Funding, organized by the International Council for Commercial Arbitration and Queen Mary University of London. She was nominated for membership in the Academic Council of the Institute for Transnational Arbitration.

James Moliterno’s book, “The

Chris Seaman published “Best Mode

“Outsourcing Corporate Accountability,” is forthcoming in Washington Law Review and proposes a new regulatory approach for enforcing labor standards in global supply chains. In January, she organized a roundtable on international business and global governance. She presented at workshops and events hosted at the law schools at Boston College, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Virginia and Berkeley. She also presented at the annual meeting of the Law and Society Association on the influence of contracting choices on the legitimacy of private dispute resolution mechanisms.

American Legal Profession In Crisis,” is out in paperback, and includes a new chapter on the crisis in legal education. His publications include “Why Lawyers Do What They Do” and “A Way Forward for an Ailing Legal Education Model.” His pieces on the crisis in legal education and legal education reform appear in ABA Litigation Magazine and Bencher Magazine. Moliterno has presented on a variety of topics in Turkey, Spain, Slovakia, the Republic of Georgia and Indonesia and to the State Bar of California, as well as the Association of American Law Schools Clinical Conference and the Aspen Institute Law & Society Seminar in Washington.

Brian Murchison was special guest

speaker at the Ted Dalton American Inn of Court, speaking on the collaboration of Floyd Abrams and Alexander Bickel in the Pentagon Papers

Trade Secrets” in the Yale Journal of Law and Technology. His article in the Virginia Law Review, “The Case against Federalizing Trade Secrets,” was featured on SSRN’s list of top 10 papers in intellectual property. He presented at the 2014 Trade Secret and Information Policy Workshop at the University of Florida and at the Vanderbilt IP Scholars Roundtable.

Victoria Shannon’s article, “Harmo-

nizing Third-Party Litigation Funding Regulation,” is forthcoming in the Cardozo Law Review and presents a novel framework for regulating transactional, procedural and ethical elements of the third-party litigation funding industry. She presented at workshops hosted at the law school at the University of Pennsylvannia, the University of Virginia, Berkeley, George Washington and Wake Forest. She participated in two meetings

Faculty Accomplishments

Discovery

A. Hall) in the New York University Annual Survey of American Law. He presented at Yale, Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton and the American Enterprise Institute and continues to be widely quoted in the media. He also continues to serve as a consumer representative to the National Association of Insurance Commissioners.

Kish Vinayagamoorthy’s article,

Sally Wiant ’78L served as a mem-

ber of the ABA site evaluation team of George Mason School of Law. She also published a comment, “3D Printing,” in the Washington and Lee Law Review.

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Cybersecurity, Privacy and the Law Big data means big questions

BY STEPHANIE WILKINSON

In June of 2013, Edward Snowden, a former employee of the CIA and contractor for the National Security Agency, blew the whistle on the U.S. government’s vast intelligencegathering programs. Snowden’s revelations sparked a vigorous public debate on the proper trade-off between personal privacy and national security and raised the larger issue of privacy in the Internet age.

Who has the right to examine records of our phone calls or e-mails? What about our shopping habits, library check-out records or travel routes recorded by EZ Pass, parking-lot cameras or cell-tower pings? Does using a smartphone or signing onto a social media platform mean you’ve forfeited your right to privacy? These questions have led to a slew of legal challenges that strike at the very core of our democracy.

Examining these issues are a number of W&L Law faculty and alumni who bring insightful perspectives on big data, cybersecurity, privacy and the use of technology by the government and law enforcement on the local and national level.

Margaret Hu, former Justice Department staffer and current W&L Law professor, is studying the movement toward biometric identification systems and their impact on the rights of immigrants, voters, workers and average citizens. Professor Russ Miller, an expert in German and U.S. constitutional law, is regularly called on to interpret American attitudes toward privacy and security to European audiences, and vice versa. Adjunct Professor Chip Muir ’03L has advised the commonwealth 18

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of Virginia on cybersecurity issues and is exploring the business opportunities in helping companies remain secure. Professor Josh Fairfield, a technologist of renown (his family’s business, Rosetta Stone, was among the first foreign-language educational software), works on defining the legal landscape of our mixed-reality environment. Fairfield’s former research assistant, Mike Bombace ’12L, works as an analyst at Booz Allen and is building an expertise on virtual currencies and money laundering.

Professor Erik Luna has collaborated on a paper with Fairfield on digital innocence, arguing that defendants must have the same access to big data as their prosecutors. This year’s commencement speaker, Chris Wolf ’80L, a civil litigator turned Internet data and privacy expert, heads up the Privacy Forum which seeks to advance responsible data practices.

Collectively, these scholars are tackling some of the most important issues of our era.

“Technology always moves too fast for the law,” Fairfield noted. “Law moves at the pace of oral arguments, story by story. But law is how we humans figure this stuff out.”

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Just before Margaret Hu left her position as special policy counsel at the U.S. Department of Justice, in 2012, she learned that Congress and the Department of Homeland Security were debating the institution of a DNA-based Social Security card. It was being introduced as a way to break the partisan deadlock on immigration control.

With her background at the Department of Justice focusing on immigration-related unfair practices, Hu was alarmed. She’d had experience working with problems surrounding the databases and techniques used to target the identities of illegal aliens. She noted the discriminatory practices introduced into immigration regulations after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

In recent scholarship, Hu has examined the implications of biometric cybersurveillance, such as driver’s licenses and passports embedded with radio frequency identification chips, which, if linked up to GPS tracking systems, could create a full-scale government surveillance system.

“This is 1984 come to life,” Hu said.

Equally troubling is the government’s use of database screening systems. These notoriously inaccurate systems are increasingly employed to determine who can get a job, who can fly on an airplane and who can vote. Even more sobering, we know through Edward Snowden’s leaks that the NSA’s cybersurveillance determines who the U.S. targets for drone strikes.

Mistakes in data entry on the government’s side (failure to update a surname upon marriage or divorce, for instance, or to include hyphenated names) or mistakes in using the system or accessing the data of the E-Verify system can be the difference between gainful employment and being turned down for a job. Worse, employers aren’t required to tell applicants that their denial of work was based on their use of E-Verify, leaving them with no way to clear their names.

Faulty databases have resulted not only in people being denied jobs but also in deportations, sometimes to countries unrelated to the person’s nation of origin. Hu is especially troubled by the secrecy under which lists of citizens are maintained, updated and purged.

“What is happening is a threat to democracy in a very big way. It’s hard to determine what’s happening if it’s going on behind closed doors. You can be stripped of constitutional rights, the right to counsel; you can become a non-person in the eyes of the state,” she said.

When Hu discusses these topics with students, she’s struck by a growing gap among the generations in attitudes toward privacy.

“I have to remember that most of them are the 9/11 generation—they were maybe 10 years old when the towers fell—and they’ve grown up with the threat of terrorism hanging over their heads,” she said. “They’ve gotten used to the idea that a lack of privacy is worth it if it means they’re more secure.”

The use of biometrics is bound to be confusing for a generation raised on movies that portray both the dystopian elements of advances in science and technology—films like “Minority Report” and “Gattaca”—but also television shows like “NCIS,” which illustrate the benefits to law enforcement of things such as street cameras and cell-tower triangulation.

“On the one hand, they think, ‘I’m not a threat to anyone, so who cares if the government knows when I order a pizza?’” Hu said. “On the other hand, a lot of them draw a line with biometric stuff—like a full-scale DNA database of all U.S. citizens. They’re wondering if they’ll be the last generation to be scared by that.”

As for Hu, she is resigned to her role in reigning in cybersurveillance abuses. “I may not be able to stop the train,” she said, “but I can blow the whistle.”

Biometric Identification Systems “What is happening is a threat to democracy in a very big way. It’s hard to determine what’s happening if it’s going on behind closed doors. You can be stripped of constitutional rights, the right to counsel; you can become a non-person in the eyes of the state.”

—Margaret Hu

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Strengthening the Firewall “We can’t get in front of hackers.

We can get better and better defenses, but we’re always behind.”

—Lawrence “Chip” Muir ’03L

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When Lawrence “Chip” Muir ’03L took a job in 2004 as assistant commonwealth’s attorney for Lexington and Rockbridge County, the computer crimes he dealt with were straightforward, such as the theft of a PC from the local social services office.

“Those were the simple days,” he said.

They didn’t last. Before long, computers became the vehicle of crime rather than the target. Reports of cyberbullying at local schools surfaced, and a student at Rockbridge County High School was caught uploading indecent photos. Realizing that computer-based crimes were only bound to grow, Muir turned his attention to informing himself and educating the community.

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In 2008, Muir relocated to Richmond to serve as a special assistant U.S. attorney in the computer crime section, with the power to prosecute in any court in Virginia. He focused on child pornography, eBay fraud and crimes executed via peer-to-peer networks. When he heard Richard Clarke, the former National Security Council adviser on counterterrorism, discuss the growing threat of cyberwarfare, it galvanized him.

