UVA Today today is running a Law School story on the retirement of Lillian BeVier, the first tenured female member of the school’s faculty.
If you’ve got about 24 minutes, enjoy the YouTube video of her retirement ceremony. You’ll get a taste of what made her a special member of the law faculty.
UVA Today Honcho Marian Anderfuren writes:
The Monday after Final Exercises is reserved for U.Va. athletes who were competing on Sunday. That’s when eight players and two staff members from the men’s lacrosse team and two members of the women’s softball team had their moment in the sun. And clouds. And sun.
Leah Sears Ward, who received a L.L.M. from the U.Va. School of Law in 1995, is reportedly on President Obama’s short list for a U.S. Supreme Court nomination. Ward is chief justice of the Georgia Supreme Court. (Here’s her New York Times profile.)
If Ward is nominated, endures the shark-infested confirmation process and ends up landing the coveted seat, she won’t even be the first U.Va. L.L.M. elevated to a nation’s highest court this year. Back in January, 1983 graduate Donal O’Donnell took a seat on the Supreme Court of Ireland.
This just in from the Law School: Here’s video of the address that Homeland Security Secretary (and 1983 U.Va. Law alumna) Janet Napolitano gave after receiving the Thomas Jefferson Foundation Medal in Law.
The folks who study and work on North Grounds can tell you: softball is a Big Deal in those parts. Doubtless in more than one of the Law School’s cherry-wood lockers, bats and gloves share space with interview suits.
This past weekend, softball was a force for good in the community. The North Grounds Softball League hosted its 27th annual U.Va. Law Softball tournament, bringing in a record 120 teams from 53 schools (think of the economic impact!). The tourney raised $20,000 for Charlottesville non-profit Children, Youth and Family Services and another $3,000 for U.Va.’s Public Interest Law Association, which funds summer fellowships for students working in public service (a total that was matched with another $3,000 from the Law School Foundation).
To add the cherry on top of the charity sundae, a home team, U.Va. Blue (pictured), won the men’s division. (A team from the Florida Coastal School of Law took home the co-rec title.)
(Read the Daily Progress article on the tournament here.)
UPDATE, April 21: Listen to the UVA Today Radio Show report on this story:
The annual Virginia Film Festival is in the fall, but there seems to be lots of video to take in this spring. To wit:
That’s what happened to third-year law student Doug Bouton, whose father, Daniel Bouton, a longtime prosecutor and judge in Virginia, joined the U.Va. Law faculty this spring. The younger Bouton recently wrote a column for the student-run Virginia Law Weekly describing his experience.
I was informed that Diesel Dan would be teaching at UVA Law not from Diesel himself, but from another law student. I scoffed at the ignoramus who inquired whether my dad was teaching at the Law School— “Ha. Definitely not,” I boldly asserted, looking down on him from my pedestal. When I later told Diesel Dan about this preposterous question, I was surprised to discover that I, in fact, was the ignoramus—he would be teaching at the Law School beginning in the spring of 2010. I guess I stupidly assumed that his son, who was still attending UVA Law, would be privy to that information before anyone else.
The Washington Post has an obituary of Louis Auchincloss, a 1941 gradate of U.Va.’s Law School who went on to become “a novelist, essayist, biographer, editor and lawyer whose literary beat was the decline of the old WASP world of power and privilege to which he belonged.”
Matt Nicholson, a May graduate of the U.Va. Law School, has been named a Bristow Fellow.
That means a lot to a few people. For the rest of us, I’ll explain a little bit. The U.S. Solicitor General is essentially the government’s lawyer, arguing cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. Each year, the Solicitor General’s office names just four Bristow Fellows, whose responsibilities are “drafting briefs in opposition to petitions filed against the government in the U.S. Supreme Court and monitoring cases in lower courts for appeal.”
Nicholson — who also holds an undergrad degree in political science from U.Va. — appears to be a man to watch; he was the articles editor for the Virginia Law Review, and is currently clerking for Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III on the Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
U.Va. law professor Margaret “Mimi” Riley offers an overview of the health care reform plans before Congress:
Law students sometimes get a bad rap for supposedly being most interested in landing a six-figure salary at a swanky law firm. In reality, though, many are idealistic and interested in public service careers.
But pursuing those kinds of careers can be difficult for students who may have taken out loans to attend law school, on top of the loans they took out to earn an undergraduate degree.
Which brings us to Saturday’s auction to benefit the Public Interest Law Association, which raised $50,000 to help offset the expenses of law students who take summer jobs in public-interest law, instead of more lucrative internships with law firms.
Law professor John Norton Moore, who directs U.Va.’s Center for Oceans Law and Policy, recently gave a talk at the Law School on the control of piracy, which he called a “very, very serious issue in world order.”
He noted that international law allows any nation to go after pirates in international waters, and even in territorial waters under certain circumstances.
His prescription? Stop paying ransom; put small military security teams aboard ships in the region; prosecute the pirates you catch; and outlaw certain piracy equipment (such as long ladders) in pirate-infested waters.
He also advised ships to cruise faster, remove fixed ladders and take evasive actions when attacked. Pirates “need calm weather and they need slow ships,” Moore said.
Here’s Moore’s complete 23-minute talk:
The U.Va. School of Law has put together an online tribute to Sen. Edward Kennedy, a 1959 alumnus who died Tuesday.
The site includes words, photos from his student days as well as more recent visits, and a video of Kennedy’s keynote speech at the 2006 Conference on Public Service and the Law.
The U.Va. School of Law has posted an interesting set of three brief “Welcome to Virginia Law” videos in which current law students (and May grads) share their advice and experiences to incoming students. Alas, there does not appear to be an easy way to link to the individually, but they appear on this page. I particularly liked the second video, “Charlottesville,” which is applicable to all students — and really, any newcomer to Charlottesville.
From the Law School’s news site comes a dispatch from John Stephens, who is spending the summer working for the AIDS Law Project in Johannesburg, South Africa through the Law School’s Class of 1957 South Africa Human Rights Summer Fellowship.
His work focuses on realizing South Africans’ constitutionally guaranteed right to adequate food and nutrition.
“These are enumerated rights in the South African constitution; part of my job is to research school feeding programs in connection with the realization of them,” Stephens writes. “My other major assignment has to do with formula for feeding infants.”
An excerpt:
I have been challenged in all of the astonishing and aching ways I hoped to be. The change is multifold: new country, new culture, new job, new friends, new skills and a new city — a very big one. I have lots of questions: Can I turn left on red? Am I lost? Are they honking at me? Should I eat that? Is this a sickness, or just a discomfort? Is he angry or is this funny? Could this be the good fight? Is this the struggle? Can I even ask this question?
