News - May 2007
Michigan Law grad earns fellowship with National Women's Law Center
May 30, 2007
Contact: John Masson, (734) 647-7352, jpmasson@umich.edu
Only a few weeks are likely to divide Taryn Wilgus Nulls’ studies at the University of Michigan Law School from her new duties helping educate others about the effects of Title IX on female athletes.
That change comes about thanks to a fellowship the Washington, D.C.-based National Women’s Law Center recently awarded the newly graduated Null, who interned with the organization last summer.
During her career at Michigan Law she worked as selection coordinator for the Michigan Journal of Gender and Law, co-chaired the Organization of Public Interest Students, and served as at-large board member for the American Constitution Society. Null, who graduated Stanford University in 2002 with a degree in history, also volunteered with the Family Law Project and worked with the Child Advocacy Law Clinic while at Michigan Law. And she previously served in internships with the American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan and the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
She plans to spend the summer studying for the California bar exam – and looking forward to her opportunity in the nation’s capital.
Michigan Law student wins Israeli Supreme Court clerkship
May 30, 2007
Contact: John Masson, (734) 647-7352, jpmasson@umich.edu
Julie Marder has been fascinated by Israel since she returned from the first of her two trips there. Now the third-year Michigan Law student will have a chance to learn more about the country by clerking for one of its Supreme Court justices.
“They’re on the forefront on a lot of issues,” Marder said. “And I’m hoping it will be an experience I can bring back and translate into my practice in America.”
Marder said Michigan Law’s emphasis on internationalism helped make the clerkship, with Justice Ayala Procaccia, possible. She named Virginia Gordan, assistant dean for international affairs, and professors Reuven Avi-Yonah and Omri Ben-Shahar – formerly of Tel-Aviv University – as key supporters in achieving her goal.
The professors, she said, “went above and beyond their role as professors to guide me during this process.” The law school itself did as well, she added, by awarding her a Bates Fellowship to help fund the overseas fellowship.
“One of the things that drew me to Michigan Law was the fact that they had this exchange relationship with Tel-Aviv University,” said Marder, 25. “One of the Israelis who came here told me she had an American friend who had just spent a summer clerking in the Israeli Supreme Court, and that it was eminently do-able.”
Marder, a Summer Starter when she arrived at Michigan Law in 2005, is spending this summer working at Latham & Watkins in Chicago. She’s looking forward to graduating in January and starting her clerkship in spring.
“The Israeli system is similar, yet also different,” said Marder, from the Chicago suburb of Arlington Heights. “They’re really interested in other nations’ decisions in the law, and that’s something I found intriguing. They also blend in Jewish law. I find that very interesting as an American, with our total separation of church and state.”
Two graduates from Michigan Law win Equal Justice Works fellowships
May 25, 2007
Contact: John Masson, (734) 647-7352, jpmasson@umich.edu
Two Michigan Law graduates will soon embark on careers in public service with a special boost from an Equal Justice Works fellowship program.
The graduates, Sarah Bookbinder and Fiza Quraishi, share that dedication to public service which is the hallmark of the fellowships. The program enables new lawyers to carry out carefully targeted two-year plans to advocate for people who aren’t adequately represented in the legal system. Equal Justice Works runs the largest such postgraduate program in the country; successful candidates essentially design their own fellowships.
Quraishi’s fellowship, sponsored by the Morrison and Foerster Foundation, will have her working at the National Center for Youth Law, focusing her efforts on California foster children with unmet mental health needs. She expects to provide direct representation for foster youth and help train children’s advocates on mental health law. Before arriving at Michigan Law, Quraishi worked extensively with at-risk and foster children in New York City. She also is a veteran of Michigan Law’s Child Advocacy Law Clinic.
Bookbinder, from Boston, is scheduled to begin her fellowship – sponsored by Greenberg Traurig LLP – in September on Mississippi’s Gulf Coast. She’ll help the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights. Under Law work with community development organizations in five communities hit hard by Hurricane Katrina. Bookbinder already has volunteered twice in the devastated region and hopes to offer legal assistance and help create affordable housing for people who often are on the verge of homelessness. She’s clerking this summer for U.S. District Court Judge John T. Nixon in Nashville, Tenn.
“It’s a huge honor, but more than that it’s also an amazing inroad into the kind of work I want to do,” Bookbinder said of her fellowship. “I think it would have been pretty much impossible without it.”