“I thought, one of three crimes involves a computer, and yet I really know too little about it,” Muir said. “I began thinking of the vast and valuable information on computers. I put a law school intern on the task of pulling together white papers from a half dozen experts on cybercrime.”

Muir wanted to understand the vulnerabilities cyberwarfare exposed Virginians to. But he had another motive as well. “I realized that there was very little training being done in cybersecurity in Virginia. I wanted to start some conversations about ways security could become a workforce opportunity in the state.”

Private companies that possess critical infrastructure need to assess threats and protect themselves. “It’s a costloss function, not a revenue generator,” he said. “We can’t get in front of hackers. We can get better and better defenses, but we’re always behind.”

So when companies invest in this area—and they do, increasingly—there’s a shortage of staff to help them.

They’ll need to hire trained staff, even if it’s expensive.

“The numbers of jobs lost for every breach in R&D is sobering.”

Muir pitched the idea to former Gov. Bob McDonnell that cybersecurity should be a focus for economic development in Virginia. Though his strategic plan didn’t come to fruition before McDonnell’s term ended, Muir has carried that thought into his subsequent work at W&L Law, where he teaches a course on cybercrimes, and at a conference on cybersecurity he pulled together for the National Association of Attorney Generals in June 2011. In 2012, he left state employment to start his own firm, consulting with businesses on cybersecurity.

As an adjunct, Muir teaches a limited number of courses, but he appreciates his students’ deep engagement with the subject matter. Several have reported that papers written for Muir’s class—on subjects ranging from the use of RICO statutes to prosecute cyberMafia to policy recommendations based on personal testing of wire-transfer scams—have helped land them jobs.

Muir remains keen on the idea of expanding and extending education on cybertopics, either by creating a certificate program in cybersecurity, launching a cybersecurity accelerator program, holding a CLE conference for alumni or proposing a law school clinic in which students could advise companies on cybersecurity issues.

Privacy, Security and Democracy “Germans can’t fathom how the U.S. allows its government to intrude in private life in this way.”

—Russell Miller

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When Edward Snowden’s revelations about NSA wiretapping of German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cellphone surfaced, Russell Miller’s phone started ringing. As a comparative constitutional law scholar, with particular expertise in German law, Miller is frequently called on by the media in both countries to translate each other’s attitudes on privacy, security and democracy.

“Germans can’t fathom how the U.S. allows its government to intrude in private life in this way,” Miller said. That’s understandable, he added, given their fraught history of totalitarianism over the last three-quarters of a century. The German approach to privacy stems from a constitutional stance that assumes that information about an individual is protected in the same way as other liberties are. In the U.S., on the other hand, privacy challenges are dealt with through the courts.

In June, Miller appeared before the special committee of the German parliament (Bundestag) that is investigating the NSA spying scandal and its nexus with Germany. He noted that the special investigative committee is a rare undertaking and is “just one sign of the depth of Germans’ frustration, which has strained the relations in this long-standing and important partnership.”

Miller provided expert testimony on the legal framework in the U.S. and offered comparative insight into how each country addresses the difficult challenge of balancing interests in security and liberty. “My familiarity with the law and legal culture of both countries allows me to do more than just describe the relevant law, but also to offer some deeper insight into the reasons why Americans and Germans see these issues so differently.” Among the questions Miller addressed were the authority in American law for foreign intelligence activities, as well as the constitutional and statutory limits on those activities.

“I always say there’s a brilliant irony here,” Miller noted.

“Americans, who are known for their libertarian suspicion of the state, seem at ease with this overweening, muscularly intrusive state when it comes to intelligence-gathering.”

But there’s irony in the German attitude, too. German dedication to the concept of militant democracy requires rights tradeoffs that Americans might not understand.

Whereas Americans trust the political process to safeguard democracy, Germans recall all too well that the Nazis were voted into power in free and open elections. To prevent such

extremism from taking hold again, Germany instituted a domestic intelligence agency, called the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, which has been criticized for its own clandestine activities. In addition, Miller noted, Germany itself relies heavily on U.S. intelligence.

The most noteworthy U.S. protest against overreaching in intelligence gathering occurred in the 1970s, Miller noted, when the Church Committee published its 14-volume report on the intelligence gathering activities of the NSA, CIA and FBI in the wake of the Watergate scandal. In 2008, Miller published an edited volume on the lessons learned: “U.S. National Security, Intelligence and Democracy: From the Church Committee to the War on Terror.”

The book reflects on both the courage required by the committee to question government actions and the benefit to our democracy of that inquiry. “Constitutional governance and the rule of law are profoundly American,” Miller wrote. The example of the Church Committee “serves as a call to courage for our own era, one that is responsive to the adage that those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it.”

Miller helps his students put their own attitudes in context. “My instinct about Americans’ comfort with intrusive government is that our myth of the lone rider has always been mostly just that, a myth. We look to state authority for safety. It takes extraordinary abuses—like those that surfaced with the Church Committee—to rouse Americans to protest.”

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Digital Currencies and Money Laundering ”Virtual worlds are attractive to bad actors—whether they’re drug dealers or terrorists—because they are as ubiquitous as the Internet and present high potential for anonymity.”

—Mike Bombace ’12L

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As a senior consultant at Booz Allen Hamilton, in Washington, Mike Bombace ’12L provides insights on digital currency and money laundering to clients in the U.S. government, tapping into a line of research during his time as a student at the Law School. Under the tutelage of Josh Fairfield, Bombace spent his 1L summer researching virtual currencies for a presentation Fairfield would make at a social media conference.

“I had taken a contracts class with Josh and really liked the way he thinks,” Bombace said. Having been a gamer and a web designer, he found a kinship with Fairfield, whose interest in such topics as the privacy implications of online advertising and the regulation of e-commerce intrigued him.

“Working with Josh, I started to build out an interest in alternative-payment systems.”

A tweet sent out by a Booz Allen employee about virtual currencies led Bombace to track down the sender, not knowing it would lead to the offer of a summer internship and a job following graduation. “I just wanted to pick his brain about Bitcoin,” he said. “But when I got him on the phone and told him what I was working on, he was impressed, and that led to this job.”

Government clients have a pressing need to understand how digital currencies function and how they might be implicated in threat finance—the means by which organizaions that pose a threat to national security finance their 22

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operations. In a paper he published in the Journal of Virtual Worlds Research, Bombace discusses virtual currency in the gaming world, the potential for money laundering and the emerging regulations being undertaken by the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN). At issue is how to regulate virtual currencies and how to prevent money laundering through gaming systems.

The walls between government currency and virtual currency are porous. One can buy various types of virtual currency on eBay and thus exchange real currency for game money. Other games start out free but then require payment via credit card, bank transfer or PayPal to continue playing. The virtual and the real worlds of finance have begun to overlap in sometimes startling ways. The currency for a Swedish game called Entropia, for instance, became so popular that the game developer applied for—and was granted—a banking license by the Swedish government.

“Where people congregate and money flows, illicit actors are likely to exploit gaps within those systems,” Bombace wrote in his paper. “Virtual worlds are attractive to bad actors—whether they’re drug dealers or terrorists— because they are as ubiquitous as the Internet and present high potential for anonymity.”

The way to approach regulation, Bombace said, is to encourage the industry to be self-regulating. Require the retention of activity logs (which, among other things, trace users’ currency transactions), encourage sophisticated authentication (to ensure that users are who they say they are), limit high-risk payment systems (the kind that don’t take care to authenticate their users, for instance) and, finally, provide immunity for game companies that have made good faith efforts to regulate their currencies, but whose currency is found to have been used for laundering.

“The goal is to not regulate everything and thereby stifle innovation,” he said. “It’s to let things grow quickly without massive holes that criminals and terrorists and predators can exploit.”

E

Every time an invention comes along with the power to shift the way people perceive or interact with the world, there’s a period of uncomfortable adjustment, notes Joshua Fairfield. Whether it’s the advent of the automobile, the telephone or the Internet, it takes time for people to learn how to deal with the changes that come in the wake of innovation.

“The first revolution is always technological,” Fairfield said. “The second is social.”

Today, we’re living in a particularly challenging part of the cycle because of the growth of mobile computing. The merging of the Internet with the world around us—what has come to be called “mixed reality”—is testing our society on multiple fronts. And it’s only going to get more complex, as data processing devices become even more embedded into the stuff around us.

“In the future, we’ll all be mimes—gesticulating, nodding, talking into seemingly empty space,” Fairfield said.

“With everything voice-activated, we’ll be interacting with worlds that aren’t there. Think about the kind of mixed reality that we see today, like navigating roads through the virtual world of a Google map, but just wait. Wearable computing will blow the wheels off.”

