Duke Law Magazine Fall 2023

Fall 2023 | Volume 42 Number 2 DON’T HIRE

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AI and algorithmically-based applications may help solve humanity’s most pressing problems. But they also come with challenges for civil rights and liberties.

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From the Dean

Dear Friends: We always want to maximize the opportunities that innovations create and ensure students are ready to do the same when they enter the profession.

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NE OF THE BIGGEST STORIES of the past year was the release of ChatGPT, an online tool that uses artificial intelligence to generate quick, human-like responses to prompts, often with impressive accuracy. Almost overnight, people were testing it out to see if it could compose a cover letter, write a college essay, and even pass the bar exam (it did all three).

Here at Duke Law School, our initial response was both excitement and alarm. We were eager to try this remarkable new tool, which seemed to have the power to revolutionize work, including the work of lawyers in the future. But we also could see its potential harm in an educational setting if it jeopardized our ability to assess students and know whether their work is their own. Duke Law students maintain a strong commitment to academic integrity, documented in our Honor Pledge and in our expectations for independent coursework, and ChatGPT isn’t going to change that. But in the short term, we decided to prohibit the use of generative AI in any assignments without specific permission from the professor while we assess its impact.

This response was typical of how we approach new technology. We always want to maximize the opportunities that innovations create and ensure students are ready to do the same when they enter the profession. But as we explore

what makes them so alluring, we must also bear in mind their potential to undermine fundamental values, whether in the Law School or society at large.

The legal implications of generative AI and other algorithmically based tools are the subject of the cover story in this issue of Duke Law Magazine. These technologies promise to make life easier and more efficient in myriad ways, from improving productivity to increasing access to services, even legal services. They also, however, can introduce error and bias, intrude on individual privacy, or lead to wrongful arrests and prosecutions. Our curriculum in law and technology has featured a course in AI for seven years, but today a wide swath of our faculty, from bioethics to criminal law, are studying the ways it and related technologies challenge our fundamental civil rights and liberties — and what can be done about it. I hope you find their insights as intriguing and thought-provoking as I do.

Thank you as always for your friendship and support.

Warm regards,

Kerry Abrams James B. Duke and Benjamin N. Duke Dean and Distinguished Professor of Law

Contents

Fall 2023 Volume 42 Number 2

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DEAN

Kerry Abrams ASSOCIATE DEAN, COMMUNICATIONS, MARKETING, AND EVENTS

Andrew Park EDITORS

Valerie Marino Jeannie Naujeck CONTRIBUTING WRITERS

Richard Blaustein ’92 Hayley Foran Richard Lawson Susan Miller Jeannie Naujeck Andrew Park Sean Rowe

AI and algorithmically-based applications may help solve humanity’s most pressing problems.

But they also come with challenges for civil rights and liberties.

ART DIRECTION & DESIGN

Marc Harkness ILLUSTRATION

Marc Harkness PHOTOGRAPHY

Colin Huth Ken Huth Matthew Odom Sean Rowe Les Todd

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DIGITAL PRODUCTION

John Bigelow Marc Harkness Valerie Marino Sean Rowe Michael Wright

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ALUMNI NOTES COORDINATOR

Jenny Light

Duke Law Magazine is published under the auspices of the Office of the Dean, Duke University Law School, 210 Science Drive, Box 90362, Durham, NC 27708

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This publication was produced using paper which supports Duke’s commitment to sustaining our environment.

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Dean’s Message 2 The Commons 19 Faculty Focus 44 Profiles 52 Alumni Notes 63 In Memoriam 64 Sua Sponte

The Commons Ideas, achievements, and events from around Duke Law School

Alison Ashe-Card named inaugural associate dean for diversity, equity, and inclusion

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LISON ASHE-CARD, an experienced litigator, career services professional, and champion of diversity, equity, and inclusion in legal education and the legal profession, joined Duke Law School July 1 in a new senior leadership role.

As Duke Law’s inaugural associate dean for diversity, equity, and inclusion, Ashe-Card reports to Dean Kerry Abrams and has overall responsibility for developing and advancing DEI initiatives and supporting an inclusive climate throughout the Law School. Her portfolio of responsibilities includes collaborating with other leaders in the Law School community to help each unit achieve, track, and communicate its DEI goals; acting as a resource to individual students 2

Duke Law Magazine • Fall 2023

and student organizations in navigating inclusion and equity challenges; and representing the Law School in university-wide DEI efforts.

“I am thrilled to welcome Alison Ashe-Card into this critical new role advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion at Duke Law School,” Abrams said. “Alison stood out in the search process as an especially wise, thoughtful, and experienced leader who will be a valuable resource for students, faculty, and staff.”

Ashe-Card previously worked for a decade at Wake Forest University School of Law, where she was most recently associate director of diversity and inclusion in the Office of Career and Professional Development. In this role, she led the development

and implementation of the office’s educational programs as well as developing and guiding schoolwide diversity and inclusion initiatives. Before working in higher education, Ashe-Card was a products liability attorney at Womble Carlyle Sandridge & Rice (now Womble Bond Dickinson) for 14 years.

“Given her prior accomplishments in advocating DEI values and developing DEI programs in academic and law practice settings, I am convinced Alison will contribute something truly unique and distinctive to our community,” said Alex Zhang, associate dean of information services and director of the J. Michael Goodson Law Library, who served as co-chair of the search committee. “I was very impressed by Alison’s extensive experience working with law students and her profound understanding of their needs in many aspects, which will make her a resourceful and engaging mentor to members of our student body with very different backgrounds.”

Raised in New Jersey, Ashe-Card graduated magna cum laude from Spelman College with a bachelor’s degree in political science. She earned her JD from American University Washington College of Law, where she was president of the Black Law Students Association and worked in the Women in the Law Clinic.

Ashe-Card, who said she aspired to be a lawyer from age 10 “so I could help people,” initially envisioned a career working in public interest law. She entered the profession as a staff attorney with the Legal Assistance Foundation of Chicago (now Legal Aid Chicago) for five years, working in the shadow of the largest public housing project in the country.

After relocating to North Carolina, she joined Womble, where in addition to her litigation practice she engaged in frequent pro bono service and was a leader in the firm’s efforts to diversify the profession.

She was a member of the firm’s first diversity committee and helped create Womble Scholars, a program that annually gave scholarships to diverse rising 2Ls at every North Carolina law school.

“I felt that because of the privilege I have being a Black female attorney, I have an obligation to give back and work in this space,” she said. “So in my practice, I started taking on these issues.”

When she joined the career and professional development staff at Wake Forest Law in 2013, AsheCard continued that work, including serving on the school’s first diversity committee, which she later chaired, and serving as advisor to the Black Law Students Association. In 2019, while continuing to provide career counseling, she began serving in the formal role leading the school’s DEI initiatives, which included convening conversations on race, developing educational programs on implicit bias, reviewing

curricular offerings for inclusivity, and serving on a group tasked with developing a standard on the display of names and gender markers in university data systems.

Ashe-Card said the opportunity to shape a new role focused entirely on DEI was too good to pass up, and she is excited to work with people throughout the Law School community to build on the plans set forth in the Law School’s Preliminary Strategic Plan for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. She is also excited to begin working with students and draws particular inspiration from a staff member who served as an informal support for her and others from underrepresented backgrounds when she was in law school.

“I hope to be a resource for students in a lot of different ways,” she said. “It takes time to develop those relationships, but I hope that as people see me in spaces throughout the Law School, they can recognize that I’m someone who you can very easily approach. I remember what it was like being in a law school and knowing that there was somebody that I could talk to.”

Ashe-Card has brought her interest and expertise in DEI issues to leadership roles in numerous professional organizations. She recently concluded service on the board of directors of the National Association for Law Placement (NALP), which represents legal career professionals, and previously served as chair of its Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Section and co-chair of its Diversity and Inclusion Section Strategic Planning Work Group. Beginning in 2020, she co-authored a six-part series in the NALP Bulletin entitled “Making Noise: Doing Our Part to Dismantle Racism and White Supremacy in the Legal Profession.”

Ashe-Card also serves on the Boards of Governors of the North Carolina Bar Association (NCBA) and North Carolina Bar Foundation and is a past president of the North Carolina Association of Black Lawyers. In recognition of her extensive pro bono service, she has been honored as an inaugural member of the Association of American Law Schools’ Pro Bono Honor Roll and a Life Fellow of the American Bar Foundation and has received the NCBA’s CitizenLawyer Award and the Lifetime Community Service Award from DRI, the largest organization representing civil defense lawyers.

“Alison quickly rose to the top of our applicant pool,” said Professor Veronica Root Martinez, who served on the search committee. “Her previous experiences working on DEI initiatives at a law school, paired with her connections within the North Carolina legal community, made her an ideal candidate for this position. I am excited to see her work with the administration, faculty, and students to make Duke Law an even better place.”

“I hope to be a resource for students ...

I remember what it was like being in a law school and knowing that there was somebody that I could talk to.”

— Alison Ashe-Card

Duke Law Magazine • Fall 2023

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The Commons

Judge Tayeba Parsa in Gdansk, Poland

Exiled Afghan judge serving as inaugural Bolch Rule of Law Judicial Fellow

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Duke Law Magazine • Fall 2023

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UKE LAW SCHOOL WELCOMED Judge Tayeba Parsa of Afghanistan in May as the first Bolch Judicial Institute Rule of Law Judicial Fellow.

During the year-long fellowship, Parsa will study, teach, conduct research, and pursue new educational and professional opportunities with support from Duke Law and the Bolch Judicial Institute. She is also receiving support from the Open Society University Network’s Afghan Challenge Fund.

Parsa, a judge in the Commercial Division of Appellate Court of Kabul Province, was among some 250 women judges in Afghanistan in August 2021 when the Taliban retook power. She was forced to flee for her life, leaving her home country and her 17-year career in law behind.

“The goal is to give Judge Parsa the time, educational and networking opportunities, and support systems she will need to prepare to continue her legal education and scholarship or to pursue professional opportunities in legal practice,” said Paul W. Grimm, a retired federal judge and the David F. Levi Professor of the Practice of Law and director of the Bolch Judicial Institute.

“She is incredibly devoted to the profession of judging and to the ideals of justice for all. Her bravery — not just in her harrowing escape from Afghanistan but in enduring years of discrimination, threats, and even abuse as a woman judge in a male-dominated society — underscores how deeply she believes in the rule of law. We hope this fellowship will give her many opportunities to advance her studies and career.”

Parsa is now living in Durham with her husband and young daughter and the family is applying for asylum in the United States. After she completes her fellowship, Parsa, who began serving as a judge in Afghanistan at age 24, hopes to work toward a JD.

“This educational opportunity is so important for me to regain my career and to be able to work again for Afghanistan, even from exile,” Parsa said in a June interview with Allyson Duncan ’75, a retired judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit.

“I hope I can get a law degree again.”

Leaving Afghanistan

When the Taliban re-claimed power across Afghanistan, they threatened to kill Afghans who supported the previous democratic government, which was built with help from the United States over nearly 20 years. The country’s women judges were in particular danger. Many, including Parsa, immediately went into hiding and burned their law degrees and case documents to erase evidence of their work.

Parsa told Duncan she was particularly vulnerable because of her high visibility.

As communications officer for the Afghan Women Judges Association, she had many international connections and had given interviews to foreign media highlighting the peril women judges were in as the Taliban closed in on Kabul.

“For the Taliban, simply being a government judge is enough reason to be killed without a trial. Two male judges were murdered by the Taliban the moment the Taliban discovered both men were judges,” Parsa told Judicature in 2021.

“But for women judges, the danger is much greater. Threats against women judges were always more acute and came from those who were against women being judges, and even worse, from those who were not wanting women to be a part of the workforce at all. And the threats sometimes went beyond letters and calls.”

Thanks in large part to Parsa’s outreach and coordination with the International Association of Women Judges (IAWJ), which helped to arrange her evacuation and temporary refuge, Parsa was among the few women judges who escaped Afghanistan in the days immediately following Kabul’s fall to the Taliban. The IAWJ has since rescued more than 200 women judges and is working to evacuate all who remain. Its efforts were honored with the 2023 Bolch Prize for the Rule of Law. Parsa and her husband, Jamal Wahid Abdul, were evacuated to Poland, where they received temporary refugee assistance from the government and welcomed their daughter Mahdis. Though they are grateful for the support they received in Poland, living in limbo for 19 months was difficult for both Parsa and Abdul, who also has a law degree and worked in data management in Afghanistan. Particularly painful was the realization that with the Taliban takeover, Afghanistan had just lost the accumulated wisdom of all the women judges who had worked, often under great duress, on behalf of justice and the rule of law, she told Duncan.

“I was happy to arrive in Poland and be alive,” Parsa recalled. “The next day, I realized I was not a judge anymore and I’d lost my career forever. It was so painful for me. I thought, ‘It’s not enough to save yourself. What happens to Afghanistan?’

“I studied and practiced law with a passion for almost 17 years. Protecting rightful people and preventing justice from being undone by corruption in courts gave meaning to my life. I was never happy only because I had a good position and was able to make money and a comfortable life for myself and my family. I was so pleased because I was able to make a difference in the society, and I had direct impact on administering justice.”

It has also been difficult for Parsa to have her family dispersed and not be able to visit them. Her five sisters and mother fled the country before the fall of Kabul, and while her mother has since become a resident of Sweden, her father was granted temporary refugee status from Poland and can’t be a permanent citizen of Sweden or obtain health care there.

Parsa and Abdul celebrated Mahdis’s first birthday in August with neighbors and other local Afghan families, and they will welcome their second child in November.

As part of her fellowship, Parsa is auditing courses in Duke Law’s Master of Judicial Studies program. She has particularly enjoyed American Statutory Interpretation,

Parsa with her husband and daughter in Durham.

“While I am alive, I do not give up. I fight for the rule of law, equality, and women’s and minorities’ rights, even from exile.”

— Judge Tayeba Parsa taught by David W. Ichel Distinguished Professor of Law Neil S. Siegel, and found analogies between the issues raised in Race and Civil Rights and problems in Afghanistan, where the judiciary did not represent all minorities, especially those from the Shi’a community. Her own family is Hazara, a predominantly Shi’a Muslim ethnic group that have long been targeted by the Taliban.

Parsa participated in Duke Law’s Summer Institute on Law, Language, & Culture (SILCC) program for foreign students, attorneys, and scholars, and will join other courses and programs at Duke this academic year as well as pursue her own research into topics pertaining to the rule of law and women’s rights. She hopes to one day be an advocate for immigrants in the U.S. and for women’s rights in Afghanistan.

“I would like to build my knowledge of law, to learn from my experiences in the United States and from other judges, and use my knowledge to be able to work in the field of law and for the future of Afghanistan,” she said.

“I would like to dedicate the knowledge that I get through this opportunity at Duke to the service of the people of Afghanistan, to rebuilding Afghanistan, and bringing back the rule of law, equality, and justice to the people of Afghanistan.

While I am alive, I do not give up. I fight for the rule of law, equality, and women’s and minorities’ rights, even from exile.”

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The Commons

Wilson Center database tracks police reform legislation

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EW EVENTS HAVE GALVANIZED calls for policing reform more than the 2020 murder of George Floyd, who died handcuffed and pinned to the ground under the knee of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. Floyd’s death sparked outrage, protests, and calls for legislation around the country to help reduce citizen deaths at the hands of law enforcement. Yet they have risen since then: During 2022, 1,243 people were killed by police in the United States, according to mappingpoliceviolence.org, up 8% from 1,149 in 2020.

To ascertain whether calls for policing reform resulted in policy change, the Wilson Center for Science and Justice at Duke Law created a database to track legislation related to law enforcement policies and practices. It includes more than 3,800 federal, state, and local bills introduced from 2018 to 2022 across a range of topics.

Of the total, only 602 bills — or 16% of those introduced — had been enacted as of August 2023. An additional 3,089 bills have failed, with 118 pending and two vetoed.

And while much more legislation to regulate police activity was introduced in 2020 and 2021 following Floyd’s death, the percentage of laws that passed didn’t increase.

It wasn’t just the number of bills proposed and passed, but also the types that interested Wilson Center faculty director and L. Neil Williams, Jr. Distinguished Professor of Law Brandon Garrett.

Some laws were proposed to make police more accountable for racial discrimination and abuses of use of force, but others would bolster police powers and keep information about police misconduct from being made public.

“We were interested in what kind of legislation was going to result and we saw over time that, like lots of topics, the reactions Garrett to calls for police reform were polarized and partisan,” Garrett said.

On police use of force, 454 bills were introduced, including seven at the federal level, but only 71 were enacted. Nationally, there are no clear standards for how and when police should use force. One effort, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act of 2021, passed the U.S. House of Representatives but stalled in the Senate over the issue of qualified immunity for officers.

“The standards that the Supreme Court has come up with have made it almost impossible to hold police accountable for egregious constitutional violations. The only way to fix that prob- Gammell ’10 lem is to change things at the federal level because the most important civil rights suits are brought in federal court,” said Garrett.

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Duke Law Magazine • Fall 2023

Angela Weis Gammell ’10, the Wilson Center’s policy director, said some cities have set up civilian advisory and review boards to increase community oversight of police, but few of those have produced a transformative change.

“What is interesting and exciting about these past few years is that conversations around regulating police have gone in a number of different directions — from budgeting to facial recognition to new technologies to policing accountability data. It’s a much broader policy space, and legislation being introduced and passed reflects it,” said Garrett.

Legislation that Elana Fogel, assistant has been clinical professor and direcenacted in tor of the Criminal Defense states includes: Clinic, added that many reform activists believe a change in law enforcement statutes creating culture is also needed. police study The database does not commissions include laws that revise criminal procedures or substantive criminal statutes regarding qualified immunity offenses. Nor does it include executive orders, such as the 2022 executive concerning order issued by President police in schools Joe Biden, “Advancing Effective, Accountable Policing and Criminal regarding Justice Practices to racial profiling Enhance Public Trust and Public Safety.”

A team of 11 students having to do with worked to create the databiometric data base with Sean Chen, the assistant director for cataloging and metadata regarding body cameras services in the J. Michael Goodson Law Library. It will be continuously updated on oversight of to serve as a repository for police agencies those conducting research.

“It’s an enormous amount of work to read regarding certification thousands of pieces of of police officers legislation, think about how to break them into topics, code them properly, concerning budgets and keep checking on the status of legislation, because legislative sessions regarding training last many months and a bill that seems to be stalled could suddenly be on police data enacted,” Garrett said. collection — Susan Miller

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Clinic Spotlight

Community Enterprise Clinic

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HE CLINICAL EXPERIENCE at Duke Law School provides students with the opportunity to combine theory and practice to develop a deeper understanding of substantive law as well as the soft skills required in client-facing lawyering.

The Community Enterprise Clinic serves nonprofit organizations and social entrepreneurs that need assistance with planning and implementing community development projects. Working under the supervision of Andrew Foster, the Kathrine Robinson Everett Clinical Professor of Law and the clinic’s director, students serve as outside general counsel to nonprofits that directly benefit the Durham community, taking transactional projects from conception to implementation in areas Foster such as affordable housing, community revitalization, business formation, and public policy.

“The overarching theme for everything we do is to be a front door for the university, utilizing our resources in a way that serves our community at large,” Foster said. “There aren’t many pro bono opportunities for nonprofits, so this clinic directly addresses that access to justice gap.”

Highlights of the clinic’s work in the past academic year include projects focused on the preservation of equitable housing, comprehensive reorganization, and racial justice.

Eno River Association

AFFORDABLE HOUSING

In the spring semester, clinic students acted as a neutral third party to draft a framework agreement suitable to several parties involved in an affordable housing dispute.

At issue were several properties owned by the Eno River Association, a group that held land in which vulnerable tenants resided. The clinic took on the case when a group of tenants reported that their landlord had asked them to vacate the properties because the group planned to sell the land they lived on.

Caleb Strawn JD/MTS ’23, Michael Kitain ’23, and Taylor Harris ’23 visited

the homes, met with the tenants and representatives from the Eno River Association, and worked towards creating a plan to help both reach their goals. The students conducted multiple client-facing meetings to come up with a framework to move things forward in a mutually agreeable resolution. The tenants will get to remain in their homes, according to local press coverage that credited the clinic with providing legal support.

“This project was incredibly high stakes for the people we were working with, and the clinic was an extremely valuable resource to reach a resolution,” said

Duke Law Magazine • Fall 2023

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Clinic Spotlight

Community Enterprise Clinic

Chelsea Garber ’23 PhD ’20, Emily Martchek ’23, Reed Cowart ’23, and Marino Leone ’23 with a member of the Crest Street Community Council

Harris. “Working with that many clients with diverse interests is something I’d never done before as a student. It was the highlight of my law school experience.”

Strawn said the case took him “from learning the law as a student to learning to be a lawyer.”

“We were given a lot of responsibility and opportunity in this clinic to talk to clients on our own and take a transactional approach to building trust and crafting a solution,” he said. “It was really empowering to be able to do that, especially within our own community.”

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Duke Law Magazine • Fall 2023

Crest Street Community Council

NONPROFIT GOVERNANCE

A clinic team took a deep dive into Durham’s history to better position another local nonprofit for the future. Their client, the Crest Street Community Council, was established in the 1980s when the North Carolina Department of Transportation announced plans to build a four-lane expressway (now N.C. 147) through the Crest Street neighborhood. The council had helped to relocate affected residents and eventually grew to a nonprofit that established HUD-funded housing and even a senior living facility.

This year, the group asked student-attorneys Emily Martchek ’23, Chelsea Garber ’23 PhD ’20, Reed Cowart ’23, and Marino Leone ’23 to help it restructure in a way that honored its original mission of preserving the community’s rich history while ensuring its legal legitimacy as a nonprofit that operates several properties around the Crest Street community.

“It felt urgent,” said Cowart. “If they didn’t take certain actions, they would lose their togetherness, just due to poor corporate governance, and that’s where we stepped in.

We mapped out all the entities the council was responsible for and found some they weren’t even aware of. And we laid out a framework of how they could best move forward with obtaining money to run the organization, updating policies to maintain their nonprofit statuses, and other important items.”

The student-attorneys conducted extensive fact-finding and studied corporate tax law to craft the action plan, which they presented to the group’s board. They received individual plaques from the council to commemorate their efforts.

“The relationship building was my favorite part of this experience,” said Leone, “to hear their stories and hear about Crest Street’s history and feel like I was part of something bigger. As a lawyer you need to know the law, but in a transactional clinic like this, you learn how to help from the client’s perspective.”

Triangle Land Conservancy

RACIAL EQUITY

Harper’s Home

SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP

When Heather Hindin’s nine-year-old daughter, Harper, began treatment for leukemia at Duke Children’s Hospital in fall 2021, she encountered many families who had traveled from far away to seek care for their children, often with the prospect of a long-term stay. She and Harper felt lucky that their home is in Durham, just two miles away.

“After really hard days or a week in the hospital, we were fortunate to be able to walk in our own front door, be with our dogs, and sleep in our beds, and that’s not the case for everybody,” Hindin said.

Hindin sought assistance from the clinic to launch a nonprofit, Harper’s Home, that will give more families that comfort and stability. The organization will raise funds to build a small number of cottages and duplexes on Hindin’s one-acre property where families can stay while their children are in the hospital.

The project was assigned to Strawn, who enrolled in the clinic with an interest in social entrepreneurship and a desire to practice corporate or real estate law after graduation. He worked with Hindin to develop a list of priorities for starting Harper’s Home, and over the semester drafted articles of incorporation and by-laws, an application for tax-exempt status from the Internal Revenue Service, and a charitable solicitation license from the state. He also wrote a memo on real estate transaction structures that will enable Hindin and her daughter to live in their home while leasing or selling the part of the lot where the cottages will be built to the nonprofit.

“It’s been a perfect capstone experience at the Law School, getting to pull together everything that I’ve learned in a variety of classes and bringing it to bear on this representation,” Strawn said. “Getting to walk through the formation process with somebody eager to start an organization and actualize their mission has been an incredible experience.”

Hindin praised Strawn’s “dogged determination” and Foster’s guidance in helping her move forward with establishing Harper’s Home.

“I have this passion for making this happen, but I can’t be the person who’s pulling all the strings. I need smart people at the table to help me,” Hindin said.

“Andrew and Caleb helped me carve a path that feels like it will come to fruition.”

A farm tour at Faithfull Farms in Chapel Hill, NC

Photo: Triangle Land Conservancy staff

Caleb Strawn JD/MTS ’23 with Heather Hindin and her daughter, Harper

The Triangle Land Conservancy (TLC) is a North Carolina nonprofit that fights Black land loss by helping BIPOC and other historically disadvantaged populations acquire farmland through its Good Ground Initiative. The group sought legal assistance from the clinic with drafting policies and procedures to limit its legal risk while prioritizing racial equity and allowing TLC to be intentional in its work with marginalized groups.

Student-attorney James Street ’23 had full ownership of the project, which he said was a challenge both intellectually and personally as he worked through complex layers of law.

“Growing up low-income James Street ’23 in North Carolina, I wanted to use what I learned in the classroom to work on projects that impacted people with backgrounds like mine,” Street said. “This clinic provided a space for me to give back from a position of privilege that I had earned. I worked with a lot of nonprofits before I came to law school, so I was eager to be a part of TLC’s work and ensure they could continue with their goals.”

Through face-to-face client interaction, property tours, and fact-finding, Street helped ensure that the Good Ground Initiative complies with federal and state laws and develops criteria for choosing applicants for land ownership without being discriminatory.

“When you’re taking this clinic, there’s an emphasis on client impact and the bigger picture. Here, you’re challenged to put yourself in the mission and realize that these are real lives that you’re impacting,” said Street.

