The 2019 Alabama Law Alumni Society Banquet is scheduled for Friday, February 1, at The Florentine in downtown Birmingham. The banquet will honor U.S. Senator Richard Shelby (‘63) as the recipient of the 2019 Sam W. Pipes Distinguished Alumnus Award.
Senator Shelby was first elected to the Senate in 1986 and is currently in his sixth term. He is Chairman of the Senate Committee on Appropriations. He is a senior member on the Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee and the Committee on Rules and Administration. He also serves on the Committee on Environment and Public Works.
Prior to his election in the U. S. Senate, Senator Shelby served four terms in the U.S. House of Representatives and eight years in the Alabama legislature.
All alumni are invited to attend the Banquet. For more information or to purchase tickets, contact Cindy Rice at crice@law.ua.edu.
As you know, Hugh F. Culverhouse, Jr., recently pledged $25 Million to fund the Culverhouse Endowment for Excellence. This is a gift so generous that the Board of Trustees of the UA System authorized changing our name to the Hugh F. Culverhouse Jr. School of Law at the University of Alabama. As extraordinary as it is, Hugh’s gift alone can’t meet all of our needs nor make good on all of the opportunities that will sustain us as a great law school. In short, we continue to need you to help us.
Here’s how you may help. Hugh’s pledge is scheduled to be paid in full over a period of four years. He has offered a challenge: If we can raise $5 Million from additional sources, hopefully by the end of the calendar year, he will expedite the next installment in his pledge, to match our new contributions. Your gifts can be for any purpose, and can include donations made for naming opportunities. So you may follow your own muse as you consider the purposes for your gift.
I recognize that many of you have already given generously to the School of Law. But I believe it’s important that we send a visible signal that Alumni Giving continues to be important to the life of the Law School. To that end, I ask you to give generously by the end of the year by visiting www.give.ua.edu. Payments on existing pledges will count toward the challenge.
Please know that I am ever grateful for your contributions to the Law School.
Respectfully yours,
Dean Mark E. Brandon
More than 100 Tuscaloosa middle school students visited the Law School on Friday.
Students from Eastwood Middle School and Tuscaloosa Magnet School – Middle participated in the Middle School Open House, a program designed to introduce middle school students to law school.
Dean Mark E. Brandon welcomed the students. He urged them to prepare for law school now by learning how to write well and to think logically. It also wouldn’t hurt to learn how the government works and how laws are made.
“Long before they got here, our students were preparing for law school,” Brandon said. “Even before they were in college, our students were preparing for law school. Even in middle school, our students were preparing for law school. They didn’t know they were preparing for law school, but they were.”
2L Moot Court Fellows Lindsey Barber, Cory Church, and Anne Miles Golson were recently crowned Co-Champions of the Southeast Regional of the National Moot Court Competition. As Co-Champions of the region, the Fellows will next compete at the National Finals in New York City in January.
Coached by Assistant Dean for Students Mary Ksobiech and managed by Josh Kravec, 2L, the team defeated Vanderbilt University, Cumberland School of Law, Louisiana State University, the University of Mississippi, and Belmont College of Law on their march to the title. Their excellent oral advocacy consistently outscored their opponents; each advocate earned multiple perfect scores from the judges throughout their rounds.
Brigadier General (Ret.) Richard F. Allen (’73) was selected by the Board of Trustees of the Army War College Foundation as an Outstanding Alumnus of the United States Army War College.
The Honorable Christy Olinger Edwards (LL.M. ‘14) was elected to the Alabama Court of Civil Appeals.
The Honorable Monet Gaines (‘01) was appointed as Montgomery County District Court Judge by Governor Kay Ivey.
Anna Clark Morris (’96) has been named by Attorney General Steve Marshall to lead the office division that prosecutes public corruption and white collar crime cases.
John Rogers (LL.M. ’13) was re-elected to the Ohio House of Representatives.
Kristen M. Vigilant (’18) joined Swift, Currie, McGhee & Hiers in the firm’s Atlanta office. She is a member of the Coverage and Commercial Litigation team.
Alabama’s Culverhouse Law is planning the inaugural Frank M. Johnson, Jr. Memorial Endowed Lecture on Constitutional Rights and Liberties. The event is scheduled to begin at 8:30 a.m. Friday, January 25, in the Bedsole Moot Court Room. The Honorable Guido Calabresi, Senior Judge, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, has agreed to deliver the keynote address.
Bradley Arant Boult Cummings, LLP donated $8,000 to the Alabama Law Alumni Society on behalf of the firm’s graduates of the Law School.