Fairfield sketches such a future in his pioneering paper on mixed reality, published in the Berkeley Technology Law Journal in 2012:

While mixed reality isn’t inherently dystopian, it can pose a challenge to community. When every person can choose his or her own reality, what will keep us bound together? Will we all move through our lives in our own self-constructed bubble, editing each other in or out at will?

How will disputes over clashing realities be resolved?

Fairfield proposes that our legal system, in its struggle to deal with the challenges of this new world, ought to refrain from stretching laws that apply to the online sphere to these situations and instead look to the offline world for guidance.

“The best available analogy for governing mixed reality is the background principles of the common law,” he noted, “not the law of online intellectual property licensing.”

Fairfield is, by temperament and circumstance, predisposed not to fear technological change. At the same time, he recognizes the legitimate concerns brought about by big data. If, with data-tracking, GPS and cybersurveillance tools, we can track anyone, at any time, and if data mining by law enforcement goes un- or under-regulated, we live at risk of forfeiting fundamental democratic principles.

“No doubt there are nasty bumps in the road ahead,” Fairfield acknowledged. “But no society that doesn’t fix this can continue as a democracy.”

Imagine a world in which your clothes are free but your clothes carry shifting advertisements on smart fabric. Imagine a world in which your communication and interaction with others are so extensively digital that you can choose to edit your ex-husband out of your existence—you won’t have to see him, hear him, see anything he has written, hear any phone calls, nothing. The future of Mixed Reality, where virtual world technologies govern our everyday life, is already here.

Mixed Reality “In the future, we’ll all be mimes— gesticulating, nodding, talking into seemingly empty space. With everything voice-activated, we’ll be interacting with worlds that aren’t there. Think about the kind of mixed reality that we see today, like navigating roads through the virtual world of a Google map, but just wait. Wearable computing will blow the wheels off.”

—Joshua Fairfield

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Digital Innocence “As a society, we incarcerate an extraordinary number of citizens.

We know that eyewitnesses regularly misperceive things and that people give false confessions.

With all these people in prison, the question is, what is the error rate?”

—Eric Luna

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In the 22 years since Barry Sheck and Peter Neufeld founded The Innocence Project, more than 300 wrongfully convicted people have been exonerated through the use of DNA testing. Now, two W&L Law professors are fostering the idea of digital innocence, the harnessing of newer technology and big data to similar ends.

Erik Luna and Josh Fairfield bring complementary interests to bear on this endeavor. Luna, the Sydney and Frances Lewis Professor of Law, teaches criminal law and procedure and has written about search and seizure law.

Fairfield’s expertise is in the intersection of technology, the online world and the law.

“As a society, we incarcerate an extraordinary number of citizens,” said Luna. “We know that eyewitnesses regularly misperceive things and that people give false confessions.

With all these people in prison, the question is, what is the error rate?”

Advances in DNA technology have been a tremendous boon to those wrongfully accused or convicted. Only a small fraction of cases have biological evidence that can be tested.

On the other hand, the rapid growth of consumer tracking, cybersurveillance and data mining in the public and private sectors means chances are good that essential digital information pertaining to almost any case exists on a server somewhere.

The trick is getting access to it. While the government and law enforcement has been using information gathered by means ranging from dashboard-mounted cameras to Facebook posts to web-surfing histories to bring wrongdoers 24

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to justice, to date those accused haven’t had the same ability to locate, use or sometimes even know of the existence of potentially exculpatory data.

This strikes Luna and Fairfield as essentially unfair and a matter of constitutional law.

“Data being used to convict must be made available to the defendant. This cannot be one-sided,” Luna said. “Right now, no system exists to pass information to the defense.

And even the existence of data is faith-based. If the government tells people the information doesn’t exist, you have to take it on faith that that’s true.”

Luna foresees slow growth of digital exoneration efforts, with test cases playing out on the federal and the local level simultaneously. He points to some recent cases where digital evidence has already proved innocence. In one, a police cruiser’s dashboard camera provided not only visual proof of a defendant’s innocence but also violent abuse on the part of the officers. In another, Occupy Wall Street protesters were acquitted of disorderly conduct through video evidence.

The tools of data now can, and ought to be, harnessed at all stages of the process—pre-trial, at trial or post-conviction—to ensure that justice is done. Another hurdle looms, however: establishing standards and practices for data sharing between law enforcement and the NSA intelligence community. “There needs to be a way to break down the wall between the two,” Luna said. “We need to make sure that if data is stored—wherever it’s stored—it’s available to the defense.”

Fairfield and Luna are mindful that some folks might interpret their digital innocence proposal as tacit endorsement of current government and corporate data-gathering and citizen-monitoring practices. Nothing could be further from the truth. Their work serves “not as a paean to surveillance but as a kind of warning,” they write. “If the government gathers information about its citizens, it cannot use that data solely to accuse and convict.”

W

When Christopher Wolf ’80L helped launch the Future of Privacy Forum in 2008, Facebook and Twitter were in their infancy, sharing was something we urged kids to do and posting was how the British mailed their letters. If Americans were concerned about personal privacy, we were more likely to draw our curtains than shut down our computers.

What a difference six years can make.

“Back when we started the forum, there was very little discussion of things like cloud computing or ‘the Internet of things’ and not much education about privacy,” Wolf said.

“Now there’s a new challenge to address every day.”

Wolf has an unusually broad window into the world of cyber privacy. In his private practice as a partner at Hogan Lovells L.L.C., he works closely with corporate clients on data security and privacy issues and directs the firm’s privacy and information management practice. As co-founder of the Future of Privacy Forum, he helps gather thinkers from all corners of society, including schools, government, private industry and individuals, to address the rapidly evolving privacy landscape and to promote best practices to handle the challenges. And as the co-author of the book “Viral Hate: Containing Its Spread on the Internet” (2013), written with Abraham H. Foxman, he tackles the subject of personal responsibility and civility in the online age.

For all the exposure he has had to the threats posed by big data, Chinese hackers, social media overexposure or government surveillance programs, Wolf is surprisingly upbeat about what’s coming down the road. Asked if we should all consider personal privacy a thing of the past, Wolf gives an unequivocal no. “I’m bullish on the future of privacy,” he said.

“Yes, there are things I think we should be worried about, but that worry should be tempered by enthusiasm for the innovation that technology has brought us, and the many ways it has allowed us to be connected,” he added. “We don’t need to ignore the risks, but we can also focus on the positives.”

To get privacy right, all parts of society will have to engage in drawing boundaries and creating cultural and legal norms around privacy. It’s not merely a government problem to solve—nor can it be, Wolf said. There’s a common responsibility to work it out.

“You can’t expect laws to regulate everything. There has to be some self-regulation,” Wolf said. “Responsible corporations take the stewardship of their customers’ data very seriously. They have to. To put it simply, they have to ask themselves, ‘If we use our customers’ data this way, will people think it’s creepy?’ If it crosses the creepy threshold, that’s a problem.”

In today’s world, the gathering of data is a given, Wolf noted, and that’s unlikely to change. “We need to move away from a focus on collection of information and toward considerations of how it’s used.”

Government action and the restraining hand of the marketplace can help reset accepted standards of privacy only to a certain degree. Wolf believes each person has a strong role to play as well in reshaping the norms of transparency and accountability.

“Individuals have a responsibility to be civil, to protect our own privacy and who we share our information with,” he said. And despite the common lament about children of the Internet age, he added, “Young people do care about privacy.

They may have a different sense about self-promotion and branding than earlier generations, but they care. There are still lines that shouldn’t be crossed.”

Sharing, Posting and Privacy “You can’t expect laws to regulate everything. There has to be some self-regulation.

Responsible corporations take the stewardship of their customers’ data very seriously. They have to. To put it simply, they have to ask themselves, ‘If we use our customers’ data this way, will people think it’s creepy?’ If it crosses the creepy threshold, that’s a problem.”

—Christopher Wolf ’80L

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Reunion Weekend April 11 and 12

Law Alumni W&L Law welcomed back alumni who graduated 50 years or more. From l. to r.: Stan Fink ’64L, Pete Straub ’61, ’64L, David Gibson ’64L, Kemp Morton ’59, ’64L, Tom Budd ’61, ’64L, Barry Kerchner ’64L, Don Partington ’61, ’64L, Jim Rowe ’64L, Ed Ames ’61, ’64L, Ben Lynch ’64L, Ed MacKinlay ’58, ’64L, Charlie Reed ’64L, Suzanne Wade (alumni planning coordinator and honorary member of the class of ’64L) and Lionell Hanock ’64L.

During a lovely spring weekend, alumni congregated in Lexington to celebrate Law Alumni Weekend at Lewis Hall. As well as reconnecting with friends and faculty, alumni remembered their alma mater with combined gifts totaling over $1.2 million.