“There’s so much to learn from the clinical faculty and it’s not always just the law. You learn how to be professionals, how to deal with difficult issues with empathy, and work towards being a better citizen, not just a better lawyer.”

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Clinic Roundup Highlights from the Duke Law School clinics

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ACULTY AND student-attorneys in Duke Law’s 12 clinics advance their clients’ interests in a variety of ways — often through advocacy in court or administrative processes but also by recognizing opportunities to help meet basic community needs.

Read on for highlights of their work during the 2022–23 academic year.

Imo-Jah DeSouza, Mark DeSouza, and Shirley Garrett ’24

Immigrant Rights Clinic secures return for veteran Deported U.S. Army veteran Mark DeSouza was reunited with his family in January after the Immigrant Rights Clinic successfully petitioned the Department of Homeland Security to let him return to the United States. DeSouza was separated from his mother and children for nearly a decade. He has suffered two strokes and is experiencing diabetic complications and cognitive decline.

Shirley Garrett ’24 and Clinic Fellow Jenny Kim, who drafted the request for humanitarian parole and filed it on Veterans Day, traveled to JFK Airport with the veteran’s daughter, Imo-Jah DeSouza, to welcome him back and ensure a smooth process at inspection. DeSouza met his granddaughter for the first time later that day.

“Working to bring Mr. DeSouza back to the United States has been the most rewarding experience in my law school career thus far,” Garrett said.

“I am so grateful for how supportive and dependable his family has been through this process.

We could not have done it without them. The moment I saw Imo-Jah run into her father’s arms, I felt like all of our hard work and long hours had finally paid off. Being able to reunite this beautiful family and advocate for the care and justice Mr. DeSouza deserves has truly been a gift.”

Added Kim: “Seeing the resilience of Mr. DeSouza and his family in action has been awe-inspiring. I am very thankful that we, working alongside his family and advocates for deported veterans, were able to bring him home. My heart is full in knowing that he is reunited with his family and accessing necessary medical care through the Department of Veterans Affairs. Every deported veteran, like Mr. DeSouza, deserves the attention and care that they dedicated to serving our country.”

DeSouza’s case is one of several cases that the Immigrant Rights Clinic has partnered with Black Deported Veterans of America, Public Counsel, and the ACLU of Southern California to resolve, Kate Evans, the clinic’s director, said. Director of Pro Bono D.J. Dore, an Army veteran, also provided technical assistance.

“We never thought we’d see the day where our dad, a deported veteran, would step foot back on American soil, but here we are, all thanks to this amazing team,” said Imo-Jah DeSouza.

“From the minute they heard about my dad’s story and his sickness they jumped into action. They even flew in to meet my dad at the airport, which was the icing on the cake. This was the best way to start the new year and we couldn’t have done so without the support of this team. Thank you so much on behalf of the DeSouza family!”

Evans

Immigrant Rights Clinic Fellow Jenny Kim (left) and Shirley Garrett ’24

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Civil Justice Clinic wins verdict against Durham landlord Civil Justice Clinic students Adam Golden ’23 (pictured left) and Andrew Tisinger ’23 (above) successfully conducted a bench trial in Durham County District Court, pursuing affirmative claims on behalf of clients against their former landlord for multiple breaches of the statutory warranty of habitability, housing code violations, and unfair trade practices.

Golden and Tisinger made opening and closing statements, did direct examinations of two clients, and presented testimony from the local Durham housing code inspector. They also cross-examined the defendant’s mold expert witness as well as the defendant landlord. At the conclusion of the trial, the judge awarded a verdict of $15,250 for rent abatement and unfair trade practices and said she would award attorneys’ fees after submission of an affidavit from counsel.

“Both these students managed the case with great skill, and our clients were well-served,” said Charles Holton ’73, the clinic’s director.

Holton

First Amendment Clinic brief backs successful appeal by N.C. Attorney General in libel case First Amendment Clinic Director Sarah Ludington JD/ MA ’92 and Supervising Attorney Amanda Martin filed an amicus brief in support of North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein’s successful Fourth Circuit appeal of Grimmett v. Freeman, a case that challenged the constitutionality of the state’s 1931 criminal libel law.

Ludington Martin The case stemmed from an ad produced by Stein’s campaign during the 2020 election that accused Stein’s opponent, Forsyth County District Attorney Jim O’Neill, of leaving rape kits untested. After O’Neill supporters complained to the state Board of Elections, which declined to recommend charges, Wake County District Attorney Lorrin Freeman launched an investigation into whether Stein violated the law, which criminalizes publishing “derogatory reports” about a candidate, “knowing such report to be false or in reckless disregard of its truth or falsity.”

A three-judge panel of the Fourth Circuit ruled unanimously in February to vacate the district court’s verdict, concluding that application of the law would likely violate citizens’ First Amendment rights, and Freeman closed her investigation.

Children’s Law and Immigrant Rights Clinics team up on driver licensing effort Many new North Carolina residents are getting back on the road thanks to the efforts of Jordyn Kathmann, social work intern in the Duke Children’s Law Clinic.

While conducting needs assessments among Spanish-speaking clients of the Immigrant Rights Clinic, Kathmann noted that many wished to get a driver’s license but had struggled to pass the state licensing exam.

Through the clinics’ combined efforts, clients received Spanish language study materials, driver manuals, instructions for creating test appointments, and follow-up support. As a result, many have since passed their tests and earned the license that is critical to conducting the business of daily life.

“It’s a great example of collaboration between clinics and lawyers working with social workers in an interdisciplinary setting,” Children’s Law Clinic Director Crystal Grant said.

Grant

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Environmental Law and Policy Clinic submits comment on gill nets Three students in the Environmental Law and Policy Clinic submitted a formal comment letter asking the National Marine Fisheries Service to deny North Carolina a permit to license the use of gill nets and ban the use of anchored gill nets in inshore waters by all commercial and recreational fisheries.

Mary Beth Barksdale ’23, Daphne Zhao ’23, and Hayden Dubniczki, a graduate student in the Nicholas School of the Environment, wrote on behalf of their client, the North Carolina Coastal Fisheries Reform Group, in response to an application by the state’s Division of Marine Fisheries for a 10-year incidental take permit allowing it to license the use of gill nets to harvest fish from estuaries.

The Coastal Fisheries Reform Group seeks to ban gill nets from inshore waters because of the dangers they pose to marine life: In addition to catching the intended fish, nets also entangle endangered species such as sea turtles and sturgeon, as well as sea birds, bottlenose dolphins, and other non-targeted fish.

The student team researched the Endangered Species Act and the National Environmental Policy Act, read scientific literature on the status of multiple fish species, sea turtles, and sturgeon and the impacts of gill nets, and reviewed reams of fish management plans, endangered species recovery plans, government reports, and more than 1,000 pages of emails from the state. They also interviewed experts in the field and prepared a 34-page argument against use of the nets — all in about five weeks.

“I’m incredibly proud of them all. They were fearless, diving into issues and laws they knew little about two months prior, and each demonstrated a tremendous work ethic,” said Clinical Professor Michelle Benedict Nowlin JD/MA ’92, the clinic’s co-director.

“They worked really well as a team and collaborated brilliantly. It’s anyone’s guess how this will play out, but the students succeeded in developing an impressive body of evidence in the record, which can be used to challenge the agency’s decision in court if necessary.”

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Recognizing significant legal clerkships, fellowships, and honors

Mary Beth Barksdale ’23, Hayden Dubniczki, Daphne Zhao ’23, Clinical Professor Michelle Benedict Nowlin JD/MA ’92

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Claudia Benz ’23 received one of two E. Barrett Prettyman Fellowships and in August began an intensive two-year training program in criminal trial advocacy and clinical teaching at Georgetown University Law Center.

Recipients of the highly competitive fellowship spend their first year representing indigent clients in local courts of the District of Columbia and their second year taking classes in clinical teaching and supervising students representing defendants in misdemeanor and juvenile cases through Georgetown Law’s clinics. Upon completion, fellows receive a master’s degree in advocacy.

Benz was co-director of the pro bono Juvenile Sentence Review Board Clemency Project and a student-attorney in both the Health Justice Clinic and the Criminal Defense Clinic.

During her 3L fall semester she externed at the Durham Office of the Public Defender and represented a defendant at trial in traffic court, cross-examining a police officer and making the final argument.

“Indigent clients don’t just deserve free lawyers. They deserve really, really good lawyers,” Benz said.

Benz entered Duke Law School with a clear vision for her path. After graduating from the University of Chicago, she taught local fifth graders through Teach for America.

There she began to more fully understand the issue of the school-to-prison pipeline and got to know families who had incarcerated relatives.

“That’s when I knew I wanted to work on the issue, and I thought public defense would be a way to work at an individual level,” Benz said.

“I am so grateful for this opportunity and know that it will help me become a competent and effective public defender.”

Kelly Keglovits ’23 was awarded the Law School’s Keller Fellowship, which is supporting her work in North Carolina and South Carolina with Pregnancy Justice for one year.

Pregnancy Justice, previously known as National Advocates for Pregnant Women, defends the rights of pregnant people against state control and criminalization. The group represents people charged with crimes because of pregnancy or any pregnancy outcome — including birth, miscarriage, stillbirth, and abortion — and also engages in impact litigation, mobilization and public education, and research.

“When I entered law school, I knew this was what I wanted to do,” Keglovits said. “I came to Duke Law wanting to pursue a career in reproductive rights and the Keller Fellowship is allowing me to do that.”

Keglovits traces her interest in reproductive rights to seeing restrictions on abortion enacted in Oklahoma, where she grew up, and Texas, where she attended college. The Supreme Court’s decision last summer in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned Roe v. Wade, only raised the stakes for her, she said.

Keglovits interned with the American Civil Liberties Union of Oklahoma during her 1L summer, followed by a 2L externship with Planned Parenthood South Atlantic. She spent her 2L summer at the Center for Reproductive Rights in New York, where she worked on challenges to state abortion restrictions passed after the Dobbs ruling.

She also was a student-attorney in the Wrongful Convictions Clinic and Health Justice Clinic.

The Keller Fellowship was established by members of the class of 1987 in honor of their classmate John Keller, who has spent his career with Legal Aid of North Carolina.

Diana Kenealy JD/LLM ’23 was awarded Duke Law’s 2023 International Law and Human Rights Fellowship and has joined the Business and Human Rights Unit of the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights at its Geneva headquarters for the first of two six-month placements. She is focusing on improving corporate accountability for human rights on issues including forced labor and environmental damage.

“This fellowship allows me to jump right into a career in human rights law. I’ve had amazing opportunities to work on human rights accountability issues at Duke and I can’t wait to put those experiences into practice at the U.N.,” Kenealy said.

Kenealy spent her 2L summer working on anti-corruption and extradition issues with the U.S. Department of State and her 3L fall working on human trafficking accountability with the U.S. Department of Justice. She traveled to The Hague with the International Human Rights Clinic and was instrumental in creating and launching the Human Rights Pro Bono Project.

“Diana came to Duke Law committed to developing her expertise in human rights,” said International Human Rights Clinic Director Jayne Huckerby. “She combines theory and practice very effectively and takes extraordinary initiative in doing so.”

Established in 2017, the fellowship provides a bridge between law school and work in international human rights. Kenealy hopes to focus her career on accountability mechanisms for human rights abuse and redress for people whose rights are violated.

“The fellowship has enabled our students to do high-level, cutting-edge work in an area of law that is difficult to go into straight out of law school,” said Huckerby.

“The work is extraordinarily impactful and important in the human rights space.”

Ellen Goodrich ’23 and Lily Talerman ’23 are the inaugural recipients of the Farrin Fellowship, established

by James Farrin ’90 and his wife Robin Farrin in 2021 to support graduating students in a year of domestic public interest legal work, preferably for low-income or indigent clients in the Carolinas and benefiting individuals or groups that have historically faced discrimination.

Talerman has joined the voting rights team at the Durham-based Southern Coalition for Social Justice, which partners with communities of color and indigent communities to defend their legal rights in areas including elections, police accountability, racial discrimination in the criminal legal system, and school discipline policies.

“It’s a big time for voting rights. I’m excited to be doing this work leading into a presidential election,” said Talerman, who worked on a political campaign between college and law school. “I’m also excited to get more invested in the South and the communities in North Carolina.”

Talerman said she was impressed by the organization’s focus on community lawyering and partnering with the people it serves.

“I don’t want to be a lawyer that just makes decisions for people without considering their input or experiences.

I’ll be happy knowing that I’m letting community members lead and using the legal skills I’ve built at Duke Law to help them get there,” she said.

Goodrich has joined the Student Press Law Center, a Washington-based organization dedicated to the promotion, support, and defense of the First Amendment and press freedoms for high school and college journalists.

She is working on its legal hotline as well as on legislation to expand press freedoms for student publications in North Carolina and direct outreach to students on First Amendment law.

“I have a journalism background and I’m also very interested in education, so I’m excited to work with an organization that is a perfect mix of both and help students understand their First Amendment rights,” said Goodrich.

“To have support from the Farrin Fellowship means a lot to me. It’s the reason that I’m able to do this work, and it’s nice to see a shared interest and willingness to invest in students’ futures.”

As student-attorneys in the First Amendment Clinic, both Goodrich and Talerman displayed passion, enthusiasm, and commitment to a vitally important area of the law, said Senior Lecturing Fellow Amanda Martin, the clinic’s supervising attorney, who recommended them for the fellowship.

“There’s not always a profit motive to the public interest sector, but there couldn’t be anything more fundamental to the function of democracy,” Martin said. “It really has to be a calling, and for Lily and Ellen, I believe it is. It’s another reason why the Farrin Fellowship is such a gift.”

Farrin is founder, president, and CEO of the Law Offices of James Scott Farrin, one of the largest personal injury and product liability firms in North Carolina.

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IN THE CLASSROOM:

Law and Policy Lab students tackle the legal and ethical challenges of data governance

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INETEEN STUDENTS FROM the Law School, Graduate School, and Sanford School of Public Policy participated in a role-playing simulation course this spring in which they navigated the legal, ethical, and technological challenges involved in the collection and sharing of sensitive health data for research purposes.

In Law & Policy Lab: Data Governance, each member of the class was assigned a role of either hospital administrator, researcher, or patient advocate. Six cohorts of JD, Master of Public Policy, and Master of Bioethics and Science Policy students then spent the semester designing data-sharing collaborations known as learning health networks to support the study of the longterm effects of COVID-19 infection, or “long COVID.” In the process, they tackled difficult data governance questions, such as what constitutes an appropriate funding mechanism for their networks, how best to protect patient confidentiality, what limits should be placed on how information is used, and even where and how to store it.

Instructor Keith Porcaro ’11 Health care is one of the few sectors of the U.S. economy in which the use of data is regulated, which makes it an ideal context for a simulation course, said instructor Keith Porcaro ’11. In health care, reusing and manipulating data are critical to achieving breakthroughs in research, but the act of collaboration can clash with medical privacy concerns.

Porcaro, the Reuben Everett Senior Lecturing Fellow and director of the Duke Center for Law and Technology’s Digital Governance Design Studio, encouraged the students to fully adopt the perspectives of people in the roles they were assigned to play. Inspired by board games, he developed “prototyping kits” to help students imagine what they wanted their collaboration to look like and translate those imaginings into something tangible.

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Porcaro first asked students to consider a simple form granting parental consent for the collection of a child’s health information: Would they sign it? Are they engaged by it? What changes would make it more inviting? The answers informed the cohorts’ work, which included assembling a portfolio of key documents to support their collaborations. A priority of the course was to impart to students how decisions they make interact with existing systems of structural exclusion, either reinforcing the systemic impact or beginning to break it down.

“The course really allowed us to try to balance the practical realities of data governance with the freedom of being in a classroom and understanding how this could actually happen in the real world,” said Alan LeBlang ’24. “Balancing innovation with the hard realities of our very rigid systems and finding ways to be creative while also complying with legal and ethical realities has been very exciting.”

Through the Digital Governance Design Studio, which is funded by grants from the Ford Foundation and the Omidyar Network, Porcaro conducts research on decision support tools, such as advice-giving software, for organizations that meet critical needs. A former data governance consultant, he also helps organizations make decisions about and build processes governing the data and technology on which they depend.

He has advised children’s hospitals on the design of learning health networks and is currently working with a group led by Massachusetts General Hospital to improve outcomes for bipolar disorder.

This fall, instead of a semester-long simulation on a single topic, Porcaro’s course consists of minisimulations on a broader range of data governance topics: how companies protect data, how research collaborations form, and how large public datasets are built. He is also preparing a large course for the spring on algorithms and artificial intelligence to provide students with a foundational understanding of technology, as they imagine deploying it in practice or critiquing an application.

Ultimately, he believes the governance of other types of data beyond health information, such as environmental data and court data, is ripe for this model of teaching, and anticipates creating frameworks that other schools can use when designing simulation courses of their own. He hopes that students will come away with a greater appreciation for the role that lawyers can play in fostering innovative solutions, whether in data governance or other contexts.

“We are trying to show students that their legal skills can be used for other ends and help them to think of lawyers as facilitators,” Porcaro said. “With their skills, they can help different groups come together and find common ground with agreements that will last and adapt to changing circumstances. It’s a different perspective for lots of students.” — Andrew Park

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Convocation 2023

ATE ADAMS, senior vice president and general counsel for Apple, told Duke Law School’s class of 2023 to be generous, take risks, and seek ways to make each moment count during their May 13 Convocation ceremony.

“Our journey as professionals is a marathon, not a sprint,” said Adams. “So savor each moment, and seize today’s opportunity to enrich your lives and the lives of those around you.”

The event in Cameron Indoor Stadium honored 234 graduating JD students, 20 of whom also earned a Master of Laws, or LLM, in international and comparative law, and seven of whom also received an LLM in law and entrepreneurship. Seven graduating JD students earned a graduate degree from another department or school at Duke University in addition to their JDs. Thirty-six graduating JD students received the Public Interest and Public Service Law certificate.

Eighty-three graduates of law schools in other countries also received their LLM degree. Nineteen trial and appellate judges received an LLM in Judicial Studies.

In her opening remarks, Dean Kerry Abrams noted that the JD candidates were the first in Duke Law’s history to take all of their firstyear courses remotely before returning in person for their 2L year.

“You came back from a difficult situation and made Duke Law your own,” Abrams said. “You came together as a community to support one another and rebuilt the campus culture, making us even stronger than we were before. If the last two years are any indication of how you will conduct yourselves in the world as lawyers and citizens of your communities, our future is bright indeed.”

Distinguished speaker Kate Adams shares lessons from legendary environmentalists

Abrams introduced distinguished speaker Adams, who is a member of Apple’s executive team, reporting to CEO Tim Cook MBA ’88.

Adams oversees legal matters at the world’s most valuable company, including corporate governance, intellectual property, litigation and securities compliance, global security, and privacy.

“Now is an amazing place. It is full of immediate possibilities if you are open to them.”

— Kate Adams, senior vice president and general counsel, Apple

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Prior to joining Apple in 2017, Adams worked at Honeywell for 14 years, rising to senior vice president and general counsel. Before that, she was a partner at Sidley Austin. Adams also served as a trial attorney for the U.S. Department of Justice’s Environment and Natural Resources Division, and clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor and Stephen Breyer when he was chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. She graduated from Brown University and received her law degree from the University of Chicago.

Adams’ address was based on three lessons passed on by her parents, John H. Adams ’62 and Patricia Adams, who attended Duke University as an undergraduate. They attended the ceremony along with Kate Adams’ daughter Harriet Wiser T’23 and other family members.

With the support of Patricia Adams, a teacher, author, and environmentalist, John Adams co-founded the Natural Resources Defense Council in 1970 as one of the first nonprofits created to enforce the country’s nascent environmental laws. He served as its executive director and, later, president until 2006. He received an honorary doctor of laws from Duke in 2005 and in 2010 was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the country’s highest civilian honor. The couple co-authored A Force for Nature: The Story of NRDC and the Fight to Save Our Planet, published in 2010.

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Kate Adams recalled that despite starting their family in a two-room apartment at the beginning of their careers, her parents always kept their door open to lawyers, scientists, and advocates in the burgeoning environmental movement that would give rise to organizations like the NRDC. Often, she said, her mother would roast chicken and potatoes for whomever showed up.

“What really set the organization — and indeed, the movement — on its path was the generosity and openness my parents showed to any and all comers,” she said. “Even when we didn’t have a lot to give, we gave what we had. And that example of generosity and community has always stayed with me.

“My parents taught me that whatever you have to give, wherever you are in life, is enough. Whether it’s hospitality, pro bono legal services, or a chicken dinner, your generosity of spirit will be appreciated — and may even be inspirational.”

Adams said her parents also encouraged her to take unexpected paths, and to look for opportunities to find purpose and meaning there. Adams did just that: Rather than become an environmental lawyer after her Supreme Court clerkship, she pursued a career in corporate law.

“I found that I loved working in business, and that I had a knack for solving strategically complex problems. And I thought I might be able to influence how at least one company tackled its environmental problems,” she said. “To my parents’ credit, they never once criticized this decision. They always told me how proud they were that I was a woman in business and the path I’d chosen would have its own rewards. And they were right.”

When she joined Honeywell as head of litigation, Adams recalled, the company was in poor financial shape, had a reputation as a notorious polluter, and carried the largest Superfund liability of any corporation in the country. But rather than continue a legal battle over the cleanup of New York’s Onondaga Lake, the site of years of industrial pollution, Honeywell began a restoration project that has significantly improved its water quality a decade-and-a-half later.

MJS class speaker Douglas M. Fasciale, an associate justice on the New Jersey Supreme Court

LLM class speaker Rennan Gil Alves Nascimento

“That experience taught me that wherever you might find yourself, the potential to make a difference is always present,” Adams said. “So as you begin your careers, always remember: You can have incredibly rewarding experiences in the most unlikely of places.”

It was that choice that created the opportunity to join Apple, Adams said, though that wasn’t always obvious. At one point when she felt frustrated and stagnant in her career, she turned to her mother for a sympathetic ear.

“She said to me, ‘Don’t wish your life away, Kate. Live it now,’” Adams recalled.

“It has taken me many years to appreciate the significance of now. But now is an amazing place. It is full of immediate possibilities if you are open to them.”

Class speakers emphasize the value of diversity and community

Convocation also featured speakers selected by the graduating classes. MJS class speaker Douglas M. Fasciale, an associate justice on the New Jersey Supreme Court since 2022, described an early conversation among his class of 19 judges and justices that profoundly impacted and intensified their experience in the program.

The class was asked the seemingly simple question, “How would you describe yourself?” he recalled. But as each person began to share not only the facts of their lives but also meaningful experiences that had shaped them, Fasciale realized the question “magnified the lens through which we saw one another.”

“We no longer looked at each other with the impressions that we had going into the class,” he said. “We began to look at each other as described by one another, and it was incredible. We took time to listen to each other, to learn from one another, and to appreciate what each person brought to the table.”

Looking back, Fasciale said, he was reminded “that relationships matter, that each person has value, that we impact everyone that we meet, and that we have much to learn from one another.”

JD class speaker Vanessa Keverenge

“Let us not forget that with our existence, legal knowledge, and power comes the opportunity to bring others up with us.”

— Vanessa Keverenge ’23 LLM class speaker Rennan Gil Alves Nascimento of São Paulo, Brazil, noted the diversity of his class, which included students from 37 countries and the highest number of students from the African continent in the program’s history. It may be more comfortable to limit our circles to people who appear, think, and believe in a way that is familiar to us, but that is not the path of progress, Nascimento said.

“History has shown us that we achieve greater results by embracing our differences, not by fighting them. And our year together is evidence of this,” he said. “For most of us, the LLM was an immersive experience outside our home countries. But together we learned that the sense of belonging can come from anywhere in the world.”

JD class speaker Vanessa Keverenge, of Winter Park, Florida, recognized the class for beginning its first year “alone behind a screen in an isolating time.”

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Dean Kerry Abrams

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“Now, look around you and at how far we’ve come — all of us, together in one room,” she continued. “Your strength is the citizenship that you demonstrated, the kindness and compassion you showed each other, and the community that you built — virtually and in person.”

Noting that starting law school during a global crisis had shaped the class into a braver, more community-oriented, and more vocal group, she urged her classmates to use their power with purpose and impact.

“Let us not forget that with our existence, legal knowledge, and power comes the opportunity to bring others up with us. Don’t forget that we have the power to create the systems that we want to see,” Keverenge said. “And as the legal theorist Angela Harris says, we have the power to reimagine and recreate a more equitable world. Don’t forget that our strength is amplified by our ability to continue to build community as we move through life.”

Closing the ceremony, Abrams wished the new alumni a fulfilling career in the law and urged them to return.

“Please come back often and maintain a strong connection with your professors, your classmates, and the next generations of Duke Law students. This is just the beginning of what we hope will be a long relationship with your alma mater,” she said. “Congratulations and good luck to each of you.” — Jeannie Naujeck

Faculty Focus

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Foster, Longest awarded newly endowed clinical professorships

UKE LAW SCHOOL AWARDED newly endowed clinical professorships to Andrew Foster and Ryke Longest, longtime faculty members and leaders of the clinical program, effective July 1.

Dean Kerry Abrams nominated the two on the recommendation of a committee of faculty and emeritus faculty who currently hold, or have held, professorships.

Foster has been appointed to the Kathrine Robinson Everett Clinical Professorship. He joined the Duke Law faculty in 2002 to establish the Community Enterprise Clinic, a transactional law clinic that he continues to direct. The clinic assists organizations in Durham and across North Carolina on matters such as nonprofit governance, affordable housing, community development, and social entrepreneurship.

From 2007 to 2021, Foster directed the Law School’s clinical program, leading the process of expanding it from three clinics to 11 and helping to more than quadruple the size of the clinical faculty (with the launch of the Criminal Defense Clinic in 2023, the Law School now has 12 clinics).

