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From Texas Law to the Supreme Court: Meet Alejandra Ávila ’14
Ávila reflects on the experiences that took her from law school to clerking for Justice Sonia Sotomayor during the October 2022 Term. She was the 39th Texas Law graduate to clerk at the Supreme Court, and the first to do so for Justice Sotomayor. Read this story.
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Faculty Spotlight
Helping Jamaica Write a Constitution
Global constitutional expert Richard Albert has seen his research relied upon numerous times in countries around the world reviewing or rewriting their constitutions. In 2021, he advised the Constitutional Convention of Chile on designing procedures of constitutional reform for the country’s proposed constitution. And in 2022, the Supreme Court of Kenya relied extensively on his theory of constitutional dismemberment in its decision on a major dispute over a constitutional reform.
Now, Prof. Albert is helping Jamaica—the country where his parents met and his great-great-grandfather was born—in its transition from a constitutional monarchy to a republic. Albert is one of 15 people appointed by the Jamaican Prime Minister to serve on the Constitution Reform Committee, helping to lay the groundwork for a new governmental framework.
According to Albert, the CRC has three objectives. “One, to replace the King with a Jamaican Head of State,” says Albert. “Two, to modernize the country’s constitutional arrangements. And three, to patriate the Constitution – to bring it home, at last, from the United Kingdom.”
Public Accommodations and Civil Rights
Within minutes of the announcement of the recent U.S. Supreme Court opinion in 303 Creative v. Elenis, Prof. Elizabeth Sepper found herself on the radio explaining the potentially far-reaching implications of the court’s decision and her concerns about them. “The central issue was whether states can apply anti-discrimination law to a commercial business that uses some expression in the production of their products. The court said, no, that the free speech clause bars that application. And that applies across the nation to applications of public accommodations anti-discrimination laws, and potentially further into other areas of anti-discrimination law.”
Sepper, one of the nation’s foremost experts on public accommodations laws, was cited in Justice Sotomayor’s dissent in 303 Creative. She has written extensively on how the history of anti-discrimination laws relates to current conflicts between these laws and the rights of free speech and free exercise of religion.
With a focus at the intersections of equality, healthcare, and religious rights, her extensive scholarship probes the ambiguities and potential conflicts among these subjects. “I don’t think I fit in a box. I’m a bit of a chameleon,” says Sepper.
Finding Resilience in the Law
When many lawyers think about the first year of law school, they recall coffee-fueled discussions about the theories behind contract consideration and tort law remedies. Prof. Erik Encarnacion wants to change the way the profession thinks about these foundational concepts.
Encarnacion’s new research includes a series of articles on how resilience can shape traditional private law. His writing and speaking on resilience thus far have focused on tort law remedies, but this lawyer and philosopher hopes to open the door to questions about the bases for modern law. In “Resilience, Retribution, and Punitive Damages,” Encarnacion introduces the concept of “retributive resilience” in punitive damages.
The paper argues that rather than representing an unjustified “windfall,” awards of punitive damages paid to the plaintiff can in appropriate cases be “a crucial avenue by which victims may attain a constructive form of retributive justice that allows them to demonstrate, to themselves and others, their resilience.” This is a departure from the widely-held view that punitive damages are inherently opposed to tort law’s compensatory aims, and Encarnacion says he resists “knee-jerk hostility to punitive damages.”
Innovating the Curriculum
“It’s the best class I ever taught in my life.” That’s how Prof. A. Mechele Dickerson, describes “COVID and the Law,” the course she created in 2021 to discuss lessons in law and society learned from the pandemic. Because that pandemic was still ongoing as the course began, Dickerson realized that the best way to teach it was to bring in guest lecturers from around the entire university. In each weekly session, students heard from experts on medical issues, environmental justice, the rights of people who are in jails, prisons, and detention facilities, workplace health and safety laws, intellectual property law, and more.
The broad scope captured essential parts of Dickerson’s approach to both her scholarship and teaching: embrace interdisciplinary learning and find inspiration in real-world challenges.
“Texas, in terms of my scholarship and my teaching, is absolutely perfect, because we’re a very large research university, which means that I am given grace and flexibility to teach where my research is going,” says Dickerson, who has been recognized for both her teaching and her scholarship as an elected member of the American Law Institute and an inductee into the University of Texas Academy of Distinguished Teachers.