Moliterno Led Third-Year Curriculum

Jim Moliterno, who retired this year after 14 years at W&L Law, was already an established leader in legal education when he arrived in 2009 as the Vincent Bradford Professor of Law. Then-Dean Rod Smolla had recruited Moliterno to lead the design and implementation of the Law School’s revolutionary third-year curriculum, which consisted entirely of practice-based simulations, real client experiences, and advanced explorations into legal ethics and professionalism.

The school—and Moliterno—made headlines with this reform, the first major evolution of the upper-level curriculum at any law school since the arrival of legal clinics. While the program has evolved in the decade since its launch, the focus on experiential education ushered in by Moliterno remains a key feature of W&L Law, with all students required to complete numerous credits of practice-based instruction in order to graduate.

For 21 years prior to joining W&L, Moliterno was the Tazewell Taylor Professor of Law, Director of the Legal Skills Program, and director of Clinical Programs at the College of William & Mary. He was the architect of William and Mary’s ethics, skills, and professionalism program, which in 1991 won the inaugural American Bar Association Gambrell Professionalism Award.

in Education Award from the Virginia State Bar Section on the Education of Lawyers in Virginia.

“Jim’s passion for improving the legal profession broadly and the ethical administration of law by lawyers and judges know no geographical ethical manner.”

Beyond his work at law schools, Moliterno has traveled throughout the world to help countries develop ethics policies and training programs. He has designed new lawyer and judge ethics courses in Serbia, Armenia, Georgia, Czech Republic, Japan, Indonesia and Thailand. He has trained law professors in China, Thailand, Georgia, Armenia and Serbia. He has trained judges in Kosovo and both judges and prosecutors in Indonesia. He has worked to revise the lawyer ethics code in Thailand and Georgia and lectured extensively on international lawyer ethics topics in Spain, Czech Republic, and Slovakia.

How can a teacher of such complex topics be so effective across that many different languages and cultures? Soledad Atienza, dean of the IE Law School in Madrid, suggests it is due to Moliterno’s ability to adapt across all circumstances, recalling a talk he gave during a panel.

“He was not only brilliant in his speech, but he said he would speak slowly so that all those non-English speakers would understand him,” said Atienza. “His communication skills are such, that some non-English speakers in the audience said, ‘I understood every word, I did not know my English was so good!’’

For evidence of Moliterno’s impact abroad, one need look no further than former Soviet Georgia, where he participated in a number of USAID projects. Irina Lortkipanidze, a regional rule of law advisor, noted that the Georgian translation of his book “Global Issues in Legal Ethics” was the first book on lawyer ethics available in the Georgian language and said Moliterno’s work was instrumental in shaping the future of the legal profession in that country.

“He was able to take a system that was in its infancy and develop it into a model that other bar associations across Europe could look to as an example,” said Lortkipanidze.

No surprise, then, that his work in that country earned him the nickname “Father of Ethics.”

Indeed, he has been recognized throughout his career for his work advancing legal education, both in the U.S. and abroad. In 2012 he received the Rebuilding Justice Award from the Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System and in 2017 received the William R. Rakes Leadership

Faculty Notes

DAVID BALUARTE has been awarded a Fulbright U.S. Scholar Grant that will take him to Iberoamericana University (IBERO) in Mexico City, where he will teach in the Refugee Law Clinic and assist in the development of clinical legal education more broadly at the University.

BRANDON HASBROUCK was among the most downloaded from the Social Science Research Network (SSRN) in 2022. His work was downloaded nearly 13,500 times during the year, placing him 16th on a list combining scholars from all categories of legal research. He placed 10th in downloads for U.S. law professors.

Scholarship by SARAH HAAN on sexism in corporate governance was featured bounds,” said Brant Hellwig, former dean of W&L Law. “I have admired and indeed have often been amazed at his unbridled passion not only for teaching students substantive law, but for doing so in a manner that will allow them to effectively and efficiently serve their clients in a professional and

While Moliterno’s time teaching in Lewis Hall is at an end, his William & Mary colleague Jim Heller believes the work that has defined his career will go on.

“I doubt that ‘retire’ is a word in Jim Moliterno’s vocabulary,” said Heller. “I suspect he will be engaged in training lawyers and judges, if not students, for many years to come.” recently in a commentary by New York Times business and economic columnist Peter Coy. Coy interviewed Haan and cites extensively from her Stanford Law Review article “Corporate Governance and the Feminization of Capital,” which explores the largely forgotten history women played as corporate shareholders and details their early fights for inclusion on corporate boards.

KISH PARELLA was appointed to Oxford University’s Centre for Corporate Reputation as an International Research Fellow. The Centre for Corporate Reputation is an independent research center within Oxford University’s Saïd Business School. Through their international research fellows program, the Centre partners with leading scholars like Professor Parella to research the role of social evaluations in business and society.

ALAN TRAMMEL’s new article “The False Promise of Jurisdiction Stripping” was accepted for presentation at the Harvard/ Stanford/Yale Junior Faculty Forum, regarded as the premier conference for junior and mid-career scholars. The article, coauthored with Dan Epps of Washington University in St. Louis, will be published in the Columbia Law Review in November.

MELANIE WILSON was chosen to serve as president-elect of the Association of American Law Schools (AALS) during the AALS annual meeting on January 7, 2023. Wilson has served the AALS in numerous capacities, including membership on its Executive Committee since 2020.

KAREN WOODY has been appointed to a four-year term on the National Adjudicatory Council (NAC) of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA). FINRA is a government-authorized not-forprofit organization that works to ensure the integrity of financial markets through oversight of the more than 624,000 securities brokers and dealers across the country. Using AI and machine learning, FINRA analyzes billions of market events daily to support investors, regulators, policymakers and other stakeholders.