Foster also founded and taught in the Start-Up Ventures Clinic from 2010 to 2012 and served as the interim director of the Externship Program from 2015 to 2016. He led the ad hoc committee that created the Law & Entrepreneurship Program and served as its inaugural director from 2009 to 2011.

“Duke Law School simply would not have the vibrant and robust experiential education offerings we have today if it were not for Andrew Foster’s leadership,” Abrams said. “Andrew has helped make our clinical program one of the strongest in the nation and it continues to grow. He is also an exceptionally talented and devoted teacher and one of our most institutionally minded faculty.”

Prior to joining the Duke Law faculty, Foster practiced with Womble Carlyle Sandridge & Rice (now Womble Bond Dickinson).

He earned his JD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Law, where he was a Chancellor’s Scholar and graduated Order of the Coif, and was a summa cum laude graduate of Rutgers University.

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The Everett Clinical Professorship has been made possible by the Kathrine Robinson Everett Charitable Trust. Everett was from North Carolina and the third female graduate of UNC Law School. She received the highest score on the 1920 North Carolina bar exam and was the first woman to argue an appeal in her state’s highest court, which she won. She practiced law for over 70 years, focusing on probate, real estate, and family law, and retired at 97.

Everett’s son, Robinson O. Everett, served on the Duke Law faculty for 51 years. In 1954, Kathrine Everett, Robinson Everett, and his father, Trinity College law graduate Reuben Everett, were sworn into practice before the U.S. Supreme Court, making them the first family to join the Supreme Court bar together. The UNC Law Library is named in Kathrine Robinson Everett’s honor.

“I am honored and deeply humbled to be named the first Kathrine Robinson Everett Clinical Professor of Law,” Foster said.

“Kathrine Everett was a person of immense integrity, an excellent lawyer, and a tremendous leader.

Equally important, she was a pathbreaker who helped to transform the profession in deeply profound ways. It is an inspiration to be associated with her. I very much appreciate the Everett family’s generous support of Duke Law and am particularly grateful to have the work of the clinical program recognized in this way.”

Longest has been appointed to the John H. Adams Clinical Professorship. Since 2021, he has directed the Law School’s clinical program, working to restructure the governance of the clinics and creating opportunities for leadership development among clinical faculty through committees focusing on issues such as clinical pedagogy. He served as assistant director of clinics from 2019 to 2021.

Longest holds a secondary appointment as a clinical professor of environmental sciences and policy at Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment. He has co-led a Duke Bass Connections project with Lecturing Fellow Lee Miller examining the impact of decarbonization policy on communities of color and proposing community-led alternatives, and he was recently named a Duke University Climate Change Faculty Fellow. This fall, he is helping to teach a class of 150 undergraduates in a university-wide course.

“As clinical programs director and clinic co-director, Ryke Longest has a well-earned reputation for being creative, innovative, and extraordinarily

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collaborative,” Abrams said. “He established a highly effective model of interdisciplinary teaching and research in the Environmental Law and Policy Clinic and is a constant presence in efforts to advance sustainability and environmental justice in our community and beyond.”

Longest joined the faculty in 2007 as the first director of the Environmental Law and Policy Clinic, an interdisciplinary clinic that represents nonprofit community-based and environmental organizations to address a wide variety of environmental concerns.

He now co-directs the clinic, a joint venture with the Nicholas School that enrolls both law and graduate students, with Clinical Professor Michelle Nowlin JD/MA ’92. He earned his undergraduate and law degrees from UNC-Chapel Hill.

The Adams Clinical Professorship is named for John H. Adams ’62. After attending Duke Law, Adams worked as a prosecutor and Wall Street lawyer before founding the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC), the first national environmental advocacy group to bring change through the courts. In his roles first as the organization’s executive director and later as president, he spearheaded efforts to win the classification of greenhouse gases as pollutants under the Clean Air Act. In 2010, President Barack Obama awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, describing his role at NRDC as “unparalleled by the leader of any other environmental organization.”

Adams’ wife, Patricia Adams, attended Duke University as an undergraduate.

“I am so honored by this recognition,” Longest said. “The Adamses have led the modern environmental movement, making possible the work that I have been doing here at Duke. And John specifically strongly encouraged me to work across disciplines and across Duke University, a lesson I have taken to heart and will strive to achieve going forward. I want to thank both John and Patricia for their support and guidance over the years.” — Andrew Park

At a May 4 ceremony at the Washington Duke Inn, Duke University President Vincent Price recognized five members of the Duke Law faculty who were awarded distinguished professorships in 2022-23: Kerry Abrams, the James B. Duke and Benjamin N. Duke Dean and Distinguished Professor of Law; Christopher Buccafusco, the Edward and Ellen Marie Schwarzman Distinguished Professor of Law; Timothy Meyer, the Richard Allen/ Cravath Distinguished Professor of International Business Law; Jedediah Purdy, the Raphael Lemkin Distinguished Professor of Law; and Sarah Bloom Raskin, the Colin W. Brown Distinguished Professor of the Practice of Law.

NEW FACULTY

Ryo, prolific scholar of immigration and criminal law

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MILY RYO, a highly regarded legal scholar and social scientist who studies issues at the intersection of immigration law and criminal law, joined the Duke Law School faculty on July 1 as a professor of law and sociology.

Ryo, who comes to Duke from the University of Southern California Gould School of Law, employs both quantitative and qualitative methods in her research and publishes scholarship in both law reviews and peer-reviewed social science journals. In June, she won the 2023 Article Prize from the Law and Society Association for “A Study of Pandemic and Stigma Effects in Removal Proceedings,” 19 Journal of Empirical Legal Studies 560 (with Ian Peacock).

Ryo was awarded an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship in 2017 and an American Bar Foundation/JPB Foundation Access to Justice Fellowship in 2020.

Her research is currently supported by a three-year grant from the National Science Foundation Law & Science Program.

“We are thrilled that Emily Ryo will be joining us at Duke Law,” said Michael D. Frakes, the A. Kenneth Pye Distinguished Professor of Law and Professor

of Economics. “She is a prolific and careful scholar who has made a number of significant contributions on key issues in immigration law and policy. Emily will be a valuable addition to our law and social science and empirical legal studies presence at the Law School, in addition to bringing important subject matter expertise in the immigration space.”

Ryo, who won USC Gould’s Distinguished Teaching Award in 2021, will teach Criminal Law and Immigration Law at Duke.

“Emily is the leading voice on the impact of immigration enforcement policy on migrants inside and outside the United States,” said Clinical Professor Kate Evans, director of the Law School’s Immigrant Rights Clinic. “Her research is often the first stop for advocates, policymakers, and scholars engaged in immigration reform and already informs our advocacy in the clinic.”

Ryo holds a PhD in sociology from Stanford University, a JD from Harvard Law School, and a BA in history from the University of Illinois UrbanaChampaign. Before entering graduate school, she worked at Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton in

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Faculty Focus Washington, and she took a year off from her PhD program to clerk for Judge M. Margaret McKeown of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. She has also been a research fellow at Stanford Law School and a visiting scholar at Stanford’s Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity.

“I’m thrilled to join Duke Law School,” Ryo said. “This is an incredible opportunity for me to grow as a teacher and scholar. The faculty is extraordinary, and the intellectual community is so vibrant and welcoming. I can’t think of another school that would offer that experience and environment for me.”

Ryo wrote her dissertation on unauthorized migration, and her research is currently focused in three areas: legal compliance and legal enforcement, including the negligible deterrent effects of U.S. detention policies; access to justice, especially the role of lawyers in immigration proceedings; and judicial and administrative decision-making, particularly in immigration adjudication.

With Ian Peacock, she undertook the first comprehensive empirical analysis of noncitizens detained by U.S. authorities, “A National Study of Immigration Detention in the United States,” 92 Southern California Law Review 1 (2018). The study drew on administrative records from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other data to examine the duration, location, and conditions of detainees’ confinement and found that “detention outcomes vary significantly across facility operator types (private versus non private) and facility locations (within or outside of major urban areas).” The article was cited by U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor in her concurring opinion in Garland v. Aleman Gonzalez last year.

Ryo and Peacock also conducted the first comprehensive analysis of the use of county jails to hold immigrants, “Jailing Immigrant Detainees: A National Study of County Participation in Immigration Detention, 1983-2013,” 54 Law & Society Review 66 (2020). And with Reed Humphrey, Ryo conducted the first systematic examination of government data on juveniles in immigration detention, “Children in Custody: A Study of Detained Migrant Children in the United States,” 68 UCLA Law Review 136 (2021). They carried out a longitudinal analysis of records of all children detained by the Office of Refugee Resettlement, the agency within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services charged with their care, finding high numbers of children who were at heightened risk of trauma or needed specialized care, a system that was overburdened and under-resourced, and troubling inequities in detainees’ treatment and length of detention.

Ryo has also focused attention on access to justice, examining court records to understand the impact of legal representation in removal proceedings and bond hearings. In “Represented But Unequal: The Contingent Effect of Legal Representation in Removal Proceedings,” 55 Law & Society Review 634 (2021), she and Peacock looked at 1.9 million immigration court records between 1998 and 2020 and found that the impact of counsel can depend on factors including a judge’s gender, a court’s location and caseload, or even the political party occupying the White House.

“These findings suggest that the representation effect depends on who the judge is and their decisional environment, and that increasing noncitizens’ access to counsel — even of high quality — might be insufficient under current circumstances to ensure fair and consistent outcomes in immigration courts,” they write.

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Ryo’s recent scholarship on immigration adjudication includes the first large-scale empirical studies of applications for naturalization. She sued the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) under the Freedom of Information Act to obtain administrative records that make up a new and original dataset (the agency would later invite her to brief officials on the findings of her research).

In one study, “The Importance of Race, Gender, and Religion in Naturalizing Adjudication in the United States,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2022), Ryo and Reed Humphrey found that approval rates were lower for non-white applicants than for white applicants, while males fared worse than females, and immigrants from Muslim-majority countries fared worse than those from other countries. They also found a significant interactional effect, with certain subgroups performing worse than others.

In another study, “Citizenship Disparities,” 107 Minnesota Law Review 1 (2022), Ryo and Humphrey examined 2.6 million decisions made by USCIS field offices, which process citizenship applications. The study found wide variations among the 87 offices in the approval rate of applications and the time it took to obtain a decision. They also found that these outcomes could be predicted by the racial or political makeup of the community in which the field office was located, the local unemployment rate, and whether local law enforcement had an agreement with federal authorities to detain undocumented immigrants.

“We should expect relatively similar adjudication outcomes across field offices, all else being equal, given that the U.S. Constitution requires uniform national standards and federal law on the books delineates a seemingly routinized process for naturalization adjudication. Yet this is not what we find,” they write.

Ryo traces her interest in immigration law to the experience of immigrating to the United States at age 11 with her South Korean family. She began to consider an academic career studying the law and legal actors and institutions while working with Stanford Law professor John Donohue during a break from private practice.

She chose sociology because of the “broad and inclusive” training it offered.

“The type of questions that I’m asking as a scholar are very much reflective of the complexity of the world in which we live in, both in terms of human interactions and institutional developments and challenges,” she said. “And so to try to understand those kinds of complexities and to reach as broad a set of audiences as possible, I really wanted to have at hand different kinds of methods and theoretical approaches that I could deploy.”

At Duke, Ryo anticipates exciting collaborations with faculty in the Law School, including in the Wilson Center for Science and Justice, and in other departments, such as Sociology, Political Science, and Economics as well as the Sanford School of Public Policy. She is the 19th Duke Law faculty member with a doctorate (PhD or SJD).

“Emily’s unique combination of merging sophisticated data analysis skills with the theoretical tools of sociology has led to profound insights on questions of immigration law and policy,” said Professor Sara Sternberg Greene. “Duke Law is very lucky to have her join our faculty.” — Andrew Park

NEW FACULTY

Katskee, defender of religious freedoms, named Appellate Litigation Clinic director

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ICHARD B. KATSKEE, a veteran lawyer and advocate whose career has focused on protecting First Amendment freedoms and defending anti-discrimination laws, joined Duke Law School June 26 as assistant clinical professor and director of the Appellate Litigation Clinic.

Katskee previously was vice president and legal director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, having served in that role since 2015. In April 2022 he argued before the U.S. Supreme Court in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, representing a school district in a case involving a coach who conducted midfield prayers at high school football games.

Katskee began a long association with Mayer Brown in 1998 and has been counsel in its Supreme Court and appellate practice twice over his career. He also served at Americans United for two separate seven-year periods. A nationally recognized expert in education law, Katskee also was legal advisor to the assistant secretary for civil rights in the U.S. Department of Education, where he led the development of policy implementing the federal laws barring discrimination on the basis of race, sex, and disability

in the nation’s schools, colleges, and universities. He is an elected member of the American Law Institute.

“Richard Katskee’s distinguished record of public interest practice and appellate advocacy will enrich our clinical offerings,” said Ryke Longest, the John H. Adams Clinical Professor of Law and director of clinical programs. “Students and clients alike will be well served by his leadership of our Appellate Litigation Clinic.”

A career transition to teaching has been in mind for some years, said Katskee, who has taught classes in law and religion at American University Washington College of Law, political theory at Harvard College, and professional ethics at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

“I really wanted to reach out to the next generations of lawyers and help them find their paths,” Katskee said. “What caught my eye about Duke’s Appellate Litigation Clinic is the chance to combine appellate lawyering with training students to do that work and teaching in the classroom. It pulls together all the threads of the things that I love as a lawyer and a teacher.”

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Katskee is “one of the most outstanding and creative appellate lawyers in the country,” said James E. Coleman, Jr., the John S. Bradway Distinguished Professor of the Practice of Law, who founded the clinic.

“His commitment to the public interest will be an inspiration, not just for the students in his clinic, but for students generally. His appointment cements Duke’s position as one of the top law schools for the development of complex litigation skills.”

Katskee holds a bachelor’s degree in political science from the University of Michigan, a master’s degree in political science from Harvard University, and a JD from Yale Law School. He clerked for Judge Stephen Reinhardt of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and Judge Guido Calabresi of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, and in 2001 he began his career in private practice as an associate at Mayer Brown.

In 2004 Katskee became assistant legal director at Americans United, a non-profit organization that works with an interfaith coalition of religious leaders to protect equality and religious freedom through advocacy and litigation. His first matter was Kitzmiller v.

Dover Area School District, a landmark case in which Americans United joined with the American Civil Liberties Union and private counsel to represent parents suing to overturn a Pennsylvania school board’s resolution to present intelligent-design creationism as an alternative to the scientific theory of evolution in the highschool biology curriculum. A district judge ruled for the plaintiffs, writing in a strongly-worded opinion that the resolution had violated the establishment clause of the First Amendment.

“Our clients were seven families with different beliefs and different religious traditions,” Katskee recalled. “They all came together because they felt that they, their families, and their houses of worship should be the ones to decide what religious instruction their children received; the public schools shouldn’t be making those choices and forcing others’ beliefs — or even their own — on their children.

“Finding people of many faiths, as well as nonbelievers, coming together to stand up for the religious freedom of everyone – that’s really what motivated me in the work that I did at Americans United.”

Other recent litigation responded to attempts to use religious claims in the workplace and the marketplace to get exemptions from laws barring discrimination based on sexual orientation, gender identity, race, and disability, as well as efforts to impose religious beliefs through legislation limiting reproductive rights.

Career echoes themes of early experience Working at the intersection of education, religion, and anti-discrimination law drew together themes that Katskee said have run through his life since his childhood in Omaha, Nebraska, where he and his sister were the only Jewish students in their elementary school.

“That experience had a lot to do with how I came to think about what religious freedom means,” he said. “Accommodating religion, religious belief, and religious practice is enormously important. But when it’s done in ways that impose on others the costs and burdens of my belief or my religious practice, or when I try to use the power and the levers of government to force my beliefs and practices on others, that’s when religious freedom is being harmed.”

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His formative years in Omaha also shaped Katskee’s views on diversity, equality, and opportunity, when a court order to desegregate the district’s racially imbalanced schools brought in new thirdgrade students who became lifelong friends.

“I remember the vice principal telling us that a group of new kids was coming from Lothrop Elementary, which had been an all-Black school, and helping us figure out how to welcome them and make them feel at home. I also remember that there were people who were worried about race riots at the high school. The juxtaposition of that worry with the experience of these new friends in school helped define the way that I see the world,” Katskee recalled.

“It was only later, when I began the academic study of these sorts of issues, that I realized that a lot of my core values and principles came out of that experience. Throughout my career I’ve been trying to create opportunities to expand and diversify the legal community and the legal world the way that my world was expanded. That’s something that I very much want to continue at Duke.”

Conscious since early in his career of the low numbers of women, people of color, and first-generation students in appellate litigation, Katskee said he has paid particular attention to recruiting diverse staff members, fellows, and interns, providing opportunities for meaningful contributions to litigation work as well as guidance to ensure that they develop and progress in their careers. He is a mentor with The Appellate Project, which works to increase representation of people of color as appellate attorneys and judges.

Katskee also brings to students in the Appellate Litigation Clinic a passion and talent for legal writing. In Monkey Girl, a 2008 book about the Kitzmiller case, author Edward Humes praised Katskee’s “elegantly written briefs” as “veritable beach reading in a field better known for its ponderous prose.” In 2020 he won the Education Law Association’s August Steinhilber Award for outstanding brief writing in an appellate case.

“The judges I clerked for and the folks I learned from when I was starting in private practice were spectacular writers who cared about every word, every sentence, and every paragraph. That became part of who I am too, and it’s something that I want to share with students,” Katskee said.

“I’ve seen the results, both in court and in having people out in the world be able to understand the legal arguments. If we as lawyers can write in ways that regular people can understand, we are doing a better job for our clients, a better job for the courts to whom we owe obligations, and a better job for the world as well.”

Student-attorneys in the Appellate Litigation Clinic research, brief, and argue on behalf of clients in federal appeals, typically in the Third, Fourth, and D.C. Circuits, on a wide range of civil and criminal matters.

In addition to building on the clinic’s past successes, Katskee plans to expand the range of matters it handles to accommodate a range of student interests, from non-discrimination work and reproductive justice to criminal law.

“Criminal law is not something that I’ve really done in my career yet. But there’s a huge underserved population that needs good legal representation. And for the students to see that the work can be rewarding would be a victory.” — Jeannie Naujeck

NEW FACULTY

Bishop, empirical scholar of law and finance

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OBERT E. BISHOP, an empirical scholar of the economics of corporate governance and securities law with experience in public policy, legal practice, and finance, joined the faculty July 1 as an associate professor of corporate law.

Bishop was previously a fellow at both the New York University School of Law Institute for Corporate Governance and Finance and the Berkeley Center for Law and Business at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law. His research interests span topics at the intersection of law and finance, including corporate governance, hedge fund activism, securities, and markets more broadly, with emphasis on the market consequences of regulatory intervention.

He is teaching Business Associations this fall, and in the spring semester he will offer a new financial valuation class that will train students to build discounted cash flow, IPO, M&A, and leveraged buyout models, similar to programs taught in business schools.

“Duke Law School is a truly awesome research institution with a great set of students and a long history of policy impact,” Bishop said. “I’m thrilled to join the faculty. I’ve been fortunate to have professors who played a fundamental role in my life and helped me get here, and I hope to play that role with students and help them get to wherever they want to be.”

“Bobby Bishop brings to Duke Law a unique combination of legal scholarship, regulatory experience, and quantitative financial skills,” said John M. de Figueiredo, the Russell M. Robinson II Distinguished Professor of Law, Strategy, and Economics.

“This will translate into his not only pushing the frontiers of academic understanding of business organizations, but also will allow Duke Law to extend its offering of advanced and interdisciplinary business law courses for our students.”

Born and raised in Texas, Bishop received a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from the University of Chicago. He worked in the Middle East and East Africa for the U.S. Department of Defense before earning his JD and MBA from Columbia University.

Bishop clerked on the Delaware Court of Chancery from 2017 to 2018 and served as counsel to U.S. Securities and Exchange Commissioner Robert J. Jackson, Jr., before resuming his academic studies at Yale University, where he earned an MA, M.Phil., and PhD in accounting.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Bishop served as senior advisor on financial markets at the U.S. Department of the Treasury, where he helped implement the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act, a $2.2 trillion economic relief package signed into law in March 2020. He worked on a team that set up Federal Reserve lending facilities to backstop financial markets, including the Commercial Paper Funding Facility, Corporate Credit Facility, and Money Market Mutual Fund Liquidity Facility.

“Those early months were a fascinating and crazy time of getting those set up,” Bishop recalled.

“As each of those facilities came into place and the market stabilized, my portfolio broadened to include everything from debt issuance and the debt limit to housing, student loans, and Treasury’s work on Puerto Rican economic reforms. It was really special and a great honor to be there.”

In his doctoral dissertation, “Investor Commu­ nication and Say-on-Pay,” Bishop explores how a corporate governance mechanism in the 2010 DoddFrank Act may have had the unintended consequence of giving hedge funds a channel to gauge shareholder receptiveness to activist intervention.

The “say-on-pay” provision mandated a non-binding vote on executive pay by shareholders of U.S. companies and also allowed shareholders to choose the frequency of such votes at the time of enactment. Bishop’s empirical analysis identified the relationship between the say-on-pay vote and future hedge fund activity. “[T]hose who favor shareholder voting as a corporate governance mechanism should carefully consider the effects of such votes on investor communication when evaluating such policies,” he writes.

Bishop’s interests in business law and finance developed at Columbia Law under Jackson, who was a professor there before serving as an SEC commissioner from January 2018 to February 2020.

— Jeannie Naujeck

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NEW FACULTY

Fine ’11 returns to Duke as supervising attorney of Criminal Defense Clinic

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AUREN FINE ’11, a nationally recognized advocate for youth justice reform, joined the faculty in July as assistant clinical professor of law and supervising attorney of the Criminal Defense Clinic.

Fine was previously the Stoneleigh Visiting Fellow at the Quattrone Center for the Fair Administration of Justice at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School. She stepped down in January 2022 as co-director of the Youth Sentencing & Reentry Project (YSRP), a Philadelphia-based organization she co-founded to keep children out of adult jails and prisons and support people incarcerated as youths as they return to their communities.

“Lauren has tremendous skill and experience in the mitigation, re-entry, and systemic advocacy spaces that will expand what we’re already doing at the individual client level,” said Clinical Professor Elana Fogel, director of the Criminal Defense Clinic, which completed its inaugural semester in the spring.

“Her accomplishment in envisioning, designing, and successfully launching a nonprofit, the creativity and vision and dedication that it takes to do something like that, and the nationally recognized level of success her work has had will enable her to connect to our students and inspire their own creative and groundbreaking advocacy.”

Fine grew up near Philadelphia and earned a bachelor’s degree in history and international studies at Yale University before entering Duke Law School. Always drawn to working with young people, she deepened her interest in the juvenile and adult criminal legal systems through her involvement in the Children’s Law Clinic and the Innocence Project, pro bono work at the Durham County Youth

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Home, and internships supported by the Public Interest Law Foundation.

Following graduation, Fine returned to Philadelphia to clerk for Judge David R. Strawbridge of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. She then spent two years as a Zubrow Fellow in Children’s Law at the Juvenile Law Center, where she identified an unmet need for mitigating evidence and re-entry planning in cases where youths were being charged as if they were adults, and for similar resources in juvenile life-without-parole cases in which defendants might be provided the opportunity to be resentenced. The next year she and Joanna Visser Adjoian co-founded YSRP to partner with attorneys, youth clients, juvenile lifers, and their families to develop mitigation evidence and re-entry plans and advocate for change in how youths are treated by the criminal legal and carceral system.

“The gap we wanted to fill was making sure there was a more nuanced picture and understanding of the child who was facing these extreme penalties in adult court and trying to bring the community into the courtroom process,” Fine said.

Fine included law students in YSRP’s work through an interdisciplinary pro bono student intern program co-developed with Penn Carey Law and Penn’s School of Social Policy and Practice. She also partnered with law students on one of YSRP’s biggest policy wins, a multi-semester project with students from the Justice Lab at Temple University’s Beasley School of Law that led directly to the cessation of a decades-long policy of charging parents in Philadelphia for the cost of their children’s incarceration.

Under Fine’s leadership, YSRP also trained and supervised students from seven Philadelphia-area law and graduate social work schools to provide mitigation and re-entry support for juvenile lifers who were resentenced in Philadelphia pursuant to Supreme Court rulings in Miller v. Alabama and Montgomery v. Louisiana.

Fine has received numerous honors for her work at YSRP, including the Law Alumni Association Young Alumni Award in 2020 and the Beyond Duke Service and Leadership Award in 2017. With Visser Adjoian, she received the American Constitution Society’s 2018 David Carliner Public Interest Award as well as leadership awards and grants from Echoing Green, the M. Night Shyamalan Foundation, and the Claneil Foundation, among others.

The Criminal Defense Clinic provides students with hands-on experience as trial level advocates representing indigent clients facing misdemeanor criminal charges in Durham District Court. In addition to developing professional skills, students study issues around mass incarceration, including the role of race and poverty in the criminal legal system, and develop ideas for systemic policy reform. — Jeannie Naujeck

Lawrence G. Baxter retires

AN ACCOMPLISHED SCHOLAR, TEACHER, AND BUSINESS EXECUTIVE, BAXTER PIONEERED THE STUDY OF BANKING REGULATION AT DUKE LAW SCHOOL

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AWRENCE G. BAXTER, an internationally renowned expert in both administrative law and financial regulation whose formidable intellect, global mindset, and bold vision led him to make major contributions in law, business, and society, retired from teaching at Duke Law School in December.

