Twice each year, Dean Jay Conison provides a comprehensive law school update in the form of a letter to alumni and friends.

October 2009

Dear Alumni and Friends:

Only a few months have passed since my last letter to you. In that letter, I discussed at some length the economic environment we were facing, the fact that we were weathering the economic challenges well, and the plans and programs that will continue to enable us to thrive. The period since that last letter has seen many important developments in the life and work of the Valparaiso University School of Law. These reflect continued success and even stronger ability to succeed in the years to come. The main developments include:

A strong new class of first-year students has entered and begun their studies. The most impressive characteristic of our new students is that 26% of the new J.D. class consists of students from underrepresented racial and ethnic groups. This is a significant increase from last year, where 15% of the fall 2008 entering class were students from such groups.

The Board of Directors of Valparaiso University has approved construction of the new Lawyering Skills Center—Heritage Hall building. By the time you receive this letter, construction will be under way. Completion of the project is set for fall 2010.

The writing, lecturing, law-reform, and similar activities of our faculty abound, indeed continually increase. Virtually every member of our faculty has an active program of writing, lecturing, and other high-level service.

We have begun to develop law-related educational programs for a wide range of new constituencies, including high school students and executives of nonprofit organizations.

I will share information about all this and more in the following pages.

The New Class

Our new first-year class consists of 191 full-time students and 12 part-time students. As I noted above, 26% are racial and ethnic minorities. In addition, 47% are women; 17 have one or more Master’s degrees; and 32% are 25 years of age or older.

In my spring Alumni Letter, I described my talks with admitted students about our perspective on legal education as education in law as a calling. A substantial number of our new students have already demonstrated a strong commitment to service through prior work and volunteer activity. Eight students are military veterans and five have worked as police officers or for a rescue squad. Others have engaged in political service, for example by working full-time on the last presidential campaign or by serving as interns in the White House or Congress. Some students have worked as child welfare case managers or in other roles in social services; others have taught in public schools. Close to 15% of the entering class have served with the Red Cross, Habitat for Humanity, Amnesty International, or the Special Olympics; as domestic violence and crisis hotline outreach counselors; as mentors to children; or as AmeriCorps community workers.

The overall work experience of these students is impressive. Many already have leadership and management experience in accounting and finance, human resources, pharmacy, real estate, retail, insurance, and sales and marketing. Three students have created their own businesses, including one who founded and ran his own tax and consulting firm for 16 years. Others have worked in occupations ranging from commercial pilot and certified flight instructor to real estate and mortgage services, information technology, farming, and, of course, law, working as interns, paralegals, and clerks.

Our students have graduated from undergraduate and graduate schools in 37 states and 3 foreign countries. Three of our international students attended undergraduate schools in the United States yet are citizens of Canada, Liberia, and Poland. Other students were born and raised in Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Mexico, Poland, Romania, Russia, the Philippines, Moldova, Vietnam, and Kenya.  Collectively, our entering students speak at least 10 languages in addition to English; languages spoken by more than one new student include Spanish, Russian, Polish, French, and Arabic.

Finally, our new students represent more than 100 undergraduate institutions across the country, including:  Amherst College, Arizona State, Calvin College, Dartmouth College, DePaul University, Gonzaga University, Howard University, Indiana University, Loyola Marymount University, Miami University of Ohio, Purdue University, Rutgers, St. Mary’s, Seton Hall, University of Colorado, University of Florida, University of Illinois, University of New Mexico, University of Michigan, University of North Carolina, University of Texas, University of Washington, University of Wisconsin, Valparaiso University, Villanova, Wabash College, and Willamette.

Lawyering Skills Center—Heritage Hall

The law school’s 2000–05 Strategic Plan, finalized in October 2000, contains the following as one of the law school’s facilities goals:

• Renovate Heritage Hall

After nine years of planning and effort, that goal evolved into a more ambitious one:

• Build a new Heritage Hall as part of a larger Lawyering Skills Center

And, at this moment, that more ambitious goal is being realized.

The new Lawyering Skills Center will have two major parts and will triple the space of the old building. One part of it, the new Heritage Hall, will house our clinics. Thanks to the design skills and creativity of our architects, the new Heritage Hall will look almost exactly like the original, 1875 Heritage Hall, thus meeting our desire to preserve in some way this historical building. Yet, it will be a fully modern facility, providing a highly functional home for our present and future clinical programs. The other major portion of the Lawyering Skills Center will be an architecturally congruent wing that will house rooms and other resources for our extensive skills-training program and for other educational functions of the law school. This wing will include a technologically advanced teaching trial courtroom and several other teaching rooms. The lower level of the building will be dedicated to important infrastructure needs of the entire law school.

Thanks to our construction manager and the leadership of the University’s facilities department, we are working under a rapid but realistic construction timeline. The project is scheduled to be completed in October 2010.

Information on the project and on construction will continue to be available on line at www.valpo.edu/law/heritagehall.

The Work of the Faculty

The faculty are an immensely productive group of individuals, and one of the areas in which they are especially productive is scholarship. Some of the recent and pending publications of our faculty members include:

• Robert Blomquist’s[1] article, The Trouble with Negligence Per Se, will be published by the UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA LAW REVIEW.

