Dean's Blog

It is 6:00 PM on the Wednesday night before Thanksgiving. Classes ended Monday and the students are hunkered down for finals. My wife has already called me wanting to know why I am not home yet. The plain answer is that I have some written materials due for a CLE that I should have done long ago. They will be finished soon.

It has been a while since my last blog. This Fall's travel schedule has been significant. Last week, I was with members of our faculty in Washington D.C. interviewing prospective faculty members. We will be hiring two new faculty members for the Fall of 2009 and identified some outstanding candidates. Those candidates will be visiting the law school over the next month along with some local and in-house candidates.

Last week, Professors Bo Cole and Mike Floyd and I traveled to Sao Paulo, Brazil. The visit had three purposes. The first was to meet many of the contacts Professor Cole had made over his past 20 years of travel to Brazil. The second was to present academic papers. I presented a paper on the US discovery system to a gathering of Brazilian federal judges and law clerks and Professors Cole and Floyd and I each presented papers at an international conference celebrating the 20th anniversary of the Brazilian constitution. We were joined at that conference by professors from Portugal and Canada.

This is the time of year when the pace at the law school quickens. The 1L's are beginning their LLR writing assignments and the upperclassmen have settled into their routines. Of course, when you walk through the halls, you see students not only studying but also preparing to represent Cumberland in national competitions throughout the fall semester. All of our student competition teams have been enjoying unprecedented success. Because of our success and the generosity of our alumni, we will send more teams into national competition than we ever have.

As I have mentioned in one of my previous blogs, we have a year long orientation for our entering students entitled Called to the Bar. It is designed to emphasize the core values of our profession and to emphasize that being a lawyer is a real calling not just a job. Our first Called to the Bar program is always special. Doug Jones '79 talks to our students about the prosecution of the individuals who bombed the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in September of 1963. Doug has received national honors for his work in that prominent case.