Baxter, the David T. Zhang Professor Emeritus of the Practice of Law, served on the faculty from 1986 to 1995, during which he taught Administrative Law and Criminal Law and created the Law School’s first courses in domestic and international bank regulation. He returned in 2009, when his focus turned to exploring the future of banking regulation after the financial crisis and shaping a new curriculum around the emerging risks to global economies and markets posed by climate change. In between, he spent over a decade as a business executive, steering one of the country’s largest banks to a leading position in online financial services when few others foresaw the transformative potential of the internet.

Before moving to the United States, Baxter was already a rising academic star in South Africa, having written a text that would be used in litigation to fight government apartheid practices. The book is still acclaimed as the seminal interpretation of administrative law in the country.

“Lawrence has an incredibly versatile skill set, having achieved so much success in so many disparate ventures,” says Richard Schmalbeck, the Simpson Thacher & Bartlett Distinguished Professor of Law and Baxter’s colleague during both terms on the faculty.

Sarah Bloom Raskin, the Colin W. Brown Distinguished Professor of the Practice of Law, says Baxter’s name is “synonymous with the appropriate and correct way to understand financial regulation, particularly as it pertains to banks.”

“You let drop in Washington, D.C., … ‘Lawrence Baxter says’ and people automatically assume you know what you are talking about,”

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Faculty Focus

“Everybody needs a drop of luck, but you don’t get very much of it unless you are positioned right.”

— Lawrence Baxter, pictured here with professor James D. Cox in 1990

Raskin says. “He is infinitely credible as a banker because he is a law professor, and he is infinitely credible as a law professor because he has been a banker.”

Baxter maintains that his career has been entirely unplanned. But he acknowledges that his success in multiple realms has also been driven by his “magpie-like” curiosity and a discipline that reflects his father’s frequent admonition, “If you’re going to do it, do it right.”

“Passion has very often been an unacknowledged trigger for me in doing something well,” he says. “And I’m fascinated by the intersection of luck and hard work.

Everybody needs a drop of luck, but you don’t get very much of it unless you are positioned right. So my whole career has been the product of lots of luck, but also huge enthusiasm for what I’ve done.”

A “very difficult” decision

Born in Pietermaritzburg, a medium-sized city about an hour inland from South Africa’s eastern coast, Baxter “fell in love with the law” while earning his bachelor’s and law degrees at the University of Natal (now the University of KwaZuluNatal). After receiving his LLM and Diploma in Legal Studies at the University of Cambridge, he returned to the University of Natal in 1978, joining the law faculty and earning a PhD in administrative law.

After going through compulsory military service — and having been exposed in England to materials about apartheid that were banned in South Africa — Baxter came to realize that he was not being trained to protect the country but rather to maintain a system of oppression against his fellow citizens.

“My eyes were opened, and I saw what was really going on, and I no longer could have the level of patriotism that I’d been told I should have growing up because I didn’t trust the leaders,” he says. “That meant I was opening myself up to instability. I’ve lived my life that way ever since.”

By the mid-1980s, Baxter’s Administrative Law (Juta, Cape Town, 1984), regarded as the first comprehensive work on the area and one that reshaped the discipline in South Africa, was emerging as a sort of legal blueprint for challenging government apartheid practices. He credits John Dugard, the eminent South African scholar of international and human rights law who has twice been a visiting professor at Duke Law, with showing him how the law could be leveraged.

“John had learned from the civil rights movement in the U.S.,” Baxter recalls.

“He said, ‘You know, the civil rights movement knew how to use the legal process to advance their interests. And we have to do it in South Africa.’

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“So that set me off looking at administrative law not just as the narrow technicalities, but what you could do with it. We didn’t have a constitution where you could use challenges to violations of rights, but you could challenge the exercise of ministerial or government discretion under administrative law. And it actually greatly contributed to the eventual collapse of apartheid when it finally happened.”

In 1986 Baxter came to Duke Law for a sabbatical teaching Comparative Administrative Law at the invitation of A. Kenneth Pye, former dean and professor then serving as university chancellor, and then-dean Paul Carrington. Before long, Carrington asked him to join the faculty and he found himself torn by the decision of whether to remain in the U.S. or return home. The political situation was heating up in South Africa, and colleagues and former students litigating against the government were being targeted for bans and worse.

“Those people were in far more danger than I was at that time, though it would probably have evolved if I’d stayed,” Baxter says. “When I accepted the offer from Duke I felt very guilty about not going back.”

Donald L. Horowitz, the James B. Duke Professor Emeritus of Law and Political Science and the author of A Democratic South Africa? Constitutional Engineering in a Divided Society (1991), remembers long conversations with Baxter about the pros and cons of going back versus staying at Duke.

“He was very well established in South Africa. His family was there and he’d been the author of the leading textbook on administrative law in South Africa, so as a young academic he was extremely well-known,” Horowitz says. “Making the decision to stay at Duke was very difficult for him.”

Still in his early 30s, Baxter joined the governing faculty and was “immediately seen as an effective teacher, popular with both students and colleagues, and [he] quickly established himself as an expert in American administrative law,” Schmalbeck says.

But the following year, Baxter received a call that would change his academic path when the Administrative Conference of the United States asked him to research the enforcement powers of federal banking agencies. During interviews with banking

“He is infinitely credible as a banker because he is a law professor, and he is infinitely credible as a law professor because he has been a banker.” — Sarah Bloom Raskin officials and regulators, he uncovered the beginnings of the savings and loan crisis that eventually resulted in the failure of over a third of the nation’s S&L institutions at a cost of $160 billion.

“I got to know a lot of regulators at that time quite well and when I would say to them, ‘The numbers don’t add up,’ they would look at me and sort of nod.

So they knew I knew,” Baxter recalls.

“And as I went around Washington and I was running up the numbers for the amounts that would be needed to bail out what was then hundreds of bankrupt savings and loans around the country, I started to get interested in the business dynamics. I went back to Duke and said, ‘You know, we really need to be teaching bank regulation because nobody teaches it outside of economics departments, and they’re not lawyers.’ And people looked at me sort of funny. I remember [Professor] Walter Dellinger saying, ‘That sounds about as boring as it could possibly get.’ I said, ‘No, it’s very important.’

“All of a sudden, advanced economies realized that their financial regulators needed to coordinate. And I was seen to be ahead of the curve. But I was lucky. I was at the right place at the right time.”

Baxter continued consulting in Washington, working with the Senate Banking Committee to strengthen bank oversight and consumer protection through what became the 1991 Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation Improvement Act. He also teamed with faculty colleagues Dellinger and Professor H. Jefferson Powell on a successful Supreme Court appeal for the respondent in Wilder v.

Virginia Hospital Association, a case involving hospital Medicaid reimbursement.

But by 1995 Baxter felt he needed concrete business experience to more fully understand the underlying economics and business dynamics driving instability in the U.S. financial industry. He took a sabbatical to work as special counsel for strategic development at Charlotte-based Wachovia, then one of the nation’s largest and strongest banks. After his proposal to cut compliance and regulation costs by consolidating three banks across state lines was adopted, Wachovia asked him to stay on.

“I couldn’t resist it. It was so tempting. There was so much change going on,” he says.

Leading its emerging businesses division, Baxter guided Wachovia’s initial foray into life insurance. Later, as chief e-commerce officer, he pioneered its entry into online banking and built Wachovia’s digital platform into a leading provider of financial services.

“I think there’s a bit of visual and pattern thinking that eclectically assembles things from different parts of my experience,” Baxter says. “I knew the basic shift was going to move from the producers of financial services to the users, because I had just got a computer that had Windows on it, and I realized that changed everything.

“When we were building our online customer base, we had about 50,000 internet users. And we thought, ‘Wow, this is going fast.’ And one of my colleagues said, ‘Let’s go for 100,000.’ And partly out of ignorance, but partly out of enthusiasm and a vision, I said, ‘Why don’t we make it 250,000?’ People were gobsmacked. And we went way past 250,000.

“What started out as something treated with huge skepticism became the busiest channel in the whole company by far. And it shocked the traditional bankers.”

Many who worked with Baxter at Wachovia call him a visionary with talent at both strategy and execution and an ability to lead with integrity and harness the strengths of diverse team members. By 2006 e-commerce was no longer a niche division in the company or in financial services, and he retired from Wachovia and began advising internet startups and consulting for businesses on cybersecurity. But another financial crisis was brewing, caused in part by the collapse of home prices and mortgage-backed securities. Baxter again had a front-row seat as Wachovia lost deposits and funding support and was acquired by Wells Fargo in December 2008 for a fraction of its former value.

“I retired and I thought I was going to go read great books and have great thoughts, and then write a great book,” Baxter says. “None of that happened.

Things came up, namely a financial crisis. But apart from that, I also realized retirement was a miserable existence.”

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“I remember one student saying to me, ‘Professor Baxter, could we talk about your carbon footprint?’ My carbon footprint was appalling.” — Lawrence Baxter A new chapter and a new focus

At the urging of former Law School colleagues, Baxter returned to Durham in early 2009 to study and teach the causes of the crisis and the evolving post-crash regulatory environment through an interdisciplinary lens of law, public policy, and business.

He intended to stay briefly and then return to the technology sector. Instead, he reinvigorated an academic center focused on global financial markets that he would direct for 12 years and taught large classes on banking regulation and derivatives and smaller ones such as Financial Technology and Complex Adaptive Systems and the Law. In July 2018 Baxter was awarded the inaugural Zhang professorship.

“Lo and behold, things developed,” he says. “Duke’s a wonderful place to be.”

He was also becoming increasingly aware of another looming threat. As chair of the Duke University Advisory Committee on Investment Responsibility from 2017 to mid-2022, he was confronted by student demands to divest Duke assets from fossil fuel companies. Impressed, he began to educate himself on climate change.

“Until I became chair of the committee, I knew that it was happening, and I didn’t dispute that global warming was a thing, but I didn’t think it was urgent,” Baxter says. “It’s moving faster and faster now, and I’m sure that a lot of people who never paid attention to climate change will feel like it’s the lightning that we never saw strike. But that urgency has been there for quite a while.”

He became a critic of energy-intensive industries such as cryptocurrency, writing on the environmental impact of digital coin mining and questioning strategies like carbon offsets that don’t cut emissions at their source. In spring 2020 he began teaching a readings class on the impact of climate change on financial markets, which originated when Raskin approached him about the role financial regulation might play in addressing it. With characteristic boldness, he proposed they explore the topic in a semester-long class.

“This course became the foundation by which Lawrence and I started the process of articulating the connections between financial markets and climate change,” Raskin says. “In the early days, it was rudimentary because we were exceedingly careful and disciplined and cautious. In the later days, when we became more confident that we were onto critical connections between climate and markets, the course became a mechanism for students to explore new connections and policy responses, most of which were ahead of the actual work of monetary and financial regulatory policymakers.”

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Students were passionate about making an impact on what many call the most pressing issue facing their generation, Baxter says. They also challenged him to rethink his own passion for exotic automobiles, which originated during his youth when his father worked on race cars. A longtime collector whose array of rare, custom, and antique sports cars “classed up the Law School parking lot,” as Schmalbeck jokes, Baxter sold many of his personal vehicles and switched his daily driver to an electric Porsche Taycan.

“I remember one student saying to me, ‘Professor Baxter, could we talk about your carbon footprint?’” he recalls. “My carbon footprint was appalling.

Education on this subject has had a big personal impact on me.”

Raskin says Baxter’s bold answer to her question about climate change and financial regulation had a personal impact on her. She has become one of the most prominent voices calling for regulators to get more involved in mitigating climate risks to the stability of the economy and financial system and create more incentives to speed the transition from fossil fuels.

It also, she says, began to shape a new area of study as they convened other top thinkers in law, economics, and public policy, including Professor GinaGail Fletcher, in the Regenerative Crisis Response Committee, a group that produced policy papers and recommendations for a more sustainable economy.

At a celebration for Baxter in May, Raskin spoke movingly about their partnership.

“Throughout all of this exploration and collaboration, Lawrence became for me not only the leader in the world of climate-related financial risk, but something even more important than that. He is a friend of the highest caliber — there through thick and thin, through laughter and tears,” she said.

“We all have in our lives those rare people with whom we will try ideas, check how far they go, and decide how we share these ideas, whether our nation can handle them, embrace them, act on them. For me, that is Lawrence.”

Since leaving the Law School, Baxter has been involved in multiple projects, including consulting and serving on boards. He is vice chair of the North Carolina Innovation Council, which facilitates innovation and investment in financial and insurance technology, and a senior advisor on climate financial risk, regulation, and litigation at Kaya Partners, an advisory firm that helps firms address climate change.

“I know I must be immersed in a lot of things,” he says. “I thrive on change. I’m fascinated by the next, the disconnected leap. And I don’t know where that comes from other than it was nurtured by being in a world, from when I was small, of instability.

“For all its challenges, America is still, for me, such an exciting place. And Duke exemplifies the best of it.” — Jeannie Naujeck

Faculty Notes

Jones elected chair of Duke University Academic Council Trina Jones, the Jerome M. Culp Distinguished Professor of Law, was elected chair of the Duke University Academic Council Feb. 21.

The council and its Executive Committee are the chief instruments of faculty governance at Duke and represent the opinions of the faculty to the university’s administration and Board of Trustees. Jones was elected by a vote of the university’s faculty and began a twoyear term as chair on July 1.

“I am deeply honored to serve in this capacity and to have the trust of faculty colleagues across the university,” Jones said.

Jones, who joined the Law School faculty in 1995, is a leading expert on racial, socioeconomic, and gender inequality, particularly as it pertains to the workplace. Her scholarship has appeared in leading law reviews, including Columbia Law Review, Duke Law Journal, Emory Law Journal, and Georgetown Law Journal, and she has lectured around the world on colorism, intersectionality, and sexual harassment.

Jones directs the Center on Law, Race & Policy and teaches Race and the Law, Critical Race Theory, Employment Discrimination, Law and Literature: Race and Gender, and Civil Procedure.

She received the Distinguished Teaching Award from the Duke Bar Association in 2019 and the Gavel Award from the Duke Law Black Law Students Association in 2019 and 2022.

Jones has served six terms on the Academic Council and has been a member of its Executive Committee. She also currently chairs the university’s Faculty Hearing Committee and has served on numerous other university bodies, including the University Priorities Committee, the President’s Council on Black Affairs, and the Academic Affairs and Audit, Risk, and Compliance Committees of the Board of Trustees.

She is the fourth Law School faculty member to chair the Council, following Professors Paul Haagen (2005-07), Robert Mosteller (1998-2000), and Francis Paschal (1966-67).

Professor of the Practice of Law Charles J. Dunlap, Jr., a retired Air Force major general, was the 2022 recipient of the International Society of Military Ethicists’ highest honor.

Dunlap received the Brigadier General Malham M. Wakin, USAF (Ret.) Founders Award for lifetime achievement and service in the field of ethics and the military profession at the organization’s annual conference. It was only the third time the award has been given.

The society’s president, Lt. Gen. Chris Miller, USAF (Ret.), presented Dunlap with the award, citing his leadership “in and out of the uniform as a thinker and a doer.” George Lucas, distinguished chair of ethics emeritus at the U.S. Naval Academy, called Dunlap “a force of nature,” recapping his career and contributions to the broader understanding of ethics and law in national security and military service.

Dunlap retired from the Air Force in 2010 after a 34-year career in the Judge Advocate General Corps. At Duke Law he teaches courses including National Security Law, International Law of Armed Conflict, and Use of Force in International Law. As executive director of the Law School’s Center on Law, Ethics and National Security, Dunlap annually organizes the National Security Law, or LENS, Conference, which attracts top speakers and leaders from the military, government, think tanks, and business. The 28th annual LENS Conference was held in February.

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Faculty Focus Christopher H. Schroeder, the Charles S. Murphy Professor Emeritus of Law and professor emeritus of public policy, retired July 9 as assistant attorney general and head of the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) in the U.S. Department of Justice.

Schroeder, a member of the Duke Law faculty since 1979, had held the position since the beginning of President Joe Biden’s administration. The OLC advises the Justice Department, the White House, and the executive branch on matters concerning presidential authority, executive privilege, and separation of powers, among a wide range of other issues, which put Schroeder in the center of some of the most important issues arising during Biden’s presidency.

“It has been a great honor to serve the president, his administration, and the American public,” Schroeder said. “I am grateful to Duke Law School for the flexibility it has given me over the years to serve in various capacities in the federal government, and for the Horvitz Program in Constitutional & Public Law, which has done so much during my association with Duke to highlight the importance of government service and the rule of law.”

At a farewell ceremony, Attorney General Merrick Garland presented Schroeder with the Edmund J. Randolph Award, the department’s highest honor, “in recognition of [his] outstanding service to the U.S. Department of Justice and the nation.”

Schroeder, who led the Department of Justice agency review team for the Biden-Harris transition in 2020, previously worked in the OLC during the Clinton administration, serving as deputy assistant attorney general from 1993 to 1996 and acting assistant attorney general in 1996. He also served as assistant attorney general and head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Policy during the Obama administration, from 2010 to 2013.

David F. Cavers Distinguished Professor of Law Deborah A. DeMott contributed a chapter to The American Law Institute: A Centennial History (Oxford), which was published April 20 to mark the 100th anniversary of the organization.

DeMott’s essay, “Restating the Law in the Shadow of Codes: The ALI in Its Formative Era,” recounts the period between 1923 and 1945 as the institute, which produces scholarly work to clarify, modernize, and otherwise improve the law, established itself. She spoke about the essay on a panel of contributors at the ALI Annual Meeting in May and at an event at the Law School in April moderated by David F. Levi, the James B. Duke and Benjamin N. Duke Dean Emeritus, who serves as president of the ALI. Separately, an ALI publication for which DeMott served as the sole reporter, Restatement of the Law Third, Agency (2006), was cited by the U.S. Supreme Court during the October 2022 term in its opinions in Bartenwerfer v. Buckley and Percoco v. United States and by Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett in her concurring opinion in Biden v. Nebraska. The restatement was also cited by the District of Columbia Court of Appeals in its opinion in Carroll v. Trump in April.

DeMott, a member of the Duke Law School faculty since 1975, is an expert on the law of agency who has written extensively on the subject. Her scholarship and teaching also focus on business organizations, fiduciary obligation, and art law.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Law Nia Johnson was selected by students to receive the Duke Science & Society Faculty and Staff Leadership Award at its commencement ceremony on May 13.

Johnson, who teaches Race, Bioethics, and the Law, “fostered a strong sense of belonging among the graduate student cohort, allowing them to thrive academically, professionally, and personally,” according to the award announcement.

Johnson joined the visiting assistant professor program ­— which prepares emerging scholars for success in the legal academy with two- or three-year faculty appointments, research support and feedback, and an opportunity to hone their teaching skills — in 2022. Her scholarship lies at the intersection of health policy, bioethics, race, and the law, where she studies implicit biases and explicit discrimination in the delivery of healthcare throughout the United States.

In July, she was selected by Duke’s Office of Interdisciplinary Studies for a Wilhelmina M. Reuben-Cooke Culturally Responsive Pedagogy and Practices Fellowship. The fellowship, named after one of the first African American undergraduates admitted to Duke, is awarded to faculty who propose projects examining issues of social justice, health equity, and environmental racism.

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Clinical Professor of Law Anne Gordon was elected to the Executive Committee for the Association of American Law Schools Section on Clinical Legal Education at the organization’s annual meeting in January. One of three members, she will serve a threeyear term.

Gordon is director of Duke Law’s Externship Program. She also teaches Social Justice Lawyering and Movement Lawyering Lab: Law for Black Lives.

According to the AALS website, Executive Committee members “support the work of the many committees in the section, provide support to regional and topic-specific conferences and events, coordinate programming central to the section’s mission, and work collaboratively with the section to advance the goals and priorities of clinical legal education.” The section’s goals include supporting the clinical community in efforts to advance racial justice.

Gordon has written recently on avoiding bias in clinical pedagogy. Her article, “Cleaning Up Our Own Houses: Creating Anti-Racist Clinical Programs,” was published last year in the Clinical Law Review.

Raphael Lemkin Distinguished Professor of Law Jedediah Purdy is the editor of a new edition of Henry David Thoreau’s writings published Aug. 15.

Walden and Other Writings (Norton) contains some of Thoreau’s bestknown work, including the full text of Walden and the anti-slavery essays “Civil Disobedience,” “Slavery in Massachusetts,” and “A Plea for Captain John Brown.” Purdy wrote an introduction for the book, which is meant for readers encountering Thoreau’s writing for the first time.

Purdy re-joined the Duke Law faculty in 2022 from Columbia Law School, where he was the William S. Beinecke Professor of Law and co-director of the Constitutional Democracy Initiative. He previously served on the Duke Law faculty from 2004 to 2019, most recently as the Robinson O. Everett Professor of Law. Purdy teaches and writes about environmental, property, and constitutional law as well as legal and political theory. He is the author of nine books, including, most recently, Two Cheers for Politics: Why Democracy Is Scary, Flawed, and Our Best Hope (Basic, 2022).

Stanley A. Star Distinguished Professor of Law and Business Steven L. Schwarcz provided expert testimony to members of the U.S. House of Representatives Financial Services Committee who met May 18 to discuss legislative proposals to regulate stablecoins.

Schwarcz’s written testimony was presented to members of the House Subcommittee on Digital Assets, Financial Technology, and Inclusion for the hearing titled “Putting the Stable in Stablecoins: How Legislation Will Help Stablecoins Achieve Their Promise.” Stablecoins such as Tether and Binance Coin are a form of digital currency that are tied to the value of another asset, most commonly the U.S. dollar, to provide price stability in often volatile digital currency markets.

Schwarcz, one of the world’s foremost scholars in commercial, contract, and bankruptcy law and a pioneer in the field of asset securitization, has written and spoken widely on regulating digital currencies, including decentralized commercial cryptocurrencies and Central Bank Digital Currencies issued and backed by a government entity. In July, he chaired a panel titled “Regulating Global Stablecoins and other Cryptocurrencies” at the 2023 meeting of the United Nations-sponsored World Law Congress and gave written and oral testimony on “Vertical Integration of Crypto and Digital Asset Markets” to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s Market Risk Advisory Committee.

A paper co-authored by Michael D. Frakes, the A. Kenneth Pye Distinguished Professor of Law and professor of economics, was selected as the best submission in Health Law, Insurance Law, and Torts at the annual meeting of the American Law and Economics Association in June.

In “Racial Concordance and the Quality of Medical Care: Evidence from the Military,” Frakes and MIT economist Jonathan Gruber report on a study that analyzed data from the Military Health System to assess the role of racial concordance between patients and medical providers in driving use of preventive care and the implications for patient outcomes.

They found that increasing the share of Black physicians had a positive impact on medication adherence and mortality of Black patients. The paper was published in December by the National Bureau of Economic Research, where Frakes serves as a research associate.

Frakes is an empirical scholar conducting research in health law and innovation policy. His scholarship has appeared in leading economics, law, and medical journals.

He is currently serving as the principal investigator on a National Institutes of Health-funded study exploring the effects of immunizing physicians from medical liability on the extent and quality of the medical care they deliver.

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A job screening tool that rejected female applicants

Software that made real estate ads visible to only certain demographics

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License plate readers tracking cars from states that restrict abortion in states that do not

Facial recognition technology that flagged innocent people as criminal suspects, and prevented migrants with darker complexions from filing claims for asylum

AI and algorithmicallybased applications may help solve humanity’s most pressing problems.

But they also come with challenges for civil rights and liberties.

by Jeannie A. Naujeck

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A

RTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE and algorithmically-based applications are transforming nearly every aspect of society.

They can process and analyze massive amounts of data, rapidly identify patterns, and make inferences at a scale, scope, and speed that hold great promise for increasing productivity, reducing costs, improving access to services, and helping solve some of society’s biggest challenges.

But these advances also raise troubling implications for civil rights and liberties. If it fails to comply with existing laws and regulations, the use of AI and algorithms can result in consequences including workplace discrimination, wrongful arrests, and the disclosure of some of the most sensitive information about individuals.

Even more concerning, AI-enabled neurotechnology can now read brain activity and translate a person’s thoughts into text, with vast potential for misuse by corporations and agents of the state. In a new book, The Battle for Your Brain: Defending the Right to Think Freely in the Age of Neurotechnology (St. Martin’s Press), Nita Farahany JD/MA ’04 PhD ’06 proposes a new human right protecting “cognitive liberty.” (Read more, page 41). “[W]e are rapidly heading into a world of brain transparency, in which scientists, doctors, governments, and companies may peer into our brains and minds at will,” writes Farahany, the Robinson O. Everett Distinguished Professor of Law and professor of philosophy. “With our DNA already up for grabs and our smartphones broadcasting our every move, our brains are increasingly the final frontier for privacy.”

The release last fall of ChatGPT, one of several “chatbots” that answer questions, write term papers, even create artwork — and the start of an “AI arms race” among Google, Meta, and other major tech companies — have forced regulators and lawmakers to confront looming concerns over the potential harms of such tools. Their challenge will be to develop guidelines for their lawful and ethical use without squelching U.S. innovation and global competitiveness. At an 36 Duke Law Magazine • Fall 2023

event in April, U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission Chair Charlotte Burrows described AI as the “new civil rights frontier.”

But many of those threats and risks are already here, especially for vulnerable and marginalized groups whose civil rights may be most imperiled by common applications of these emerging technologies. Those include people of color, who are more likely both to be targeted and to be misidentified by automated cameras and facial recognition technology; people seeking sensitive health services, who may have their movements tracked and shared by their own personal devices as well as public surveillance systems; and people in the criminal legal system, who increasingly have bail, parole, or sentencing decisions determined by algorithms that may be based on biased or inaccurate data.

