U. Miami Law Brags About Recent Faculty Hires

The University of Miami School of Law sent out a deservedly self-congratulatory announcement bragging about our new hires:

Four legal scholars – Lawrence Lokken, Mary Ann Franks, Tamara Rice Lave, and Carrie Bettinger-Lopez — will join UM Law next year, bringing with them a rich array of professional and scholarly experiences. Experts in taxation, human rights, criminal law, and law and gender, these recent hires represent a diversity of interests that will enrich the Law School’s research and teaching enterprises.

Lawrence Lokken is the Hugh Culverhouse Eminent Scholar in Taxation at the University of Florida Levin College of Law and has taught at the University of Georgia and New York University. He has written numerous articles and books in the field of taxation, including Fundamentals of International Taxation, Federal Taxation of Employee Compensation, and Federal Taxation of Income, Estates & Gifts.

Lokken joined the University of Florida Law School in 1974 and was named the Hugh Culverhouse Eminent Scholar in Taxation in 1994. He has served as a Research Consultant for Harvard Law School’s International Tax Program and on the United Nations Ad Hoc Group of Experts on International Tax Matters. He received his J.D. degree, magna cum laude, from the University of Minnesota and a B.A., cum laude, from Augsburg College.

Mary Anne Franks is the Bigelow Teaching Fellow and Lecturer in Law at the University of Chicago Law School. She received her J.D. from Harvard Law School in 2007, where she was Senior Executive Editor of the Harvard Journal of Law and Gender and an Executive Editor of the Harvard Human Rights Journal. She received her D.Phil. in 2004 and her M.Phil. in 2001 from Oxford University, where she studied on a Rhodes Scholarship. Her dissertation focused on philosophical, legal, and psychoanalytic constructions of sexual violence. She graduated summa cum laude with a BA in Philosophy and English from Loyola University New Orleans in 1999.

Before coming to Chicago, Franks taught courses in social theory and philosophy at Harvard University, where she received four Derek Bok Distinction in Teaching Awards. She has also worked as a senior consultant for The SAB Group, conducting negotiation skills seminars for lawyers and other professionals. Her research and teaching interests include law and gender, free speech, cyberlaw, and international and domestic criminal law.

Tamara Rice Lave is a lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law. She also served as a Visiting Professor at the University of Navarro in Pamplona, Spain where she taught a course on substantive U.S. criminal law. Lave received her Ph.D. degree in Jurisprudence and Social Policy from the University of California, Berkeley, and her J.D. degree from Stanford Law School, where she served as Associate Editor of the Stanford Law Review.

Lave’s teaching and research interests are in the areas of criminal law, criminal procedure, evidence, jurisprudence and law and philosophy. She has published several articles, including “Only Yesterday: The Rise and Fall of Twentieth Century Sexual Psychopath Law” and “Breaking the Cycle of Despair: Street Children in Guatemala City.”

Carrie Bettinger-Lopez currently teaches in the Human Rights Clinic at Columbia Law School. She helps to coordinate the Human Rights in the U.S. Project and Bringing Human Rights Home Lawyers’ Network, a network of over 100 public interest lawyers who are actively involved in domestic human rights strategies. Her research and teaching focuses on international human rights law and advocacy, including the implementation of human rights norms at the domestic level. Her main regional focus is the United States and Latin America, and her principal areas of interest include violence against women, gender and race discrimination, and immigrants’ rights.

Prior to joining Columbia, Bettinger-López worked as a Skadden Fellow at the American Civil Liberties Union, Women’s Rights Project, where she focused on employment and housing discrimination against domestic violence victims and low-wage immigrant women workers. At the ACLU, she filed a landmark case against the United States before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights on behalf of Jessica Gonzales, a domestic violence victim whose three children were killed after police in Colorado failed to enforce a restraining order against her estranged husband, and whose constitutional claims against the police were rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2005. Bettinger-López, the Human Rights Clinic, and the ACLU currently represent Gonzales in Jessica Gonzales v. United States.

But we've still got a LOT more slots to fill.

This entry was posted in U.Miami. Bookmark the permalink.

7 Responses to U. Miami Law Brags About Recent Faculty Hires

  1. This is an incredibly impressive list of scholars. Their background and experience is second to none. Your law school will be the envy of any ivy league institution with people who are of that calibre there.

  2. mfr says:

    What do you think of the analogy of Dean White arriving at the University of Miami School of Law to Obama entering the United States’ presidency, coming in after President Bush and having to totally undo and reverse everything going wrong with a ship headed full speed in the wrong direction?

    Because, assuming President Obama was, is, or intends to do that (even though he clearly hasn’t, doesn’t, and won’t at this point), I think it’s an appropriate metaphor for Dean White, if even insufficient for the vast amount of praise and gratitude she deserves.

  3. michael says:

    Doesn’t work for me. I don’t know a lot of people who think either Paul or Dennis did (m)any things wrong. People did criticize Dennis for being very cautious about new programs, and generally cheap, but the upside was that his successors had more money to play with.

  4. mfr says:

    Okay. I see how the comparison between Bush and Dean White’s predecessors is unfair because Bush was the worst leader in the history of anything. It’s more about Dean White entering what was a rudderless ship, in that the school was meandering along but totally incapable of any existential changes that would have dramatically improved the situation. It’s not that the people before her did the wrong or bad things, but that they clearly weren’t substantially improving the school or helping it progress. Assuming that the over-acceptance rate for Fall 2010 will not be around 50%, and even nearly 100% of what a proper law school class should be as it was this year, I will be absolutely delighted beyond belief. That is seriously some change that I can believe in.

  5. I think it’s an appropriate metaphor for Dean White, if even insufficient for the vast amount of praise and gratitude she deserves.

  6. 2008 Grad says:

    I am sure these professors are all very smart and talented and I am sure they will bring something to the campus. However, the law school doesn’t need more professors teaching courses relating to gender studies and other similar topics. When I was at the law school (graduated in 2008), it was nearly impossible to take bankruptcy if you wanted to take other substantive courses or get work experience, and I also believe bankruptcy was only offered once a year. The school needs to focus on teaching classes its students actually want and need, and until it does so I am afraid it will remain alienated from its current students and thus its alumni base. Please implore the dean to hire faculty that teach substantive and useful courses.

  7. Donna Coker says:

    And don’t forget about Scott Sundby who will join us in fall 2011. See his bio at http://law.wlu.edu/faculty/profiledetail.asp?id=44

Comments are closed.