While also celebrating the legal legacies (see above photo), two alumni were recognized for their outstanding contributions to W&L and their exceptional professional achievements.

The Outstanding Alumus/a Award went to Reggie Aggarwal ’94L, the CEO and founder of Cvent, a publicly traded cloud-based software company focused on event management. Aggarwal led Cvent from a

two-person startup to a 1,450-person company with a $1.3 billion market capitalization. This honor joins a long list of others for Aggarwal: CEO of the Year by the Washington Business Journal; Entrepreneur of the Year for the Washington, D.C., area by Ernst & Young; a rising star by Forbes Magazine; one of the 100 Top Tech Titans

by Washingtonian Magazine for three years; and one of the 25 most influential people in the meetings industry

by MeetingNews and Business Travel News.

Although Aggarwal was unable to attend Alumni Weekend, he sent a message that new Law Council President William Toles ’92, ’95L read to the assembly. “This award means

Class reunion chairs Calvin Awkward ’06, ’09L (left) and Stuart Nibley ’75, ’79L (right) present a check to Dean Nora Demleitner.

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much more to me than the others I have received,” he wrote. “W&L gave me a strong moral compass and lifelong friends.”

Aggarwal is founder and chairman emeritus of the Indian CEO High Tech Council (now the DC Chapter of TiE), which The Washington Post said was “maybe the singularly most successful association in the past decade.” Aggarwal was also appointed by the governor of Virginia as chairman of the Chief Information Officers Advisory Commission.

Pete Straub ’61, ’64L received the 2014 Volunteer of the Year Award, which recognizes those individuals who go above and beyond assisting the Law School.

Networking over breakfast on Saturday morning.

Reunion Weekend

Weekend 2014

Straub has been a Law Class Agent for over 20 years and has served on numerous reunion committees, including chair of his 50th. Prior to retirement, Straub was a trial lawyer in St. Louis and with the Department of Justice, was an advisor to Attorney General Saxbe and the House Judiciary Committee, and was the general counsel of the Selective Service System. After leaving government service, he opened his own law office focusing primarily on family law.

In accepting his award, Straub noted, “The key to good leadership is to get good people to work for you. There’s no telling what you can accomplish if you don’t care who gets the credit.” He added, “Reunions are

fun. They are easy to work on.”

Straub is a long-time member of the Northern Virginia Planning Council and the Alexandria Optimist Club, serves on the board of the Alexandria Salvation Army, is active with the Boy Scouts, serves on the resident council at his retirement community, belongs to the National Academy of Elder Law Attorneys, serves on the board of Friends of the W&OD Trail and volunteers for the National Park Service. Straub also served as a commissioner of Alexandria Economic Opportunity Commission and on the boards of Capital Hospice, Trinity University, Alexandria Country Day School and Sigma Nu Educational Foundation.

April 11 and 12

The Class of 2004L

Pete Straub ’61, ’64L, the 2014 Volunteer of Year, tries out his new chair.

The Class of ’64L presents its reunion gift to Dean Nora Demlietner. From l. to r.: Stan Fink ’64L, Peter Straub ’61, ’64L, Tom Budd ’61, ’64L, David Partington ’64L, Demleitner and Kemp Morton ’59, ’64L.

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Class Notes

1969L

The Hon. Jack L. Lintner received the 2013 Trial Attorneys of New Jersey Professional Lawyer of the Year Award from the New Jersey Commission on Professionalism in the Law. He is a member of the Bridgewater law firm Norris McLaughlin & Marcus P.A.

1970L

The Hon. Ray W. Dezern Jr. was

elected president of the American Judges Foundation. He retired as a full-time general district court judge in Norfolk, Va., after 18 years on the bench, but plans to continue part time and substitute for other judges in district courts throughout the state.

1976L

Frank L. Duemmler, COO and

partner at Kayne Anderson Real Estate Advisors, has moved to Boca Raton, Fla. In 2007, the firm launched its first private equity fund. Back then, in the midst of the financial crisis, they raised $136 million in equity between December 2007 and March 2009, which they were able to invest by the end of 2010. They started with six people.

Since then, the firm has raised an additional $1.3 billion and has expanded to 30 people.

Jonathan L. Spear, vice presi-

dent and deputy general counsel for Verizon Enterprise Solutions, retired after 21 years with the company. He began his career with MCI in 1992 as senior counsel. He was appointed vice president and deputy general counsel in 2004, supporting the public sector legal, system integrator sales and product development group. He was named to his current position upon the acquisition of MCI in 2006. He lives in McLean, Va.

1980L

Jordan D. Dorchuck, of Irving,

Texas, has been appointed executive vice president, general counsel and secretary at BSI Financial Services Inc., a privately held company specializing in residential mortgage servicing, subservicing, default solutions, loan quality control and business process outsourcing

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The North Shore-LIJ Health System’s Foundation and Law & Psychiatry Institute have established a $200,000 endowment to fund a scholarship and summer fellowship program that will focus on educating students at the Touro Law Center on the legal challenges facing veterans. The endowment is named in honor of Sol Wachtler ’51, ’52L, a life trustee of the North Shore-LIJ Health System, former chief judge of the New York State Court of Appeals, a longtime member of the Touro Law Center’s board of governors and an Army veteran.

Over the past several years, Wachtler and the North Shore-LIJ Law & Psychiatry Institute have collaborated with Chief Judge Jonathan Lippman, the Unified Court System of New York, the Veterans’ Administration and the District Attorneys of Kings, Queens and Nassau counties to support the establishment of county-based veterans’ mental health courts.

These courts are designed to divert veterans with mental health disorders, including substance abuse, who have committed nonviolent criminal offenses, from incarceration to behavioral health evaluation and treatment.

services. In addition to providing legal counsel, he will lead BSI Financial’s regulatory compliance program and vendor management operations. He will also manage the human resources, training, quality control and internal audit departments as BSI Financial builds out these functions. He has been recognized by the Mortgage Bankers Association as a certified mortgage banker, one of a few lawyers in the industry to have achieved this distinction.

1981L

Gene A. Marsh joined the Birmingham, Ala., office of Jackson Lewis P.C. in the practice of college and professional sports law. Jackson Lewis is based in White Plains, N.Y.

1983L

Michael E. Nogay was again

named a West Virginia Super Lawyer. He was also selected for membership in The National Trial Lawyers Top 100 Trial Lawyers.

He litigates cases in West Virginia, Ohio and Pennsylvania.

Thomas R. Petty joined Miles

& Stockbridge as a principal in the law firm’s growing real estate and construction practice group in Washington. Thomas has more than 30 years of experience in commercial real estate law and has represented clients across the

mid-Atlantic region and around the country in a broad spectrum of commercial real estate transactions, with a focus on real estate finance, including debt and equity financing and commercial lending matters, leasing and sustainable development. He advises clients on the use and impact of the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED® certification, along with other green building initiatives and legal issues.

1984L

James W.C. Canup is co-chair of

Kaufman & Canoles’ business taxation practice group.

Stephen I. Luparello is director,

division of trading and markets, at the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The division regulates the major securities market participants, including broker-dealers, credit rating agencies, transfer agents and self-regulatory organizations such as stock exchanges, FINRA and clearing agencies.

1986L

Stokely G. Caldwell Jr., an attorney

with Robinson Bradshaw & Hinson P.A., received the TRAC Star Award at The Racing Attorney Conference, an annual motorsports law conference presented by the Indianapolis Bar Association Sports and Entertainment Law Section and the North Carolina Bar Association.

Class Notes Margaret H. Campbell ’81L is a

shareholder and has practiced employment, litigation and labor law at the Atlanta office of Ogletree Deakins since 1981. At W&L, she was a member of the W&L Law Review and of the Jessup International Moot Court team and was a Burks Scholar. She has served as a law firm liaison and as a member of her reunion class committee.

John R. Clark III ’80L is president

of Steuart Investment Co., a private Washington-based enterprise focused primarily on real estate investment, ownership and development. He is a director at the National Rehabilitation Hospital and a trustee of the Virginia Foundation for Independent Colleges.

Clark has been an alumni career mentor.

Courtney Camp Enloe ’97L is senior

litigation counsel, in Atlanta, at Georgia-Pacific L.L.C., a global consumer products company. In this role, she advises the company on issues relating to risk and reputational management, and leads strategy for a wide range of litigation matters, including a successful appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court in 2013. She has served as a chapter volunteer and as a member of her reunion class committee.

New Law Council Members

Val S. McWhorter ’66, ’69L is

a founding partner in the Tysons Corner, Va., law firm of Smith, Pachter, McWhorter. The 30-lawyer firm specializes in construction and government contract law, with a national and international client base. In 2014, Gov. Terry McAuliffe appointed him to serve as a commissioner on the Virginia Port Authority. He has been a law class agent.