More information about Equal Justice Works and the organization’s fellowships is available at www.equaljusticeworks.org
"Remembering Mr. Rickey" in Cooperstown
Michigan Law dean, professor to speak June 6 at Hall of Fame on law school's role in breaking baseball's color barrier
Contact: John Masson, (734) 647-7352, jpmasson@umich.edu
It’s been 60 years since Jackie Robinson first took the field with the number 42 – and the weight of American history – squarely in the middle of his back.
The world knows the story of how Robinson broke Major League Baseball’s modern color barrier at Ebbets Field in Brooklyn. But less familiar is the remarkable story of Branch Rickey – University of Michigan Law School grad and Brooklyn Dodgers president, general manager, and part-owner – who signed Robinson to that history-making big league contract.
That’s something Michigan Law Dean Evan Caminker and Professor Richard D. Friedman hope to help remedy June 6 at the 19th Cooperstown Symposium on Baseball and American Culture at the National Baseball Hall of Fame. The pair are scheduled to participate in “Baseball and Freedom: Remembering Mr. Rickey,” one of several panel discussions planned for the three-day conference.
Caminker plans to talk about Michigan Law’s long history of racial inclusion, which dates to before 1870, when Gabriel Franklin Hargo became the school’s first black graduate. The dean also will highlight the school’s connection to another African-American baseball pioneer, Moses Fleetwood Walker. Walker attended Michigan Law and played for Michigan’s varsity baseball team before becoming the generally acknowledged first African American big league ballplayer, with the then-Major League Toledo Blue Stockings. Caminker also will talk about Rickey’s remarkable career, which already included a long list of accomplishments when he arrived in Ann Arbor in 1909.
By that time the 27-year-old Rickey – who was still recovering from a life-threatening bout with tuberculosis – had already played big league baseball, studied and taught law at Ohio Wesleyan, coached varsity college baseball, and been an athletic director. He remained a live wire in Ann Arbor, Friedman said, as a law student who simultaneously coached Michigan’s varsity baseball team.
“The story goes that the Dean only agreed to allow him to coach if he appeared on time and ready to answer questions in class every day,” Friedman said. “And he did.”
Significantly, Friedman and Caminker added, Rickey’s classmates at Michigan Law included African-Americans and women.
“Michigan Law has always been open to all races and sexes, as a matter of law and policy,” Friedman said. “Rickey was used to a tolerant environment, and Michigan advanced that. But he also had seen intolerance, and came to detest it at an early age.”
After graduating from Michigan Law in 1911, Rickey tried without success to get a small legal practice off the ground. Friedman said that had been Rickey’s goal in playing baseball all along – he saw it as a means to become a successful lawyer. But that wasn’t to be, so instead Rickey came back to Ann Arbor and coached Michigan’s varsity baseball team until Major League Baseball’s St. Louis Browns hired him away.
While he went to St. Louis to work for the Browns, Rickey was with the Cardinals when he unleashed a stream of innovations still in use today. He established the first real farm system for the Cardinals and, later, for the Dodgers. He also built the first Florida spring training facility, Dodgertown, which remained in use today. All the while he was pushing innovations such as pitching machines and batting helmets, Friedman said, as well as urging Major League Baseball to expand from the 16 teams that played from the turn of the century into the 1950s.
All those accomplishments will provide fodder for Caminker, Friedman, and fellow panelists who include former ACLU director Ira Glasser, attorney Thurgood Marshall Jr., and Branch B. Rickey III, president of the Triple-A Pacific Coast League and Branch Rickey’s grandson. More information on the symposium is available at http://www.baseballhalloffame.org/library/symposium/index.htm
“Rickey never made it as a lawyer,” Friedman said. “He was a mediocre manager, as well. But he was a remarkable baseball executive who transformed the game – even before Jackie Robinson.”
International Judicial Conference brings high court justices
from 40 nations to University of Michigan Law School this week
May 14, 2007
Contact: John Masson, (734) 647-7352, jpmasson@umich.edu
Judges from more than 40 countries will gather at the University of Michigan Law School later this week for the 15th Annual International Judicial Conference.
The conference brings together chief justices and other senior judges to discuss issues crucial to maintaining an independent judiciary and preserving the rule of law. Participants in the two-day conference – who come from locales as diverse as the Philippines, Poland, and Portugal – will meet in sessions May 17 and 18 to discuss the interactions between different legal traditions around the world.
The conference has been held in such cities as Strassbourg, Washington, Warsaw, Kiev, and Prague and is sponsored by the The Furth Family Foundation and co-sponsored this and the previous two years by Michigan Law. The Furth Family Foundation was established by Frederick P. Furth, who earned a B.A. from Michigan in 1956 and a law degree from the University of Michigan Law School in 1959. He went on to found The Furth Firm in San Francisco and the Chalk Hill winery in Sonoma County.
