News

MORGANTOWN, WEST VIRGINIA — Larry V. Starcher, former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Appeals for West Virginia, has established a fund at West Virginia University to benefit legal education.

The endowment will support adjunct faculty salaries at the WVU College of Law.

Starcher has been a lecturer at the College of Law since 2009, teaching trial advocacy and pre-trial litigation. He has served as an adjunct faculty member in the college’s trial advocacy program since 1991.

“WVU and the law school provided me with life-changing opportunities,” said Starcher. “With this endowment, I want to acknowledge that in a meaningful way while supporting the future of legal education in our state.”

MORGANTOWN, WEST VIRGINIA – Articles by two WVU Law students have been published on the Oxford Human Rights Hub Blog (OxHRH Blog).

Tasha Frazie and Christopher Smith, both 3Ls, wrote the posts as part of their International Human Rights Law class this fall.

The OxHRH Blog, which is based at the University of Oxford’s Faculty of Law, “aims to promote dialogue between human rights researchers, practitioners and policy-makers from around the world.” It is a prominent global forum with a focus on rigorous legal analysis that has been recognized with an OxTalent Award and by the British Academy.

In his post, Smith addressed  citizenship rights in the Dominican Republic, particularly a new policy of retroactively stripping citizenship from individuals born to “foreigners in transit.” 

MORGANTOWN, WEST VIRGINIA – A clinic at the West Virginia University College of Law clinic has been honored for its work in entrepreneurial assistance.

The Entrepreneurship and Innovation Law Clinic (EILC) was recently presented with the 2015 Entrepreneurial Support of the Year award by TechConnectWV.

EILC gives law students the opportunity to provide legal services to start-up companies, small businesses, non-profits, and individuals. The clinic works with clients in counseling for a product plan or business organization; licensing; employee and contractor agreements; intellectual property; financing and venture capital; planning and negotiation; dispute resolution; and generalized assistance in business formation, planning, and strategy.

Founded in 2006, TechConnectWV is a statewide economic development organization dedicated to the advancement of science, technology, and the innovation economy in West Virginia. It is focused on four technology sectors: advanced energy, chemicals and advanced materials, biosciences, and biometrics. TechConnectWV works to grow and diversify West Virginia’s economy through innovation-based economic development.

MORGANTOWN, WEST VIRGINIA – Two experts from  West Virginia University recently participated in a workshop at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC, to discuss the future of coal workers and their communities.

Rochelle Goodwin, WVU senior associate vice president, moderated a panel discussion on the current conditions and pressing needs of coal communities. She is the former director of state operations for Senator John D. “Jay” Rockefeller and a 2000 graduate of WVU Law.

Law professor  James Van Nostrand (left), who serves as director of WVU’s Center for Energy and Sustainable Development, discussed the trends and outlooks faced by coal workers and their communities.

MORGANTOWN, WEST VIRGINIA—The Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) recently provided $150,000 in federal funding to the  West Virginia University  Land Use and Sustainable Development (LUSD) Law Clinic to support an ongoing partnership.

“NRCS, our partners and West Virginia landowners will continue to greatly benefit from this agreement with the LUSD Law Clinic,” said Nicole Viars, acting state conservationist. “We are able to continue our commitment through collaborative efforts to address risks and purchase conservation easements. In turn, we will be able to protect more agriculture lands over time.”

Since 2014, the LUSD Law Clinic has assisted NRCS with conservation efforts for more than 20 properties in the state, including farmlands, wetlands, and open spaces. The funds support the LUSDLaw Clinic, based at the WVU College of Law, and NRCS to conserve land and provide educational and other outreach services throughout West Virginia.

“The additional funding allows us to continue working with NRCS until September 2019 with greater capacity than before,” said  Katherine Garvey, director of the clinic.

MORGANTOWN, WEST VIRGINIA – In 2011, the United Nations adopted the Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, establishing the first global standards for preventing human rights violations by businesses.

Four years later, a new book made possible by a  WVU College of Law conference is the most comprehensive guide to business and human rights. Published by the Cambridge University Press, “The Business and Human Rights Landscape” is edited by  Jena Martin, a WVU law professor, and Karen Bravo, an Indiana University law professor.

The book is based on papers presented at a gathering of global experts on business and human rights hosted by theWVU College of Law in September 2013. Organized by Martin, it was the first comprehensive conference on business and human rights held at a university in the United States.

