Eric Amarante
Associate Professor of Law
Professor Eric Amarante published The Absurdity of Criminalizing Encouraging Words in the Cato Supreme Court Review on September 18, 2023. The Cato Supreme Court Review is the first academic journal to be published after the Court’s term, and is invitation-only. Professor Amarante also played an integral role in founding the Knoxville Latino Bar Association (the “KLBA”), which is the first Latino bar association in East Tennessee and is dedicated to nurturing and empowering a community of Latino attorneys, judges, law professors, and law students in East Tennessee. The highlight of the year was the KLBA’s celebratory launch honoring Judge Hector Sanchez, Tennessee’s first Latino trial court judge. Professor Amarante also played a significant role in planning and organizing the Tennessee Law Review’s symposium Working Toward Justice on Difficult Ground, which honored Professor Emerita Fran Ansley. He provided a short piece on the meaning of Professor Ansley’s work for the symposium. Professor Amarante was a panelist for an ABA Webinar sponsored by ABA Forum on Affordable Housing and Community Development, and he also served as a commentator for the Community Economic Development Works-in-Progress session at the 2023 AALS Annual Meeting. Finally, in conjunction with several other organizations, Professor Amarante helped organize the Knoxville Bar Association’s Black-Owned Business Clinic and Legal Advice Clinic, held at the Knoxville Area Urban League on February 16, 2023.
Bradley Areheart
Professor of Law
Professor Brad Areheart’s article with co-author Dave Hall, The Bias Presumption, is forthcoming in the Georgetown Law Journal. He is currently working on a new treatise, Tennessee Employment Law, for Lexis. Earlier in the year, he was added as a co-author to a leading Labor Law textbook, which is published by West Academic. He has spoken widely in 2023 on labor law, labor arbitration, and employment discrimination. He has also presented his current work in progress, The Privilege Gap, several times.
Wendy Bach
Professor of Law
Professor Wendy Bach spent much of 2023 giving talks to a variety of audiences—in Tennessee and across the country—on her book, Prosecuting Poverty, Criminalizing Care. Highlights included an author meets reader panel at the Law and Society conference featuring Professor Bach’s book and a new book by Professor Dorothy Roberts; a conversation between Professor Bach and Professor Khiara Bridges, hosted by Pregnancy Justice; an amazing event at Knoxville’s own Union Avenue Book Store; and a symposium on the book sponsored by the Southwestern Law Review. Professor Bach was awarded the University of Tennessee’s Jefferson Prize in recognition of her scholarly contributions. She also launched, along with colleagues at the University of Texas at Austin, the University of South Carolina, and Pregnancy Justice, a tracking study documenting pregnancy-related prosecutions in the three years after the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs. Finally, she received seed funding from the University, along with her colleague Professor Michelle Brown in Sociology, to found the Appalachian Justice Research Center, a trans-disciplinary research and training collaborative dedicated to advancing just and equitable community visions in Appalachia and the Mountain South. She looks forward to the official launch of the Center in the Spring of 2024.
Benjamin Barton
Helen and Charles Lockett Distinguished Professor of Law
Professor Ben Barton’s Deborah Rhode In Memoriam: Three Stories and Ten Life Lessons has been published in the Fordham Law Review symposium celebrating the life and legacy of the great Stanford Law Professor and legal ethicist (as well as feminist and lawyers-as-leaders scholar) Deborah Rhode. He co-authored an article entitled Comparative Rights to Counsel and Access to Justice: The American and Brazilian Approaches and Realities with Brazilian judges and law professors Fernanda Antunes Marques Junqueira and Flávio da Costa Higa. On a related note, Ben Barton was invited to present on American Access to Justice Issues to the 12th Judicial District Labor Court Judges in Porto Velho, in the state of Rodonia, Brazil. Professor Barton presented in person on May 31 to roughly 100 judges and staff and was thrilled by the hospitality and the interchange. Professor Barton recently gave a presentation to participants attending the West Point Diversity and Inclusion Leadership Conference. In the presentation, he explained the history of higher education affirmative action cases, as well as the facts, holding, and potential implications for the military of the case Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard .
