Joann Grages Burnett, Esq., associate director of career and professional development at Stetson University College of Law, is the recipient of the 2019 American Bar Association’s On the Rise – Top 40 Young Lawyers Award.

The American Bar Association’s (ABA) Young Lawyers Division (YLD) annually recognizes 40 ABA young lawyer members who exemplify a broad range of high achievement, innovation, vision, leadership and legal and community service with its On the Rise award.

The ABA YLD provides new lawyers with tools for success, skillset development resources and networking opportunities.

The accolade recognizes young lawyers who are shining brightly in their law careers.

“I have had the opportunity to work with some of the most committed, talented, diverse and innovative young lawyers from across the country while serving in the American Bar Association’s Young Lawyers Division,” said Burnett, who is a Stetson Law alumna. “I’m deeply appreciative to my award nominator Shayda Le and honored to be included in this group of amazing lawyers and leaders.”

Award eligibility includes being an ABA member in good standing, a licensed attorney in the United States or one of its territories and at least 36 years old or younger during the nomination year.

At Stetson Law, Burnett specializes in employer readiness for students and alumni and oversees postgraduate judicial clerkship initiatives within the Office of Career and Professional Development. She serves as the co-chair for Stetson Law’s award-winning “Professional Development Conference: Campus to Career” and ABA’s YLD member resources director, where she leads the division’s professional development and wellness initiatives.

Prior to providing law students with career and professional development opportunities, Burnett was an assistant public defender for the Sixth Judicial Circuit of Florida and handled misdemeanor, juvenile and felony cases.

For Burnett, the award is a prominent recognition.

“This award is very special to me,” said Burnett. “As someone who uses her law degree in a unique way at Stetson Law, it is incredibly rewarding to be recognized among so many wonderful young lawyers who I truly respect and admire.”

“I’m grateful for the opportunity to serve in the American Bar Association’s Young Lawyers Division and thankful that Stetson Law has supported my involvement with such enthusiasm,” said Burnett. “The Young Lawyers Division has afforded me with so many wonderful opportunities and this award is simply the icing on the cake.”

Award honorees will receive national recognition in ABA print publications and online and on social media and will be recognized at the YLD awards breakfast during the ABA’s 2019 Annual Meeting at the San Francisco Marriott Marquis in San Francisco, California on Saturday, Aug. 10.

 Stetson University College of Law’s moot court team argued in the final round of the 2019 Robert Orseck Memorial Moot Court Competition before the justices of the Florida Supreme Court, and the justices awarded law student Chris Pate with the Best Oralist in the Final Round. This year’s competition was held during the 2019 Annual Florida Bar Convention at the Boca Raton Resort and Club in Boca Raton, Florida on June 28.

“Moot court competitions, like all advocacy competitions, give students an opportunity to practice and hone the skills they will need to practice law,” said Brooke J. Bowman, J.D., moot court board director and professor of law at Stetson Law. “Awards, such as these, show Stetson’s commitment to training practice-ready attorneys and demonstrate why Stetson has been number one in advocacy for so many years.” Professor Bowman coached this year’s Orseck team.

Third-year Stetson Law students and Moot Court Board members Chris Lawson and Pate had an opportunity to argue a fictitious case in front of attorneys, civil and county judges and Florida’s District Courts of Appeal judges during the competition.

The final round of the Robert Orseck Memorial Moot Court Competition has been judged by Florida Supreme Court justices for a number of years. Stetson Law students have advanced to the final round 15 times since 2000 and Pate is the fourth moot court team member to win the award for the Best Oralist in the Final Round.

On June 13^th, the Stetson University community welcomed a piece of history to the Gulfport campus. Dean Kristen Adams of the College of Law and Dean Timothy Peter of the School of Music held a special dedication to celebrate the donation of a piano previously owned and played by Liberace himself. Marco A. Jimenez, son of Stetson Law professor Marco J. Jimenez, capped off the dedication by taking a seat at the piano and filling the Mann Lounge with melodies by Liszt and Chopin.

Donated by the parents of a current Stetson University student, the piano is over 100 years old and carries with it decades of musical history. Liberace came to know the piano in the 1930’s before his monumental rise to fame. After playing a small gig in a Milwaukee bar, he asked the owner if he could buy the old six-legged grand piano. The piano changed hands, and the rest is history.

The piano was delivered to the Bell Auditorium in Augusta, GA (now the James Brown Arena) at the special request of Liberace whenever he played there. Before his first Augusta performance, he had the piano shipped from a warehouse in Chicago where it had remained since his purchase. It is said that the first time Liberace played the old piano after so long he shed a tear at the familiarity and comfort of the instrument. Despite having access to the most pristine pianos of his time, Liberace insisted that this piano be delivered each time he played in Augusta. It was a treasure to him and it will remain a treasure to our community.

