Year: 2011

Usually the courts of last resort in federal cases, the Federal Courts of Appeals are widely misunderstood by the public, as is appellate practice generally. The American Bar Association is working to change that through a new project, a blog called “Media Alerts on Federal Courts of Appeals.” The ABA hopes to increase awareness and understanding of the Federal Courts of Appeals by expanding access to the work of those Courts. The University of Texas School of Law plays an important role in this project: students report on decisions issued by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.

UT Law’s Class of 2014 arrived August 22, 2011, for 1L Orientation and the beginning of classes. As usual, the incoming students are a diverse and accomplished group.

David Hall, ’69, executive director of Texas RioGrande Legal Aid, turned his youthful passion for helping the poor into a distinguished and influential public-interest legal career.

Ryan Newman, ’07, will begin a clerkship for Justice Samuel Alito at the U.S. Supreme Court at the beginning of the 2011–2012 term.

Karen Engle earns 2010 Best Book Award from American Political Science Association Section on Human Rights.

The University of Texas School of Law has awarded the seventh Equal Justice Scholarship to Cassandra McCrae, an incoming first-year law student. The scholarship covers tuition and fees for three years of legal study. McCrae has committed to working after law school on a full-time basis for three years providing direct legal services to low-income individuals or groups at a nonprofit organization in the United States.

Professor Robert Chesney testified before the House Armed Services Committee on July 26, 2011, in Washington, D.C. as legislators continued their debate over policies surrounding the detention and prosecution of accused terrorists.

Howard Wolf, ’59, wants to transform TxDOT to meet the needs of a changing Texas, and world.

Dan Mangis’s career as a Foreign Service officer has taken him far from Austin to Baghdad’s Green Zone.

Apparently, there is a little more Badger in one of our long-tenured Longhorns than many folks might have realized. Professor George Dix, the George R. Killam Jr. Chair of Criminal Law, was recently named “Badger of the Year” by the Austin-area alumni of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Video is available of Professor William Forbath's recent lecture at the University of Oregon on “Human Rights: the Socialism of the 21st Century?”

An Interview with Inga Markovits on her book, Justice in Lüritz: Experiencing Socialist Law in East Germany, winner of the Law and Society Association’s prestigious J. Willard Hurst Prize