“As artificial intelligence has become an everyday presence in our daily lives, rather than step in to safeguard our rights, government agencies, including law enforcement, are increasingly trying to deploy these new technologies,” says Brandon Garrett, the L. Neil Williams, Jr. Distinguished Professor of Law and faculty director of the Wilson Center for Science and Justice at Duke Law. “Pressing issues concerning the deployment of AI in criminal cases are not being meaningfully addressed.”

AI and related applications are now so commonly used by employers, lenders, landlords, law enforcement, health systems, government offices, and other businesses and service providers that anyone can experience an intrusion of privacy or be denied a benefit from an automated system using biased or erroneous information. Such ramifications may be difficult, if not impossible, to challenge.

Open for inspection:

YoUr PersOnal DatA Indeed, the ascendance of automated technologies and AI has intensified concerns over the collection and use of data, particularly personal information that individuals consider private.

“In class, I like to talk about privacy as a value separately from privacy as a right,” says Senior Lecturing Fellow Jolynn Dellinger ’93, who teaches classes on privacy law and ethics and technology at the Law School and at Duke Science & Society. “We have to rely on laws to give us the rights we have, in large part. And the United States isn’t the best at providing privacy protections.”

That’s especially true when it comes to data privacy. ChatGPT, a large language model application, answers user prompts by predicting text sequences it has “learned” by analyzing vast quantities of publicly available information on the internet. It and other machine learning models continuously train on text and images, including data about people that is both about them and produced by them. But the use of this data raises fundamental questions on ownership of personal information and the right to keep it private, especially as AI’s ability to draw connections between disparate pieces of data makes it harder to keep information siloed.

“In this age of big data and the digital world we live in, you’re seeing increasing overlaps in the different categorical areas of privacy, and the lack of regulation is becoming more and more significant every day because of all the new things that can be done,” Dellinger says. “Physical, informational, decisional, intellectual privacy can all be at risk when algorithmic decision-making is employed – particularly without a human in the loop.”

Last fall Dellinger began teaching a new seminar, Privacy Law in a Post-Dobbs World: Sex, Contraception, Abortion and Surveillance, that she developed in response to the Supreme Court ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization ending the constitutional right to an abortion. The June 2022 decision has raised fears that

people seeking abortions can be surveilled digitally, and that internet search and purchase history, use of mobile apps and devices, communications, and location data could all be used as evidence against individuals accused of violating abortion laws.

“When we go outside, our faces, our conversations, our movements conducted in public are often considered public,” Dellinger says. “But in practice, we rely on practical obscurity. We do not anticipate being watched, followed, and tracked everywhere we go throughout a day. Aggregating data about our public movements permits insight into our lives that is likely not expected by the average person.”

Even before Dobbs, the Veritas Society, a Wisconsin anti-abortion group, was using geolocation data from mobile phones to target digital media ads to “abortion-vulnerable women” as they were visiting abortion clinics.

And the increasing prevalence of automated license plate readers, which feed images of vehicles and license plates from high-speed cameras to algorithms that recognize and translate them into data, means vehicles can be tracked as they travel, and their owners identified. In July, The Sacramento Bee reported that dozens of California law enforcement agencies had shared license plate reader data on outof-state vehicles with their counterparts in states that ban or limit access to abortion.

Dellinger calls the post-Dobbs landscape “a perfect storm for privacy.”

“Obviously, Dobbs affects your bodily integrity and your physical privacy, and it affects whether you can make decisions for yourself,” she says. “But also, the vast ability of states that are criminalizing abortion to use your information for purposes of surveillance is really scary.”

In August, Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker signed legislation preventing license plate reader data from being shared with out-of-state governments and law enforcement unless they agree not to use it to prosecute people seeking reproductive care. It is the first state to enact such a law.

But the potential illegality of obtaining and using personal data without explicit notice and consent, especially in commercial applications, poses existential questions for companies that build AI-driven systems. ChatGPT was temporarily banned by Italian data regulators this spring over privacy concerns and is facing investigations and lawsuits in other European countries under the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation, which was passed in 2018.

Clearview AI, a company that builds and licenses facial recognition technology, has also run afoul of EU regulators and has been fined, sanctioned, and banned in multiple countries.

“We do not anticipate being watched, followed, and tracked everywhere we go throughout a day.

Aggregating data about our public movements permits insight into our lives that is likely not expected by the average person.”

— Jolynn Dellinger ’93

While there is no comprehensive U.S. federal data privacy law, successful actions have been brought at the state level. Currently, 11 states have comprehensive consumer data privacy laws with varying rights and restrictions; seven have children’s privacy laws; and three — Illinois, Texas, and Washington ­— have biometric privacy laws, according to Husch Blackwell. In May, Clearview AI settled a class action lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union in Illinois charging it with violating that state’s 2008 Biometric Information Privacy Act; as part of the settlement Clearview agreed to sell its database only to government agencies and not private companies. The Illinois law was also used to bring a class action lawsuit against Facebook for collecting biometric facial information through a photo tagging tool without consumers’ notice or consent. A $650 million settlement in that case was split among some 1.6 million Illinois Facebook users.

Many states are now considering bills that, like the California Privacy Rights Act that took effect in January, shift the presumption of ownership of personal data to consumers. This summer, Massachusetts state lawmakers introduced a “location shield” bill that would ban tech companies from selling consumers’ cellphone location information.

“People share data selectively. They might share with Facebook, or they might share with an app on their phone, or they might share on a particular site on the internet,” Dellinger explains. “But when all of that data that you have shared in discrete contexts ends up in the same pile, which is what’s happening with data brokers that create dossiers or profiles on people, then that data can be mined for insights about you that certainly you didn’t intend to share and that you may not even know about yourself. It really calls into question your ability to control access to your personal information.”

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Risk includes issues of

BiaS and fAirNEsS In April, the heads of several federal agencies, including the FTC, EEOC, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice, released a joint statement committing to vigorous enforcement of existing civil rights laws and other legal protections, applying them to the use and impact of automated systems, including AI. Many agencies have had the issue in their sights.

The EEOC, for example, has been advising employers on the use of AI for several years. Automated technologies are common in all types of employment settings, and about 80% of employers use some kind of AI powered tool for recruiting and hiring, according to the Society for Human Resource Management. Many large companies now employ HR analytics specialists.

“People are really excited about AI applications and tools,” says Rachel See ’00, who helped shape EEOC policy as an EEOC Commissioner’s senior counsel for AI and algorithmic bias prior to moving to Seyfarth Shaw in June. In the private sector, she now advises clients on AI risk management, governance, and regulatory compliance.

“When used correctly and carefully, AI can help with hiring, create process efficiencies, help identify qualified candidates you might otherwise miss, and meet your DEI goals. If an AI-powered assessment can be more fair and less biased than human processes, there’s a business case for doing it, and doing it right. If you do it wrong, you might violate the law.

Whether you use AI or a human process, the law looks at that result.”

See spent more than a dozen years leveraging her background in technology and law while serving in various posts in federal government. Around 2019,

HIRE

she started having conversations with EEOC officials about the impact on the workforce of selection tools that use AI and began to work on the agency’s policy initiatives on how federal anti-discrimination laws apply to employers’ use of such technologies.

AI and algorithmically-based systems are trained on data sets, and when used for a function such as recruiting and hiring, biased data can “teach” them to prefer certain characteristics and exclude otherwise qualified people. For example, when Amazon began using a proprietary hiring algorithm in 2014 to recruit for technical careers the system “learned,” after reviewing past resumes, that successful applicants were typically male. It would then reject applications that identified the jobseeker as a woman.

When machines make biased or discriminatory decisions, just as when humans do, employers are accountable for any violation of laws including Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, the Age Discrimination in Employment Act, the Americans with Disabilities Act, and the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act, See says.

“Understanding how our civil rights laws apply to all of these aspects of the employment relationship requires you to delve into not just the law and how the law applies, but how you are using the technology,” she says.

“AI, or machine learning, isn’t present in the statutory text of Title VII or the ADA or any of these other laws, but they apply to a decision that you’re making with the assistance of artificial intelligence, or that you’re letting the bot make on its own. ‘The robot made me do it’ is not an effective affirmative defense. You as the employer are owning that decision.”

Several states are considering legislation on the use of AI and automated systems in the workplace, including a bill in Illinois that would prohibit employers from considering race or zip code as a proxy for race, a Vermont bill that would restrict electronic monitoring of employees, and a Massachusetts bill that would require disclosure of decisions made using algorithms and monitoring. New York City Local Law 144, which took effect in July, requires businesses that use AI in hiring and promotion decisions to disclose their use to job applicants and to subject the tools to a yearly audit for racial and gender bias.

See says employers need to consider their use of such tools in the context of risk management. One resource, AI Risk Management Framework 1.0, released in January by the National Institute of Standards and Technologies (NIST), provides guidance to help organizations assess the trustworthiness of AI-driven systems and utilize them responsibly.

DON’T HIR E

“‘The robot made me do it’ is not an effective affirmative defense. You as the employer are owning that decision.”

— Rachel See ’00

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“It provides a way of thinking about risk, and risk includes the risk that the algorithm isn’t doing what you think it does, and that includes bias and fairness,” See says of the NIST document.

The Federal Trade Commission also has taken a lead in enforcing laws within its jurisdiction. Absent a comprehensive federal data privacy law, the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection has resorted to applying sector-specific laws, including the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, and others that cover financial information and education records.

The agency has ordered WW International (formerly Weight Watchers) to delete data it collected from children and “destroy any algorithms derived from it.” It has also taken action against Amazon for keeping children’s voice recordings captured through its Alexa digital assistant to train its voice recognition algorithms.

“Machine learning is no excuse to break the law,” FTC officials wrote in a settlement announcement. “Claims from businesses that data must be indefinitely retained to improve algorithms do not override legal bans on indefinite retention of data.”

Last year the FTC said it would consider broad new rules governing commercial surveillance and use of AI to analyze the data companies collect from consumers’ online activities.

The movement toward added data protections is in step with public sentiment, says Clinical Professor Jeff Ward, director of the Duke Center on Law & Technology, who has taught the law and ethics of AI since 2016. Students today, he says, are especially attuned to privacy considerations.

“It is super apparent to young people what’s going on in a data-driven society,” Ward says. “People see a lot of opportunity in AI, but they are now largely aware of the key biases. It’s worked its way into the culture. People are way more willing to be suspect of technological solutions to technological problems.”

PryInG OpeN the “BlaCK bOx” in criminal justice

The reliance on automated and AI and algorithmically-based systems is especially concerning in matters where human life and liberty are at stake, says Garrett, a leading scholar of criminal justice outcomes, evidence, and constitutional rights.

A longtime advocate for more rigorous standards in the forensic sciences — his most recent book, Autopsy of a Crime Lab: Exposing the Flaws in Forensics, detailed widespread problems in forensic labs and the methods used to analyze evidence — Garrett has in recent scholarship called for transparency and accountability around the use of AI and automated technologies in the criminal legal system, where they are utilized, in varying degrees, at nearly every stage from investigations to judicial decision-making.

“If a forensic tool adds accuracy and value to a criminal investigation, then how it works should be disclosed,” Garrett says.

Used properly, such tools can generate leads in solving crimes and make courts run more efficiently. Predictive algorithms that calculate a defendant’s risk of recidivism based on variables such as age and prior convictions can help divert non-violent defendants from jails and are used to help make decisions in pre-trial detention, sentencing, corrections, and reentry.

But the rapid uptake of technology has also raised issues of bias, discrimination, and privacy, and concern over potential violations of defendants’ constitutional rights, including the right to know and challenge evidence and collection of

“Interpretability should be understood as constitutionally required in most criminal settings.”

— Brandon Garrett

evidence and the admissibility of evidence from unverifiable sources in a criminal prosecution.

Law enforcement agencies in numerous jurisdictions have adopted automated cameras, license plate readers, and facial recognition systems from companies like Clearview AI, which trained its algorithm on a database of 30 billion images it scraped from the Internet. Clearview AI has also licensed the application to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the FBI. Opponents of this type of surveillance say it is disproportionately used in communities of color based on data that reflects decades of over-policing. Similar arguments have been made regarding predictive policing algorithms that determine where to deploy law enforcement resources based on crime and arrest data. Some municipalities, including San Francisco, have banned public surveillance tools, citing those concerns as well as privacy and documented discrepancies in the accuracy of facial identification of people with darker complexions.

While police departments have solved crimes using facial recognition software, they have also made at least six reported wrongful arrests after the technology misidentified innocent people as criminal suspects. All of those wrongfully arrested were Black.

Elana Fogel, assistant clinical professor of law and director of the Criminal Defense Clinic, says the Duke Law Magazine • Fall 2023

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widespread use of public surveillance tools subjects everyone, indiscriminately, to investigation. Prior to joining Duke Law in 2022, Fogel was a federal public defender in San Diego and has long advocated oversight and transparency in the use of emerging science and technologies in law enforcement and combating mass incarceration.

“While we don’t generally have a legal right to privacy while out in public, these surveillance capabilities tend to feel more invasive and hold stronger information-gathering capabilities than another person would be able to capture in passing,” Fogel says.

“The presence, or perception, of a police dragnet monitoring us as we all go about our daily lives also runs counter to our ingrained expectation that the Constitution protects us from being followed and searched by law enforcement unless they have a good reason to encroach on our privacy and autonomy.”

What is particularly concerning for individual criminal cases, Fogel says, is that the normalization of constant surveillance can make a person’s experiences of legally improper and invasive policing seem less egregious.

“The practical result is that the strength of those protections erodes, and defense challenges of arrests, evidence, and statements unreasonably obtained are less likely to be granted,” Fogel states.

“The negative impact of these problems is increased by the fact that these technologies replicate racial disparities and discriminatory targeting by being concentrated in so-called “high crime areas.”

The use of non-transparent, or “black box,” AI and algorithmically-based systems — commercially developed products protected by trade secrecy rights that prevent examination and validation of the underlying data and calculation methods — is particularly problematic in criminal legal settings for several reasons, Garrett and Cynthia Rudin write in “The Right to a Glass Box: Rethinking the Use of Artificial Intelligence in Criminal Justice,” forthcoming in Cornell Law Review. The article describes problems with facial recognition technology, predictive policing algorithms, and forensic evidence used to analyze evidence with DNA from multiple parties. Garrett and Rudin, the Earl D. McLean, Jr. Professor of Computer Science, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Statistical Science, Mathematics, and Biostatistics & Bioinformatics at Duke, argue for a strong presumption of transparency and interpretability.

“First, regarding data, criminal justice data is often noisy, highly selected and incomplete, and full of errors,” they write. “Second, using glass box AI, we can validate the system and detect and correct errors.

Third, interpretability is particularly important in 40 Duke Law Magazine • Fall 2023

legal settings, where human users of AI, such as police, lawyers, judges, and jurors, cannot fairly and accurately use what they cannot understand.

“Where independent evaluation is not possible or permitted, there are substantial due process and policy concerns with permitting such black box AI results to be used as evidence.”

Garrett and Rudin cite a federal judge’s 2017 ruling ordering the New York City Office of Chief Medical Examiner to reveal the source code of software it used to analyze complex DNA evidence left at a crime. After calculation flaws were discovered, the use of the software was discontinued. But while some judges have ruled evidence from algorithms inadmissible, far more have allowed it and even denied defense attorneys’ requests to have independent experts examine software on the grounds that intellectual property interests could be compromised if developers were compelled to reveal source code.

Rather than proprietary systems that “consistently underperform and disguise errors,” they advocate using open tools.

Garrett proposes that legislation require mandatory transparent and interpretable AI, absent a compelling showing of necessity, for most uses by law enforcement agencies in criminal investigations.

“Interpretability should be understood as constitutionally required in most criminal settings,” he says. “So long as the use of AI could result in generation of evidence used to investigate and potentially convict a person, the system should be validated, based on adequate data, and it should be fully interpretable, so that in a criminal case, lawyers, judges, and jurors can understand how the system reached its conclusions.”

Indeed, system transparency will be critical for judges who must assess and determine the admissibility and authenticity of evidence discovered through algorithms that may be trained on biased data or produced by AI, such as deepfakes, said Paul Grimm MJS ’16, the David F. Levi Professor of the Practice of Law and director of the Bolch Judicial Institute.

Speaking in May on the growing use of AI in both the legal profession and the judicial system, Grimm warned of the risk judges face in allowing jurors to see or hear evidence that later turns out to be false.

“How is this evidence that has to be decided going to influence the fact-finder in this case? Does it have the requisite validity and reliability?

“Even if you tell a jury, ‘This is bogus evidence, this is not authentic,’ they saw it. ... And even though they know it’s bogus, it impacts the way in which they’re processing that information.”

“It’s not that the evidence is technical in itself; it’s just that there’s something about AI. The concepts are so hard to explain in some of these software applications, how they got the results they did,” Grimm said. “The good news is that when we have had programs for judges in the past on this, there’s been a lot of interest in it. Judges want to get that kind of assistance.”

Judges may be the ultimate gatekeepers of evidence. But as new uses for AI continue to permeate the culture and make their appearance in every aspect of law and the legal system, it will be incumbent on everyone in the profession to become educated and conversant in at least the basics of the technology. Among younger generations of lawyers and law students coming of age in the age of AI, there’s an eagerness to engage with technology they will almost certainly encounter in their careers, according to Ward.

“Concern about AI has grown, but at the same time, young people are really excited about what the technology could mean and don’t really want to enter into a career where people are turning a cold shoulder to it,” Ward says.

“Things are going to change for our students, our graduates, way faster than people realize. So for that reason, they care a lot about it.”

“I think this could be incredibly empowering, and also potentially the most oppressive technology that we’ve ever unleashed on society.” — Nita Farahany JD/MA ’04 PhD ’06

Q&A: Proposing a right to

CogNitivE liBertY S

INCE HER NEW BOOK CAME OUT IN MARCH, Professor Nita Farahany JD/MA ’04 PhD ’06 has been a frequent presence on the national and international stage, making numerous media appearances and presenting at the World Economic Forum in Davos, TED2023, South by Southwest, and many other venues.

The Battle for Your Brain: Defending the Right to Think Freely in the Age of Neurotechnology (St. Martin’s Press) details how rapid advances in neural interface technology are making it possible to decode brain data, and how that development necessitates a new understanding — and encoding — of a human right to cognitive liberty, or mental privacy.

The book’s release coincided with the broad release of ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence chatbot that can produce logically consistent answers to simple questions and has intensified fears of an AI-driven future. But it’s the culmination of more than a decade of thinking on the ethical, legal, and social implications of emerging technologies for Farahany, the Robinson O. Everett Distinguished Professor of Law and professor of philosophy, who is also the founding director of Duke Science & Society and faculty chair of the Duke MA in Bioethics & Science Policy.

At an April 10 author celebration sponsored by the J. Michael Goodson Law Library and Office of the Dean, Farahany discussed the ideas in The Battle for Your Brain with David Hoffman ’93, a senior lecturing fellow at the Law School and the Steed Family Professor of the Practice of Cybersecurity Policy at Duke’s Sanford School of Public Policy. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

DAVID HOFFMAN: Can you give us a quick overview of

the books?

NITA FARAHANY: The quick and dirty is that neural interface is going to become one of the primary ways we interact with all the rest of our technology. It’s going to be in our everyday devices and it’s already happening, it’s just a question of scale. The book goes through each of the different contexts in which it’s already happening, and it builds across bioethical dilemmas in each chapter.

The right to cognitive liberty as a human right is what I propose to enable us to have self-determination over our brains and mental experiences.

The right to self-determination includes the right to access our own brain activity, to enhance it and to change it, even to diminish it.

DH: One of the things that you and I both share is an inherent optimism of the power that technology can have to improve people’s lives. Where is this technology headed and what kinds of things can it do?

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NF: Your brain health and activity are really fundamental to what it means to be human. And so the next big market and big thing is to track brain activity. As the sensors have gotten much better and can be embedded in earbuds and headphones and even little wearable tattoos behind your ear, people can track things like their focus, their attention, their emotions, or if they’re going to have an epileptic seizure, minutes or hours beforehand.

From migraines to depression to Alzheimer’s dementia, all of these things have early neural signatures that can be detected. And the basic brain states that can be decoded, or meditation that can be enabled, are pretty extraordinary, even with the devices where they are today. Once people start wearing them in much greater scale, there’ll be even bigger data sets from which AI can use pattern recognition to learn even more. The ability to reclaim our brain health and wellness and to be able to solve neurological disease and suffering, or at least have major new ways to address it, is incredibly promising.

And that doesn’t even begin to talk about the ways in which we can so much more seamlessly interact with the rest of our technology. People who’ve used neural interface to play video games or move a cursor, people who have neurodegenerative diseases and are able to connect with those devices say it’s revolutionary. It’s a fundamentally different way about thinking about how we interact with the world around us.

DH: Could you talk a little bit more about the advances in analytics and AI and how it intersects? What does that mean for the benefits that could be created from some of this data?

NF: On one hand, I would like for all brain data to be kept on the device and overwritten and nobody else to have access to our brain data, because once they do the risks really become profound: the risk of employer misuse, the risk of corporate misuse and commodification to microtarget advertisements to us, the risk of government use and misuse of the data.

On the other hand, 55 million people around the world suffer from dementia and 60% to 70% of them suffer from Alzheimer’s disease. More than a billion people suffer from a mental health or drug use disorder, and 300 million people suffer from depression. These are profound tolls on society. Real-world, everyday engagement with brain sensors while we go about our everyday lives would truly be a treasure trove of data in the hands of scientists and researchers who are applying it for the common good.

So how do we collect brain data in ways that puts it in hands of researchers and scientists, but not in the hands of corporations who can commodify and misuse it, or governments who can peer into it? I believe cognitive liberty is a starting place because it flips the terms of service in favor of individuals. I propose that if you have a right to mental privacy, there has to be a bona fide legal exception to gain access to that brain data, and it has to be narrowly tailored for a specific use case and purpose. And it has to truly be justified based on the nature of the intrusion relative to the interest of the individual.

DH: What will the consequences be if we don’t do something to protect people’s interests?

NF: Already in workplaces worldwide, brain activity is being monitored for things like attention and fatigue levels. Corporations are already using it to do neuromarketing. Governments are already interrogating the brains of criminal suspects to see their recognition of different salient aspects of crime scenes.

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“This technology has arrived, but it hasn’t gone to scale yet.

So we have a moment before that happens.”

— Nita Farahany JD/MA ’04 PhD ’06

Governments are investing in brain biometrics so that when you go to the airport, instead of having your irises scanned, you would sing a little song in your head, and that could be decoded to authenticate you, which would be a very secure form of authentication. But that means that you have government access to the brain, and in the same way that governments already subpoena Fitbit and Apple Watch data to convict people of crimes, you can be sure they will collect brainwave data if it’s accessible to them.

The last and creepiest is cognitive warfare. The risk of hacking into these devices and manipulating them, especially as you start to think about generative AI and the closed loop that’s being created with them, is chilling.

We could go on all day about the terrifying and dystopian aspects of it, because I think this could be incredibly empowering and also potentially the most oppressive technology that we’ve ever unleashed on society.

DH: How could the right to cognitive liberty have us bend more towards utopia than to dystopia?

NF: This technology has arrived, but it hasn’t gone to scale yet. So we have a moment before that happens. And I believe that if we recognize a right to cognitive liberty, which requires updating the international human right to privacy to include mental privacy, the expansion of that understanding of freedom of thought is important and powerful.

There’s this idea that undergirds most of human rights law — the right to self-determination. I think we should explicitly recognize an individual right to self-determination in the age in which our brains and mental experiences and so much of our bodies can be accessed and manipulated and changed by others, a right for us to be able to have autonomy and to exercise that dignity over ourselves.

I think recognizing it both explicitly and also starting to understand it as a liberty interest would go a long way.

And my hope is that by giving a framing to it, by giving a conversation to it, by giving a thing that we can rally around both in law and principle, that it will help shape norms and what we expect from corporations and what we expect from governments going forward.

“So long as humans are making substantive editorial decisions, inserting computers into the process does not eliminate the communication via that editing.”

— Stuart Benjamin

AI and sPeEcH Supreme Court jurisprudence suggests it would protect generated content

H

ISTORICALLY, THE SUPREME COURT has taken an expansive view of the First Amendment, ruling in a series of cases that constitutionally protected speech includes content as varied as video games and the creation and transmission of cable TV programming.

With automated systems now curating ­— and even generating ­— much of the content presented online and in social media feeds, the Court has begun to address whether editorial decisions made by algorithms constitute speech.

Stuart Benjamin, the William Van Alstyne Distinguished Professor of Law and a scholar of the First Amendment, administrative law, and telecommunications, considered Supreme Court jurisprudence and how it might view algorithmicallybased outputs in an article published more than a decade ago. In “Algorithms and Speech,” 161 University of Pennsylvania Law Review 1445, he argues that, with a few exceptions, automated decisions on what content appears on web pages and search engine results are constitutionally protected speech.

“In every case in which the Court has applied the First Amendment, abridgement of substantive communication has been the issue,” he writes. “So long as humans are making substantive editorial decisions, inserting computers into the process does not eliminate the communication via that editing.”

Benjamin says his argument that algorithmic output is analogous to previously affirmed forms of speech still stands, and the output of AI tools like ChatGPT is the same result that could be achieved by humans, given enough time.

“This is not artificial general intelligence. Large language models are not reasoning on their own. Fundamentally, these are still programs that are created by humans,” Benjamin says. “I think that if there are attempts at regulating large language models like ChatGPT, then you’re going to have the very same First Amendment questions that would apply if you’re regulating the algorithms that Google uses. So I think that there is going to be a hurdle to government regulation.”

