Points of Pride

October 30, 2009

Faculty Accomplishments:

Professor Elizabeth McCormick has recently secured a $7500 grant from the Oklahoma Bar Foundation.  The Oklahoma Bar Foundation awarded the grant to the Tulsa Immigrant Rights Network as part of the 2009 OBF grant award program. 

The Phyllis Hurley Frey Professorship, established in September 2009 by Martin A. Frey, Professor Emeritus, has been awarded to Professors Rex Zedalis and William Hollingsworth for the accomplishments and excellence in teaching. 

Professor Martin Frey has recently published "Arbitration: Assured Resolution" (co-author Kay Bridger-Riley), Solo eNewsletter Winter 2009 (ABA publication for solo and small firm practitioners).  He will also serve as the Keynote speaker at The University of Tulsa College of Law luncheon at the Oklahoma Bar Association's Annual meeting, November 4, 2009.

Professor William Hollingsworth, a Professor of Law who joined the law school faculty in 1975, was named to the position for the 2009-2010 academic year. Author of the book Ending the Explosion: Population Policies and Ethics for a Humane Future, his primary scholarly interests are world population, ethics, and popular culture. Hollingsworth has also been an IndoAmerican Fellow at the American Institute for Indian Studies in New Delhi and received the Sterling Graduate Law Fellowship from Yale Law School. He teaches criminal law, criminal procedure, jurisprudence, and mental health law. He intends to retire at the end of the fall semester.

Professor Rex Zedalis, a Professor of Law who joined the law school faculty in 1981, has been selected to fill the professorship upon Hollingsworth’s retirement through the 2011-2012 academic year. He is author of The Legal Dimensions of Oil and Gas Law in Iraq: Current Realities/Future Prospects, a book recently published by Cambridge University Press. He serves as director of the TU’s Comparative and International Law Center and is a fellow of the law school’s Sustainable Energy & Resources Law Program. A frequently published author, Zedalis’ scholarship explores the interface between international law and energy/commercial endeavors. Zedalis received the Outstanding University Professor of the Year Award, TU’s highest teaching honor, in 2004, and has received the TU College of Law’s Outstanding Law Professor of the Year Award four times.

Student Accomplishments:

John Christiansen (JD’10) and George Overstreet (JD’10) have recently been accepted into the Attorney General Honors Program.  The Attorney General’s Honors Program is a highly competitive program and is the only way that the Department hires entry-level attorneys.  Selection for the program is based on many elements of a candidate’s background including academic achievement, law review or moot court experience, legal aid and clinical experience, and summer or part-time legal employment.  The Department also considers specialized academic studies, work experience, and extracurricular activities that directly relate to the work of the department. 

Law School Accomplishments:

The Boesche Legal Clinic’s Tulsa Immigrant Rights Network has partnered with Educare to provide legal services to immigrant parents whose children attend Educare.  Tulsa Educare is a state-of the art early childhood center that provides education and care for 200 children (from birth to age 5) and their families with full day, year round early childhood education, family support services, and ongoing medical care.  The Educare model was developed by the Chicago-based Ounce of Prevention Fund, which seeks to intervene in generational poverty and promote best practices in early childhood education.

The Utsey family continues to show its deep support of the TU College of Law by funding the Utsey Family Endowment for Library Acquisitions in American Indian and Indigenous Law benefiting the Mabee Legal Information Center.

Howard and Paula Utsey, along with their son, Brian Utsey (JD ’05, LL.M. ’06), visited campus October 12 to celebrate the second installment of their three-part gift that created the endowment to expand and enhance the MLIC’s collection of research materials in Native American law.

The Utseys’ gift has already made it possible for the MLIC to purchase the Lexis-Nexis Serial Set maps, which is a digitized database of maps that appears in the U.S. Serial Set. These maps provide students and faculty with material that can be studied to reconstruct historical developments. They also are important tools to use in the study of tribal land holdings and reservation boundaries.
This commitment aligns with their establishment of the Utsey Family Scholarship Endowment, which provides scholarships to full-time law students in the Master of Laws (LL.M.) program in American Indian and Indigenous Law.