Stetson Law graduate Jonathan Glover wins second place in the 11th Annual American Bankruptcy Institute’s Law Student Writing Competition.

Glover’s article “The Bankruptcy Code’s Disservice to Those Who Served” is available on the American Bankruptcy Institute website. The article will also be published in the American Bankruptcy Institute Journal this summer.

Stetson University College of Law announces the appointment of Roberta Kemp Flowers, J.D., professor of law, as the interim director of the Center for Excellence in Advocacy. She begins her new role on June 1.

Flowers will be stepping down from her role as the director of the Center for Excellence in Elder Law to temporarily take the helm as the interim director of the Center for Excellence in Advocacy. Law Professor Rebecca C. Morgan, J.D. will fulfill the duties of the interim director for the Center for Excellence in Elder Law.

Flowers was the Center for Excellence in Advocacy’s director when the program began in the early 2000s and later became the director of the Center for Excellence in Elder Law. Returning to her previous role will be a homecoming, which will allow her to create a shared vision with others in the advocacy community at Stetson Law along with educating a new generation about effective advocacy.

 “I look forward to having Roberta’s guidance and experience at the helm again,” said President Wendy B. Libby, Ph.D. “She set the stage for the Center for Excellence in Advocacy, creating a foundation of knowledge and curriculum and building a tradition of excellence that continues today.”

Stetson Law is ranked the no.1 school for trial advocacy for the 21^st time in the United States by U.S. News & World Report. The publication has been reporting law institution rankings for the past 25 years.

Stetson Law is committed to the concept of the complete advocate — one who commands a superior understanding of the law, is able to persuasively present evidence and has the humanity to know when to do what is right and just.

“My biggest goal this year is to bring all of the different pieces of advocacy at Stetson Law together,” said Flowers. “So many different members of the Stetson community are involved in advocacy. It will be a great opportunity for us to discuss how we can work together to improve a student’s education and our national influence in the advocacy arena.”

Michael Davids J.D. ’19 has published a scholarly legal article, written originally for a Stetson seminar, in the Seattle Journal of Environmental Law.

It is called To Bee or Not to Bee and addresses threats to useful honeybees and suggestions for legal reform.  

Second-year student Christopher Hedges spent his spring semester working at the United States Attorney’s Office (USAO) for the Middle District of Florida. Professor Beane’s Federal Litigation Externship class places students in the U.S. Attorney’s Office, the U.S. Department of Justice, and the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs in order to gain real-world experience in federal litigation.

Hedges is a second-career law student with a background in business and a passion for courtroom litigation. He sees the focus on experiential learning at Stetson Law as a way to stand out from the crowd, as well as a way to gain valuable experience and knowledge that does not come from a classroom or textbook.

Hedges urges interested students to participate in some kind of experiential learning at Stetson, and if possible, to devote an entire summer to an externship or clinic. Students may need to carefully evaluate their course loads when taking an externship during a semester full of classes—Hedges spent 16-24 hours a week at the U.S. Attorney’s Office. He emphasizes the importance of being able to come into work regularly and consistently in order to reap all the benefits of the externship experience.

At the U.S. Attorney’s Office, interns can be doing a different task each day. Some days Hedges was doing work preparing for a trial, such as redacting documents that will be used as evidence. Some days he spent researching and writing or drafting documents. Because of the nature of the office, interns can encounter cases of first impression where extensive research is required to examine a novel or unknown issue.

Students are not assigned to just one attorney at the U.S. Attorney’s Office, so they have a chance to experience a variety of cases and procedures. For Hedges, this was an invaluable experience to see how a case proceeds from beginning to end. He shadowed one U.S. Attorney who built an entire case upon jury instructions, beginning by asking what needed to be proven to the jury to get a guilty conviction. Hedges emphasizes the holistic nature of the experience and says, “If you don’t see the case from beginning to end you don’t see how all the pieces fit together.”

Hedges encourages students interested in trial advocacy, either civil or criminal, to seek out this externship. You will have the opportunity to meet specialized legal personnel, including trial team specialists who create exhibits and support attorneys in preparing for trial. He describes this kind of experience as getting students out of the “bubble” of law school and providing the kind of real-world experience that is integral to being an effective attorney.

During his externship Hedges utilized information from multiple classes, including Criminal Procedure, Criminal Law, Research and Writing I and II, Evidence, and Trial Advocacy. Ultimately, working at the U.S. Attorney’s Office gave him the chance to blend the black letter law he learned in the classroom with experiential skills utilized by successful attorneys in order to prepare himself for a career in litigation.