In a pair of cases heard in the October 2022 term, Gonzalez v. Google and Twitter v. Taamneh, the Court rejected claims that the technology companies were

liable for aiding and abetting violent and lethal terrorist attacks that they claim stemmed from content posted on the companies’ platforms by third parties and amplified through their algorithms. Despite the cases’ First Amendment implications, the Court declined to address whether the content was protected speech, focusing on culpability under anti-terrorism laws. But its unanimous opinion did indicate a reluctance to impose restrictions in an area that is, as yet, unregulated.

“Defendants’ mere creation of their media platforms is no more culpable than the creation of email, cell phones, or the internet generally,” Associate Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in the unanimous opinion. “And defendants’ recommendation algorithms are merely part of the infrastructure through which all the content on their platforms is filtered.”

In the October 2023 term, the Court will hear two cases in which lower courts split on the question of whether activity on public officials’ social media accounts constitutes protected speech. In O’ConnorRatcliff v. Garnier, members of a California school board who used their personal social media accounts to communicate about their work blocked parents from viewing and commenting on their pages. In Lindke v.

Freed, a city manager in Michigan deleted a Facebook user’s comments and blocked him from commenting further after he criticized the official’s policy decisions.

The Court will also hear two cases involving state regulation of social media. NetChoice v. Paxton and Moody v. NetChoice involve 2021 laws passed in Texas and Florida, respectively, that aim to prevent “deplatforming” of individuals by curtailing the editorial discretion of large platforms like Facebook and X (formerly Twitter). The Texas law, which was upheld by the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, prohibits platforms from discriminating on viewpoint, with a few exceptions, and imposes transparency requirements, while the Florida statute, blocked by the 11th Circuit, requires an extensive explanation of any decision involving the censorship of a user, and prohibits platforms from banning political candidates.

While both laws have political undertones — they were passed by states with strongly conservative legislatures ­­— Benjamin predicts that the Court will agree with the 11th Circuit that they are unconstitutional, in keeping with its historically broad view of protected speech and reluctance to regulate editorial decision-making, whether by human or machine.

“This will be the most grappling with these First Amendment issues involving editing that the justices have done in a while, and it will give us a sense as to where their jurisprudence may be heading,” Benjamin says. “More specifically, although this is not a case about AI, it will give us some insights about how they would understand regulation of AI.” Duke Law Magazine • Fall 2023

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Profiles

Photo: Pasha Kritchko

ALUMNI Q&A

Illia Salei LLM ’14

A

S A HIGH SCHOOL STUDENT, Illia Salei LLM ’14 was pretty confident he was going to be a lawyer. He never expected to be a political prisoner.

Salei, whose mother is a law professor and father established one of the first private law firms in post-Soviet Belarus, was detained in 2020 for his work representing politicians who opposed Belarusian autocrat Alexander Lukashenko in the country’s presidential election that year. Lukashenko, who has ruled since 1994, was declared the election’s victor despite allegations of widespread fraud that drew international condemnation and sparked the largest protests in Belarus’s history. His government responded with a brutal crackdown on dissent that has only 44 Duke Law Magazine • Fall 2023

intensified as the war in neighboring Ukraine has highlighted Lukashenko’s close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Salei and his law partner Maksim Znak were charged under an article of the Belarusian criminal code concerning “actions aimed at causing harm to national security of the Republic of Belarus,” and 84 international human rights organizations, bar associations, law societies, and individuals later signed a letter protesting their arrest. They spent a month in pre-trial detention before being summoned with other jailed activists to a remarkable meeting with Lukashenko broadcast on state television. After declining opportunities to recant his support for the opposition, Salei

was transferred to house arrest for six months. Following his release, he escaped the country.

Since August 2022, Salei has served as associate counsel for the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development in London, which invests in countries transitioning to market-based systems and has pledged up to 3 billion euros in financing to support Ukraine’s economy during the war. He continues to speak out in support of his clients, who have been sentenced to lengthy prison terms, and against Lukashenko’s regime, including in meetings with officials in the United States and EU and a visit to Duke Law School.

Duke Law Magazine spoke with Salei about working for change in Belarus, his arrest and confinement, and his hopes for the future of his country.

“...I was working a lot with the media, both Belarusian and international, trying to make the case as public as possible because this is actually one of the most powerful means of defense in Belarus. And apparently at some point I was too loud.”

DUKE LAW MAGAZINE: When did your interest in political

activism begin?

ILLIA SALEI: I was always interested in Belarusian history and politics, and after getting an education in the U.S. and having experience working in the jurisdictions where the law actually works, I wanted to contribute to developing this in my own country, which is very far from being a democratic state. In May 2020, a couple of pretty prominent people announced their presidential ambitions, and one of them was Viktar Babaryka, a famous Belarusian businessman and philanthropist and chairman of one of the largest private commercial banks in Belarus.

In the very beginning, I was just collecting signatures, basically in the streets, in support of Viktar. But at some point when I was doing that, Viktar showed up himself to say hi to people, and I approached him and said, ‘It’s a great honor to meet you and I really admire your decision. This is indeed a very important step. And if you need any legal support for your campaign, I would be happy to help.’ And it was a very brave step of his — previously, almost every democratic presidential candidate in Belarus ended up in jail. As for me, in two days, I got a call from the campaign office saying, if you’re still interested, please come over.

DLM: At that time, did you have any sense that volunteering for his campaign would be risky?

IS: In theory, yes. We had the experience of previous presidential campaigns when candidates were arrested for allegedly trying to overthrow the government, just simply by participating in the election. But especially as a lawyer, you understand that every step you take is legal and absolutely lawful, so there should not be any reason for them to come after you. But when this happens, you understand what kind of reality you live in.

DLM: But you also believed that change was needed?

IS: There was a huge need. A whole new generation of educated people who studied abroad, like myself, were coming back home.

The private sector in Belarus had already developed quite significantly, and people in the private sector appreciate freedom. And COVID-19 happened, and whole countries were going on lockdown, but in Belarus, Lukashenko was saying that this is a conspiracy, and COVID doesn’t exist. As a preventive measure against COVID, he suggested Belarusian people continue working, drink vodka, and go

to the sauna. So people did not need to be MDs to understand that the government simply lies to their faces.

DLM: When Lukashenko was declared the winner, you were representing the only opposition leader who was still free and had remained in the country, Maria Kalesnikava, whom the government also later arrested. Was that what led to your arrest?

IS: Indeed, I was honored to represent and advise Maria, a true leader and one of the bravest people I have ever met in my life.

Following her arrest, I was working a lot with the media, both Belarusian and international, trying to make the case as public as possible because this is actually one of the most powerful means of defense in Belarus. And apparently at some point I was too loud. I was leaving my apartment in the morning and when I opened the door, seven or eight masked unidentified guys entered my apartment and handcuffed me. I was then brought to the state investigative committee for interrogation and further transferred to the pretrial detention center, in the very city center of Minsk. I spent a month-and-a-half there.

DLM: And Lukashenko actually visited you?

IS: Yes. One early morning, a month after my arrest, they brought me to the headquarters of the security service — the KGB — in the center of Minsk to a room with others who were involved in the democratic movement, including Viktar. Lukashenko entered the room and asked, ‘So what did you want?’ But obviously he was not interested in our answers. It was more like a lecture on how he was ‘building’ the country. When Viktar told him that we actually just want to live in a free society, we want a free market economy, we want a fair election, we want independent courts and the rule of law, the answer from Lukashenko was that he had seen the market economy and democracy in the 1990s after the Soviet Union collapsed and it doesn’t work. In Lukashenko’s opinion, Belarusian people don’t like it. He did not believe that hundreds of thousands of Belarusians were protesting in the streets exactly in support of democratic values. Or he did not want to believe.

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Profiles

“Lukashenko entered the room and asked, ‘So what did you want?’ But obviously he was not interested in our answers. It was more like a lecture on how he was ‘building’ the country.”

Illia Salei was brought to KGB headquarters in Minsk to meet with Alexander Lukashenko (right) during his detainment, shown here on television.

DLM: What happened after that meeting?

IS: A couple of days after the meeting with Lukashenko, I was transferred to house arrest. In my view, they wanted to pacify the protests by showing that Lukashenko is ready to make certain steps towards the people demanding change. In return, they were awaiting certain steps from us. A couple of times I was offered the chance to cooperate and to give interviews to state media. But I refused. I said, ‘No, I have my values and I know that I didn’t do anything wrong because I’m a lawyer myself.’ So I spent another six months under house arrest in complete isolation. No internet, no visitors, no outside walks — even in jail you are brought for a 30-minute walk once a day. On the one hand, it’s way better to be at home, but mentally I think it was even more difficult than in jail.

After six months I was released on bail. I was allowed to continue working but strictly advised not to take part in any political activity, not to give any interviews to independent media. Otherwise, I would go back to jail. I saw that the people who were released before I was, the security service started arresting them again.

Viktar had been sentenced to 14 years in prison. I realized that I needed to flee the country. I didn’t tell my family, I didn’t tell my friends, because I realized that if someone came to them asking where I am, they would not need to lie, because they will sincerely not know where I am. I just took my backpack and left Minsk at night. And in a couple of weeks, I found myself in Poland where I lived until August 2022. And then I moved to London.

DLM: It must be difficult to be away from your country, especially as it seems like the situation there has only deteriorated.

IS: Obviously, I cannot go back because I’m still being prosecuted, but I do miss my home. I miss my friends. The Belarusian regime is only increasing the repressions. Every day someone is being arrested, especially those people who stood up against war in Ukraine, those people who were helping Ukraine.

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DLM: It’s telling that so many of the people facing repression are lawyers.

IS: In authoritarian regimes, the key threats are lawyers and journalists. Maksim and I were the first cases of serious repression against lawyers. After that, for quite a long time, no lawyers were arrested. The targeted repressions against lawyers mostly involved disbarment on fake grounds of violation of professional ethics or lack of qualification. But then at some point they realized that this is not enough and initiated changes to the law regulating the legal profession. Before, advocates were allowed to have their own private practices as a law firm or as an individual lawyer. Today, they are allowed to practice only in specially created legal entities being established by the Ministry of Justice and under its full control. So there is no more independent bar in Belarus.

DLM: What are your hopes or expectations for Belarus moving forward?

IS: I’m pretty confident that in the end, Belarus will be an independent and democratic country with the rule of law and an independent court system and a proud member of the European family of democratic states. For one simple reason: We have no other option. Belarus is a European nation with rich history and traditions of democracy and the rule of law.

Our ancestors were among those who back in the 16th century drafted the Statutes of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the first codified laws in Europe, as well as the Constitution of 3 May 1791, the first modern constitution in Europe. Our feeling of freedom was taken from us at the time of the Russian occupation at the end of 18th century, and we still go through the phantom pains of the former Soviet empire. But we had our feeling of freedom back in 2020. And once you felt it, you know, it’s impossible to take it from you.

Daniel S. Bowling III ’80

D

ANIEL S. BOWLING III ’80, a longtime senior executive for Born in Georgia and raised in Mississippi, Bowling earned one of the world’s most iconic brands, retired from 18 years his bachelor’s degree from Millsaps College. After graduatof teaching at Duke Law School in the spring. ing from Duke Law, he joined Smith, Currie and Hancock The former head of human resources for Coca-Cola Enterprises, in Atlanta, where he became a partner focusing on labor and Bowling applied his corporate background employment litigation. In 1986 Bowling and study of positive psychology to courses in joined Coca-Cola Enterprises as chief labor and employment law, which he began labor counsel — “In Atlanta, when Coke teaching in 2005, and a popular seminar on calls you go,” he says — rising through lawyer well-being. legal and management positions to Bowling’s upbeat personality and genuine become senior vice president of human interest in students made him a confidant resources and a member of the corporato those looking for advice on managing the tion’s executive committee. demands of law school. In 2015 he received While at Coca-Cola, Bowling became the student-voted Distinguished Teaching interested in the work of Martin Seligman, — Daniel S. Bowling III ’80 Award, which he called “the great honor of a pioneer in the field of positive psycholmy career.” ogy and author of bestsellers including “What I love most about teaching is getting to know the students Learned Optimism and Authentic Happiness. Seligman’s research and being in the classroom with them, exploring and laughing,” squared with Bowling’s own belief that companies were becomBowling says. “People learn a lot better, I’ve found, when they’re ing more focused on the grievances of a few unhappy employees relaxed and open and when a teacher uses emotional intelligence, than fostering a positive corporate culture among the majority not just pure logic.” who were content. Happy employees, Bowling had observed,

“We talk about meaning in class, and my belief is that you don’t find meaning; meaning finds you.”

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Profiles were more loyal and productive than those hired solely for their skills, and also less likely to unionize.

After leaving Coca-Cola in 2005, Bowling began consulting for corporations such as R.J. Reynolds and teaching a one-credit labor law seminar at Duke Law with former Coke colleague Gray McCalley ’79. He also enrolled in Seligman’s program at the University of Pennsylvania, earning a master’s in applied positive psychology in 2009. He has remained involved with the program as a lecturer and advisor ever since.

Father’s resilience showed the power of optimism

Bowling traces his interest in positive psychology to his father, who kept a cheerful, optimistic outlook throughout his life despite personal hardships.

“He lost both parents within one year of each other when he was 10 and he could have spiraled into a pretty miserable, troubled life but he didn’t, and I think it was through the power of optimism,” Bowling recalls. “He was diagnosed with terminal cancer when he was 70, but even then, he fought it with optimism. I think I was very much influenced by that and I was very fortunate to grow up with that as an example.

In 2010 Bowling began teaching a second seminar, Well-Being and the Practice of Law, that he designed around data and literature on hedonics and psychological health, as well as studies on depression, substance abuse, and career dissatisfaction among lawyers and their impact on legal professionalism. Bowling encouraged students to use self-measurement tools to assess their own happiness and character traits and suggested research-based interventions they could apply to align their career choices with their strengths and enhance their well-being. The class quickly became popular, and its curriculum has become a model for programs at other law schools.

“The premise of my course is that a happier lawyer, however you find that, is a better lawyer,” Bowling says. “We focused on skills you can take with you for life and practice: resilience, how to cope, how to rebound, learning how to challenge your own catastrophic thinking.”

Bowling was surprised and pleased by students’ willingness to share their insecurities, doubts, and anxieties about the pressures of law school. The classes became especially meaningful as students coped with the uncertainty and loneliness of the pandemic, he says.

For the past 10 years Bowling also taught a doctrinal class in labor law, a topic that has gained relevance for students with the recent emergence of organizing in industries not historically associated with unions.

“Hearing about a steelworkers’ strike or a coal miners’ strike seems distant in today’s world, but it becomes more real when Apple, Amazon, and Starbucks are having labor union issues,” Bowling says.

“Students now are beginning to graduate from colleges where they may have been taught by a union member who very well may have missed two weeks on strike.”

In 2022 Bowling co-wrote two commentaries on physician unionizing with former Katharine T. Bartlett Distinguished Professor of Law Barak Richman, now a professor at George Washington University Law School, and Stanford University School of Medicine professor Kevin Schulman. The articles led to speaking engagements before groups including the American Medical Association.

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“I never would have thought I’d end up spending the later chapters of my career in an academic environment. But meaning changes as the stages of life progress, and I think I’ve found much more meaning in that than I did in the other ones.” — Daniel S. Bowling III ’80 Researching that work whetted a greater interest in scholarship, Bowling says, and currently he is working on a project on the 19th century labor movement that may become a book. He also is teaching an expanded version of the lawyer well-being course at Georgia State University College of Law in Atlanta, his home base, though he and his wife Libby also maintain a home in Durham and enjoy strong ties with Duke University, from which two of their three children also graduated.

“We talk about meaning in class, and my belief is that you don’t find meaning; meaning finds you,” Bowling reflects. “I was an indifferent law student at Duke, to be honest, and I never would have thought I’d end up spending the later chapters of my career in an academic environment.

“But meaning changes as the stages of life progress, and I think I’ve found much more meaning and calling in that than I did in the other ones.” — Jeannie Naujeck

Photo: Matt Odom

Yendelela Neely Holston ’06

G

ROWING UP IN LAURENS, SOUTH CAROLINA, Yendelela Neely Holston ’06 was aware of racism. She recalls watching a Ku Klux Klan march at eight years old, and being overlooked for academic opportunities at school for which she was well qualified.

But she didn’t experience its most overt, direct form until a spring break trip to Myrtle Beach, when she and friends from Furman University were forced to leave a restaurant one afternoon because of their skin color. While waiting for their order at a seafood joint, employees told them they couldn’t sit down and that the restaurant was closed, even though signs clearly stated otherwise.

Police called to the scene accused them of “creating a disturbance” and ushered them away — without the food they had purchased.

While the group suspected the cause, it was not until they were welcomed into a neighboring restaurant that it was directly confirmed; that owner apologized and explained that the establishment was notorious for its mistreatment of Black customers.

“I was, one, just shocked and upset that in 2001 I had been refused the right to eat in a restaurant because I am Black, and two, that the police co-signed on the action, condoned it,” Holston says. “I knew both of these things were illegal, but I also didn’t have any recourse.”

The experience, and the powerlessness she felt, would propel Holston toward law school and addressing inequities through her legal work, community service, and speaking out against injustices.

“I am on the side of creating an injury-free environment, and it aligns with my life goal and my life mission,” says Holston, a partner at Kilpatrick Townsend in Atlanta and the firm’s chief diversity and inclusion officer. “I recounted that experience at the beach in my Duke essay because that was the turning point for me, knowing that this conduct was wrong but not knowing enough about the laws and my rights to stand up against it.”

That passion guides Holston in her labor and employment practice, where she helps corporate clients create work environments that are inclusive, non-discriminatory, and legally compliant. As a Duke Law Magazine • Fall 2023

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Profiles

leader at the firm where she has spent most of her career, Holston also works for greater representation of people of color in the legal profession, particularly women of color, who made up less than 1% of law firm partners nationwide in 2021.

In February 2023 Holston was named president of the board of directors of Atlanta Legal Aid Society, where she has served as a board member since 2014.

Atlanta Legal Aid handles some 20,000 cases each year for clients in five metro counties, where housing needs have become acute in the past few years. Half of the organization’s $42.3 million economic impact last year was in housing benefits.

“As a child, I remember my parents having legal issues that are the kind handled by Legal Aid and not having a place to turn,” Holston said. “The legal system impacts us all in some shape or form and thus it should be accessible to us all. Money should not be a barrier.”

She is also a trustee of her undergraduate alma mater, where she has funded one scholarship that gives a student from a public high school the chance to study abroad, as she did in southern Africa, and another to help close the gap between tuition and financial aid.

A love of rules and procedure

Holston grew up in a town with a long history of racial tension.

Established in 1785, Laurens is named for Charleston planter and merchant Henry Laurens, who enslaved nearly 300 people and co-founded the continent’s largest slave trading company.

By the late 1800s, as the textile industry began to grow in the county and nearby Greenville, South Carolina’s governor pushed for segregation. In 1915, the state passed a law prohibiting people of different races from working alongside each other.

Today, roughly 72% of the 9,300 residents are white and about a quarter are Black, according to 2022 Census estimates. By the time Holston was a child, desegregation was well entrenched in Laurens, but racism was alive and well at the Redneck Shop, which sold Klan robes and other white supremacist paraphernalia, including photos of lynchings, and served as a meeting place for white nationalist groups.

A Black Baptist minister and civil rights activist, Reverend David Kennedy, bought the building six years ago, and his relationship with the former Klansman who owned it is depicted in the 2018 film Burden. Today, Kennedy plans to turn the building into a museum for diversity.

“Race is still very prevalent — and at the same time, also not,” Holston says. “There is a Black side that’s separated from the white side of Laurens.”

Holston’s family lived on an integrated street one block from public housing. They were limited in means, but not in striving.

“We grew up poor,” Holston states. “Our parents were trying to keep us grounded in understanding our condition — but also not being defined by it or feeling stuck in it.”

In school, though, she began to sense race playing a subtle role.

She was often the only Black person in her classes, and despite being an excellent student, guidance counselors and teachers didn’t tell her or her parents about advanced classes that were available.

When she noticed that white classmates were taking an honors English class she didn’t know about, Holston realized that withholding knowledge is another form of discrimination.

50 Duke Law Magazine • Fall 2023

“I am on the side of creating an injury-free environment, and it aligns with my life goal and my life mission.”

— Yendelela Neely Holston ’06

Grounded in the past, looking to the future

Holston would go on to double-major in history and political science at Furman, where Don Aiesi ’65, who taught political science at the university for more than 50 years before retiring in 2018, encouraged her to apply to Duke Law School. At Duke, she discovered an affinity for rules and procedure, thanks to Trina Jones, the Jerome M. Culp Distinguished Professor of Law and director of the Center on Law, Race & Policy, who made Civil Procedure “exciting.”

“She taught you to think beyond the rules and critically look at them,” Holston says. “The whole analysis was more than procedure.”

That focus on rules and procedure has enabled her as a lawyer to win many cases in discovery, she says.

Lately Holston has been addressing clients’ concerns over the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in June that race-based admissions programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Opponents of diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives have set their sights on corporate programs.

But Holston says the ruling should not change the corporate landscape. “The Fourteenth Amendment doesn’t apply in corporate America,” she says. And, she points out, “Title VII jurisprudence, which does apply, is already very clear on when and how a company can act to correct its prior racially discriminatory behavior.”

Diversity and inclusion initiatives fall within this and Equal Employment Opportunity Commission guidance that a company can aspire to correct an existing race detriment within the organization, she notes.

Holston keeps at hand a printout of the Court’s opinion. It’s heavily marked up, with numerous colored tabs marking passages. The ruling feels personal, because Holston knows some people believe she was accepted to a top law school because of race and not merit.

In fact, she graduated with high marks from high school, college, and law school, evidenced by the magna cum laude and cum laude distinctions on her undergraduate and Duke Law diplomas, respectively.

Her own opinion is that it’s right and equitable to consider race in admissions to help correct historical systemic impediments that continue through longstanding practices. She prefers to call it “intentional intervention,” not “affirmative action.”

“We are intentionally intervening and saying that we appreciate the history of both de jure and de facto segregation, and that unless we intentionally act to disrupt and intervene, that status quo is going to continue,” she explains.

That history is why, on her office wall, Holston keeps a framed map of Laurens, a town with a hurtful past that inspired her to change the future.

“I keep the map of Laurens to stay grounded and to remind me of the socioeconomic position from which I came,” Holston says, “and also all of these things that shaped how I move about the world.”

— Richard Lawson

John Norton Moore ’62

J

OHN NORTON MOORE ’62 looks back on Duke Law Journal as the laboratory that created his writing career, which to date includes dozens of solo and co-authored books and numerous articles and book chapters.

“My law review experience at Duke taught me how to write,” he recalls. “That was a dramatic change in my life, with other student editors walking me through the writing process and editing my work.”

Moore, who retired from teaching in 2020 after 53 years on the faculty of University of Virginia School of Law and over 25 as an adjunct professor at Georgetown University Law Center, is still writing. In March, he published his 45th book, The Struggle for the Law in the Oceans: How an Isolationist Narrative Betrays America (Oxford).

Many consider it a landmark that reflects Moore’s mastery of oceans law and decades-long championing of the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). He is also co-leading an international group effort to write a manual on Jus ad Bellum (Law for Going to War), expected to be released this winter.

With seven presidential appointments, including one by Ronald Reagan to serve as chair of the board of the U.S. Institute of Peace, Moore is considered a founder of two fields of American law — national security law and oceans law and policy. He credits Duke Law and its faculty with giving his legal career an auspicious start.

“I learned precise thinking from [Professor] Douglas Maggs,” he says, adding that Dean Elvin R. “Jack” Latty and Professor Robinson O. Everett were also major influences. But renowned scholar Brainerd Currie, whom Moore vividly remembers for his writing and teaching in Conflict of Laws, had the greatest impact on him.

“For the Conflicts exam, I had read everything Currie wrote, and I had memorized all the potential cases with full citations for use on the exam,” he says. Afterwards, Currie called Moore to his office and commended him.

Following graduation, Moore earned an LLM at the University of Illinois, was assistant dean at the University of Florida Law School, and spent a post-doc year at Yale Law School. He joined the UVA Law faculty in 1966.

Moore’s oceans law courses had students who were government officials as well as those interested in marine environment protection, shipping, natural resources, and offshore development. “It was an eclectic mix, and as varied as there are issues in the law of the sea,” says James Kraska, a professor of oceans law at both the U.S. Naval War College and Harvard Law School who studied for his LLM and SJD under Moore.

Kraska believes, as Moore does, that after the U.N. Charter, the Law of the Sea Convention is the most consequential treaty of the 20th cenDuke Law Magazine • Fall 2023

51

Profiles tury, dealing with about 100 cross-cutting issues. The European Union and 168 nations are parties to the Convention, but the full U.S. Senate has never ratified it. “It is a lot to manage, and there is nobody in the last half-century in the United States who has mastered the peculiarities of each of these numerous issues like John.”

The U.S. was a prime mover for negotiating a new comprehensive treaty that would improve on the 1958 Geneva Conventions on the Law of the Sea, especially in priority areas such as enhanced freedom of navigation, recognition of an extended continental shelf, fisheries, the environment, deep seabed mining, and dispute settlement. Treaty negotiations intensified during the Nixon administration and Moore, then working at the State Department, was appointed the U.S. Ambassador for the Law of the Sea Convention. He also chaired the National Security Council Interagency Task Force on the Law of the Sea, which coordinated 18 U.S. government agencies, including the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Moore left the negotiating team after 90 percent of the treaty, including its national security provisions, was concluded. Developed nations, however, felt the seabed mining section treaty was flawed.

Moore, who had by then returned to UVA Law, wrote a letter to President Reagan suggesting changes, such as guaranteeing access rights for U.S. mining companies and a permanent seat for the U.S. on the Council of the Seabed Authority. A new section making these changes was negotiated and widely adopted in 1994. The Clinton administration submitted the treaty for ratification, but opposition within the Senate has so far prevented the U.S. from becoming a party, despite strong support from the U.S. Navy, U.S. Coast Guard, environmental groups, and industry.