This year’s agenda begins with a session on incorporating treaty law and the law of nations in domestic judicial decision-making and features justices from Indonesia, the Dominican Republic, and Denmark. Later topics include judicial borrowing of foreign law into domestic law, judicial autonomy for corporate, commercial and trade adjudication, and the use of specialized courts in complex corporate and commercial cases. Panelists for those discussions come from the judiciary of countries as disparate as Estonia, Jordan, Bangladesh and Ecuador.
Furth and Michigan Law’s Dean Evan Caminker will present remarks Thursday morning to open the conference, and the event will conclude with a dinner Friday evening.
A complete agenda is available at http://law40.adsroot.itcs.umich.edu/michiganlaw/newsandinfo/pdf/IJCAgenda.pdf.
Media interested in attending may call the Michigan Law communications office at (734) 647-7352.
Michigan Law student takes first place in American Indian Law Review contest
May 8, 2007
The Federal Indian Law program at Michigan Law produced another published paper this year as second-year student Mark Shahinian’s entry – “The Tax Man Cometh Not: How the Non-Transferability of Tax Credits Harms Indian Tribes” – took the American Indian Law Review writing competition’s top prize.
Shahinian, who is studying law and natural resources in a joint degree program, said his entry sprang naturally from his involvement last summer with a Native American group pushing to develop wind power in South Dakota in an area with little else to offer for economic development. The award comes with a $1,000 prize.
“They’ve been left with just terrible land, and there’s not much you can do with it,” Shahinian said of the Native Americans on reservations in lower South Dakota. “But the wind does blow, and you can do something with that.”
Shahinian joins at least half a dozen earlier participants in Assistant Professor Gavin Clarkson’s Federal Indian Law courses who have published papers produced in either his class or his advanced seminar. Clarkson said the article writing component, which he’ll be repeating for the fifth straight year in the fall, is helping boost Michigan Law’s standing among Indian law specialists. One recent graduate, who took both the course and the seminar, published two articles and earlier this year accepted a position as general counsel for a tribe.
“The caliber of Michigan students who take Indian Law is quite high,” Clarkson said. “I probably have some of the top Indian law students in the country, and I would say Michigan Law students probably publish more Indian law articles than any other students in the country.”
Clarkson holds simultaneous appointments as an assistant professor in the School of Information, a visiting professor at the Law School, and a faculty affiliate in the Native American Studies program. He also is an enrolled member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma and is a nationally recognized expert on the subject of tribal finance. He recently testified before the Senate Finance Committee regarding tribal access to the capital markets.
The growth of interest in Indian law at Michigan parallels the increased scope of Native American interests around the country, Clarkson said. While some tribes need help with the legal issues surrounding the rapid economic development accompanying casinos and other successful tribal enterprises, many other tribes need urgent help with the persistent problems of poverty and economic stagnation.
That’s one area Shahinian hopes to apply his Michigan Law education when the time comes.
“I’m not 100 percent sure, but I think I want to do things with trying to create ecologically friendly economic activities in communities that actually need it,” Shahinian said. “It’s been slow going out there, but hopefully it will start to pick up.”
Third-year Michigan Law student captures national Burton Award for Legal Achievement
May 3, 2007
Some surprises are more pleasant than others, and graduating Michigan Law student Brian A. Hawkins would put capturing a Burton Award for Legal Achievement into the former category.
Hawkins learned that he had won the prestigious award – to be presented June 4 at a banquet in Washington, D.C. – before he even knew he was under consideration for it.
“I wasn’t aware that I’d been nominated,” Hawkins said, “but I got a letter last Saturday informing me that I had won something.”
That something turned out to be one of 15 Burton Awards given to law students nationwide. The program, sponsored by LexisNexis, is in its eighth year and is designed to encourage a simpler form of legal writing than the dense, jargon-laden style of the past. Hawkins’ article, “The Glucksberg Renaissance: Substantive Due Process since Lawrence v. Texas,” was published in the Michigan Law Review last November and earlier won Michigan Law’s Helen L. DeRoy Memorial Award. In it, Hawkins explores cases involving un-enumerated rights in the U.S. Constitution in the wake of the 1997 Glucksberg case and the 2003 Lawrence case.
Hawkins, from Utah, has accepted a position in Denver with the San Francisco-based firm of Morrison and Foerster. He said the award is a gratifying capstone to his career at Michigan Law.
“It’s satisfying to see that my piece was put up in competition and was selected,” he said. “It’s nice to see something that went up against a national sample and still came out as one of the winners.”