• Ivan Bodensteiner’s[2] article, Scope of Second Amendment Right: Post-Heller Standard of Review, will be published in the TOLEDO LAW REVIEW. Ivan and Rosalie Levinson[3] have recently finished updating their four-volume treatise on Civil Rights litigation.

• Zachary Calo’s[4] review of James Boyd White’s book, Living Speech, will be published by the JOURNAL OF LAW, PHILOSOPHY AND CULTURE. Zachary has recently posted several important working papers on SSRN,[5] including Catholic Social Thought, Political Liberalism, and the Idea of Human Rights; The Internationalization of Church-State Issues [book review]; and Torture, Necessity and Supreme Emergency: Law and Morality at the End of Law.

• Bruce Ching’s[6] article, Argument, Analogy, and Audience: Using Persuasive Comparisons While Avoiding Unintended Effects, will be published by JOURNAL OF THE ASSOCIATION OF LEGAL WRITING DIRECTORS.

• David Herzig’s[7] article, Am I the Only One Who Pays Tax? The Largest Tax Loophole for the Rich – Exchange Funds, has recently been accepted for publication by the MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY LAW REVIEW.

• Faisal Kutty[8] has recently published several influential book reviews and commentaries, including a review of ISLAM AND SECULARISM by Nader Hashemi in the GLOBE AND MAIL.

• Foundation Press has recently published two textbooks that Michael Murray[9] has co-written with Professor Christy Hallam DeSanctis of the George Washington School of Law. The books are LEGAL RESEARCH AND WRITING ACROSS THE CURRICULUM: PROBLEMS AND EXERCISES and ORAL ADVOCACY: TRIALS, APPEALS, AND MOOT COURT.

• Jeremy Telman’s[10] paper, Law or Politics: Hans Kelsen and the Post-War International Order, will be published in CONSTELLATIONS, an international relations journal. Jeremy’s book review of THE ORIGIN OF AFRICAN-AMERICAN INTERESTS IN INTERNATIONAL LAW, by Henry Richardson, III, has been accepted for publication by the SOUTH AFRICAN JOURNAL OF HUMAN RIGHTS LAW.

• Alan White’s[11] article, Borrowing While Black: Applying Fair Lending Laws to Risk-Based Mortgage Pricing, will appear in 60 SHOUTH CAROLINA LAW REVIEW 677  (2009).

A convenient way to stay current with our faculty’s scholarship is to periodically check the online VALPARAISO JOURNAL OF LEGAL STUDIES on SSRN, which can be found at http://www.ssrn.com/link/Valparaiso-U-LEG.html. Other articles and papers by our faculty can be found by visiting http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/DisplayAbstractSearch.cfm, and searching by author. These sites provide access to recent publications, works-in-progress, working papers, and some older publications. The articles and papers generally may be downloaded free of charge.

Faculty members have also been highly engaged in oral presentations, including conferences and lectures. Some, but by no means all, of the recent activity in this area includes the following:

• Penelope Andrews[12] was on the Organizing Committee for the 2009 Law & Society Conference, and chaired various panels there including one concerning Professor Henry Richardson’s major book, THE ORIGIN OF AFRICAN AMERICANS' INTEREST IN INTERNATIONAL LAW. Penny organized a symposium on Comparative Constitutionalism at Stellenbosch University in South Africa in March 2009. In addition, she is an organizer and moderator of the upcoming conference to be held at the law school, Civil Rights in the Obama Era. The date of this conference is November 13.

• Zachary Calo traveled to Denver in August where he led a faculty colloquium on retribution, justice and mercy in criminal law. Also in August, he gave a presentation at a faculty workshop at St. Louis University Law School.

• Bruce Ching presented papers at the Applied Storytelling Conference in Portland, Oregon, in July, the Northwest Regional Legal Writing Conference in August, and the Southeast Regional Legal Writing Conference in September.

• JoEllen Lind[13] chaired two panels on constitutional law at the Law & Society meeting and also presented her paper on Lawyering in a Global Economy. JoEllen also presented a paper on the Erie Doctrine at the Seventh Circuit Bar Association’s Annual Conference in May.

• Rebecca Huss[14] presented papers and gave talks at a substantial number of conferences and programs over the summer, including: Acting as Guardian/Special Master, Beyond the Headlines: The Bad Newz Kennels Investigation, USDA Office of Inspector General Professional Development Conference (Nashville, Tennessee, July 2009); Lessons Learned: Acting as Guardian/Special Master in the Bad Newz Kennels Case, Arizona State Bar Association, Animal Law Section Meeting (Phoenix, Arizona, June 2009) and also at University of Chicago Law School (Chicago, Illinois, May 2009); Why Context Matters: Defining Service Animals Under Federal Law, panel on  Theory and Context, Law & Society Conference (Denver, 2009); and Constitutional Issues, Rethinking Dangerous Dogs Panel, No Kill 2009, Bringing Sheltering into the 21st Century, (Washington, D.C., May 2009).

• Paul Kohlhoff[15] was a panelist at the Low Income Taxpayer Representation Workshop at the ABA Tax Section meeting in May. Paul discussed the impact of a recent opinion of the Tax Court, Lantz v. Commissioner.