“The Business and Human Rights Landscape” includes in-depth explorations of the U.N. Guiding Principles. It also presents practical case studies of current events, such as the 2013 garment factory collapse in Bangladesh that killed more than 1,100 people, as well as perspectives of historical events such as the colonial slave trade.

The Supreme Court of the United States’ historic 5-4 decision in Obergefell v. Hodges (2015) made same-sex marriage legal in all 50 states. On the front lines of the case was 2010 WVU Law graduate Jacklyn “Jaci” Gonzales Martin, then an attorney with Gerhardstein & Branch in Cincinnati, Ohio, and co-counsel for lead plaintiff Jim Obergefell (above). Not long after the ruling, Martin talked to WVU Law Magazine about her involvement in the groundbreaking civil rights victory.

I met Jim Obergefell and his husband, John Arthur, shortly after they were married in the summer of 2013. When the Windsor decision [declaring Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act unconstitutional] came down that summer, having been together for 20 years, Jim and John decided to make their union official.

John had ALS, and he did not have long to live. He was bedridden, so the couple took a medically equipped plane to Maryland and married on the tarmac. It wasn’t until Jim and John got home that it started to sink in for them that although their marriage was legal in Maryland and recognized by the federal government, their marriage did not exist in their home state of Ohio.

My boss, Al Gerhardstein, was introduced to Jim and John through a mutual friend days after their wedding, and our firm started dreaming about how to ensure that their marriage would be recognized by their home state. We knew that the state’s system for recording deaths would be one inevitable and imminent way Ohio’s marriage equality bans would affect this couple. There is a place on a death certificate to mark whether a person was married and the name of their surviving spouse. For John Arthur, unless we acted, he would be known on his last official record of his life as “single” and Jim Obergefell would not be recognized as his surviving spouse.

John T. Chambers, WVU Law Class of 1974, has been namd the number two “Best-Performing CEO in the World” by Harvard Business Review (HBR). Chambers is the executive chairman and former CEO of Cisco Systems. He is also a graduate of the  WVU College of Business and Economics. 

To compile its list of the world’s best-performing CEOs, HBR looked at companies that were in the S&P Global 1200 at the end of 2014. The magazines evaluated 907 CEOs from 896 companies (some firms have co-CEOs) as of April 30, 2015. Chambers stepped down as Cisco Systems CEO in July 2015 after more than two decades at the company’s helm.

To read Harvard Business Review’s “The Best-Performing CEOs in the World” (Nov. 2015),  click here.

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jj/11/4/15

MORGANTOWN, WEST VIRGINIA – Lani Guinier, Harvard law professor and pioneering civil rights advocate, will deliver the annual Baker Lecture at the West Virginia University College of Law on Thursday, November 5, at 12 p.m. in the event hall. 

Admission is free and the public is invited to attend. A reception and book signing will follow the lecture. 

In her latest book, “The Tyranny of the Meritocracy: Democratizing Higher Education in America” (Beacon Press, 2015), Guinier calls for a reshaping of higher education to better serve society by educating more students from diverse backgrounds. The current higher education model in the U.S., she argues, fails its mission of equal opportunity and social mobility by continuing to serve and reward the privileged.

Guinier is the Bennett Boskey Professor of Law and the first woman of color appointed to a tenured professorship at Harvard Law School. Throughout her career, she has addressed issues of race, gender, and democratic decision-making, and sought new ways of approaching questions like affirmative action while calling for candid public discourse on these topics.

In 1993, President Clinton nominated Guinier to be the first black woman for Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights. The nomination was withdrawn following a wave of controversy and negative press.

The Baker Lecture at WVU College of Law is presented annually in honor of C. Edwin Baker, a leading constitutional law scholar who died in 2009. He was the Nicholas F. Gallicchio Professor of Law and Communication at the University of Pennsylvania Law School.

MORGANTOWN, WEST VIRGINIA— Rosalind Lister, assistant director of career services at WVU College of Law, was recently selected to fulfill the remaining 18 months of a term as a Regional Representative for National Association for Law Placement (NALP) Southeast Region.

Regional Representatives serve on the NALP Regional Resource Council and facilitate the flow of information between members and the NALPBoard, identify regional issues and volunteer opportunities, support the existing groups in the region, and participate in and plan annual education conference activities. NALP’s five regions are Northeast, Mid-Atlantic, Southeast, Midwest, and West/Rocky Mountain.

Lister joined the WVU Law staff in 2006. She earned her M.S.Ed. in Counseling & College Student Personnel and B.A. in Communication from Purdue University.

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