Gregory N. Stillman ’74L is

practice group leader of Hunton & Williams’ intellectual property group, in both the firm’s Washington and Norfolk offices. He focuses on federal trial and appellate litigation, with emphasis upon patent litigation. He has served as a law class agent and as a member of his reunion class committee and as a professor of practice in W&L’s Third-Year Program, teaching patent litigation.

Joseph S. Zasa ’92L, of Dallas, is the

managing partner of ASD Management, an operator of 26 ambulatory surgery centers throughout the U.S. He focuses on existing centers that require turnaround expertise and developing new outpatient surgery centers with physicians and hospitals. Zasa served on the board of directors of the Texas Ambulatory Surgery Center Association and served as its president. At W&L, he has been a chapter volunteer and a member of his reunion class committee.

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Class Notes

1988L

William S. Maddox, of Rockland,

Maine, won a United States Supreme Court case in Rodney W. Russell v. the United States, 13-7357. The case, which involved a prosecution for false statements relating to a health-care matter, has been remanded to the First Circuit.

1991L

Charles K. Grant is president of

the Nashville Bar Association. He is the first African-American president in the association’s 182-year history and will serve a one-year term in this role. He has previously served the association in various other positions, including president-elect, co-chair of the employment law and civil rights committee and chair of the judicial incumbent and candidate evaluation committee.

1994L

Robert K. Tompkins (’90) joined the Washington office of Holland & Knight as a partner. He provides strategic counsel to companies that have or are seeking government contracts. He also advises investors in these firms. Tompkins was formerly chair of the government contracts group at Patton Boggs.

1996L

Kristopher E. Ahrend, of Bur-

bank, Calif., has been promoted to senior vice president, recorded music rights administration, at Warner Music Group. He will oversee a newly established division encompassing U.S. artist royalties, publishing royalties and licensing, master licensing, rights administration and catalog legal affairs. He has been with Warner Music Group for eight years.

Lorraine Richardson Lord (’90) has been named chief staff attorney for the Supreme Court of Virginia.

She was senior counsel in the complex commercial litigation practice group at McGuireWoods L.L.P.

1997L

Shawn C. Boyer, founder and chair-

man of Snagajob, has joined the board of directors at Montage, a provider of purpose-built video interviewing solutions. Montage is headquartered in Wisconsin. Boyer was CEO of Snagajob from 2000 to 2013 before he became chairman. During his tenure as CEO, Snagajob was named to both Fortune Magazine’s 25 Best Small & Medium Size Companies to Work For list and Deloitte’s Technology Fast 500 for five years, consecutively.

Aaron L. Dettling, of Hoover, Ala., has opened his own law practice. He specializes in labor and employment and governmental law.

1999L

Justin D. Flamm is included in

Ohio Rising Stars 2014, a Thomson Reuters business. Flamm is a partner at Taft Stettinius & Hollister L.L.P. in Cincinnati.

Gerald R. Ryan Jr. opened his

own law practice in his hometown of Valdosta, Ga. The new firm, Ryan & Golden L.L.C., will focus on workers’ compensation, civil litigation and alternative dispute resolution.

2000L

Ralph M. Clements III has joined

the Alabama Department of Revenue Legal Division as assistant counsel in Montgomery.

Michael E. DeMatt opened the

law firm of Turnin & DeMatt P.C., in Greensburg, Pa. He focuses on personal injury, criminal defense and civil litigation.

Jonathan W. McCrary (’96) moved to St. Louis and joined the law firm of Sandberg Phoenix & von Gontard P.C. as counsel in its healthcare group.

Andrea K. Short will lead the legal Joshua D. Jones ’04L (left) founded the Birmingham office of Bressler, Amery & Ross P.C., along with 10 partners from his former firm, including Stuart Roberts ’97L (right) and Rima Hartman ’94L (center). Bressler has offices in New York,

New Jersey, Florida and now Alabama. In addition to a general civil defense practice, Jones also specializes in the defense of brokerage firms and financial institutions against claims asserted by their customers.

In addition, he is serving his third term as co-chair of the securities arbitration subcommittee of the ABA section of litigation and has been recognized by Alabama Super Lawyers since 2011 as a Rising Star in the area of securities litigation. Hartman practices labor and employment litigation, including discrimination, harassment and retaliation claims.

Roberts, also named to the Alabama Super Lawyers’ list, represents employers in a broad range of litigation matters, including defense of cases under federal and state discrimination laws, wage and hour laws and workers’ compensation.

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team supporting Verizon Enterprise Solutions’ public sector markets. Short joined MCI in 2005, working in the litigation group, handling complex customer, vendor and inter-carrier litigation, including disputes involving federal and state contracts. Since joining the public sector legal organization earlier this year, Short has led the state government and education legal team, responsible for public sector customers including New York City, the state of New York and the commonwealth of Massachusetts.

2001L

Heidi Reamer Anderson joined

Fanatics Inc., a leading online retailer of licensed sports merchandise, as associate general counsel. She lives in Jacksonville Beach, Fla., with her husband, Tom Anderson ’01L, and their daughter, Ginny.

back to Virginia and is senior counsel at MERSCORP Holdings Inc., which owns and operates the MERS System, a national electronic registry system that tracks the changes in servicing rights and beneficial ownership interests in mortgage loans.

2002L

Misty Leon Bernknopf, of Dallas,

is senior counsel at Wilkins Finston Law Group L.L.P. She has over 11 years of experience in various employee benefits and compensation matters faced by public and private employers and tax-exempt entities. She advises clients on benefit plan design and compliance issues and provides legal counsel regarding retirement plans and health plan regulatory concerns under federal statutes.

Scott B. Gregerson has been

named CEO of ValleyCare Health Systems after serving as interim CEO since February 2014. A Dublin, Calif., resident, he previously served as ValleyCare’s vice president of strategic partnerships from April 2012.

Kyle C. McInnis joined Kean Miller

L.L.P. as partner in its new office in Shreveport, La. He practices in the estate planning, business and corporate and tax groups. He is a board-certified tax law specialist and a board-certified estate planning and administration specialist.

2003L

1st Lt. Anaeli C. Sandoval ’13L reported to basic training at Fort Benning, Ga., in January. After completing basic training, she will report to Fort Bragg in Fayetteville, N.C.

tion litigation, environmental nuisance litigation, mass asbestos litigation, intentional torts and fraud and civil RICO litigation. He also serves as punitive damages counsel to a major transportation company. In that role he has helped defend numerous highexposure wrongful death and traumatic injury cases, with a particular focus on constitutional due process issues and corporate conduct defense at the pretrial, trial and post-trial stages.

L’Shaunteé J. Robertson is an as-

sistant U.S. attorney at the U.S. Attorney’s Office. She lives in Washington.

2006L

J.P. McGuire Boyd Jr. (’97) has

been elected partner at Williams Mullen in its Richmond office. He

defends banks, mortgage lenders, servicers and debt collectors against a wide variety of federal and state law claims, including both individual and class-action claims. He has a broad background in matters involving residential mortgage lending and servicing, foreclosures and commercial loan workouts and is well-versed in federal and state regulations governing financial institutions.

Class Notes

Robert M. Jefferson has moved

Sherry A. Fox, of Mechanicsville,

Va., is a shareholder of ThompsonMcMullan. She focuses on adoption law, civil and commercial litigation, business entities and transactions and employment law.

Rakesh Gopalan is a partner at

McGuire Woods L.L.P. in its Charlotte, N.C., office.

Judith N. Ndoping (’08L) joined Stinson Morrison Hecker L.L.P. as a litigation associate in its Kansas City, Mo., office.

Ashley Everhart Pearson, of

Charlotte, N.C., joined Carolinas HealthCare System in 2012 as a staff attorney. In January, she was promoted to associate general counsel.

Andrea J. Yoak, of Richmond, is a shareholder of ThompsonMcMullan. Her focus is on elder law and disability planning, estate planning and administration and fiduciary and chancery litigation.

Damien P. DeLaney left Akin

Gump and is now of counsel at Jackson Lewis P.C. in Los Angeles.

Edward W. Neufville III, of Silver Springs, Md., is included on the 2014 Maryland Super Lawyers Rising Stars list.

2005L

Aaron G. McCollough is a partner at McGuire Woods L.L.P. He is in the restructuring and insolvency practice group in its Chicago office.

Mitchell K. Morris is a partner at

McGuire Woods L.L.P. in its Richmond office. He represents clients in a wide array of matters in state and federal courts, including transporta-

Sandra Ingram Speakman ’99L (center) and Alabama Veterans Affairs Com-

missioner W. Clyde Marsh (left) accepted the Abraham Lincoln Pillars of Excellence Award for Innovative State Programs in Alabama from then U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs Secretary Erik Shinseki (right) during a Feb. 11 ceremony at the White House.