• Jeremy Telman chaired two panels and was a member of a third at the 2009 Law & Society Conference. Jeremy will present a paper, Originalism and Its Discontents, at a conference in honor of Dominick LaCapra, at Cornell University at the end of September, and will present a paper based on an article in progress, Is the Quest for Corporate Responsibility a Wild Goose Chase? The Story of Lovenheim v. Iroquois Brands, Ltd., at the Central States Legal Scholars Association meeting in October.

Alan White has organized a major interdisciplinary conference to be held at the law school in May 2010. The conference will focus on the empirical analysis of the mortgage crisis data collected by the federal government and other sources. Alan has also participated in many conferences and programs in recent months dealing with mortgage lending and the mortgage crisis. At the Law & Society meeting, Alan presented a paper (with Andrea McCardle from CUNY) concerning their research on the behavior and attitudes of consumers when making mortgage decisions.

There is much more I could report on faculty activity, but there is insufficient space in this letter. I will only note that Alan White’s work on the mortgage crisis has received substantial attention from government officials and the press. Alan testified before a subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee on July 9, and on July 5 his work was the subject of a column in the New York Times by financial writer Gretchen Morgenstern.

I will close this section of the Letter with news of two recent awards to our faculty. Laura Dooley[16] has received this year’s Valparaiso University Alumni Association’s award for Outstanding Teaching. And Ruth Vance[17] has received the School of Law 2009 Distinguished Faculty Award. Presentations of both awards were made at the University Convocation in August 2009.

Teen Legal and Other Initiatives

In my spring letter, I briefly described our plans to develop educational programs and services for individuals other than those seeking a J.D. or other formal law degree. Over the summer, we moved quickly to implement some of these plans; still others are in the planning stages.

One initiative that has already attracted a great deal of interest is Teen Legal. This is a summer program for high school students that we will begin offering in summer 2010. It will consist of a two-week, residential program at the University and will provide students with an introduction to law (and law school) through classes, hands-on work, and enrichment activities. The substantive focus of the program will be criminal law, but students will also learn about a variety of other areas. Equally important, they will be introduced to fundamental legal skills, including research, critical reasoning, and writing. Mornings will be devoted to classes in which students learn the substantive law and afternoons will be devoted to skills development—to practice in drafting pleadings, interviewing witnesses, and arguing motions. At the conclusion of the program, the students will try a case before parents and friends. The program will include enrichment activities, such as opportunities to observe court proceedings and talk to lawyers and judges, and cultural and recreational activities, such as trips to Chicago and the Indiana Dunes. If you would like further information about this program, please contact Stephanie Medlock,[18] our Director of Professional and Community Studies. Printed and online information about the program will soon be available.

Another initiative is a bit more conventional and may be of practical interest to you. We are developing a series of high-quality continuing legal education programs in areas where we have substantial teaching strength and where we find that attorneys are not otherwise being well served. Thus, we have planned for fall 2009 and spring 2010 a series of programs in legal research and writing. Programs scheduled to date in this area are the following:

• How to Conduct Effective Legal Research on the Web, on 5 December 2009 at the Valparaiso University Harre Union, taught by Educational Services Librarian & Assistant Professor Steven Probst.[19]
• Objectives and Resources for Federal Tax Research, on 16 January 2010 at the law school, taught by Associate Law Librarian for Access Services & Associate Professor Michael Bushbaum.[20]
• Researching Emerging Issues in Family Law: Paper and Electronic Sources, on 5 March 2010 at the Harre Union, taught by Associate Dean Mary Persyn.[21]
• Crafting Superior Legal Correspondence: The Essence of Good Client Communication, on 30 April 2010 at the law school taught by Professors Susan Stuart,[22] Ruth Vance, and Clare Nuechterlein.[23]
• Techniques to Enhance Your Oral Presentation, on 1 May 2010 at the law school taught by Visiting Assistant Professor Bruce Ching.[24]

Yet another initiative, one intended to reach new constituencies, is a program in conjunction with the College of Business Administration. Leaders of nonprofit organizations often reach their positions either by rising through the ranks of staff members or volunteers, or from the outside as volunteers. Often, they do not have substantial training or experience in management, finance, law, human resources, and other areas needed for effective operation of a business organization. We seek to fill this gap by providing a range of educational opportunities in these areas for nonprofit executives.

Conclusion

Space is always a limitation. Could this letter be longer, I would also write about the work of our student organizations, about upcoming events in the law school, about the work and achievements of various alumni, and about other important projects under way. My file is bulging. Some of this news—especially about events in the law school—you can find on our web site, which I hope you visit periodically.

It is a pleasure to write these letters (even if I can never say enough) and to share with you updates on progress and plans in the law school. I hope you will use this letter as a reminder to keep us informed of news about you and to let us know if you would like to become engaged further in any of our activities, initiatives, or alumni councils or projects. You can easily reach me at jay.conison@valpo.edu.

I look forward to our next opportunity to visit, whether in writing, electronically, or in person.

Very truly yours,

Jay Conison

Dean and Professor