Teri Dobbins Baxter
Interim Associate Dean for Faculty Development, Williford Gragg Distinguished Professor of Law
Professor Teri Baxter was appointed to serve as Interim Associate Dean for Faculty Development for the 2023-2024 academic year. Her article Constitutional Demotion was published in the Minnesota Journal of Law and Inequality in January and her article Child Sacrifices: The Precarity of Minors’ Autonomy and Bodily Integrity After Dobbs was accepted for publication in the University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law. In February, Professor Baxter was chosen by student leaders to receive the Harold Warner Outstanding Teacher Award. She has been invited to speak to various audiences, including a Supreme Court update for attorneys from Oak Ridge National Labs and the Department of Energy. In November she will be a panelist for a CLE sponsored by Federal Express and attended by attorneys from corporate and government legal departments and law firms. She and her co-panelists Judge Jeffrey Usman and Professor Regina Lambert Hillman will discuss cases from the last Supreme Court Term. She was also a panelist discussing Property and Privacy at the Washington & Lee University School of Law Lara D. Gass Symposium. She also participated on a panel titled “Deeply Rooted”: Discussing the Aftermath of Dobbs at a symposium sponsored by the Tennessee Journal of Race Gender & Social Justice.
Robert Blitt
Toms Foundation Distinguished Professor of Law
Professor Robert Blitt’s publications focused on Russia’s foreign policy, including the fallout from its ongoing war on Ukraine. “Putin-phonia”: Harnessing Russian Orthodoxy to Advance Russia’s Secular Foreign Policy discusses the Moscow Patriarchate’s enhanced role in disseminating Kremlin goals through its own foreign engagements, particularly in the wake of 2020 amendments to Russia’s constitution. His article Justifying Invasion: Russia’s 2020 Constitutional Amendments and the War on Ukraine draws linkages between Russia’s 2020 constitutional amendments and the country’s purported justifications for its invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Alongside these scholarly contributions, Professor Blitt published two notable op-eds: Russia’s Constitutionalized Civilizational Identity and the Moscow Patriarchate’s War on Ukraine examines the Moscow Patriarchate’s reinforcement of the Kremlin’s new civilizational identity as a tool for justifying war. Putin Constitutionalizes Soviet Mistakes Rather Than Learning from Them calls out the Kremlin’s manipulation of Soviet history to distinguish the invasion of Ukraine from previous Soviet invasions of neighboring states. Professor Blitt also presented his research findings in a variety of leading forums, including the American Society of Comparative Law (ASCL), the American Society of International Law (ASIL), the American Association of Law Schools (AALS), and Law and Society.
Eliza Boles
Assistant Professor and Digital Resources and Services Librarian
Professor Eliza Boles will publish Promoting Technological Competency through Microlearning and Incentivization in the University of Saint Thomas Law Review. In the article, Professor Boles explores the application of adult learning theory to the instruction of technological competencies for attorneys and identifies potential interdepartmental partnerships that can aid in the marketing and dissemination of a technology curriculum, without major changes to existing curricular structures. This year, Professor Boles taught two Continuing Legal Education courses for the Southeast Tennessee Lawyers’ Association for Women. The first was Ethics & Technology, covering the application of Model Rule of Professional Conduct 1.1 Comment 8 to modern practice. The second program, Competitive Intelligence, addressed best practices concerning market trend research. Finally, Professor Boles is chairing a national committee on behalf of the American Association of Law Libraries, focusing on creating and promoting educational programming for law librarians working in the realm of legal innovation and technology.
Lonnie Brown
Dean and Elvin E. Overton Distinguished Professor of Law
Dean Lonnie Brown was invited to be a Fellow of the American Bar Foundation (ABF). Fellows of the ABF comprise a global honorary society of lawyers, judges, law faculty, and legal scholars who have demonstrated outstanding leadership in the profession and service to society. Membership is limited to one percent of licensed U.S. lawyers and a limited number of international lawyers. He was also elected to the American Inns of Court Board of Trustees and was selected to be a Fellow of the Knoxville Bar Foundation. He serves as a member of the Drafting Committee for the Multistate Professional Responsibility Exam. In June, Dean Brown gave a presentation on his book Defending the Public’s Enemy: The Life and Legacy of Ramsey Clark to the Tennessee Alliance of Black Lawyers. Dean Brown published An Ill-Defined Path to an Ideal Destination, in the August 2023 issue of DICTA, a publication of the Knoxville Bar Association. Finally, Dean Brown was invited to speak in the 2023 National Conversation on Civility: Free Speech and Civility (with Dean Erwin Chemerinsky and Judge Consuelo M. Callahan of the Ninth Circuit).