Speakman is general counsel for the Alabama Department of Veterans Affairs, which was honored for its leadership in the state’s Veterans Treatment Court program for justice-involved veterans. Since its inception, the task force has been instrumental in the designation of 22 jurisdictions for veterans’ treatment courts in Alabama. Speakman lives in Auburn, Alabama, with her husband, Steven Todd Speakman ’99L, and their three children.

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Class Notes

From l. to r.: Eric Chapman ’13L, Jim Cowan ’94L, Amy Wheeler ’01L and Brian Wheeler ’01L. Not pictured: David Perry ’87L.

One year ago, Jim Cowan ’94L, David Perry ’87L and Brian Wheeler ’01L left LeClairRyan to form CowanPerry P.C., along with their former partner Amy Wheeler ’01L, and they have a lot to celebrate. With offices located in Roanoke and Blacksburg and attorneys licensed in the surrounding states, CowanPerry is well situated to serve clients in Virginia, West Virginia, North Carolina and Tennessee. Moreover, the firm is growing faster than expected; something they believe that is directly related to the firm’s business model.

“We really see ourselves as a full-time partner with our clients,” Cowan said. “Most law firms operate based almost exclusively on the billable hour, but hourly billing often isn’t the right choice for a business client. Rather, the ideal fee arrangement will likely vary by both the client and the type of matter. So, in addition to the billable hour, we offer a variety of fee arrangements, including flat fees, success-based fees and, for many of our clients, a fixed monthly retainer for outside general counsel services.”

The outside general counsel arrangement is particularly appealing for the firm’s larger and regional corporate clients because it allows them to provide quality legal services and general business advice in its core practice areas of outside general counsel, business and employment litigation, corporate and tax, labor and employment counsel, ERISA and employee benefits, land use and commercial real estate,

2007L

Michael T. Schmitt is a partner at

Ortale, Kelley, Herbert & Crawford in Nashville, Tenn. The practice consists primarily of federal civil litigation, corporate law and real estate law. He lives in Brentwood, Tenn., with his wife, Mandy ’08L, and two daughters, Lucy, 7, and Caroline, 3.

2008L

Christopher J. Brady is associate

general counsel at Air Methods, an air

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trust and estates and intellectual property. “By giving our clients this legal support with a predictable cost structure, we essentially become a part of their business and can address issues as they arise, as well as handle their legal needs,” Cowan explained.

The original four partners had already practiced together for years at previous firms and had discussed starting their own firm for some time. Since founding CowanPerry, they have hired four additional lawyers, including Eric Chapman ’13L, and John Eller ’12L, all of whom share their vision.

“Our motivation to found this firm was rooted in the changes we saw taking place in the legal market nationally,” said Cowan. “Much of our former work was practice-area specific, but we believe offering companies a cross-section of those service areas could provide more value and reduce costs.”

Although the firm still provides services by the billable hour for several national corporations and a number of regional firms, over 50 percent of their corporate work is derived from alternative fee arrangements.

“Obviously, we’re not the first to travel this route,” said Cowan. “But we believe we’ve been able to provide a great option for businesses in this region that fits with how our attorneys believe law should be practiced. The firm is a good size now, and our goal is to continue that growth where it makes sense to improve the service to our clients.”

medical transport company. He lives in Denver.

Chace W. Daley, of Tulsa, Okla., is

of counsel at Samson Resources Co., a private oil and natural gas company engaged in the discovery, development and production of oil and natural gas properties.

P. Tyler Johnson joined Jones

Robb P.L.L.C. as a registered patent attorney. He specializes in prosecution of patent applications in

the mechanical and electrical arts.

His technical expertise includes automotive technologies, consumer goods, manufacturing techniques, materials science, semiconductor fabrication and telecommunications. He lives in Arlington, Va.

Christine M. Parry, of Denver, has been named community outreach coordinator at The Blue Bench, formerly RAAP, metropolitan Denver’s only comprehensive sexual assault prevention and support center.

manager at Hewlett-Packard in its London office.

Samuel J. Hawley, of Virginia Beach, is an attorney at Sentara Healthcare, a not-for-profit healthcare organization.

Kate Silvers Sereff opened her own law practice, Sereff Law, in Broomfield, Colo. She focuses on domestic relations.

Russell N. Kruse relocated to

Richmond and has joined Hunton & Williams L.L.P. as a litigation attorney.

Jennifer W. Lin, of Fairfax, Va., is an attorney-advisor at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Jonathan P. Rosamond joined

Baker & McKenzie’s Dallas litigation group as an associate. His primary focus is on complex commercial litigation. He lives in Dallas, with his wife, Jane J. Du ’09L.

Jason Brown ’10L with South

Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley. He joined her office as an ombudsman.

2011L

Karmella Ressler Aiken has been

O’Connor as an associate in the subrogation and recover practice group in its Miami office.

Joshua T. Shaw is an assistant city

Massie Payne Cooper joined Trout-

Richard J. Maleski joined Cozen

prosecutor at the city of Dayton, Ohio, where he lives.

Patrick A. Barthle, of Tampa,

Fla., is a law clerk at the U.S. District Court, working for the Hon. Mary Scriven.

J. Patrick Becker joined Williams

promoted to counsel at BrownGreer P.L.C. She designs and tests interactive claims review platforms, supervises and trains claims reviewers and implements quality control measures in a multifaceted claims resolution program.

2010L

2012L

Class Notes

2009L

Elizabeth R. Potter is a project

man Sanders L.L.P. as an associate in its Richmond office.

Evan M. Feinman ’10L has been named Virginia’s deputy secretary of natural re-

sources by Gov. Terry McAuliffe. In this role, he’ll work with Secretary Molly Ward to protect the commonwealth’s land, air and water and to further the governor’s initiatives regarding climate change, land conservation and the Chesapeake Bay cleanup.

Feinman spent two years on a fellowship with the Public Interest Research Groups working on energy policy before attending W&L Law. He’s worked on multiple campaigns at the state and federal level and spent two years with the Commonwealth Institute, a budget and fiscal policy think tank in Richmond. Previously, he served as policy director for Gov. McAuliffe’s campaign and deputy policy director for the governor’s transition team.

In an interview with the Lynchburg News Advance, Feinman, a Lynchburg native, noted the joys of growing up in an area where he could hike on the Appalachian Trail and swim at Panther Falls. He also recalled visiting the farm of friends in the Shenandoah Valley, taking in the beauty of Ivy Creek and building forts in the woods near his home, where he would often lose his father’s tools.

“It’s a phenomenal way of life and something we should preserve,” said Feinman. “It’s easier to get a focus on natural resources when you are around them.”

As deputy secretary, Feinman serves as second-in-command in a secretariat of approximately 2,400 employees, a yearly budget of about $420 million and six agencies that include the Department of Game and Inland Fisheries, Department of Environmental Quality, Department of Conservation and Recreation and Department of Historic Resources.

“I’m excited,” he said. “We’ve got a really amazing team. I just feel privileged to be surrounded by people who are so remarkable.”

Mullen as a tax attorney in its Richmond office.

Christopher E. Miller is an at-

torney at the law office of John P. Frye P.C., a collections law firm in southwest Virginia. He lives in Lynchburg.

Christine M. Shepard is a cor-

porate and securities associate in Mayer Brown’s Chicago office. She was a judicial clerk for the Hon. Vice Chancellor Donald F. Parsons Jr. on the Delaware Court of Chancery before her move to Chicago.

2013L

LeMont E. Joyner is a consultant at Booz Allen Hamilton, a provider of management consulting, technology and engineering services. He lives in Glenelg, Md.

Lauren K. Neal is a first-year as-

sociate at Morris, Nichols, Arsht & Tunnel L.L.P. in Wilmington, Del. The practice involves corporate and commercial litigation and includes national and regional clients.

Carney N. Simpson joined

Hunton & Williams as an associate in its Atlanta office. She works with Hunton’s real estate capital markets practice. She was an intern at the Atlanta office of regional counsel for the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.

Callie E. Waers joined the firm

of Shuman, McCuskey & Slicer P.L.L.C.. She practices primarily in insurance defense, specifically professional malpractice and personal injury. She lives in Charleston, W.Va. Summer

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Class Notes Caitlin E. High ’13L to Kyle R. Hosmer ’13L on Nov. 23, 2013, at the Country Club of Virginia, in Richmond. Alumni guests and wedding party (from l. to r.): Sarah Ratzel ’09, ’12L, Callie Waers ’13L, Neil Millhiser ’11L, Olivia Fritsche ’14L, Ben Koopferstock ’13L (groomsman), Anaeli Sandoval ’13L, Alisa Abbott ’13L, Chris Hartsfield ’11L, Maggie Burrus ’14L, Kellen Lavin ’13L, Michael Bombace ’13L (groomsman), Emily Sabo ’13L (bridesmaid), Kyle (groom), Gina Lauterio ’14L, Travis Creel ’13L (groomsman), Stephen Donaldson ’13L (groomsman), Sam Vinson ’13L (groomsman), Caitlin (bride), Chris Edwards ’13L, Jeff Wieand ’13L and David Bean II ’13L (groomsman).

