Archive for July, 2009
FAMU Law School Should Get Accredited Today
Today, Florida A&M administrators and staffers will board a bus and travel to the university’s Orlando-based College of Law.FAMU
The occasion behind the journey rests thousands of miles away in a Chicago hotel behind closed doors at the American Bar Association’s business meeting. The ABA will decide the accreditation status of FAMU’s College of Law – a school that has been operating on temporary, provisional accreditation since 2004.
The law school has been open for seven years. However, it’s been a challenging time for officials and staff of the College of Law. In May 2008, a scathing report was completed about the law school. In the report, the ABA site evaluation team discussed several challenges and focused on the “dysfunction and dissention” of the faculty.
Since then, College of Law Dean LeRoy Pernell said there have been many new faculty hires. Plus, the school’s officials scaled a crucial hurdle in late June.
Posted in 
Tags: University of Minnesota Law School to Award up to 22 Post-Graduate Fellowships
The University of Minnesota Law School will award up to 22 post-graduate fellowships under a newly announced program funded by the Robina Foundation.
As many as 15 Robina Public Policy Post-Graduate Fellowships and as many as seven Robina Second Judicial District Public Defender’s Office Post-Graduate Fellowships, established through the donation of a law school graduate, will be awarded to 2009 graduates.
Applicants for the public-policy fellowships must design a project or apply for an existing unfunded project at a nonprofit organization. Public-policy projects are currently available at the Battered Women’s Legal Advocacy Project, the Cancer Legal Line, the Center for Victims of Torture, the Children’s Law Center of Minnesota, the Disability Law Center, HOMEline, the Minnesota Center for Environmental Advocacy and the Minnesota Coalition Against Sexual Assault.
Organizations with public-policy project openings that are willing to host a Robina public-policy fellow can be identified with assistance from the law school’s Career and Professional Development Center.
NYU Law School Group Petitions EPA
A New York law institute petitioned U.S. EPA today to start writing rules that take aim at the emissions linked to global warming.
The Institute for Policy Integrity, a nonprofit advocacy arm of the New York University School of Law, filed a 29-page petition (pdf) to EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson outlining the reasons why she already has the authority to set up a cap-and-trade system to curb greenhouse gases from motor vehicle fuels, nonroad vehicles and aircraft.
The NYU petition is the first to be filed with the Obama EPA seeking the start of greenhouse gas regulations. Major environmental groups so far have held their fire on the issue, explaining that they were pleased with the relative speed of the new administration in addressing climate after eight years of battle with the George W. Bush administration.
Michael Livermore, the group’s executive director, called the document a “friendly petition” designed to nudge the Obama administration into regulatory action on climate change, a move that could also spur action on Capitol Hill.
[NY Times]
Girl Abducted Near Southwestern Law School Was a Professor’s Daughter
The recent murder of a 17-year-old girl who was abducted near the Los Angeles campus of Southwestern University School of Law has sent shockwaves through the law school.
The victim’s mother, Deborah Drooz, a partner at Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck, had just finished a summer course as an adjunct professor at the school.
“This has hit all of us very hard,” said Leslie Steinberg, assistant dean of public affairs at the law school, whose own daughter went to school with the victim, Lily Burk. “We’re in shock. The community is a very close family. On a personal level, all of us are feeling this, and our hearts go out to Professor Drooz’s family. We also want people to understand that this is an extremely unusual situation, and that none of us have ever seen anything like this here.”
Burk had just picked up some paperwork at the Southwestern Law School’s building for her mother when she was abducted on Friday afternoon, according to recent press reports. During the next hour, Burk called her parents, asking how to withdraw cash from an ATM using her credit card. Her beaten body was discovered in her car Saturday morning at a downtown parking lot. A 50-year-old transient, Charles Samuel, who had entered a drug treatment program near the law school’s campus, has been arrested for her murder.
[NLJ]
Elon Law School Offers Unique Bar Prep Program
Today, around 1,200 students from across the state of North Carolina will sit down for part two of the bar exam. Yesterday, part one of the exam was given at the Raleigh Fairgrounds.
The bar exam is the test recent law school graduates take in order to become attorneys.
Countless hours of studying take place in preparation of this exam, which has about a 70 percent pass rate.
For about 30 recent Elon law school graduates, preparation for this exam made less stressful, with a one-of-a-kind program.
The Elon Law School offers the opportunity for students to live on campus for free during the end of May and the entire months of June and July.
“I haven’t heard any one else doing this,” said Damon Duncan, a member of the Elon Law School’s charter class.
Duncan and his wife Melissa, decided to take advantage of this opportunity. Damon explained that Elon President Leo Lambert and Gerry Francis, executive vice president, met with a group of law school students to figure out the best way possible for the most students to pass the exam.
“We can completely focus on studying for the bar exam,” Damon said. “It’s almost like going to boot camp. You go and everything is provided for you and the only thing you have to worry about is training and getting ready for the bar exam.”
Google Visits Howard Law School Today to Discuss Book Search
David Drummond, Senior Vice President at Google, will visit Howard University tomorrow morning and discuss the Google’s Book Search and its goal to “Equalizing Access to Knowledge.” The talk is sponsored by The Institute of Intellectual Property and Social Justice at Howard University School of Law and will include an “engaging discussion on Google’s book digitization project, the relationship between social justice and access to information,” and “its relationship to the economic development of historically disadvantaged groups.
The Google Public Policy blog also cites the recent win in the Google Book Search settlement agreement as a topic of discussion and how this settlement will “dramatically expand online access to millions of works, opening a new chapter in equalizing access to information for users nationwide.” The talk will take “a closer look at what this agreement means for historically disadvantaged groups in particular:”
[Examiner]
ABA Shrugs at Former DePaul Law School Dean’s Complaint
Concerns over the financial affairs at DePaul University’s law school — first raised by the law-school dean who was later fired — will not affect its status as an accredited institution.
The university released a report Monday from the American Bar Association, the accreditation agency for law schools, that concluded the central administration provides sufficient funds to the law school.
The funding of the law school became controversial in June when the school’s dean, Glen Weissenberger, complained to the ABA that the university had breached a 2004 agreement that guaranteed the college of law 75 percent of the “net tuition” in any given year. His memo also charged that the administration had provided inaccurate information about the revenue-sharing agreement to the ABA’s accreditation committee.
On June 18, two days after Weissenberger sent the letter to the ABA, the university fired him. The administration appointed Illinois Appellate Judge Warren Wolfson as interim dean.