Zack Buck
Associate Professor of Law
In 2023, Professor Zack Buck published Fraud, Abuse, and Financial Conflicts of Interest, his first article published in the New England Journal of Medicine, as part of its Fundamentals of Health Law Series. Associated with the article is a podcast in which he is interviewed. These pieces were designed to inform providers about structuring health care business arrangements, taking into consideration legal risk and increasing complexity. Professor Buck taught a five-week class, Comparative Health Law and Policy, as part of the Cambridge Study Abroad Program at the University of Cambridge in Cambridge, United Kingdom, in the summer. Additionally, Professor Buck published The Battle for Medicare, in the St. Louis Journal of Health Law and Policy, which examined the future of Medicare, framed as a regulatory vehicle for health law and policy in the United States. Finally, in 2023, Professor Buck spoke at conferences at the University of Maryland School of Law and Loyola University Chicago School of Law, and is set to speak at the Tennessee Bar Association Health Law Section’s annual conference and at the Tennessee Society of Certified Public Accountants Health Care Conference.
Judy Cornett
College of Law Distinguished Professor
Professor Judy Cornett presented her paper Personal Jurisdiction and “The Most Natural State” at the annual conference of the Southeastern Association of Law Schools. In the paper she analyzes the Supreme Court’s use of the phrase “the most natural state” in its decision in Ford Motor Co. v. Montana Eighth Judicial Court, 141 S. Ct. 1017 (2021). She points out that using the phrase to explain why Montana could exercise jurisdiction over Ford ignores the negative rhetorical implications of the phrase. Because “the most natural state” implies that some states are “unnatural” forums, the phrase reflects negatively on the plaintiffs who invoke such forums. Professor Cornett also contributed a chapter to a collection of essays, Intersections: Rhetorical Traditions and Contemporary Law. Her chapter, Ensnared by Custom: Mary Astell and the American Bar Association on Female Autonomy, concludes that Astell, the 17-century feminist, spoke directly to women and urged them to take action to improve their education and opportunities. In contrast, the ABA’s 2019 report Walking out the Door: The Facts, Figures, and Future of Experienced Women Lawyers in Private Practice, implicitly accepts that male lawyers dominate large firms, urging men to grant more power and benefits to women.
Sherley Cruz
Assistant Professor of Law
Professor Sherley Cruz joined the AALS Ad Hoc ABA Standard 303(c) Committee, the Executive Committee for the AALS Section on Critical Theories, the AALS Civil Rights Committee, and the Labor and Employment Law Executive Board Committee. Professor Cruz also co-founded the University of Tennessee Knoxville’s Women of Color Circle and was a member of the Diversity and Engagement Faculty Advisory Board. The College of Law awarded Professor Cruz with the 2023 Reginald Hill Faculty Scholar Award. Professor Cruz spoke at the 2023 Tennessee Law Review Symposium, Working Towards Justice on Difficult Ground, on the Justice for Migrants at Work and in the Community panel. A transcript of the presentation was published by the journal. She also published Four Ways to Update Personnel Policies that Need to Become Part of Your Annual Reviews in the KBA’s DICTA. Her upcoming law review article was selected for the 2023 AALS New and Emerging Voice in Workplace Law Workshop and Law and Society’s Feminist Lens Workshop. Additionally, Professor Cruz continues to serve on Georgetown’s Journal of Poverty Law and Policy Advisory Board and she joined the Bottom Knoxville’s Board of Directors. Professor Cruz ended her 2023 accomplishments by welcoming her son, Theodore, to their family.
Rebecca Eshbaugh
Legal Writing Lecturer
Professor Rebecca Eshbaugh joined the College of Law in August as a Lecturer in the Legal Writing Program. Since arriving, she has focused on designing and implementing an effective and engaging curriculum for her Legal Process courses. She has also joined the Admissions and Career Services committees. Before joining the College of Law, Professor Eshbaugh served as an Assistant Public Defender with the Knox County Public Defender’s Community Law Office. She looks forward to using the skills she applied there—patience, compassion, and an abiding love for legal writing—to mentor a new generation of law students.