Laura L. Crum (’82) contributed $10,000 and facilitated a gift of $2,500 from The Crum Family Charitable Foundation to The Crum Family Lecture Series, which will focus on themes related to law and business.
Frank S. James, III (’78) pledged $12,000 to the Judge Virgil Pittman Endowed Scholarship.
William D. Melton (‘66) pledged $10,000 to the William D. Melton Endowed Scholarship.
Mr. and Mrs. Jerry Powell (’75) contributed $20,000 to the Law School Foundation’s Unrestricted Fund.
Anna Jacobs Singer donated $50,000 to establish the Dr. Norman J. Singer Endowed Public Interest Law Fund.
Frances S. Stribling Estate contributed $25,000 to the Dean’s Discretionary Fund.
Jeff Utsey (‘95) facilitated a gift of $5,000 from the Gilmore Law Firm. The gift will support the William L. Utsey, William D. Melton & E. Tedford Taylor Endowed Scholarship.
PROFESSOR DEEPA DAS ACEVEDO was invited to publish a commentary in The Economy & Political Weekly, a weekly publication that has brought together academics, researchers, policy makers, and activists since 1949 and is widely read in India. Her commentary, which was published on October 27, analyzed the Indian Supreme Court’s recent decision on the constitutional status of the women’s entry ban at Sabarimala temple, in Kerala, India. She has also been invited to write a commentary for the Indian Feminist Judgments Project on an earlier lower court decision concerning the same ban that was overturned by the recent Supreme Court verdict. In December she will also be an invited contributor at a conference on freedom of religion in South Asia hosted by the National University of Singapore.
In November 2018, Professor Acevedo will be convening the first of several roundtables to discuss the interaction between legal and anthropological scholarship. The first panel will take place on November 17 at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association in San Jose, CA. The panel will bring together legal anthropologists from law schools and social science departments around North America to discuss the potential for collaboration between their disciplines. A second panel, also organized by Professor Acevedo, is planned for the 2019 Law & Society meeting in Washington, D.C.
PROFESSOR RICHARD DELGADO published “J’Accuse: An Essay on Animus,” in volume 52, page 119 of the UC-Davis Law Review Online. See https://lawreview.law.ucdavis.edu/online/vol52/52-online-Delgado.pdf
The Chronicle of Higher Education published an essay by Professor Delgado in a series titled “The Canon: What’s The Most Influential Book in the Past 20 Years?” https://www.chronicle.com/interactives/influential-books
Ulrich Baer (NYU) published a series of podcasts by leading legal scholars on speech and democracy. The series includes an interview with Professor Delgado discussing his recent book with Professor Jean Stefancic on hate speech. www.ulrichbaer.com
Professor Delgado accepted an invitation to be interviewed at UC Berkeley in a series on the careers of leaders in the law and society movement. https://www.law.berkeley.edu/research/center-for-the-study-of-law-society/conversations-in-law-and-society/
SSRN notified Professor Delgado that he is in the top 10% of authors on the website by downloads within the last 12 months, and also all-time.
PROFESSOR SHAHAR DILLBARY presented his experimental scholarship on causation at the George Mason School of Law’s Faculty Workshop. He presented another experimental article on the signaling effect of tort law at the Southern Economic Conference Association Annual Meeting in Washington, D. C. More recently, Professor Dillbary was invited by the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods (Portugal) to present a third article on the economic effect of third-party liability doctrines. He is scheduled to present his recent theoretical scholarship at Bar-Ilan University Faculty Workshop this winter (Israel).
PROFESSOR PAUL HORWITZ participated in the Notre Dame Law Review’s annual symposium, Contemporary Free Speech: The Marketplace of Ideas a Century Later. His talk, which will be published in the Notre Dame Law Review, offers a reconsideration and defense of the “heckler’s veto doctrine” in First Amendment law and its application to issues related to campus speech.
PROFESSOR ADAM STEINMAN’s commentary at MDL at 50 – The 50th Anniversary of Multidistrict Litigation, a conference co-hosted by the Center on Civil Justice at NYU Law School and the Liman and Solomon Centers at Yale Law School, was posted on YouTube.
His article, “Access to Justice, Rationality, and Personal Jurisdiction,” 71 Vanderbilt Law Review 1401 (2018), made the Social Science Research Network’s Top-10 Recent Papers for the Litigation & Procedure, Law & Society: Civil Procedure, and LSN: Procedure (Courts) topics.
The views, opinions, and conclusions expressed by faculty in their publications or research activities are those of the author and not necessarily those of The University of Alabama or its officers and trustees. The content of faculty publications has not been approved by The University of Alabama, and the author is solely responsible for that content.
