Law School Alumni Association announces 2013 distinguished alumni award recipients
The University of Texas Law Alumni Association has announced the recipients of its 2013 distinguished alumni awards. Kathryn Fuller, ’76, received the Outstanding Alumnus Award; The Honorable Robert M. Parker, ’64, received the Lifetime Achievement Award; Joe R. Long, ’58, received the Distinguished Alumnus Award for Community Service; and Dick DeGuerin, ’65, received the Honorary Order of the Coif.
Kathryn Fuller, ’76, Outstanding Alumnus Award
Kathryn Fuller, ’76, Outstanding Alumnus Award
Kathryn S. Fuller is chair of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History and a managing partner of Doyle Property Partners. She also serves on the boards of Alcoa Inc., the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Summit Foundation, and the Greater Himalayas Foundation.
Fuller was president and chief executive officer of World Wildlife Fund from 1989 to 2005 and remains actively involved with WWF as president emerita. Prior to that, she was executive vice president, general counsel, and director of WWF’s programs in public policy and wildlife trade monitoring. While at WWF, Fuller’s work emphasized the development of financing mechanisms for nature protection, the role of women in grassroots conservation, and the deepening of WWF’s scientific base.
She also served as a trustee of the Ford Foundation from 1993 until 2010, the last seven years as board chair, and as a Public Policy Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars during the 2005–2006 academic year.
Before joining WWF, Fuller worked at the U.S. Department of Justice, first in the Office of Legal Counsel and then in the Land and Natural Resources Division, where she helped create and later headed the Wildlife and Marine Resources Section.
Fuller received both her BA in English and American Literature and an honorary degree from Brown University and was a member of the Brown Corporation for seventeen years. She earned a law degree with honors from the Law School in 1976, and on graduation spent a year clerking for the chief judge of the Southern District of Texas. She subsequently pursued graduate studies in marine, estuarine, and environmental science at the University of Maryland. Her field work has included studies of wildebeest behavior in Tanzania and coral reef crustaceans in the Caribbean.
In additional to her honorary degree from Brown, Fuller is the recipient of a number of other honorary degrees and awards. Married to UT Law classmate Stephen Doyle and the mother of three grown children, she lives in Washington, D.C., and Bonnieux, France.
The Honorable Robert M. Parker, ’64, Lifetime Achievement Award
The Honorable Robert M. Parker, ’64, Lifetime Achievement Award
The Honorable Robert M. Parker received a BBA from the University of Texas at Austin in 1961 and an LLB from the Law School in 1964. He served as Administrative Assistant to Congressman Ray Roberts then entered private practice in Longview, Texas, where he tried over 100 cases to verdict in state and federal courts.
He was nominated to the Eastern District of Texas Federal Bench by President Jimmy Carter in 1979 and then to the Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit by President Bill Clinton in 1994. He retired from the judiciary at the end of 2002.
He served as president of the Gregg County Bar Association and as president of the Northeast Texas Bar Association. During his judicial tenure he served as president of the District Judge’s Association, chief judge of the Eastern District of Texas, on the Board of the Federal Judge’s Association, on the Board of the Federal Judicial Center, and was chair of the Court Administration and Case Management Committee of the Judicial Conference. He also taught a summer course on professional responsibility at the University of Iowa School of Law.
After his judicial retirement he founded Parker, Bunt & Ainsworth PC, and has engaged in an active intellectual property practice with both sons-in-law. He also serves as a trustee on the National Asbestos Trust. He lives with his bride of fifty-four years, Frieda Parker, in Tyler, Texas, where their two daughters and four grandchildren also reside.
He has been honored by the creation of the Robert M. Parker Chair in Law and the Robert M. Parker Endowed Presidential Scholarship at the University of Texas School of Law.