Joan Heminway
Interim Director of the Institute for Professional Leadership and Rick Rose Distinguished Professor of Law
In January 2023, Professor Joan Heminway became Chair-Elect of the Association of American Law Schools (AALS) Section on Agency, Partnerships, LLCs, and Unincorporated Business Associations and a member of the Executive Committee of the AALS Section on Leadership. In 2023, she has offered academic presentations in: Jackson, MS; Tallahassee, FL; Winston-Salem, NC; Gulfport, FL; San Juan, PR; Genoa, IT; Boca Raton, FL; Knoxville, TN; and Atlanta, GA. She worked with UT Law’s Clayton Center for Entrepreneurial Law to plan and host the National Business Law Scholars Conference at UT Law in June and the Business Law Prof Blog Symposium in October. Professor Heminway co-presented with Nashville corporate finance attorney Alex Davie on Securities Law Lessons from Recent Crypto Litigation and Bankruptcies at the Tennessee Bar Association’s 2023 Business Law Forum and presented It’s [Not Just] a Dog’s World: Current Issues in the Regulation of Service, Emotional Support, and Therapy Animals at the Tennessee Bar Association’s 2023 Animal Law Forum. Professor Heminway recently was appointed by the National Council of Bar Examiners to serve as a Business Associations review board member for the NextGen bar exam. She also became a contributing editor for Corporate Law Jotwell.
Michael Higdon
Interim Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and W. Allen Separk Distinguished Professor of Law
Professor Michael Higdon was named Interim Associate Dean for Academic Affairs in August 2023. He was elected Chair of the Section on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Issues at the 2023 Annual Meeting of the Association of the Association of American Law Schools. In March, his article Common Law Divorce was published in volume 74 of the Alabama Law Review. In May, he was one of four faculty members selected by the University of Tennessee to participate in the SEC 2023-24 Academic Leadership Development Program, which seeks to identify and develop from within the SEC the next generation of academic leaders. Finally, in August, he was named the W. Allen Separk Distinguished Professor of Law.
Becky Jacobs
Waller Lansden Distinguished Professor of Law
Professor Becky Jacob’s article Constitutional Hypocrisy: Governmental Approaches to Corporate Speech regarding ESG and Climate is forthcoming in the Tennessee Journal of Business Law; her article Suffering in Search of a Methodological Frame: Interdisciplinarity in the Context of the Gendered Impact of Climate Migration will be published in the William & Mary Environmental Law & Policy Review; and her article ABA Standard 303(c) Opportunities and Challenges: Confronting Divisive Concepts Statutes (with UT’s Sherley Cruz and others), will appear in the 73rd edition of the Washington University Journal of Law & Policy. She also contributed an afterword essay entitled Insider Activism in the Academy: A Refusal to Sit on the Sidelines to the Tennessee Law Review’s symposium edition honoring Professor Emerita Fran Ansley. Professor Jacobs moderated and participated in a panel on family law arbitration at the law school’s 2023 Issues in Arbitration CLE and was a commentator for a session of the Transactions: The Tennessee Journal of Business Law’s 2023 Connecting the Threads Symposium. She is a member of the planning committee for the ABA Dispute Resolution Section’s 2024 Annual Conference; is participating as a scholar in UT’s OneHealth Initiative; and has joined UT Humanities Center’s new research seminar on Native American and Indigenous Studies.
Lucy Jewel
Director of Legal Writing and Professor of Law
In January, Professor Lucy Jewel served as a panelist in two AALS conference sessions: Disrupting the Status Quo: How Law Schools Can Make a Difference by Making Difference Meaningful and Teaching Towards Equity: The Use of Pedagogy to Overcome Barriers. In June, Bristol University Press published Professor Jewel’s co-authored book, Critical and Comparative Rhetoric: Unmasking Privilege and Power in Law and Legal Advocacy to Achieve Truth, Justice, and Equity (with Elizabeth Berenguer and Teri McMurtry-Chubb). In July, Professor Jewel presented her article See That in a Small Town: Visual Rhetoric, Race, and Legal History in Tennessee at the Ninth Biennial Applied Legal Storytelling Conference at City University London. This article was recently accepted for publication by The Georgetown Journal of Law & Modern Critical Race Perspectives. By invitation in September, Professor Jewel participated in the closing plenary panel at the 2023 Epoch Symposium at Seattle University School of Law. This year’s symposium’s theme focused on the recent Supreme Court case Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. Harvard. Finally, this year, Professor Jewel served as a board member of the Legal Writing Institute, a member of Tennessee’s STRIDE committee, and the President of ClassCrits, Inc.
