Our World Champions are not the only stars in town. This month, our School of Law has achieved many important victories and milestones. Through the excellence and efforts of our students, staff, faculty, and alumni, we are—in Bumgardnerian fashion—striking out injustice.
Here are ten of our Notable Achievements:
1. The Sigrid Rausing Trust in London awarded Professor Peter Honigsberg a grant for 300,000 British pounds (approximately $500,000 US) to support his Witness to Guantanamo Project, the only project in the world to document what has taken place in the detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. He will use this new grant money to continue filming and to help find a home to archive this project for history.
2. The Williams Institute awarded our Visiting Professsor Luke Boso the 2014 Dukeminer Award for his article, Urban Bias, Rural Sexual Minorities, and the Courts. The Dukeminer Award is made for the year’s most outstanding scholarship on sexual orientation and gender identity law.
3. Professor Bill Hing and his immigration students won an important victory for a 17-year old Honduran young man fleeing persecution and gang violence in his home country. As part of our larger campus-wide project to represent unaccompanied minors as the federal government adjudicates their immigration status, the victory on guardianship status was one of the first in San Mateo County under new legislation enacted in California in August. For more information, see http://www.usfca.edu/law/news/unaccompaniedminors2014/
4. Described as one of the most powerful and important books of the years, Professor Thomas Nazario’s Living on a Dollar a Day won the International Photography Association’s Best Documentary Book Award for 2014. The award ceremony will be held at Carnegie Hall in New York on November 2nd.
5. Students Nikita Saini and Kelsey Quist won the Western Regional Judge Thomas Tang Moot Court competition organized by the National Asian Pacific American Bar Association. Nikita and Kelsey go to the national championship in Phoenix next month. They also won the Best Brief award.
6. Our Criminal Law Trial Team placed second out of 24 teams after preliminary rounds in the National Criminal Trial Advocacy Competition hosted by the California Attorneys for Criminal Justice. The team—comprised of students Rahul Balaram, Cecilia Fierro, Kirsten Haigh, and Sugam Soni—scored ahead of schools like Berkeley, Stanford, and Northwestern Law Schools.
7. Board of Governors member Peter Toren ’85 was recognized by The National Law Journal as one of 50 Intellectual Property Trailblazers and Pioneers.
8. On October 9, we celebrated our 318 alumni recognized as SuperLawyers around the nation. Here in Northern California, there were more USF alumni SuperLawyers than the combined total from Stanford and Golden Gate.
9. The families and estates of Frances Sheridan ‘59 and Robert A. Quinn made gifts to the School of Law of approximately $600,000. Their kindness and generosity provide the opportunities to today’s law students to gain the practical skills, professional training, and social justice values that are so much a part of the School of Law.
10. To round out the Top 10, Mayor Ed Lee awarded his 2014 Latino Heritage Education Award to me at a City Hall ceremony for Hispanic Heritage Month.
I thank you all for your contributions to the success of our students and School of Law.
