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 21st 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:
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.
A team from the National Law School of India University in Bangalore won the 23rd Annual Stetson International Environmental Moot Court Competition on April 13 in Gulfport.
National Law School of India University law student Bhargov Chakraborty was named Best Oralist in the Final Round.
The National University of Singapore team was the runner-up in the competition. The University of Hawaii took home the Best Memorial. Students from both the Universidad de Monterrey in Mexico and Hugh Wooding Law School in Trinidad & Tobago received the Spirit of Stetson Award.
Teams from India, Ireland, the Philippines, Singapore, and Trinidad & Tobago competed in the quarterfinals of the competition.
View a gallery of images from this event:
By Brielle Tucker
On March 15, three Stetson students, Emilia Soliman, Sarah Cibula, and Brielle Tucker, attended the Ms. JD 11th Annual Conference on Women in the Law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. The theme was “Speak Up” in honor of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s birthday, and the group celebrated by listening to women in the law speak about various timely issues.
The first workshop, “Finding your voice and using it,” presented by Gail J. Cummings of Gail J. Cummings Consulting, LLC, provided helpful tips and insights on how to be vocal and your own advocate when navigating your career.
“It was amazing to be able to network and connect with so many women attorneys with such leadership in the field,” said Emilia Soliman. “They gave great advice, especially for young soon-to-be attorneys. They taught me we can do it all.”
Stetson University College of Law’s Veterans Advocacy Clinic recently helped secure long-denied benefits for an 80-year-old Tampa Bay area Navy veteran who was exposed to radiation during atomic bomb testing in the 1950s.The veteran is now eligible to receive disability benefits retroactive to April 2012, when he filed his claim.
Stetson Law student Brian Paul presented the case before the Board of Veterans Appeals at the St. Petersburg V.A. regional office at Bay Pines, Florida. Stetson’s Veterans Advocacy Clinic collected evidence that convinced the board to find the veteran’s cancer to be as likely as not caused by his exposure to ionizing radiation.
Several Veterans Advocacy Clinic students and staff attorney Ronald “Rocky” Roodhouse LL.M. ’17 researched the etiology of the cancer, documents about the atomic bomb tests, and the standard procedures for calculating radiation exposure that occurred decades ago. The Stetson Veterans Advocacy Clinic team discovered that the VA severely underestimated the veteran’s exposure to radiation and improperly disregarded medical opinions from distinguished oncologists.
The Veterans Advocacy Clinic, located on Stetson University’s Gulfport, Florida, campus, was dedicated as part of the Veterans Law Institute in 2012 to help the growing population of Tampa Bay area veterans obtain denied Veterans Administration disability benefits.
Professor Stacey-Rae Simcox, director of the Veterans Law Institute and Veterans Advocacy Clinic, oversees Stetson Law students providing free legal assistance to veterans seeking denied disability benefits.
“Stetson’s law students are at the heart of the Clinic’s mission to serve our nation’s disabled veterans by providing them top notch legal help to receive the benefits they have earned,” said Professor Simcox.
Veterans who need free legal help with VA disability benefits appeals should reach out to the Veterans Advocacy Clinic at Stetson by calling 727-562-7324 or visiting www.stetson.edu/law/veterans.
Professor of Law Luz Nagle spent Spring Break in Colombia working on social justice initiatives.
Professor Nagle met with the community-based social justice organization Junta de Accion Comunal San José, in a village in the municipality of Guarne, Colombia. She talked with Junta leaders about ways to limit over-development and environmental damage impacting the community.
“We will be coordinating grassroots support and legal responses for the well-being of the rural people living here who just want a safe and secure environment in which to live and care for their families and properties,” said Professor Nagle.
The Junta was instrumental in building an aquaduct system to provide safe and plentiful potable water to the local communities.
While in Colombia, Professor Nagle also met with a family of shoemakers in Rionegro that is trying to expand their business and develop a strong social entrepreneurship focus, training local artesans to continue making shoes, and using the proceeds of shoe sales to make custom-fitted shoes for disabled people who otherwise cannot afford shoes. The business, which has been in the same location for 50 years, needs to move into a larger work space to hire and train more staff.
At Stetson Law, Professor Nagle teaches courses on international law and international and transborder criminal law, human trafficking, international business transactions, terrorism and global security.