Kristina Kersey
Assistant Professor of Law
Professor Kristina Kersey joined the UT Law faculty in 2023. She teaches in the Advocacy Clinic. In her first semester, she collaborated with clinic faculty on reimaging bias and discrimination training for incoming clinic students. Professor Kersey was qualified and testified as an expert witness in the area of juvenile defense in State in the Interest of A.D. in Burlington County, New Jersey. She was faculty for The Gault Center Youth Defense Advocacy Program’s Summer Academy, an intensive skills-based bootcamp training for youth defenders. She presented on raising race, storytelling, and narrative at the National Legal Aid and Defender Association Appellate Defender Training. She presented on geopolitical and historical roots of the juvenile delinquency system at The Gault Center Southern Regional Summit and at Equal Justice University. Professor Kersey gave a talk on creative strategies to defend against the transfer of youth to adult prosecution—which includes an analysis of each state’s transfer mechanism and criteria—at The Gault Center National Leadership Summit. She is presented her work-in-progress on the adult prosecution of youth at the Southern Clinical Conference in October.
Rebecca Kite
Assistant Professor and Reference Librarian
Professor Rebecca Kite serves as co-chair of the newly-formed Shared Governance Committee of the university’s Faculty Senate. This committee was formed in response to the need to re-emphasize the importance of shared governance across the university following the disruptions of COVID. The Shared Governance Committee is intended to bring together various stakeholders at UT, including undergraduate and graduate students, staff, and faculty, identify areas of shared concern, and to elevate those priorities to the Faculty Senate and the university administration. Professor Kite also wrapped up four years of service on the Government Relations Committee of the American Association of Law Libraries. That committee monitors legislative and regulatory developments that impact law librarians, as well as providing training for and advocacy on behalf of law librarians and other legal information professionals. Professor Kite concluded her service to the committee by working to recruit new law librarians to get involved in the committee’s work at the 2023 American Association of Law Libraries annual meeting in Boston this July.
Brian Krumm
Associate Professor of Law
Professor Brian Krumm was chosen as an inaugural Research Fellow, Anderson Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation (ACEI), Haslam College of Business. The ACEI aims to bridge academic research and practice related to entrepreneurship and innovation. He moderated the Plenary Panel at the National Business Law Scholars Conference on June 15, 2023. The panel, Entrepreneurship and the University, featured presentations from The University of Tennessee College of Law Transactional Law Clinic partners and clients. He also participated on two panels at the 2023 Clinical Conference: Seeing Problems as Opportunities: How to Solve Problems for Hopeful Clients, which focused on how we teach protecting clients’ interests in drafting transactional documents; and Snatching Hope from the Jaws of a Pandemic, which examined how clinical teaching was impacted by the pandemic and what practices, techniques, and technologies have continued post-pandemic. Professor Krumm was also recently selected as the University of Tennessee’s representative to the Coalition on Intercollegiate Athletics and appointed to the Chancellor’s Athletic Advisory Board. The alliance consists of representatives from sixty-four Faculty Senates from the NCAA Football Bowl Subdivision Schools and works to help faculty understand changes in requirements, demands, and resources for college athletics.
George Kuney
Director of the Clayton Center for Entrepreneurial Law and Lindsay Young Distinguished Professor of Law
In 2023, Professor George Kuney published two books with UT BE Press Repository: A Transactional Matter (with Donna C. Looper and Brian K. Krumm) and A Civil Matter (with Donna C. Looper). He also completed the 18th annual update to his single volume Treatise, California Law of Contracts (University of California CEB 2023). He has submitted the manuscript for the second edition of Mastering Legal Analysis and Drafting (to be published by Carolina Academic Press in 2024) and will soon submit the manuscript for the second edition of Mastering Appellate Advocacy and Procedure. Professor Kuney is participating in an amicus brief in Harrington v. Purdue Pharma, L.P., in the Supreme Court of the United States challenging the propriety of non-debtor releases in plans of reorganization that do not involve asbestos liabilities, which will be heard in 2024. He continues to teach Contracts I & II as well as Commercial Leasing, Bankruptcy, Reorganizations and Workouts, Consumer Bankruptcy and Finance, and, when demand exists, International Bankruptcy and Remedies.
Michelle Kwon
Interim Associate Dean for Diversity, Inclusion and Community Engagement and Professor of Law
Associate Dean Michelle Kwon’s article Clearing the Smoke: Using Taxes to Vaporize E-Cigarette Consumption Among Youth and Reduce Harm from Cigarettes will be published in the Virginia Tax Review later this year. The article draws on social science literature to encourage states to design e-cigarette taxes that economically disincentivize youth vaping while also encouraging adult smokers to use e-cigarettes as an off-ramp from traditional cigarettes. In addition to research and teaching, she has been serving, since January, as the Interim Associate Dean for Diversity, Inclusion, and Community Engagement, which is a new position at the College of Law. Along with this new leadership role, she has been selected as a member of the Chancellor’s Leadership Academy, a campus-wide, leadership development training program. Her service to the campus this academic year is focused on co-leading the Chancellor’s Commission for Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. Her service to the community includes serving as a member of the Knoxville Bar Association’s Diversity in the Profession Committee.