Weddings

Patrick L. Bryant ’02L to Deborah

Letz, on Oct. 5, 2013, in Orange, Va. Bryant is an appellate attorney in the federal public defender’s office for the Eastern District of Virginia. He wrote the certiorari petition and was the lead brief-writer in the office’s victory at the U.S. Supreme Court in Alleyne v.

United States, 133 S. Ct. 2151 (2013).

The couple live in Alexandria, Va.

Births and Adoptions Christopher A. Vrettos ’05L and his wife, Catherine, a daughter,

Cathleen Beasley, on Oct. 1, 2013. She joins sister Caroline. The family live in Nashville, Tenn.

Benjamin D. Byrd ’08L and his wife, Tia, a daughter, Ada Marie Gunn, on Dec. 5, 2013. Ada joins brother Mac. The family live in Roanoke.

Obituaries The Hon. Joseph L. Savage Jr. ’42L, of Fredericksburg, Va., died on March 27. During World War II, he served for three years as an Army Reserve officer in North Africa and Italy. Thereafter, he spent 17 months 34

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on active duty in the Judge Advocate General’s Corps in California. He served as judge of the general district court for the city of Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania County and as a substitute judge after retirement, and volunteered at Mary Washington Hospital. He was father to Thomas Y. Savage ’82L.

Richard E. Bartlebaugh ’45, ’47L,

of Coshocton, Ohio, died on March 23. He served during World War II in the Navy and attended midshipman’s school at Columbia University. He was a gunnery officer aboard the destroyer escort U.S.S. Muir (DE-770). He was president and owner of Acoustics Manufacturing Corp. and vice president and general manager of Steel Ceiling Inc. He was a member of the Detroit Rotary Club and served on the boards of the Salvation Army, the Muskingum Area Board of Alcohol, Drug Addiction and Mental Health Services and the Coshocton Foundation.

Charles F. Blackburn ’49L, of Henderson, N.C., died on Oct. 15, 2013.

He served as a pilot during World War II. He established Blackburn & Blackburn with his brother. After serving as prosecuting attorney for Vance County, he was elected to the 1959 session of the state senate representing Vance, Warren, Halifax and Northampton counties. Gov. Terry Sanford appointed him to the North

Carolina Commission for the Study of Exceptionally Talented Children and as a member and then chairman of the John H. Kerr Reservoir Development Commission. He was city attorney of Henderson and was chairman of the board of trustees of Vance County Technical Institute and of VanceGranville Community College. He was president of the Henderson-Vance Chamber of Commerce and was named its Outstanding Citizen of the Year in 1990. He served for many years in the North Carolina Army National Guard, retiring with the rank of colonel, after serving several years as judge advocate general for North Carolina. He received the Order of the Long Leaf Pine during the administration of Gov. James B. Hunt Jr. He was brother to George Blackburn ’43, ’49L.

Carter C. Chinnis ’49L, of Rich-

mond, died on Sept. 29, 2013. He served in World War II as a battery officer in the Navy and returned to active duty during the Korean War. He was editor of the W&L Law Review and a member of the Order of the Coif. He worked for Milbank, Tweed, Hope & Hadley and the RCA Corp., and founded the Cabell Corp. of Virginia and Maryland.

Rush P. Webb ’51L, of Sandusky,

Ohio, died on Dec.16, 2012. He was a commonwealth’s attorney for Carroll County, Va., and entered the Air Force in 1952. He served three years as judge advocate officer in the Strategic Air Command. He joined the Red Cross as assistant field director in the Service at Military Installations Program. He also practiced law at his own firm in Sandusky.

Roy V. Wolfe Jr. ’51L, of Mason,

Ohio, died on Oct. 29, 2013. He was a World War II veteran. He was a member of the Virginia State Senate and held the offices of deputy clerk of the Scott County Circuit Court, the Scott County commonwealth’s attorney and magistrate for the U.S. Court of the Western District of Virginia.

Stuart A. Peltz ’52L, of Newport

News, Va., died on Jan. 12. He served in the Navy during World War II. He owned and operated the Modern Cleaners for many years. He also practiced law in Newport News and Virginia Beach.

Sellersburg, Ind., died Oct. 31, 2013.

He served in the Marine Corps. He practiced law for over 50 years, closing his practice in 2008. He was a member of Phi Gamma Delta.

James A. Oast Jr. ’54L, of Virginia

Beach, Va., died on Dec. 24, 2008. He served in the Army and was a retired assistant U.S. attorney. He belonged to Kappa Alpha.

William R. Cogar ’51, ’55L, of

Richmond, died on Feb. 4. He served in the Marine Corps, rising to the rank of captain. He was a member of the W&L Law Review. He was an attorney with Troutman Sanders, a fellow of the Virginia and American Bar Foundations and a fellow of the American College of Trial Lawyers.

He served on W&L’s Law Council and was the last surviving member of the original MCV Board. He belonged to Phi Kappa Psi. He was father to William R. Cogar ’76 and grandfather to Margaret C. Cogar ’08.

P. James Kurapka ’53, ’55L, of

Gate City, Va., died Oct. 26, 2013. He was a federal employee and a veteran of the Army. He was a member of the Sons of the Confederate Veterans, the Antique Automobile Club of America, the Scott County Historical Society and the Southwest Virginia Historical Society.

The Hon. Marvin L. Bishop III ’55, ’60L, of Casper, Wyo., died on

March 19. He served in the Army and was stationed in Germany. He joined his father to form the law firm of Bishop and Bishop. He belonged to the Casper Drum and Bugle Corps and traveled the state with his family to participate in parades and concerts.

He served as municipal court judge for 25 years. He belonged to Phi Gamma Delta.

L. Christian Harrell III ’59, ’61L,

of Memphis, Tenn., died on Jan. 15.

He served in the Navy and was a real estate attorney. He belonged to Kappa Alpha.

Richard H. Parsons ’61L, of Peoria, Ill., died on March 26. He served in the Marine Corps PLC Program. He was business editor of the W&L Law Review. He formed and owned the

Bankers Title Company Ltd. He also served on the board of directors for a number of commercial entities. He served terms in elected positions, such as precinct committeeman and delegate to the 1972 Democratic National Convention. For 20 years, he was commissioner/trial judge for the Illinois Court of Claims. He became the first federal public defender for the Central District of Illinois, a position he held from August 1995 until his retirement in August 2011. In 1999, the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals asked him to take on the role as the circuit appellate defender, litigating federal cases on appeal from Illinois, Wisconsin and Indiana. Parsons was involved in numerous legal associations, including as three-time chairman of the ABA’s Criminal Amicus Curiae Committee. Over the years, he participated in a number of local community and public service endeavors.

He belonged to Sigma Phi Epsilon.

Robert B. Armstrong ’62L, of

Roanoke, died on March 31. He was a lieutenant in the Navy JAG Corps and was stationed primarily in Great Lakes, Ill., and Jacksonville, Fla. He practiced law in a variety of partnerships and as a sole practitioner in Huntington, Long Island, N.Y., and Lexington. He belonged to Sigma Chi.

Michael E. Bowerman ’65L, of

Virginia Beach, Va., died on May 13, 2013. He practiced at Kellam Law Firm and founded his own practice.

He co-founded an organization to protect and restore the Back Bay. A 40-year member of the Virginia Beach Exchange Club, he served as president and as legal counsel. He was instrumental in forming the Youth Service Federation. He belonged to Sigma Chi.

H. Benjamin Jones Jr. ’65L, of

Irvington, Va., died on Oct. 21, 2013.

He was a founding partner of Walker Jones P.C., in Warrenton, Va.

Capt. Francis E. Kennedy Jr. ’66L,

of Colorado Springs, Colo., died Feb. 9.

He served in the Air Force. He worked in property development, owning and serving as CEO of Emerald Development and Construction.

George F. Nichols Jr. ’69L, of

Chicago, died on Jan. 27. He worked for the Cook County public defender’s

office in Chicago and was briefly in private practice.

Dr. Robert M. Lawrence Jr. ’78L,

of Lexington, died on Jan. 22. He graduated from Virginia Commonwealth University with a B.S. in 1957 and a D.D.S in 1958. He practiced dentistry in Lexington for 37 years. He earned a law degree from W&L after nine years of part-time studies.

Class Notes

E. Gerry Barker IV ’51,’ 53L, of

Susan L. Pilcher ’81L, of San

Francisco, died on Dec. 23, 2013.