Joe R. Long, ’58, Distinguished Alumnus Award for Community Service
Joe R. Long
Distinguished Alumnus Award for Community Service
Joe R. Long graduated from the Law School in 1958, after serving in the U.S. Army. During law school, he worked with the Teacher Retirement System of Texas and taught school one year at the Brown Schools, a private school in Austin for children with extreme learning disabilities.
On February 1, 1958, he married Teresa Lozano. Shortly after, Long was employed by the State Securities Board as an investigator, investigating securities fraud throughout the state of Texas. He successfully participated in the first criminal prosecution under the new securities law in Plainview, Texas, in 1959, and was made chief of the Enforcement Division of the State Securities Board in that year. In February 1961, due to the illness of his father-in-law, he left the State Securities Board to operate a farming and dairy business owned by his wife’s family. He successfully operated this business for 18 months and returned to the practice of law upon the recovery of his father-in-law.
In 1963 he joined the Office of the Attorney General as an assistant attorney general in the Bond, Insurance, and Banking Division. In 1964, he was made chief of the Bond, Banking, and Insurance Division. In 1965, Long entered the private practice of law in Austin, specializing in administrative law, principally in the areas of banking and savings and loan law. For two years he was a sole practitioner and thereafter was a member of several partnerships, ultimately organizing his own law firm and continuing his specialized law practice until 1988. He continued to handle trial and appellate work in the area of banking and savings and loan law, as well as representing clients before the various regulatory bodies governing banks and savings and loan.
In 1968 he was part of a group that organized two banks in Austin, First State Bank and Community National Bank. Ultimately, he became chairman of both banks and bought control of both banks. These banks continued to operate as separate entities until 1989 with Long serving as chairman of both banks. In 1988, during a period of economic upheaval in Texas, the two banks in which Long was the principal owner were able to acquire seven banks which failed in the Austin area, and ultimately all were combined in 1989 under the name First State Bank. Long ceased to practice law and served as chairman and chief executive officer of First State Bank from 1989 to August 31, 1998, when the bank was sold to Norwest Corporation, now Wells Fargo Corporation. When First State Bank was sold it had over $620 million in assets and forty-seven branch offices scattered throughout Texas. He worked as a consultant to Wells Fargo for two years until August 31, 2000. Since that time he has overseen his private business affairs and has spent much of his time in philanthropic activities with several colleges and universities in Texas, as well as with several nonprofit corporations.
Mr. and Mrs. Long have a keen interest in Latin America and Latin American affairs. Among their recent philanthropic activities they endowed the Institute of Latin American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin with a ten million–dollar gift, the income of which will be used principally for scholarships for graduate and undergraduate students and supplemental pay for faculty members who specialize in Latin American history, politics, government, art, and history.
Dick DeGuerin, ’65, Honorary Order of the Coif
Dick DeGuerin, ’65
Honorary Order of the Coif
Dick DeGuerin graduated from the Law School in 1965. He started his law career as an assistant district attorney, moved on to work as a trial associate with Butler, Binion, Rice, Cook & Knapp, and then launched an outstanding career in criminal defense. In 1971, DeGuerin associated himself with the notable Percy Foreman’s firm, where DeGuerin’s brother, Mike, also landed. After a successful tenure with Foreman, DeGuerin went on to create his own law firm with Lewis Dickson, another protégé of Foreman’s. The law firm of DeGuerin & Dickson became one of the leading and most well respected criminal defense law firms in Houston. The firm has recently taken on a new name, DeGuerin, Dickson, Hennessy & Ward.
He has several published works and was the first attorney to bring a Hyde Amendment case. DeGuerin enjoys a widely varied practice in both state and federal trials and appeals. In practice for forty-eight years, he has successfully defended a variety of clients, including doctors, lawyers, judges and politicians, as well as people accused of murder, smuggling, money laundering, and white-collar crime. He is consistently named among the top criminal lawyers in the nation.
DeGuerin has been an adjunct professor teaching Advanced Criminal Law at the Law School since 1994. He and his wife, Janie, spend their time between Houston, their ranch in Burton, and home in Marfa, Texas.