Alex Long
Williford Gragg Distinguished Professor of Law
Professor Alex Long’s article, Imposing Lawyer Sanctions in a Post-January 6 World was published in the Georgetown Journal of Legal Ethics. His 2022 article All I Really Need to Know About Defamation Law in the 21st Century I Learned From Watching Hulk Hogan (originally published in the Wake Forest Law Review) was selected for inclusion in the 2023 edition of The Entertainment, Publishing and the Arts Handbook, an anthology published annually by Thomson Reuters (West). In May, he was quoted in a Knoxville News Sentinel article concerning the Kingston coal ash lawsuit settlement. Professor Long presented several continuing legal education courses on legal ethics during the year. He will be speaking as part of a panel on employment retaliation at the American Association of Law Schools annual conference in January.
Sibyl Marshall
Associate Professor and Head of Research, Teaching, and Collections, Law Library
In 2023, Professor Sibyl Marshall’s book Tennessee Legal Research 3d ed. (co-authored with Prof. Scott Childs) was published by Carolina Academic Press. Professor Marshall was named Chair of the University of Tennessee Graduate Curriculum Committee, and Vice-Chair/Incoming Chair of the Patron Services Committee of the American Association of Law Libraries’ Research, Instruction, and Patron Services section.
William Mercer
Distinguished Lecturer
Professor Bill Mercer’s article, Inspired Filth: Working Blue in Vaudeville America (with Joel E. Black) was published in the University of Memphis Law Review. Professor Mercer presented his paper in progress, Let My Executor Ask the Prospective Heirs Assembled this Night if They are Willing to Take What Fortune Offers Them: The Reading of the Will Ceremony and Popular Expectations of Law at the 2023 Law & Society Annual Conference. Finally, Professor Mercer served as a panelist for a discussion of the book On Juneteenth by Annette Gordon-Reed, organized by the Diversity in the Profession Committee for the Knoxville Bar Association.
Nicholas Nugent
Assistant Professor of Law
Professor Nick Nugent published The Five Internet Rights in the Washington Law Review. The article answers the longstanding question of whether the state should ever intervene in online content moderation. Following its publication, Professor Nugent wrote a six-part series summarizing the article in The Volokh Conspiracy legal blog. He also published a piece in Lawfare titled Social Media Isn’t a Public Function, but Maybe the Internet Is, which argued that the public function doctrine should be expanded to impute state action to the private entities that operate the internet’s core resources when they foreclose lawful speech from the internet entirely. Among other presentations, Professor Nugent spoke before several hundred judges and attorneys as part of a panel on Social Media & Democracy at the 81st Judicial Conference of the Fourth Circuit, in Greensboro, North Carolina, and he served as a moderator for conferences at the University of Virginia School of Law on democracy and competition in the startup ecosystem. He recently traveled to Kyoto, Japan, to serve as the primary drafter of a set of revised operating procedures for electing board members to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the international body responsible for administering the world’s domain names.
Joy Radice
Director of Clinical Programs and Associate Professor of Law
Professor Joy Radice was awarded the University of Tennessee’s Excellence in Academic Outreach award that honors those who exemplify UT’s land-grant mission by using intellectual capital to benefit the citizens of Tennessee. Professor Radice is in her second term as a Commissioner on the Tennessee Supreme Court’s Access to Justice Commission. This October, she is working to spearhead a statewide pro bono effort to train lawyers and law students to represent individuals seeking to restore their civil rights after a felony conviction. In Knoxville, she has helped launch the Second Chance Initiative sponsored by the KBA’s Access to Justice Committee, to engage more lawyers in expungement work. Professor Radice is working on a state-wide expungement coalition with the TBA Access to Justice Committee and the Tennessee Alliance for Legal Services that she described in her Tennessee Bar Journal cover story in May. For her active bar involvement and leadership (as the 2022 President of Knoxville’s chapter of Inns of Court), she was awarded the 2023 Tom and Elizabeth Fox Faculty Award for outstanding service to the bench and bar. In spring 2023, she was a guest on the In Defense of Children Podcast episode Expunging Juvenile Records and Collateral Consequences of a Juvenile Record. Professor Radice has presented extensively about integrating a wellness curriculum throughout the clinical program, and she is co-authoring a forthcoming article with Paula Schaefer, Collaborating to Create a 1L Professional Identity Curriculum in the University of St. Thomas Law Journal. Under her leadership, the Clinic has been awarded the Social Advocacy Award by The Knoxville Chapter of the NAACP and one of the Pro Bono Law Firm of the Year by the Legal Aid of East Tennessee.