The Struggle for the Law in the Oceans recounts this long history and sets out to rebut opponents’ wide-ranging claims, including that the treaty will result in a loss of U.S. sovereignty or security and that pre-existing customary law is adequate for U.S. oceans interests. Moore cites the Law of the Sea Convention’s dispute resolution mechanisms as particularly reflective of U.S. values, such as the fast release mechanism for seafarers and ships forcibly seized, which is overseen in part by the Convention’s International Tribunal of the Law of the Sea (ITLOS). In championing these provisions, the U.S. hoped to avoid repeats of the seizure of American fishermen in the “tuna war” involving Ecuador and Peru as well as the 1975 Mayaguez incident, in which 36 U.S. military personnel were killed attempting to rescue a U.S. container ship seized in Cambodia’s territorial sea.

Moore also examines the 2012 ARA Libertad case, in which the tribunal declared that Ghana’s seizure of an Argentine vessel violated warship immunity. Opponents claimed the decision would allow interference with U.S. courts, but Moore points to its support for a strongly held U.S. position, defusing of a tense situation between two nations, and upholding of national sovereignty.

“The ARA Libertad case was an extremely important case for the clarification of the status of warships,” says Rudiger Wolfrum, professor at Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law and a former president-judge of ITLOS. “In this respect, John was absolutely right. This is a landmark case.”

The ARA Libertad decision also touches on the Law of the Sea Convention’s freedom of navigation rights, which Moore highlights as a key win for U.S. negotiators. The deep seabed minerals regime — which concerns areas rich in manganese, copper, nickel, cobalt, 52 Duke Law Magazine • Fall 2023

Moore with President Ronald Reagan in 1988

and other rare minerals integral to clean energy development — is another. The Convention gives responsibility for regulating mining and issuing licenses to the International Seabed Authority, but by not being a party to the Convention, the U.S. loses out two ways, he notes: it can’t guide environmental regulations that would address fears of ecological damage and it can’t support its domestic industry against competitors such as China and Russia, with China now licensed for five sites and Russia for three.

The U.S. has already lost two of the four deep seabed mining sites the Convention reserved for it — to a Belgian company and a U.K. consortium, respectively. Some opponents say it doesn’t matter because U.S. firms can join foreign consortia too, but Moore disagrees. “Working through a foreign subsidiary changes the landscape for American jobs, technology dominance, and tax revenues, among other parameters of the national interest in seabed mining,” he writes. Moreover, the U.S. negotiated the only permanent seat on the Council of the International Seabed Authority, a position it cannot assume while a non-party to UNCLOS. The U.S. is also in a weakened position in the Arctic due to its failure to join the Convention, Moore writes. With climate change causing Arctic ice to melt, more ships will traverse the region.

Moore negotiated the provision that strikes a balance for free navigation and allows for coastal states such as Russia, Canada, and the U.S. to set protective environmental norms for Arctic activity up to 200 miles from the coast. “It is a visionary provision that is now more important than ever,” Kraska says.

While the Convention is still held up in the Senate, Moore is continuing with his writing and advocacy, but the treaty and his most recent book reflect decades of his work on oceans matters.

“This treaty was probably the greatest multilateral treaty win in United States history,” he says. “My book aims at educating the American people and hopefully members of the Senate as to the critical importance of moving the Convention on the Law of the Sea to advice and consent in the Senate.” — Richard Blaustein ’92

Alumni Notes This section reflects notifications received October 1, 2022 to June 30, 2023

D

UKE LAW ALUMNI took the helm at two law schools in July. William Brewbaker LLM ’93 was named dean of the University of Alabama School of Law, where he has served on the faculty for 30 years.

Previously, he was the William Alfred Rose Professor of Law and taught courses in health care law, health care liability, property, and jurisprudence. Patricia Timmons-Goodson MJS ’14, former vice chair of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, was named dean of N.C. Central University School of Law in Durham.

A member of the North Carolina judiciary for 28 years, she was the first African American woman to sit on the state’s Supreme Court.

1966

Thomas William Porter III received the Albert Nelson Marquis Lifetime Achievement Award from Marquis Who’s Who, a publisher of biographical profiles. Thomas, a retired corporate and securities lawyer and founding partner of Porter Hedges, was honored for his legal career, personal philanthropy, and civic involvement.

1967

H. William Constangy has authored Noncompete Law (4th ed. 2022), a national legal treatise on employment noncompete and related restrictive covenants. A retired North Carolina Superior Court judge, William is currently an arbitrator in Charlotte.

Paul Stephan Nathanson was featured in Sages of Aging: A Guide for Changemakers by Ken Dychtwald.

After leaving a major firm in the

1970s, Paul started Justice in Aging, a national program for the elderly of which he is now a governing board member.

1970

Dana Bradford II and John Weber were honored by the Florida Bar in June for having practiced law for 50 years in the state.

1971

John A. DeFrancisco was honored by the Florida Bar in June for having practiced law for 50 years in the state.

1972

Maryellen Madden joined Berger Montague in Philadelphia as of counsel in its intellectual property practice. An expert in complex litigation and commercial disputes, Maryellen moved from Montgomery McCracken.

Tom Triplett, lead nonprofit attorney for Minneapolis-based LegalCORPS, was named Volunteer of the Year for giving 280 hours of pro bono assistance in its program that provides business law services to entrepreneurs, inventors, small businesses, and nonprofits. Previously, Tom spent 35 years in legal and executive positions in Minnesota state government and served as CEO or interim CEO of five area nonprofits.

1973

Dan Blue, a former chair of the Duke University Board of Trustees and past president of the National Conference of State Legislatures, retained his seat in the North Carolina State Senate representing the 14th Senate district. He was first appointed to the district in 2009.

Terrance Schmidt was honored by the Florida Bar in June for having practiced law for 50 years in the state.

Ned Donoghue ’69 has published Prisoners of Congress: Philadelphia’s Quakers in Exile, 1777–1778 (Penn State University Press, 2023), the story of the men who became among the nation’s first political pioneers. It is Ned’s first book and the culmination of nine years of research and writing on the topic.

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Alumni Notes Leonard Simon received the American Antitrust Institute Award for his firm’s litigation in Moultrie v. National Women’s Soccer League that allowed a soccer prodigy to turn professional.

1980

Four alumni attended a December reception in Charlotte hosted by The Duke Endowment (from left): John R. Wester ’72, Russell M. Robinson II ’56 T ’54, Allyson Kay Duncan ’75, and Charles C. Lucas III ’90. Russell chaired The Duke Endowment’s Board of Trustees for 30 years; Charlie is its current chair and Allyson is a trustee.

Jack Hickey of Miami-based Hickey Law Firm was reappointed to the Board of Governors of the American Association for Justice. By virtue of this appointment, he also serves on the Board of Directors of the Florida Justice Association through 2026.

1981

Michael Dreeben argued his 108th case before the U.S. Supreme Court on Nov. 28 with Ciminelli v. United States, which challenged the Second Circuit’s “right to control” theory of fraud as a basis for liability under the federal wire fraud law.

John C. Yates received the Ann Cramer Lifetime Achievement Award from the Atlanta Business Chronicle, the publication’s top honor in its Leaders in Corporate Citizenship Awards.

John was also named to Atlanta Magazine’s 500 Most Powerful List in the Law category. He is a partner at Morris, Manning & Martin, where he launched and continues to lead its technology practice.

1982

Paul Russell Hardin was named to Atlanta Magazine’s 500 Most Powerful List in the Nonprofit Organizations category. Russ is president of four foundations that primarily support organizations in metro Atlanta: the Robert W.

54 Duke Law Magazine • Fall 2023

Woodruff Foundation, Joseph B. Whitehead Foundation, Lettie Pate Evans Foundation, and Lettie Pate Whitehead Foundation.

1983

Kate Hendricks, who began serving as Duke University’s deputy general counsel for labor and employment in 1987, has retired. After graduating from Duke Law School, Kate spent four years in private practice in Washington, D.C., before joining Duke’s team of lawyers.

1985

Janet Ward Black was named to North Carolina Lawyers Weekly’s annual Power List for personal injury lawyers. Principal owner of Ward Black Law in Greensboro, one of the largest woman-owned law firms in the state, Janet is representing several North Carolina counties in opioid litigation and has represented numerous individuals hurt by products such as asbestos.

Lorrie Marcil joined Steptoe as a partner in its Washington office, moving from Sidley Austin. Lorrie has extensive experience representing energy firms in a broad range of administrative and judicial matters involving economic and regulatory issues. She represents pipeline companies and state commissions before the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and advises clients on regulatory issues arising in energy-related transactions.

1986

Janine Brown was named to Atlanta Magazine’s 500 Most Powerful List in the Law category. Janine is the partner in charge of Alston & Bird’s Atlanta office, where her practice focuses on M&A, joint ventures, and strategic alliances.

Michael C. Castellon joined Rivkin Radler as a partner in its construction practice group in Manhattan. With more than 30 years negotiating and drafting construction-related agree-

ments and resolving disputes by mediation, arbitration, and jury and bench trial, Mike has served as general counsel for large-scale projects including the $4.2 billion LaGuardia Central Terminal B Replacement Project. He also holds an MBA from the University of Georgia.

Brent Clinkscale was interviewed in Legal Industry Reviews on his career path and practice. Brent is an independent arbitrator, mediator, facilitator, and litigation consultant in Greenville, South Carolina.

Previously he was a litigator and partner at Haynsworth Sinkler Boyd and Womble Bond Dickinson. Brent also advises moot court teams at the Charleston School of Law and the University of South Carolina School of Law. Ronald Thomas Coleman, Jr. joined Bradley Arant Boult Cummings in Atlanta as litigation partner. Ronald was previously the Litigation Practice Group leader at Parker Hudson and presently serves as chair of the Franchise Section of the ABA. Mark Spitzer joined Holland & Knight’s financial services team in Los Angeles as a partner, moving from McGuireWoods. His commercial finance practice serves banks, finance companies, and alternative lenders in a range of finance transactions.

1987

Brian Rubin received the Law360 Distinguished Legal Writing Award at the 2023 Burton Awards for his article, “A Tale of Two Enforcement Actions Against Compliance Officers.” Brian is a securities enforcement, litigation, and regulatory counseling partner at Eversheds Sutherland in Washington.

1988

Joel Cohen moved to the litigation practice at White & Case from Gibson Dunn, where he was co-chair of its white-collar defense and investigations group. A former federal

prosecutor, Joel was lead or co-lead counsel in 24 civil and criminal trials in federal and state courts, including the high-profile case of Jordan Belfort, detailed in the film “The Wolf of Wall Street.”

Lori Killinger was appointed to the Florida Commission on Community Service, also known as Volunteer Florida, by Gov. Ron DeSantis. Lori is an executive shareholder of Lewis, Longman & Walker in Tallahassee and Tampa and chair of legislative, lobbying, and governmental affairs.

Michael Scharf received the Association Internationale De Droit Penal 2022 Book of the Year Award for The Syrian Conflict’s Impact of International Law (Cambridge University Press, 2020), with Milena Sterio and Paul R. Williams.

The book is Michael’s twentieth, and his fifth publication to win a book award. He is currently the co-dean of Case Western Reserve University School of Law, a position he has held since 2013.

Ken Yun is providing strategic direction as senior advisor to Forensic Risk Alliance, a leading forensic accounting, data analytics, and e-discovery consultancy, as it launches a new office in Seoul, its first AsiaPacific location. In 1990, Ken founded Samjong Corporation, which became a member firm of KPMG in Korea. He is also founder and group chairman of Pavilion Investment Group and is widely recognized in Asia and the U.S. for his business achievements and philanthropy.

1989

Yibing Mao was appointed president of Marriott International, Inc., for Greater China. She is responsible for the strategic growth and overall operations of over 470 operating hotels and resorts under 24 brands across 130 cities. Yibing, who is from Beijing and now calls Hong Kong home, joined Marriott in 1996.

Matthew Sawchak was named a member of NC Lawyers Weekly’s Class of 2023 “Leaders in the Law.” Matt has been a business litigation attorney at Robinson Bradshaw in Raleigh since 2020. He served as solicitor general of North Carolina from 2017 to 2020. Since 2011, Matt also has served as a practitioner in residence at Campbell University’s Norman Adrian Wiggins School of Law, where he focuses his scholarship on federalism in antitrust and trade regulation as well consumer protection and advises the Campbell Law Review.

1990

Charles Lucas III was named chair of The Duke Endowment Board of Trustees. Charlie has served on the board for 18 years and is an advisor to a Florida-based family business and CEO of DF Enterprises.

LaVonne Denise Lawson joined Los Angelesbased Leech Tishman as counsel in the firm’s tax and estates & trusts practice groups. LaVonne previously served as a senior attorney with the Internal Revenue Service Office of Chief Counsel.

Gregory Omer joined Armstrong Teasdale as partner in the firm’s St. Louis office. He brings more than 25 years of experience in banking and corporate law, with both government and in-house experience. Gregory was previously general counsel and executive vice president at a regional bank holding company, a partner at two national law firms, and chief counsel for the Missouri Division of Finance.

Larry Silverman was named a member of Law360’s 2023 Florida Editorial Advisory Board. Larry is a trial lawyer with experience in antitrust, class action, mass action, and commercial

litigation matters. He co-founded Sidley Austin’s Miami office with Stephanie Peral ’15 and is a member of Sidley’s Office of General Counsel.

Rhonda Joy Tobin, partner at Robinson & Cole, was one of five women honored with the Managing Partner of the Year Award as part of Corporate Counsel’s 2022 Women, Influence, and Power in Law Awards. Rhonda has spent her 32-year law career at the Hartford-based firm as a trial lawyer with high-profile litigation experience on behalf of insurers, including the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, sexual abuse claims involving the Catholic church and academic institutions, and coverage issues arising out of the #MeToo movement and the COVID-19 pandemic.

Robert A. Van Kirk, partner at Williams & Connolly, was recognized by Benchmark Litigation as the General Commercial Litigator of the Year. Robert serves as co-chair of his firm’s commercial litigation practice, arguing at every level of the federal judicial system, including the U.S. Supreme Court.

1991

Douglas Nazarian joined the board of directors of The Legal Accountability Project. Douglas has served on the Appellate Court of Maryland since January 2013. Prior to that he served five years at the Maryland Public Service Commission and 15 years as a litigator at law firms in Washington and Baltimore.

He is a senior adjunct professor at University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law.

1992

Alberto Eguiguren Correa was elected to the board of directors of Procaps Group, a leading developer of pharmaceutical and nutraceutical solutions, medicines, and hospital supplies. Alberto has more than 20 years’ experience advising global healthcare and pharmaceutical companies in value-creating transactions, international business, strategic planning, and mergers and acquisitions of public and private companies.

Sam Braverman joined Anderson Kill in New York as a shareholder and co-chair of the firm’s government enforcement, internal investigation, and white-collar defense group. Sam represents individuals and corporate clients in complex criminal and regulatory matters. He has conducted more than 100 trials as lead counsel and is a frequent lecturer for CLEs on trial practice around the country.

Thomas George William Telfer, a professor of law at Western University in London, Ontario, was interviewed

by Canadian Lawyer Magazine about his work in mindfulness and the legal profession.

1993

Joe Alexander joined Latham & Watkins as an M&A and private equity partner in New York from DLA Piper, where he was most recently adviser to the chair and was previously its vice chair in charge of transactions. A private equity specialist, Joe represents financial and strategic investors, including private equity firms and public corporations, in mergers and acquisitions and related financing matters across numerous industries.

» Visit magazine.law.duke.edu for additional content Duke Law Magazine • Fall 2023

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Alumni Notes

Paul Genender ’94 T ’91 helped secure the exoneration in June of a Dallas man who spent more than 25 years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit.

Paul and attorneys from the Innocence Project represented Tyrone Day, who was convicted of sexual assault in 1990 and released in 2015, after DNA evidence exonerated him. Paul called the case “a humbling experience, and one that stands out in my 29 years of practice.” In September, he joined Paul Hastings as a partner in the complex litigation and arbitration practice, chair of the Texas commercial litigation practice, and co-chair of the Houston office.

Kelly Capen Douglas was named general counsel of Santa Clara University, where she is a member of the university president’s cabinet and manages SCU’s legal, contracting, policy, risk management, and compliance functions. Since 2019, Kelly has served as president and CEO of Voices for Children, one of the largest Court Appointed Special Advocate (CASA) programs in the nation. Kelly served as general counsel at the University of San Diego from 2005 to 2019.

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Alex Gonzalez, partner at Holland & Knight in Miami, was recognized by the Daily Business Review for his work as lead attorney on NCL (Bahamas) Ltd. v. ABB OY, et al. His client, NCL, was awarded $158.75 million, the largest verdict in Florida in 2022.

Satana Deberry is serving a second four-year term as Durham County District Attorney after winning the primary and running unopposed in the general election. Satana practiced criminal defense before taking office in 2019 on a reform platform.

Paul Van den Bulck was named the first independent chairman of the Belgian Football Association, where he has served as an independent member of the board of directors for two years. Paul is a partner at AKD Benelux Lawyers in Brussels, where he counsels clients on information technology law, data protection, intellectual property law, and media and entertainment law. Prior to that he was a partner at McGuireWoods in Brussels and Paris.

Sterling Spainhour was named executive vice president, chief legal officer, and chief compliance officer for Southern Company. Sterling had been senior vice president, general counsel, and chief compliance officer for Georgia Power, one of Southern Company’s three electric utilities, and served on its management council.

Previously he served as senior vice president and general counsel of SCS and was a partner at Jones Day focusing on M&A.

Jim Wagner is CEO and co-founder of The Contract Network, a new company that aims to accelerate contract negotiations by providing all parties to an agreement with a neutral platform to collaboratively manage their contract compliance. Jim co-founded DiscoverReady and Apogee Legal, an enterprise contract analytics platform that was acquired by Seal Software.

Since 2021 he has been founder and managing principal of Lean Law Labs.

Derrick Williamson spent a semester at Penn State Dickinson School of Law as adjunct faculty teaching upper-level Administrative Law. Derrick is a partner at Spilman Thomas & Battle, where he is member in charge of its Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, office and co-chair of its utility law group.

1994

Christy L. Brown was named president of Alverno College in Milwaukee.

Originally from Milwaukee, Christy began her appointment in July.

Prior to that she had served as the chief executive officer for Girl Scouts of Wisconsin Southeast since 2012.

Ronnie Vergnolle and Chris Richardson ’07 co-founded a Greenville, South Carolina, company that focuses on helping foreign nationals ace their citizenship visa interviews. Argo Visa is made up of former U.S. visa officers who have so far aided thousands of immigrants from all over the world in passing their interviews.

1995

Frank Rudolph Cooper was interviewed for a University of Nevada, Las Vegas publication on his research into the link between masculinity and police-civilian conflicts, the psychological impact of exposure to videos of violent and deadly police encounters, and what policing reforms have proven effective. Frank is the William S. Boyd Professor of Law at UNLV’s Boyd School of Law and director of its Program on Race, Gender & Policing.

Kelly Sather was chosen as the 2023 Drue Heinz Literature Prize winner for her debut work of fiction, Small in Real Life (University of Pittsburgh

Press, 2023). The collection includes nine stories of characters grappling with choices and the search for belonging in Southern California.

Jules Shepard, a former prosecuting attorney, is the founder and CEO of gf Jules, a manufacturer of premium gluten-free flours and baking mixes sold direct to consumers through her website gfjules. com and through affiliates.

Joel Taubenblatt was named chief of the wireless telecommunications bureau of the FCC’s new Space Bureau. Joel was acting chief for several years. Prior to that he served as deputy bureau chief, chief of the competition and infrastructure policy division, and chief of the broadband division at the FCC. He joined the agency in 1996 as an attorney in the Common Carrier Bureau and is a recipient of the FCC’s Gold Medal Award for Distinguished Career Service.

1996

John Carter received a PhD in theology from Boston College and has begun a two-year appointment as visiting assistant professor of law at Wake Forest University School of Law and in the Program for Leadership and Character, and visiting assistant professor of religion, law, and public life at Wake Forest’s School of Divinity.

1997

Jeffery Hart re-joined Robinson Bradshaw as a shareholder at the firm. Jeffery first joined Robinson Bradshaw in 1997 and opened the firm’s Research Triangle Park office in 2008.

Odetta MacLeish-White was named to Atlanta Magazine’s 500 Most Powerful List in the Civic Leaders category. Odetta is the director of Georgia initiatives for the Center for Community Progress. Previously she was managing director for the TransFormation Alliance, a partnership of nonprofits, government agencies, and businesses.

Amy E. Pope ’01 began a five-year term in October as director general of the International Organization for Migration, becoming the first woman elected to lead the United Nations agency. Prior to joining the IOM in 2021 as deputy director for management and reform, Amy served as senior advisor for migration to President Biden and was a partner at Schillings in London. During the Obama administration she was a member of the National Security Council, guiding strategy on migration, global health emergencies, transnational crime, terrorism, and other challenges.

Amy has also served as counsel for the Department of Justice and the U.S. Senate.

1998

Lafayette L. Crump, commissioner of city development for Milwaukee, was interviewed about his career and the city’s future in Shepherd Express magazine. Lafayette, who grew up in Milwaukee, was appointed to the position in July 2020. Prior to that, he was chief operating officer of Prism Technical Management & Marketing Services, a multidisciplinary consulting firm, and a longtime lawyer in private practice.

George B. Donnini was elected president of the Federal Bar Association, Eastern District of Michigan chapter, and to the board of directors of Butzel in Detroit, where he is a litigation department chair and co-chair of the firm’s white-collar criminal defense practice. George was named a “Notable Veteran” by Crain’s Detroit Business in 2020 and is a founding member of the Detroit chapter of the Veterans Bar Association.

Bobby Sharma launched Bluestone Capital I, a $300 million growth equity fund focused on the global sports, media, and entertainment industry, through Bluestone Equity Partners, of which he is founder and managing partner. He was also elected to a two-year term as director at large for the United States Tennis Association.

Bobby has served as global head of basketball and strategic initiatives at IMG, general counsel of the NBA Development League (now G-League), and vice chairman and CEO of Soccerex.

Jill Steinberg was sworn in as U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Georgia. She was nominated

by President Joe Biden in 2022.

Previously Jill was a partner at Ballard Spahr in Philadelphia.

Jesus Villa was named one of Wisconsin’s Most Influential Latino Leaders by Madison365.

Jesus is currently the Equal Rights Division administrator at the Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development.

1999

Norwood Blanchard III was named to Business North Carolina’s Legal Elite list. Norwood is a partner at Crossley McIntosh Collier Hanley & Edes in Wilmington, where he practices civil litigation, employment law, and municipal law.

Anthony Cieri joined Dentons as a partner in the firm’s corporate group in Lexington, Kentucky. With 20 years of experience with mergers and acquisitions and corporate law in private practice and in-house roles, Anthony most recently served as assistant general counsel and chief mergers and acquisitions counsel for a global manufacturer in the automotive industry.

Zephyr Teachout won the Washington Monthly 2023 Kukula Award for Excellence in Nonfiction Book Reviewing for her longform review in the New York Review of Books of four recent books exploring intertwined themes of employee’s rights, surveillance of workers, artificial intelligence, and COVID. Zephyr is a professor at Fordham University School of Law.

2000

Blair Hedges joined Carlton Fields’ real property litigation practice as a shareholder in its Orlando office.

Blair has more than 20 years’ experience litigating complex commercial and real estate matters, securities class actions, shareholder derivation lawsuits, and actions brought by the SEC. Previously Blair was vice president, senior litigation counsel, at Fidelity National Financial.

Rachel See joined Seyfarth Shaw as senior counsel and vice chair for emerging technology, people analytics practice group in its labor and employment department. Rachel spent the past six years at the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, where she led enforcement, policy, and digital transformation initiatives. Prior to that, Rachel was branch chief of the e-litigation branch at the National Labor Relations Board (see page 38).

2001

Rodney Bullard, who served as the head of the Chick-fil-A Foundation for 12 years, left the organization to start The Same House, a public benefit corporation focused on furthering economic mobility and bridging social division. Rodney founded and led Global Corporate Social Responsibility at Chick-fil-A. Alex C. Dale was named to Business North Carolina’s Legal Elite list. Alex practices business law at Ward and Smith in Wilmington, where he chairs the firm’s appellate practice.

2002

Corey Ciocchetti delivered the keynote speech at Entrepreneurship Day at Colorado Mesa University in Grand Junction. Corey is a professor of business ethics and legal studies

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Alumni Notes in the Daniels College of Business at the University of Denver, where he has won numerous awards for teaching and speaking. Corey is also a motivational speaker and author of Inspire Integrity: Chase an Authentic Life (Morgan James, 2018).

Jill Fraley was named to a new role focusing on pedagogy at Washington & Lee Law. Jill, a professor at the law school, will design faculty workshops to help the law school advance science-based teaching practices with an emphasis on furthering student learning and inclusivity.

Michael McGrath joined Dechert as partner in the financial services group in its Boston office. An asset management and investment funds lawyer with deep experience in the U.S. financial services regulatory environment, Michael was formerly at K&L Gates, where he was a partner and co-practice area leader of the asset management and investment funds practice.

Daniel Rosenthal was appointed president and CEO of Global Critical Logistics. Daniel most recently was chief revenue and operating officer of Root, Inc. In 2009, he co-founded Milestone Aviation Group, the world’s largest helicopter financier, which was acquired by GE Capital for $1.8 billion in 2015, after which he oversaw four subsidiaries of GE Capital Aviation Services. Daniel also served in leadership roles at NetJets.

