Latest News

  • Six students have been selected to serve as Public Service Scholars for the 2011–2012 year with the William Wayne Justice Center for Public Interest Law at the University of Texas School of Law.
  • Law School students and alumni provided pro bono legal advice to victims of the recent wildfires in Central Texas. Hundreds of people in and near Bastrop, about thirty miles east of Austin, have lost their homes or experienced significant damages.
  • Stefanie Lindquist, associate dean for academic affairs and A.W. Walker Centennial Chair in Law at the University of Texas School of Law, has been awarded the 2011 Best Conference Paper Award by the Law and Courts section of the American Political Science Association.
  • Professor William Forbath, Lloyd M. Bentsen Chair in Law, recently published “The Distributive Constitution” in Democracy: a Journal of Ideas as part of a debate with Geoffrey Stone and others about how progressives should interpret the Constitution. He will also conduct a webinar for the American Constitutional Society on October 12, 2011.
  • As senior litigation counsel for Shell Oil, environmental lawyer Cisselon Nichols Hurd, ’91, works on cases that shape the future of industry.
  • Linda Mullenix, Morris & Rita Atlas Chair in Advocacy, will participate in a roundtable discussion at New York City’s Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law on September 12, 2011, on “The Lessons of 9/11 for Mass Torts.” The discussion will focus on the U.S. Congress-created September 11th Victim Compensation Fund of 2001 and how it has helped shape our response to mass disaster and whether it provides a useful template for the future.
  • Jordan Steiker, Judge Robert M Parker Endowed Chair in Law and codirector of the Law School’s Capital Punishment Center, has cowritten (with his sister, Carol Steiker of Harvard Law School) an article in The New Republic, “Don’t Blame Perry for Texas’s Execution Addiction. He Doesn’t Have Much to Do With It,” on Texas Governor Rick Perry’s role in administering capital punishment in Texas.
  • Lisa Blatt and David Frederick are good friends from their days at UT Law who still cross paths every once in a while. That in itself is not unusual. Every Law School graduate has had the experience of running into fellow alumni in court, in social settings, or even in the grocery store. For Blatt and Frederick, however, the venue is somewhat more august—before the bar of the Supreme Court of the United States. The two have faced off against each other there three times, including twice in the recent 2010–2011 session.
  • Lynn A. Baker, Frederick M. Baron Chair in Law at the University of Texas School of Law, was one of a handful of legal scholars invited to speak at the 2011 Ninth Circuit Judicial Conference in Carlsbad, California, on August 16, 2011. Baker’s panel, “Federalism in the 21st Century: Balancing States' Rights with Federal Power,” discussed current Supreme Court federalism jurisprudence, offered predictions on the direction the Roberts court is likely to take, and debated the proper balance between federal and state power.
  • 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.