Glenn Reynolds
Beauchamp Brogan Distinguished Professor of Law
Professor Glenn Harlan Reynolds was named to the Board of Fellows of the newly created Institute for American Civics at the Baker School. He serves on the Hiring Committee and the Executive Committee of the Board. In April he spoke at Columbia Law School on Our Ruling Class Monoculture. In June he spoke to the Birmingham, Alabama Federalist Society on libel reform and New York Times v. Sullivan. He published Retconning Heller: Five Takes on New York Rifle and Pistol Assoc. v. Bruen in the William & Mary Law Review (coauthored with Brannon Denning) and Pulsed Nuclear Space Propulsion and International Law: Some Preliminary Observations in the Journal of Air Law & Commerce (coauthored with Leigh Outten). He serves on the Advisory Board of the New Civil Liberties Alliance, and has coauthored amicus briefs in several Court of Appeals and Supreme Court cases, including the upcoming United States v. Rahimi. In addition, he has published essays on libel law and affirmative action law in The New Criterion.
Briana Rosenbaum
Associate Professor of Law
Professor Briana Rosenbaum published her article, Deflect, Delay, Deny: A Case Study of Segregation by Law School Faculty Before Brown v. Board of Education, in the Tennessee Law Review. In the article, Professor Rosenbaum uses rarely accessed and recently discovered archives to examine UT Law’s segregationist history and to show the direct role that law school faculty members played in the perpetuation of segregation. Professor Rosenbaum was also awarded a Diversity Challenge Grant by UT’s Division of Diversity and Engagement to support her project, The History of Discrimination in Legal Education and Its Legacy Today. Using UT Law’s segregationist history as a case study, Professor Rosenbaum has been touring law schools across the country to invite discussions of the history of discrimination in legal education and the continuing impact this history has on law schools and the legal profession.
Paula Schaefer
Art Stolnitz Distinguished Professor of Law
After serving as Associate Dean for Academic Affairs since January 2019, Professor Paula Schaefer left that administrative role in August 2023. In addition to returning to her teaching and scholarship this fall, she has also served as Interim Communications Director for the College of Law (while the school searches for a new director). Professor Schaefer chaired the College’s ABA Self-Study Committee and coordinated all aspects of the ABA’s March 2023 Site Visit. Professor Schaefer has spoken at several conferences this year. She served as a panelist in a webinar titled Teaching Tips for New Law Professors: How to Incorporate Professional Identity Formation in Your Teaching. At the SEALS annual conference, she participated in a panel discussion on Mindfulness in Legal Education and a workshop titled From Student to Lawyer: Infusing Professional Identity Formation into the Required Curriculum. Professor Schaefer and Professor Joy Radice gave a presentation at the University of St. Thomas School of Law’s symposium Transitioning from Student to Lawyer: Infusing Professional Identity Formation into the Required Curriculum. Their article is forthcoming in the University of St. Thomas Law Journal. Professor Schaefer was recently appointed to a two-year term on the Provost’s Tenured Faculty Advisory Council. She continues to serve as a Subject Matter Expert for the Multistate Professional Responsibility Exam.
Gregory Stein
Professor Emeritus
Professor Emeritus Greg Stein’s article, Environmental Justice and the Tragedy of the Commons, was published in California Law Review Online. His review article, Land Value Capture in the Modern Context, appeared in JOTWELL. He also authored a tribute to Professor Emeritus Fran Ansley in a recent volume of the Tennessee Law Review celebrating her career. Professor Stein was a speaker at the ABA Real Property Trust and Estate Law Section’s “Essentials for Real Property Practitioners” skills training program, presenting Navigating a Real Estate Transaction. He has been quoted recently in the Knoxville News-Sentinel in articles addressing the issues of rent control and the rights of property owners to list their homes as short-term rentals when homeowner association rules prohibit such rentals. Professor Stein continues to teach Property and Real Estate Finance Law during the spring semester. He remains active as a member and committee member of the American College of Real Estate Lawyers and as a reviewer of articles and books submitted for publication to law journals and commercial publishers.
