Recipients of the Inaugural Nordenberg Fellowship Announced
Three second-year students at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law have been awarded Nordenberg fellowships. The recipients of the fellowships are J. Katherine Drabecki, Claudia Garman, and David Willey. Drabecki will intern at the Institute for European Studies in Brussels, while Garman will work in Berlin's Human Rights Division of the German Federal Foreign Office. The third fellow, Willey, will conduct research in the area of comparative and international private law at Hamburg's Max Planck Institute. The Center for International Legal Education (CILE), in association with the EU Center of Excellence, awarded the Nordenberg fellowships. Dr. Alberta Sbragia, the Chancellor Mark A. Nordenberg University Chair, is supporting the three fellowships with her professorship funds. Every Nordenberg fellow will be given a scholarship of $5,000 to support his or her internship. The stipulations of the fellowship include a compulsory internship of two months in Europe and a course in EU law designed for the fellows.
University of California-Irvine Law School Receives $1 Million Donation
The University of California-Irvine School of Law has received its first major donation since receiving approval from the UC Regents in November 2006. The Joan Irvine Smith and Athalie R. Clarke Foundation has donated $1 million to the school. Announcing the gift, Joan Irvine Smith, the great-granddaughter of Irvine Ranch founder James Irvine, said that in addition to medical, business, and engineering schools, UCI also needed a law school to emerge as a major university. The law school plans to use the donation to buy a core collection for its library. When it opens in fall 2009, the UCI School of Law will be the first new public law school in California in more than 40 years. Within the first five years, the school will likely accommodate 600 students. It will eventually have 30 full-time faculty members and is currently in the process of recruiting a founding dean.
Law Students Learn How to Collect Clues
Elon Law School students recently learned some detective skills at the "CSI Greensboro" seminar organized by Professor Steve Friedland for students in his criminal law class. The event was aimed at teaching students various techniques used by crime scene investigators. It included a mock crime scene; guest experts on fingerprint detection, blood detection, and blood-spatter analysis; and instruction on general crime scene investigation. Friedland, a former federal prosecutor, encouraged students to dust for fingerprints and test for invisible blood in an attempt to "merge the classroom with the real world" and teach them how to ask the right questions of investigating experts and how each investigative technique functions.
Guest experts included Lili Johnson, ex-NC Bureau of Investigation (NCBI) special agent; Professor Frank Keegan, Binford faculty member of the forensics program at Guilford College; and Duane Deaver, special agent with the NCBI. With 15 years of experience gathering fingerprint evidence at crime scenes, Johnson is also an associate dean of the American Academy of Applied Forensics at Central Carolina Community College in Charlotte. Emphasizing the importance of fingerprints, Johnson said that they are telltale evidence revealing the occurrences of crimes. To detect fingerprints on hard surfaces such as desktops and hardwood floors, silk powder is dusted, while for porous objects such as paper or Styrofoam cups, magnetic powder is used. Keegan, while elaborating on the use of chemicals to test for blood stains at a crime scene, demonstrated the Kastle-Meyer (KM) test used to analyze objects for blood. Phenolphthalein, a colorless molecule that turns pink in the presence of hemoglobin is used in the KM test. Deaver led a session on blood-spatter investigation. "Crime scenes, like everything else in life, are not perfect, and they don't have to be," said Deaver. He explained that blood-spatter evidence records the actuality of a crime. The amount of blood at the scene of a crime is a giveaway that establishes the facts. He cited the example of the murder of Kathleen Peterson, who was killed by her husband. Blood-spatter evidence on the staircase walls and on Michael Peterson's clothing convicted him of Kathleen's murder. Deaver advised students to "use common sense and follow cases where the evidence leads them."
UV Law Students Preparing for Supreme Court Litigation
A group of University of Virginia law students are going to have a privilege most lawyers never do. They have been carefully preparing arguments for a Supreme Court case (United States v. Watson) and will soon present them. The students' petition to bring the case before the court was among the 1% of petitions accepted by the justices, and the students are excited about the prospect of saving Watson from spending additional time in prison. Law professor Dan Ortiz and Charlottesville-based lawyer Mark Stancil are helping the students with their preparation for the case. The University of Virginia launched its Supreme Court litigation clinic last year. Students participating in the program have worked for a year exploring, researching, and writing about the cases it has tackled. The program has sharpened their writing, strategy, and Supreme Court procedure skills as well as their knowledge of important practice areas. The clinic experience has also given them opportunities to put their law school studies into practice.
Joint degree programs at Stanford Law
Stanford Law School, one of the nation's premier institutions for legal scholarship and education, will now offer joint formal degree programs for students pursuing legal studies. The law school collaborated with 13 other Stanford graduate departments and schools to design this unique program. This multidisciplinary education program aims to aid J.D. students by considerably reducing the cost and time of undertaking legal studies while concurrently pursuing a master's or Ph.D degree. This will also prepare students to face the legal profession's emergent demands and new challenges. With the rising needs of its clientele, lawyers today work in "cross-disciplinary/cross-professional teams." They have ventured into technical industries such as the environmental, engineering, and medicinal fields. This move necessitates the widening of the traditional law school curriculum, so that they embrace an all comprehensive global perspective. The law school's new formal programs thus have been made more liberal than its existing "generic" joint degree programs. It now allows students to pursue a joint degree with almost any Stanford graduate department or outside school. Because the joint degree programs allow cross credits, they reduce time and tuition by almost a year. Altogether, there are 13 disciplines for formal joint degrees in conjunction with Stanford graduate programs. The school will add more formal joint degree programs in the near future. Stanford Law School Dean Larry Kramer says the programs are aimed to develop students' "broad intellectual capital" and to allow them to "practice law in the world today." In addition to teaching law students to "think like a lawyer," the school wants students to acquire other "valuable skills and analytical abilities" that are "transferable to other serendipitous opportunities," Kramer added. "The programs [...] and the wide latitude given to students are designed to give our students a great deal of flexibility," said Prof. Jeff Strnad who supervises the law school's joint degree programs. Strnad also holds a courtesy appointment as Professor of Economics with the Stanford University Department of Economics.
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