Stetson University College of Law’s annual Legal Tech CLE on June 14 is a full-day program for lawyers and legal practitioners on using technology in the legal practice.

The program begins with registration at 8:30 a.m. at 1401 61st S. in Gulfport.

Topics include the process of integrating software when starting a firm; improving the bottom line; getting and keeping clients; cyber security; ethics and vendors; and technology and access to justice.

Speakers will include:

• Professor Jordan Fischer Teaching Professor of Law, Thomas R. Kline School of Law, Drexel University
• Daniel Whitehouse, Technology Attorney, Whitehouse & Cooper
• Susan Demers Dean of Public Policy & Legal Studies, St. Petersburg College
• Sam Harden, A lawyer who taught himself to code, Development Team Leader, Florida Justice Technology Center

For more information, and to register, visit https://www.stetson.edu/law/conferences/homepages/legal-tech-cle-agenda.php.

Stetson University College of Law has recently received a grant to support its efforts to protect aquatic resources through its Institute for Biodiversity Law and Policy.

The Joy McCann Foundation has awarded Stetson Law’s Institute for Biodiversity Law and Policy a $150,000 grant for a project to ensure effective long-term protection of aquatic restoration efforts in Florida and across the country. Under the Clean Water Act, developers are required to mitigate damage to aquatic resources, primarily by restoring wetlands and streams. The project will review the legal and financial mechanisms in place for the long-term protection of these restored sites. 

“This will be the first study that compares whether equivalent standards are being applied to all mitigation providers—mitigation banks, in-lieu fee programs, and permittees,” said Professor Royal Gardner, director of the Institute for Biodiversity Law and Policy. 

David Urban, managing director of Ecosystem Investment Partners, stated, “I am glad that an entity such as Stetson Law is going to independently review this very important issue of long-term sustainability.”

To learn more about Stetson’s Institute for Biodiversity Law and Policy, visit https://www.stetson.edu/law/international/biodiversity/. 

Michèle Alexandre, the next dean of Stetson University College of Law in Gulfport, Florida, was welcomed on the floor of the senate in Tallahassee on May 1 as Stetson Law’s first African-American dean. As Florida’s first law school, Stetson has been instrumental in training lawyers and judges throughout the state for more than a century.

Alexandre met with legislators including Senators Darryl Rouson, Jeff Brandes, Ed Hooper, Janet Cruz, Senate President Bill Galvano; Representatives Kionne McGhee and Chris Sprowls; Governor Ron DeSantis; Florida Supreme Court Justice Ricky L. Polston and staff of the Florida Office of the Attorney General including General Counsel Richard Martin during a special event in the state capital.

Alexandre is a noted civil rights, gender and race scholar, and author of “The New Frontiers of Civil Rights Litigation.” She is currently serving as the associate dean for Faculty Development and Intellectual Life, professor of law, and the Leonard B. Melvin, Jr. Lecturer at the University of Mississippi School of Law.

At the University of Mississippi, she chaired the undergraduate Honors curriculum committee, led the Honors College faculty, and taught courses in the undergraduate international studies program. She has a J.D. from Harvard Law and was Colgate University’s first black valedictorian.

Alexandre’s appointment as dean at Stetson Law, Florida’s first law school, is effective June 2019.

Stetson University College of Law’s Willem C. Vis International Commercial Arbitration Moot team competed April 13-18 in Vienna, Austria, with 372 teams from 80 countries to finish in the elite top eight of law schools that competed from across the planet.

Law alumnus Jason Stearns J.D. ’08 and Professor Stephanie Vaughan coached and traveled with the team of students Matthew Ceriale, Ryan Dwyer, Kyle McCabe and Clare McQueen. Dwyer was recognized individually with an honorable mention oralist award.  

“This is the furthest Stetson has advanced in the Vis Moot in more than six years, and it is the largest field of teams ever competing in Vienna,” said Professor Vaughan. “It is truly difficult to put into words what this group of students has done for Stetson. We are certainly back on the international map.”  

The team also performed well in a pre-moot at the historic Peace Palace in The Hague, Netherlands. The Peace Palace hosts the Permanent Court of Arbitration, and is known world-wide. Only 16 teams were invited to participate in The Hague and Stetson is the only team from the U.S. that was invited. 

The field is narrowed to 64 teams after four preliminary rounds. Stetson advanced to the round of 64 and proceeded to beat teams from Lebanon in the round of 64, Uruguay in the round of 32, and Sweden in the round of 16. In the round of eight, Stetson’s team was ultimately defeated by Ottawa, which made it to the final round. 

To learn more about advocacy at Stetson Law, visit www.stetson.edu/law/advocacy.