Tomer Stein
Assistant Professor of Law
Professor Tomer Stein had a prolific year culminating in four important and well-regarded contributions to the field of corporate law. Professor Stein’s articles have been published in journals such as the Arizona State Law Journal and the Hastings Law Journal, and have been featured in prestigious media such as the Columbia BlueSky Blog and the Legal Theory Blog. Professor Stein was invited to present his works at the inaugural Wharton-Harvard Insolvency and Restructuring Conference, the annual meeting of the American Association of Law Schools, the National Business Law Scholars Conference, and other leading academic and industry conferences and law schools across the country.
Maurice Stucke
Douglas A. Blaze Distinguished Professor of Law
For the 2022-23 academic year, Professor Maurice Stucke served as a Senior Policy Advisor at the Federal Trade Commission, where he helped inform and coordinate competition and privacy policies on three levels: first, across the FTC’s different branches (consumer protection, privacy, and competition); second, with other federal agencies and the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers; and third, with other jurisdictions’ competition agencies. Given his scholarship, including his 2022 book Breaking Away: How to Regain Control Over Our Data, Privacy, and Autonomy (Oxford University Press 2022), he led a global multi-agency project to explain the relationship between privacy and competition policies. Working with senior policy officials from agencies from around the world, he drafted a handbook to help competition agencies navigate their decision-making processes when privacy and competition concerns intersect. The experience led Professor Stucke to become an affiliate of the Baker School for National Security and Foreign Affairs. The experience has also informed several recent articles and essays, including What Can Policymakers Do About Algorithmic Collusion and Discrimination?, University of Chicago’s ProMarket, June 27, 2023; The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of US Antitrust, 11 Journal of Antitrust Enforcement 283 (2023); Innovation Misunderstood, 73 American University Law Review (forthcoming 2024) (with Ariel Ezrachi); The Darker Sides of Digital Platform Innovation, 7-8 Wirtschaft und Wettbewerb 382 (2023) (with Ariel Ezrachi); and The Role of Secondary Algorithmic Tacit Collusion in Achieving Market Alignment (August 21, 2023) (with Ariel Ezrachi).
Val Vojdik
Waller Lansden Distinguished Professor of Law
Professor Val Vojdik gave several presentations on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, the Supreme Court decision overruling Roe v. Wade. As the faculty advisor to the Tennessee Journal of Race, Gender, and Social Justice, she helped students organize its national symposium, Deeply Rooted: Discussing the Aftermath of Dobbs, on March 9, 2023. Professor Vojdik presented her paper, The Violence of Dobbs, as part of a constitutional law panel. She discussed Dobbs and access to reproductive care for Reproductive Healthcare and Our Rights, a program organized by University of Tennessee-Knoxville Commission for Women, and a seminar on Gender and the Law at New York Law School. For Women’s History Month, Professor Vojdik gave a presentation, Feminist Jurisprudence, to the Office of General Counsel for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). She also shared negotiation tips and strategies in a presentation to the faculty-staff group, Supporting Women in Agriculture, at UT’s School of Agriculture. As a member of the Tennessee State Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission for Civil Rights, Professor Vojdik participated in the committee’s review of voting rights in Tennessee, including the impact of S.B. 8005, which enhanced criminal penalties for protest following protests in 2020 over the murder of George Floyd.
Rachelle Ketchum West
Legal Writing Lecturer
Professor Rachelle West, a legal writing lecturer, joined the University of Tennessee College of Law in Fall 2023. Professor West was recently appointed Co-Chair of the Association of Legal Writing Directors’ (ALWD) Scholarship Grants Committee for the 2023-24 academic year. She served as a member of this committee during the 2022-23 academic year.
Carlos Yunsan
Legal Writing Lecturer
Professor Carlos Yunsan joined the College of Law faculty in August, having taught first-year legal writing courses continuously for the previous five years. Yunsan serves on the UT Law Alumni Council and is the President-Elect of the Knoxville Bar Association (KBA). He will be sworn in as the first Hispanic KBA President this December. Professor Yunsan has been honored as one of only ten 2023-2024 Diversity Scholars by the National Conference of Board Presidents (NCBP). This prestigious recognition exemplifies NCBP’s commitment to fostering diversity and inclusivity within the legal profession. The Diversity Scholars program brings together a wide range of bar leaders and creates a forum for candidly sharing successes and challenges in their leadership roles and for open dialogue on all issues, affording scholars the opportunity to further develop their own leadership style and learn how to put that style into action. Professor Yunsan was also selected for membership in the local chapter of the American Inns of Court.