Posts Tagged ‘University of Maryland’

The Maryland Intellectual Property Legal Resource Center (MIPLRC), which offers free legal services on intellectual property and related matters to entrepreneurs and emerging technology companies and explores relevant legal, ethical and policy issues in the high technology and intellectual property areas, is moving to the University of Maryland, College Park on September 1, university officials announce today.

The center, a joint initiative of the University of Maryland School of Law, the Maryland Department of Business and Economic Development, and now the Maryland Technology Enterprise Institute (Mtech), will be headquartered at the Technology Advancement Program (TAP) incubator, the state’s first business incubator established in 1985.

MIPLRC’s legal services will be available at no charge to university faculty and students, as well as to regional entrepreneurs and startup companies.

“One of the most common obstacles confronting entrepreneurs is an inability to properly protect their intellectual property and legal rights due to lack of knowledge or lack of funds,” says Patricia Campbell, Law School Associate Professor and MIPLRC Director. “MIPLRC helps to eliminate those obstacles, and relocating to TAP will bring the center’s valuable services directly to the vibrant community of technology entrepreneurs at the University of Maryland.”

[Reuters]

To Phoebe Haddon, diversity is more than a buzzword or a proud achievement to be plastered on a brochure. It’s an absolute key to the subject that makes her tick.

Haddon, the new dean of the University of Maryland School of Law, loves to pick apart the history and meaning of our laws. Those conversations are far richer, she says, with input from the widest possible range of people.

“I think women bring new dimensions to thinking about the law, because we ask different questions,” says Haddon, a fourth-generation lawyer whose family has advocated for civil rights for more than a century. “In the area of human rights and domestic problems, women have asked questions about a lack of equity that were simply not asked before.”

Haddon, 58, who last month became one of a handful of black women in the country to lead a law school, spent decades at Temple University in Philadelphia pushing students to think about how race, gender and class shape legal opinions. She has served on numerous panels devoted to bringing more minorities and underprivileged students into law schools. She worked for government agencies that sought to rehabilitate urban neighborhoods.

Her belief in diversity has led her to question the reliance on the Law School Admission Test (LSAT), which correlates to first-year performance in law school but in her opinion says little about who will make a good lawyer and favors wealthy applicants.

[Baltimore Sun]

Martha Marion Ertman and Karen Ann Lash, lawyers, were married Saturday at the Robert Treat Paine Estate in Waltham, Mass. The Rev. William L. Clark, a Unitarian Universalist minister, officiated, and Cantor Sabrina Sojourner took part in the ceremony.

Ms. Ertman, 45, is a professor at the University of Maryland School of Law in Baltimore, where she teaches contracts and commercial law. She graduated cum laude from Wellesley and received her law degree cum laude from Northwestern.

She is a daughter of Mary Jane Ertman and Gardner Ertman of Lexington, Mass. Her father, a retired architect, was a founder at Day & Ertman, an architectural firm that was in Waltham. Her mother retired as the associate editor of Wellesley Magazine, an alumnae publication for the college.

Ms. Lash, 47, is an independent legal consultant whose clients include nonprofit organizations and law schools. She was an associate dean at the University of Southern California Law School from 1991 to 2002. She graduated magna cum laude from the University of California, Los Angeles, and received her law degree from the University of Southern California.

[NY Times]

Phoebe A. Haddon initially carried two briefcases full of work home every night from her new job as dean of the University of Maryland School of Law. The next morning, however, she inevitably realized the briefcases remained exactly as she left them.

“I’ve now the developed the habit, after two weeks, of understanding that I better stay here and work late rather than bring stuff home,” she said with a laugh.

There are other signs Haddon is still settling into her new position: her corner office is mostly bare, save for a couple of family photos and a brilliant fuchsia orchid on her desk, a welcoming gift from her fellow administrators. At the same time, she is soaking up as much institutional knowledge as possible before charting the law school’s future through a long-term planning program she will lead this fall.

“I really want to have a lot of the process figured out so we can start right away,” she said Monday.

[Daily Record]

The American Bar Association (ABA) has selected the film “The Response” as the 2009 ABA Silver Gavel Award winner for “drama and literature.”

“The Response” was made in collaboration with the University of Maryland School of Law and funded through its “Linking Law & Arts Program,” with support from the France-Merrick Foundation and Venable LLP.

The film is a courtroom drama based on the actual transcripts of the Guantanamo Bay Combatant Status Review Tribunals. In the film, three judges must decide the fate of a Middle Eastern detainee.

[UMB]

Insurance companies in Maryland must compile information on policies sold to slave owners before 1865 under a new state law.

The reports will be kept in an archive at the University of Maryland School of Law in Baltimore and published on the state Insurance Department Web site, The Baltimore Sun reported. Students at the law school developed the idea for the law.

[UPI]