David Searle joined Sunnova as executive vice president, general counsel, after holding leadership roles at Tesla including acting head of legal and corporate secretary and deputy general counsel and senior director, compliance. Prior to that David served as vice president, chief ethics and compliance officer – international at Walmart and as chief compliance officer and associate general counsel of Bristow Group.

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Shannon Wells Stevenson was appointed solicitor general of Colorado. A seasoned trial and appellate attorney, Shannon was previously a partner at Davis Graham & Stubbs. She has briefed and argued more than 70 cases on a variety of issues before state and federal appellate courts throughout the Rocky Mountain west.

2003

Suzy Alford joined ECI Group as chief administrative officer, where she will oversee human resources, risk management, and general legal counsel functions. Suzy was most recently vice president and global employment counsel at Equifax. Prior to that she was an associate at Eversheds Sutherland and Jackson Lewis.

Sara Lester was named chief human resources officer at Dartmouth College. Since 2018, Sara managed human resources at Educational Testing Service. Prior to leading ETS’s human resources department, Sara served in its general counsel’s office, beginning in 2010.

Karla McKanders was appointed director of the Thurgood Marshall Institute, a multidisciplinary research and advocacy center within the Legal Defense Fund. Karla moves from Vanderbilt University Law School, where she was a clinical professor of law, associate director of the clinical program, and founding director of the Immigration Practice Clinic, and received the 2023 Elmer Fried Excellence in Teaching Award from the American Immigration Lawyers Association.

Larissa Meli was featured in Vanguard Law magazine to discuss her time at Duke Law as a Fulbright Scholar and her legal career that has spanned two countries.

Linda Yi Park was named to the board of directors of Clyra Medical Technologies, Inc., a subsidiary of BioLargo, Inc. Linda’s extensive corporate board and executive experience includes her current roles at Edwards Lifesciences as corporate secretary, senior vice president, and associate general counsel and board member of the Edwards Lifesciences Foundation, and prior work with Western Digital Corporation. She is a thought leader on environmental, social, and corporate governance issues.

2004

Chris Beatty, a partner at Sullivan & Cromwell, relocated to the firm’s Sydney office, with a secondary office in Hong Kong. Chris’ practice focuses on cross-border corporate finance transactions and restructurings, advising sponsors, corporations, funds, lenders, and broker-dealers on original credit and workout transactions globally.

Carol Van der Vorst joined the leveraged finance team of Freshfields in London as a partner. She will advise the firm’s financial sponsor clients on complex cross-border debt financing transactions. Carol previously served as a partner at Ropes & Gray and as a managing director in the debt underwriting group at Goldman Sachs.

2005

Thomas Lenné was appointed partner at Loyens & Loeff. Based in Brussels, Thomas’ practice focuses on cross-border and domestic M&A and private equity transactions across sectors including energy, technology, healthcare, and mining and natural resources.

Mike Levin won election to a third term representing California’s 49th district in the U.S. House of Representatives. The district includes parts of North San Diego County and South Orange County, where he was

raised. Mike, a Democrat, serves on the House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis, the House Committee on Natural Resources, and the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, where he chairs its Economic Opportunity subcommittee.

Kimberly Perdue joined Norton Rose Fulbright as a partner in its Dallas office. A corporate finance lawyer, Kimberly previously was a partner at Kirkland & Ellis representing private equity funds, financial institutions, institutional investors, and public and private issuers in financing transactions.

2006

Justin Coen joined Venable as a partner in its Washington-based FDA regulatory group, where his practice focuses on guiding companies through the complexities of drug, biologic, and device development. Justin moves from the Office of the Staff Judge Advocate, U.S. Army Medical Research and Development Command, where he was the primary legal advisor on regulated medical products to the Joint Program Executive Order for Chemical, Biological, Radiological, and Nuclear Defense.

Adam Karl Doerr, an attorney at Robinson Bradshaw in Charlotte, was awarded the Outstanding Individual Attorney Pro Bono Award by the Mecklenburg County Bar. The annual award honors an attorney who has contributed extraordinary service to the provision of pro bono services to people in need, children, or nonprofit organizations.

Philip Romohr was elected partner at Smith Anderson. Philip works with the firm’s banking and finance team, with a focus on venture finance. Prior to joining Smith Anderson, Philip

was vice president, associate general counsel of Pacific Western Bank, and prior to that, he practiced at an international law firm in Boston.

Megan Walsh launched the Gun Violence Prevention Clinic at the University of Minnesota School of Law, where she is a visiting assistant professor. The clinic is believed to be the nation’s first in-house law school clinic with a focus on promoting gun violence prevention through strategic litigation.

2007

Tiaunia Henry was elected partner at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher. Tiaunia is a trial attorney in the firm’s Los Angeles office who focuses primarily on high-stakes complex business litigation, including antitrust, breach of contract, and transnational cases.

Emily P. Mallen joined Akin Gump’s Washington office as a partner in its energy practice. Emily moves from Sidley Austin, where she advised natural gas, oil, and products pipeline clients in U.S. federal regulatory and transactional matters, including matters before the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

Alejandro A. Sánchez Mújica was appointed partner at Holland & Knight. A member of the firm’s business section in Monterrey, Mexico, he focuses on representing national and international companies in domestic and cross-border transactions.

Chris Richardson and Ronnie Vergnolle ’94 co-founded a Greenville, South Carolina, company that focuses on helping foreign nationals ace their citizenship visa interviews. Argo Visa is made up of former U.S. visa officers who have so far aided thousands of immigrants from all over the world in passing their interviews.

2008

Natalie Adams joined Foley & Lardner as a partner in the firm’s Tampa office, moving from Bradley Arant Boult Cummings. Natalie served as an assistant U.S. attorney in the Middle District of Florida for nearly 10 years, during which she received the Attorney General’s Distinguished Service Award and the Investigation of the Year Award from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives.

Douglass Calidas joined the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs as a fellow. Douglass’ fellowship is part of the Belfer Center’s Technology and Public Purpose project. Prior to his fellowship, Calidas served as chief of staff to U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar.

Emily Duncan was named senior vice president, federal affairs, for American Electric Power in Washington, moving from her most recent post as vice president, government relations for National Grid.

Emily has extensive legislative and regulatory experience working on energy policy issues. She has also worked at the Solar Energy Industries Association, the national trade association for the solar industry, where she was director of government affairs and counsel.

Amanda Neeley re-joined Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher’s Washington office in its public policy and Congressional investigations practice groups. Amanda previously worked on Capitol Hill as director of governmental affairs for the U.S. Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee and general counsel to Sen. Rob Portman as well as in several other offices.

Squire Servance, the founder and managing partner of Syridex Bio, was presented with the Distinguished Achievement in Industry Award

by Rutgers University’s School of Engineering, from which he graduated in 2004. Squire is a Rutgers University board trustee. He also holds an MBA from Duke’s Fuqua School of Business. Prior to founding Syridex Bio in 2022, Squire served as senior vice president, general counsel, corporate secretary, and chief compliance officer at Repligen.

2009

Matt Calabria won re-election to his fourth term on the Wake County Board of Commissioners, to which he was first elected in 2014. Matt is an attorney with Wallace & Nordan in Raleigh.

James Healy was elected as a 2023 member of the Connecticut Bar Foundation’s James W. Cooper Fellows Program based on outstanding service to the profession and larger community. James is a partner at Cowdery, Murphy, Dannehy & Healy in Hartford and a member of the Metropolitan District Commission and West Hartford Democratic Town Committee.

Betty X. Yang was elected partner at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher.

Betty practices complex civil litigation, with a focus on bet-the-company trials, in the firm’s Dallas office. She was recently named one of Texas Lawyer’s Attorneys on the Rise in the 2022 Texas Legal Awards.

2010

Henry Yin joined Loeb & Loeb as corporate partner and chair of Asia M&A and technology transactions. Based in

the firm’s Hong Kong and Beijing offices, Henry has significant experience in global cross-border transactions, complex public and private mergers and acquisitions, private equity and venture capital investments, and other corporate matters.

Previously Henry was a partner and head of the corporate practice in Beijing at Cooley.

2011

Benjamin Baucom joined Haynes and Boone as a Charlotte-based partner in the firm’s finance practice, moving from Moore & Van Allen. Benjamin represents banks and other financial institutions in senior syndicated and bilateral lending transactions.

Andrea Dinamarco joined Squire Patton Boggs as a partner in its Atlanta global financial services practice, moving from Reed Smith.

Previously she was corporate counsel at Tesla and lead counsel for international treasury operations at GM Financial. Andrea previously practiced law in São Paulo, Brazil.

Lauren Fine, a nationally recognized advocate for youth justice reform, joined the faculty of Duke Law School as an assistant clinical professor of law and supervising attorney of the Criminal Defense Clinic (see p. 26).

Rebecca Goldberg was promoted to senior counsel at Berchem Moses.

She is a labor and employment attorney representing management in the firm’s Milford, Connecticut, office.

Kenneth Walsh joined Yankwitt as counsel. A litigator with more than a decade of experience, Ken has practiced law in New York and Illinois, focusing on complex civil litigation with an emphasis on employment and labor disputes. Previously Ken served as a federal law clerk for two judges in the Eastern District of New York.

Jasmine Wynton, a partner in Thompson Coburn’s Dallas office, was named one of Texas Lawyer’s Attorneys on the Rise in the 2022

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Alumni Notes Amy Feagles was elected partner at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher. Amy is in the antitrust and competition practice at the firm’s Washington offices and has experience in internal investigations, regulatory, and criminal investigations by U.S. and international agencies, and complex commercial litigation.

Ruben Neal Henriquez ’14 and Tara Brigit McGrath ’14 have welcomed a baby boy, Kieran Neal Henriquez, born January 3.

Texas Legal Awards. She focuses her practice on business and employment litigation and white-collar criminal defense.

firm’s real estate practice group. He represents developers, investors, owners, and tenants in all aspects of commercial real estate transactions.

2012

Justin Yedor was promoted to partner at BakerHostetler. Based in Los Angeles, Justin is a member of the firm’s Digital Assets and Data Management Practice Group, providing advice and strategies for compliance with privacy requirements facing businesses in the retail, consumer services, entertainment, communications, financial, and manufacturing sectors.

Noor Al-Fawzan was elected partner at Latham & Watkins. Noor is a member of the firm’s mergers and acquisitions practice and corporate department in Riyadh. She advises companies and government entities on M&A, joint ventures, and other corporate transactions in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and internationally.

Catherine Martinez joined Crowell & Moring as counsel in its Doha, Qatar, office. She joins Crowell from the Commercial Bank of Qatar, where she was a senior transactional lawyer within the bank’s in-house corporate legal team. Catherine has extensive experience in the capital markets, banking, finance, and corporate sectors and has advised international corporations with operations in the Middle East, Turkey, and Europe.

Joshua Roling was named a “Rising Star” by Milwaukee Business News.

Joshua is a partner at Foley & Lardner in Milwaukee and a member of the

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2013

Andrew Edelen was promoted to partner at Davis Gilbert, where he advises companies in complex transactions such as mergers and acquisitions, equity financings, joint ventures, and strategic alliances.

Adam Faiella was promoted to member of the firm at Newark, New Jersey-based Sills Cummis & Gross, where his real estate practice focuses on zoning and land use, including the preparation of site plan and variance applications, with experience in the development, redevelopment, and construction of commercial and residential real estate and complex litigation matters.

Andrew Foglia was appointed deputy director of policy and international affairs for the U.S. Copyright Office.

Andrew joined the Copyright Office in November 2020.

Kevin Humphries joined Benesch as a partner in its corporate and securities practice group in Chicago and Columbus, Ohio. Kevin advises publicly and privately held companies on a broad range of matters, including mergers and acquisitions, divestitures, minority investments, and other strategic transactions and general corporate matters. He was previously a partner at Kirkland & Ellis.

Meaghan Krupa, a partner in the corporate and business group at Hinckley Allen and co-chair of the firm’s Women’s Forum, was interviewed on the value of mentorship in the development of her legal career and how her clerkship experience and other mentor relationships have shaped the way she supports more junior attorneys.

2014

Dennis Adjei was appointed Inn of Court Judicial Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies. The institute focuses on the promotion, facilitation, and dissemination of results of advanced legal studies and research for the benefit of persons and institutions situated in the United Kingdom and beyond.

Abraham “Abe” Benavides was promoted to partner at McCall Parkhurst & Horton. Based in Dallas, Abe has served as bond counsel, disclosure counsel, and underwriters’ counsel in debt financings involving nonprofit senior living providers, nonprofit and governmental hospitals, tollway authorities, cities, universities, and airports. He joined McCall as an associate in 2017.

Eva Guzman delivered the commencement address at Texas Law’s 2023 Sunflower Ceremony. A former justice on the Texas Supreme Court, Eva is currently partner at the Houston law firm of Wright, Close & Barger. She began her judicial career in 1999 when then-Gov. George W. Bush appointed her to the 309th Judicial Court of Harris County.

Seth Reich was recognized on the 2023 Texas Rising Stars list of the state’s top young lawyers based on his work in intellectual property law.

Alex Marc Kaufman was promoted to special counsel of Fried Frank in Washington.

Alex’s practice focuses on the structuring and offering of private investment funds. He also represents institutional clients on a variety of other securities law and corporate transactional matters.

Serena Rwejuna was named Energy, Natural Resources, and Mining Lawyer of the Year at the 2023 Women in Business Law Awards ceremony.

She was also named to the National Bar Association’s 2023 40 Under 40 Best Advocates list. Serena is a partner at White & Case in Washington.

Jonathan Rash was elected partner of Fried Frank in Washington.

Jonathan’s practice is focused on customized private fund structures, innovative cross-border fund offerings, and special strategic projects.

Donna Stroud won reelection to the North Carolina Court of Appeals.

She became chief judge in 2021, was elected to the court in 2006, and re-elected without opposition in 2014.

Aurelien Zuber joined Paris-based Medici Law in its international arbitration practice. Aurelien is a former counsel at the International Court of Arbitration of the International Chamber of Commerce. His practice includes commercial and investment disputes with a particular focus on matters involving states and African parties.

2015

Josh Fliegel began a new role as trial attorney with the Land Acquisition Section of the U.S. Department of Justice. Josh moved into government service from BakerHostetler’s Chicago office, where he practiced complex commercial litigation and was named to the firm’s “Ones to Watch” list.

Stephanie Peral co-founded the Miami office of Sidley Austin with Larry Silverman ’90. Stephanie, a senior managing associate, represents clients in a variety of areas within commercial litigation, including securities litigation, consumer class actions, and product liability and also serves clients in internal investigations and enforcement actions.

2016

Jacob Adrian was elected partner at Nelson Mullins. Jacob is based in Atlanta and practices in the areas of corporate finance, mergers and acquisitions, and private equity and venture capital.

J. Michelle Childs was elected to the Council of the American Law Institute. Michelle, who was also one of six judges from across the country to be honored by the National Judicial

College as Pioneers of Diversity on the Bench, was appointed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in 2022.

Debra Lehrmann was re-elected to the Texas Supreme Court. Debra is the longest-serving female Supreme Court justice in Texas history and was elected twice to the state’s highest court since her 2010 gubernatorial appointment.

Nicole Ligon joined the tenure-track faculty at Campbell University’s Norman Adrian Wiggins School of Law in Raleigh, where she was a visiting professor in fall 2022. Nicole was previously a clinical professor and supervising attorney of the First Amendment Clinic at Duke Law. Prior to that, she practiced with Cahill Gordon & Reindel in New York.

2017

Joseph Mackin Berklund was promoted to partner at Morris, Manning, and Martin. Joseph is a leader in technology trade associations with strong client bases across Georgia and Florida.

Sean McClelland joined the Office of the Federal Public Defender for the District of Nevada. He was formerly an associate at McGuireWoods in the firm’s antitrust, trade, and commercial litigation department in Washington. Sean is based in Reno and a member of the office’s appellate unit; his role also will include district court work.

2018

Ryan Clements joined the Alberta Securities Commission as director, advanced research and knowledge management, a newly formed division. For the past four years Ryan was assistant professor and chair, business law and regulation, at

Bobbie Burrows ’19 and Matt Drucker ’18 were married June 10 in Duke Chapel. Bobbie and Matt met as Duke Law students during a pickup basketball game and began dating a few weeks later. The Thursday before their wedding, they reconvened their friends and fellow alumni for another pickup game at Duke, this time between “Team Bride” and “Team Groom.”

the University of Calgary Faculty of Law. He will continue as a sessional instructor in securities law and fintech law and policy.

Carless Joseph Boatwright was appointed to serve as judge on Florida’s Fifth District Court of Appeal. Previously, Joe served as the managing assistant state attorney in the Seventh Judicial Circuit and an associate attorney in private practice.

Madelyn Tarr joined the Los Angeles office of Silicon Legal Strategy as a managing associate. Madelyn represents emerging companies on entity formation, corporate governance and other day-to-day matters, debt and equity financings, and M&A and other strategic transactions. She also advises venture capital investors on their investments into technology companies. Prior to joining SLS, she was an associate at Latham & Watkins.

2020

Richard Dietz won his race for a seat on the North Carolina Supreme Court. Rich served on the North Carolina Court of Appeals since he was appointed to fill an unexpired term in 2014. His current term ends in 2024.

Naseebullah Esmaty started a new position as staff attorney at the International Rescue Committee.

Naseebullah has served as an arbitrator and mediator at the Afghanistan Center for Commercial Dispute Resolution for the past nine years and also was a senior associate lawyer at Shajjan & Associates in Kabul. He earned his law degree at Goa University.

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Alumni Notes

Just six weeks after earning her LLM at Duke Law, Sanya Sharma ’23 was one of 189 young people from 31 countries to receive the Diana Award, a humanitarian honor established in memory of Princess Diana. The award recognizes Sanya’s work as the founder of Scarlet Udaan, which raises awareness of female genital mutilation and empowers young people to take action to end the practice globally. “Princess Diana continues to inspire so many of us to engage in social action and community building, I am so humbled to be receiving this award in her legacy,” she wrote on LinkedIn.

2021

Christian Bale was named one of four Temple Bar Scholars for 2023.

Christian clerked for Judge Colm Connolly ’91 of the U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware and is currently clerking for Judge Kent Jordan of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. He is also a PhD candidate at the University of Oxford. After his clerkship with Judge Jordan, he will join the D.C. office of litigation boutique MoloLamken.

Adrienne Jackson was named a “Future Rainmaker” by legal recruiter Lateral Link. Adrienne is an associate in the private equity practice of Weil’s corporate department, based in Silicon Valley.

Zachary Kaplan is serving as the first Walter E. Dellinger III Memorial Fellow in the Attorney General’s General Counsel’s Office of the North Carolina Department of Justice. In May 2022 the department’s fellowship program was

New position?

Promotion?

Life changes?

Awards?

Adventures?

62 Duke Law Magazine • Fall 2023

named to honor Douglas B. Maggs Professor Emeritus Walter Dellinger, who died in February 2022. Zack most recently clerked for Justice Robin E. Hudson on the North Carolina Supreme Court.

Nicole Phillips was named a “Future Rainmaker” by legal recruiter Lateral Link. Nicole is a real estate associate in Jones Day’s Atlanta office, where she advises clients on complex commercial real estate transactions.

2022

Mary Chandler Beam served as a law clerk for the Supreme Court of Georgia’s 2022-2023 term for Justice Carla Wong McMillian. At Duke Law, Mary Chandler was president of the Government and Public Service Society and co-editor-in-chief of Law and Contemporary Problems. She also completed an externship with North Carolina Court of Appeals Judge Darren Jackson during her third year.

Vicente Fernández, a visiting attorney at Shearman & Sterling in New York, contributed to the Latin Lawyer’s Guide on Environmental, Social, and Corporate Governance (ESG). He was part of a team of attorneys from the firm who authored chapter 1, “Status and Pitfalls of ESG Standard,” which examines governmental, consumer, and investor demands for standardizing ESG reporting in Latin America.

Harrison J. Kratochvil joined Omaha-based Cline Williams Wright Johnson & Oldfather, where he focuses his practice on commercial and governmental litigation. Harrison was a Dean’s Scholar at Duke Law. Connor Leydecker, a litigation associate at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher in Washington, won the Law360 Distinguished Legal Writing Award for his note, “A Different Curse: Improving the Antitrust Debate About ‘Bigness,’” which was published in the NYU Journal of Law and Business. Connor was one of 25 winners nationwide.

Let your classmates know how you’ve been!

2023

Pamela Goodwine was interviewed about her trailblazing legal career on Spectrum News.

Beginning as a court reporter, Pam became the first Black woman from Lexington or Fayette County on the Kentucky Court of Appeals.

Brett Ries won the National LGBTQ+ Bar Association’s Michael Greenberg Student Writing Competition for his article “Don’t Be A Drag: How Drag Bans Can Violate the First Amendment.” Ries also was a finalist in the American Constitution Society’s Constance Baker Motley National Student Writing Competition for his note, “Looking Backward To Move Forward: Ending the ‘History and Tradition’ of Gun Violence Against the LGBTQ+ Community.”

» Drop us a line at law.duke.edu/alumni.

In Memoriam

Reflecting notifications received between January 27 and September 20, 2023

1950 James A. West, Jr. May 25, 2023

1953 Nick Galifianakis March 27, 2023

1957 Edward Paul Pizer

1967 Jerry J. McCoy

1980 Shirley L. Fulton

Robert Emmett Sheahan, Jr.

Leslie K.L. Thiele

1969 William J. Bates

1983 Frank Paul Fedor

March 26, 2023

September 5, 2023

July 23, 2023

February 9, 2023

1963 Donald Ray Billings

1972 Amos T. Mills III

Mark B. Edwards June 18, 2023

1964 Samuel P. Bell III March 14, 2023

Robert K. Payson March 1, 2023

July 1, 2023

James S. Tipton, Jr. March 19, 2023

1977 Philip Andrew Bjorlo April 22, 2023

Angela Regina Murphy

1966 A. Leigh Baier May 16, 2023

Miles R. Feinstein July 22, 2023

Mathias P. Hunoval

February 4, 2023

1985 William Wiley Horton March 7, 2023

1996 Karen Sundermier March 2, 2023

1998 Derek Stephen Dohn April 20, 2023

July 27, 2023

William L. Ragsdale February 27, 2023

April 23, 2023

Robert B. Posey

February 28, 2023

April 15, 2023

February 8, 2023

1978 Susan Brooks

2005 Mangyo Kinoshita July 9, 2023

May 5, 2023

Phillip C. Christensen August 22, 2023

Steven Ross Gilford August 14, 2023

June 25, 2023

Terrence L. McCoy May 10, 2023

Duke Law Magazine • Fall 2023

63

Sua Sponte

A

NDRÉ PINELLI LLM ’23 AND LORENA CARVALHO PINELLI LLM ’23 arrived at Duke with a level of support unique among their class of international students: They are father and daughter, a first for the Law School.

“I have my safety net here,” Lorena says. “I brought it with me.”

André and Lorena discovered they’d each been pondering an LLM in 2020. André was a solo practitioner with 25 years of experience in their hometown of Belo Horizonte, Brazil, while Lorena had been working in anti-corruption and compliance law in Rio de Janeiro.

“I think it was probably May when I saw my father studying for the TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language),” Lorena says. “I asked about it and he said it was because he was thinking about doing an LLM in the U.S. And at the time I was like, ‘Okay, that’s something that I’ve always wanted to do. It would be perfect for us to go together.’”

64 Duke Law Magazine • Fall 2023

They had four classes together in the fall and one in the spring, Immigration Law, an area of law they both gravitated toward as they considered what to do after graduation.

André’s wife (and Lorena’s mother) Helê Pinelli and their 12-year-old son, Arthur, also joined them, and the family’s house in nearby Cary became a hub for other students at holidays and other occasions.

“My friends really like my father,” Lorena says. “I send a message on WhatsApp asking, ‘You guys know where my father is?’ And one time … someone sent back a picture of the two of them having a beer at the Devil’s Krafthouse at Duke.”

André, who describes going back to school with his daughter as a “blessing,” is now working in an immigration practice in Raleigh, while Lorena is practicing remotely for a firm in New Jersey.

Congratulations to the 2023 Law Alumni Association Award recipients

During Reunion weekend in April, the Law Alumni Association and Dean Kerry Abrams honored these members of the Duke Law community for their accomplishments, service, and dedication to the Law School. The Law Alumni Association awards are among the highest honors given by Duke Law School.

CHARLES S. MURPHY AWARD FOR ACHIEVEMENT IN CIVIC SERVICE

Emily Friedman ’98 Deputy General Counsel, The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Chicago, Illinois

A. KENNETH PYE AWARD FOR EXCELLENCE IN EDUCATION

Lisa Kern Griffin Candace M. Carroll and Leonard B. Simon Distinguished Professor of Law

CHARLES S. RYNE AWARD FOR PROFESSIONAL ACHIEVEMENT

INTERNATIONAL ALUMNI AWARD

Reggie Clark ’78

Kris Van Hove LLM ’92

Of Counsel, Eversheds Sutherland Atlanta, Georgia

Partner, Van Bael & Bellis Brussels, Belgium

YOUNG ALUMNI AWARD YOUNG ALUMNI AWARD

Zachary Kleiman ’13 President of Basketball Operations & General Manager, Memphis Grizzlies Memphis, Tennessee

OUTSTANDING VOLUNTEER SERVICE AWARD

Bradley Zimmer ’03 Managing Director, Cella Partners Atlanta, Georgia

Brandon Neal ’08 Senior Vice President and Deputy General Counsel, Walgreens Boots Alliance Deerfield, Illinois

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Judge Tayeba Parsa of Afghanistan, inaugural Bolch Rule of Law Judicial Fellow Page 4