She pursued a career in finance and wealth management with Arthur Andersen and served as director of wealth management at U.S. Trust. She also worked for Morgan Stanley and concluded her career as the managing director of private wealth management at First Republic Bank. She was aunt to William H. McNair Jr. ’88.

Violet Huffman Sevdy ’81L, of

Lexington, Ky., died on Feb. 13, 2013.

She was a graduate of the University of Kentucky College of Law and a member of the Kentucky Bar Association.

She was wife to Eric M. Sevdy ’81L.

Lt. Cmdr. Brian W. Robinson ’90L, of Manassas, Va., died Feb. 14.

He served in the Coast Guard as a JAG officer. He volunteered for duty in Afghanistan and served there as a legal trainer during 2010. His personal military awards include three awards of the Meritorious Service Medal, the Coast Guard Commendation Medal, three awards of the Coast Guard Achievement Medal, the Navy & Marine Corps Achievement Medal, the Army Achievement Medal and three awards of the Commandant’s Letter of Commendation Ribbon.

He also received the Department of State Superior Honor Award. He practiced law for 12 years in Boston, first as an associate at Hale and Dorr, and then as a partner at McDermott, Will and Emory. He received the Founders Award from a non-profit for his pro bono work on behalf of over 100 families in Boston’s Dorchester neighborhood.

Holly Young Walter ’91L, of Wel-

lington, Fla. died on Nov. 3, 2013. She worked at James A. Hartman P.A. and South Florida Water Management District. She was sister to Heather Young ’84L. Summer

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Class Notes

W & L M o u r n s F o r m e r L a w D e a n R a n d y B e z a n s o n Randall P. “Randy” Bezanson, the

“More than any single individual, Randy made the law school what it is today. He was a visionary leader who, together with President John Wilson, articulated and built the liberal arts model of legal education that emphasizes small classes, close student-faculty interaction, intensive writing instruction and interdisciplinary inquiry.”

—David Millon, J.B. Stombock Professor of Law

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dean of the Washington and Lee University School of Law from 1988 to 1994, died on Jan. 25, in San Antonio, Texas, following a long illness. He was 67.

Bezanson is credited with enhancing the national reputation of the law school and laying the groundwork to secure its financial future. Among his numerous accomplishments, he rejuvenated the firstyear curriculum with the introduction of small, writing-intensive classes.

“Randy’s deanship brought about monumental changes,” said Dean Nora Demleitner. “While his death is to be mourned, his legacy will live on through each of us and our law school.”

Bezanson received his B.S. and B.A. from Northwestern University and his J.D. from the University of Iowa College of Law. After clerkships on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia and U.S. Supreme Court, he returned to the University of Iowa to teach, where he established himself as one of the nation’s leading experts on the First Amendment, libel law and mass communications law.

In 1979, Bezanson became the University of Iowa’s vice president for finance and university services. He served in that post until 1984, directing one of the then largest budgets in state government and overseeing three successful capital improvement projects, including the construction of Iowa’s Boyd Law Building.

He left Iowa in 1988 to become dean of W&L Law. During Bezanson’s tenure at W&L, the University planned and constructed a major addition to Lewis Hall, named in honor of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. ’27, ’31L. This addition included more space for clinical programs, the library reading room, faculty offices and the law school’s archives, to which Powell donated his personal and professional papers.

At W&L, Bezanson emphasized what he called “the role of writing as the principal medium of learning” in making curricular changes. Even in expanding clinical programs, he pointed to W&L’s “taught clinics” with their “focus on the skills of analytical writing and oral expression.”

David Millon, J.B. Stombock Professor of Law at W&L, was just beginning his teaching career when Bezanson came to Lexington.

“More than any single individual,

Randy made the law school what it is today. He was a visionary leader who, together with President John Wilson, articulated and built the liberal arts model of legal education that emphasizes small classes, close student-faculty interaction, intensive writing instruction and interdisciplinary inquiry,” said Millon. “In the decades since Randy’s deanship, many law schools have tried to emulate our model, but it was Randy who set us on our on-going course of leadership in curricular innovation.”

Bezanson returned to the University of Iowa in 1994 after the completion of his W&L deanship. In 1998, he became the Charles E. Floete Distinguished Professor of Law, and in 2006 he became the inaugural holder of the David H. Vernon professorship. An extraordinary teacher, he was recognized in 2009 with the President and Provost Award for Teaching Excellence, the University of Iowa’s highest teaching honor.

Gail Agrawal, dean and F. Wendell Miller Professor of Law at the University of Iowa, said, “Randy will be remembered by his colleagues for his rigorous mind, his great wit, his unyielding commitment to legal education, his deep devotion to using writing as a vehicle for sharpening students’ minds, his unfailing willingness to read and comment on colleagues’ drafts, and his instinctive questioning of unspoken assumptions. Many of those qualities were on daily display around the faculty lunch table, to which Randy invariably came with a topic worthy of careful thought and discussion. His students will remember him as a gifted and committed teacher, learned scholar and wonderful mentor. His greatest professional pride came from his students’ achievements.

Life in the Boyd Law Building will not be the same without him.”

Bezanson’s scholarship spanned the fields of administrative law, constitutional law, the First Amendment, defamation and privacy law, law and medicine, and the history of freedom of the press. The author of dozens of articles, Bezanson also wrote, co-wrote or edited eight books, two monographs and six book chapters. His book with co-authors Gilbert Cranberg and John Soloski, “Libel Law and the Press: Myth and Reality,” received the National Distinguished Service Award for Research in Journalism in 1988 from the Society of Professional Journalists.

Ways to Give The Lara D. Gass Memorial Fund will help support the legal education of a future W&L Law student who embodies Gass’ ideals. The Class of 2014L has already contributed over $28,000, with 54 percent of her classmates pledging their support.

T

he death of Laura Gass ’14L in March stunned the W&L Law community. Engaged in many scholarly and volunteer activities, Gass had just been inducted into Omicron Delta Kappa for her numerous contributions to the University. She was a member of the editorial board of the W&L Law Review; symposium editor and organizer of the Law Review’s annual symposium; a member of the Women Law Students Organization; and a Kirgis Fellow. She held the Alexander M. and Rose S. Harman scholarship.

As Dean Nora Demleitner noted, however, “none of these résumé items captures the Lara Gass we had the honor of knowing. The student who would come with her electronic notebook to make sure that she captured all the important details; the symposium editor who elegantly and skillfully managed the details of a potentially explosive conference on the 40th anniversary of Roe; the young woman who devoted her little spare time to putting together a Women’s Law Student Organization event showcasing women attorneys and judges. She was a humble and compassionate person, and, on top of that, she was truly magnetic—the kind of person you would hope to run into in Sydney Lewis Hall.”

Gass made a lasting impression. “Seldom have I been as confident about a young lawyer’s future as I was about Lara’s,” said

The Hon. John A. Parkins Jr. ’72L, Superior Court of the State of Delaware, for whom Gass clerked. “In baseball parlance she was a five-tool player—she had all of the qualities necessary to leave a lasting mark. Sadly we will never know the many successes destined to come her way… . I will mourn the loss of what might have been.”

In her final year at W&L, Gass, along with classmates Patrick Bolling, Brian Buckmire, Casey Coleman and Chris Wagner, was already hard at work raising money for the Third-Year Pledge Project, which supports the Law Annual Fund and other programs. Within hours of her death, the group unanimously decided to use the 3L class gift to endow a scholarship in her memory.

The students sent an e-mail announcing their intentions and “word spread through Sydney Lewis Hall to the faculty, staff, 1Ls and 2Ls,” said Bolling. “We published the donation website and shared it on several W&L Law Facebook pages. Lara’s West Coast-based friends shared it with their friends, and it just continued to snowball. One of our biggest successes was a University-wide SBA-sponsored brunch. Hundreds of undergraduates, law students and members of the W&L and Lexington community gave gifts that added up to over $2,000 in one day. It was very inspiring.

These successes were undoubtedly more a result of Lara’s impact on her world than our

fundraising acumen. The credit goes to her.”

The Lara D. Gass Memorial Fund will help support the legal education of a future W&L Law student who embodies Gass’ ideals.

The Class or 2014L has already contributed over $28,000, with 54 percent of her classmates pledging their support.

“[Lara] was a shooting star that lit up our lives for too short of a time,” said Bolling. “But, man, what a light.”

To make a contribution to the Lara D. Gass Memorial Fund, visit law.wlu.edu/give or contact Elizabeth Outland Branner at brannere@wlu.edu or (540) 458-8191.

Gerri and Jay Gass, Lara’s parents, receive her walking stick from 2014L class president George Robertson (far right) and vice president Doug Pittman.

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Alumni parents celebrate graduation day with their children. From l. to r.: Mark Davis ’79L, Timothy Davis ’14L, Regina Davis ’80L, Robert Marks ’76L and Ellen Marks ’14L.

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