Campus Kudos
School of Law receives $5 million from alumnus
Stephen Susman, a 1965 graduate of the School of Law and a founding partner at Susman Godfrey LLP, has given a gift of $5 million to the School of Law. In honor of this gift and his past generosity, The University of Texas System Board of Regents has named a newly renovated space in the Law School’s Jesse Jones Building the Stephen D. Susman Academic Center. The gift will be used to meet the highest priority needs of the Law School.
Foreign policy expert Will Inboden to join Strauss Center
William C. Inboden, foreign policy and diplomatic history expert, will join the Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law as a Distinguished Scholar this December. Inboden will have an appointment as assistant professor in the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs. Inboden is senior vice president of the Legatum Institute in London, where he conducts research on issues related to national security, political and economic liberty, and global prosperity.
School of Law names new Tarlton Library director
Barbara Bintliff, the law library director at the University of Colorado at Boulder, has been named the director of the Tarlton Law Library and Jamail Center for Legal Research and the Joseph C. Hutcheson Professor in Law at the School of Law. Bintliff, a native Texan who will assume her position in September, is well known as a leader in the law library profession, a former president of the American Association of Law Libraries, a member of the American Law Institute, a noted teacher, scholar and consultant.
Nursing’s Family Wellness Center gets $82,256 grant
The School of Nursing Family Wellness Center has received a $82,256 grant from the Austin Affiliate of Susan G. Komen for the Cure®. The funds will be used to support the center’s Women’s Wellness Program, which provides free breast cancer screening services and follow-up for low-income women in Austin and Travis County. Past gifts from the organization to the Women’s Wellness Program total $763,942.
Two undergraduates named Goldwater Scholars
Two undergraduates, Miranda Denise Colletta and Cynthia Chen, have been awarded Goldwater Scholarships, the premier undergraduate award of its type in mathematics, natural sciences and engineering. Colletta is a student in the College of Natural Sciences, and Chen is in the Cockrell School of Engineering. The scholarships are awarded annually to outstanding second- and third-year college students.
Press Mentions
TIME: Is the Supreme Court too packed with Ivy Leaguers?
May 12
For the past half century, Americans have done a lot of hand-wringing over the racial, religious and gender make-up of the U.S. Supreme Court. But most of us, conservatives as well as liberals, believe that a diversity of backgrounds — the broad range of “empathy” that President Obama likes to gush about — does matter on the top bench.
So it’s all the more confounding that Obama, who on Monday nominated Solicitor General Elena Kagan to replace retiring Justice John Paul Stevens, follows one of the most elitist traditions there is when it comes to selecting Supreme Court judges: tapping only people who attended law school at Harvard or Yale.
University of Texas School of Law professor and Supreme Court scholar Lucas Powe fears the court risks “an ignorance of certain parts of the law.” He notes, for example, that the country’s Sunbelt growth in recent decades has made water rights a more important area of case law, one that many top schools “west of I-95” tend to teach more thoroughly than northeastern schools.
The Wall Street Journal: Transocean seeks limit on liability
May 13
Transocean Ltd., owner and operator of the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig that burned and sank last month and unleashed a massive oil leak into the Gulf of Mexico, on Thursday filed a request in court to limit its liability to just under $27 million.
Limitation of Liability proceedings not only give the petitioners — in this case Transocean — first say in a venue for litigation, but they also keep the case in front of a judge and away from a jury, said David Robertson, a maritime law professor at The University of Texas at Austin. Juries “tend to favor injured human beings over corporate defendants, and it’s presumed federal district judges have no such inclinations,” Robertson said.
The New York Times: University of Texas at Austin exhibit showcases Cronkite career
May 14
Walter Cronkite covered the birth of space exploration, John F. Kennedy’s assassination and Watergate.
Yet the reporter and television news anchor once known as the “Most Trusted Man in America” never forgot his roots. Shortly after he died last year at age 92, a search of his work desk turned up a neatly folded canvas shoulder bag used for delivering Liberty magazine, which Cronkite sold door-to-door as a child.
“He was a newspaper man at heart,” said Don Carleton, curator of the new exhibit “Cronkite: Eyewitness to a Century,” which opens Saturday at the LBJ Library and Museum at The University of Texas at Austin.
Read last week’s In the Know.
