Ninety miles south of San Jose, California, beyond where U.S. 101 merges with El Camino Real and the highway narrows to four lanes, a billboard seeks to lure truck drivers and motorists off the road. It’s happening in Soledad.” It’s an odd sign, immediately belied by the vistas surrounding it: [...]
Posts for October, 2009
New Faculty
October 23, 2009 | Issue 81Nora Freeman Engstrom ’02 was sure she wanted to teach law—she always had.
Her father was a law professor at the University of
South Carolina, and he described the job as
the best in the world.
David Freeman Engstrom ’02 has wanted to teach law for a long time. Growing up as an Air Force kid in Dayton, Ohio, Engstrom had no lawyers in his family and had no particular intention of becoming one himself.
Visiting Faculty
October 23, 2009 | Issue 81Promotions
October 23, 2009 | Issue 81Daniel E. Ho Widely considered the nation’s top young scholar in his field, Daniel E. Ho, Robert E. Paradise Faculty Fellow for Excellence in Teaching and Research, was promoted from assistant to associate professor. He teaches Administrative Law and Statistical Inference in Law and is an expert in the increasingly [...]
Retirements
October 23, 2009 | Issue 81This year, two long-standing members of the Stanford Law School community retired. Thomas C. Heller, Lewis Talbot and Nadine Hearn Shelton Professor of International Legal Studies, has accepted emeritus status, though he will remain at Stanford and continue teaching. And Miguel A. Méndez, Adelbert H. Sweet Professor of Law, is [...]
California Prisons
October 23, 2009 | Issue 81It has begun to enter public consciousness that the United States now houses more of its constituents as guests of the government—in jails and prisons—than any other nation. In this regard we not only exceed our “peers” (Australia, Canada, Japan, and Western Europe) by several hundred percent, we exceed all countries for which we have records: Russia is a distant second. It is also obvious that California has one of the most dysfunctional prison systems in the nation.
Three Strikes
October 21, 2009 | Issue 81Grasping the sheer enormity of the task that the Three Strikes Project has taken on is a challenge. Co-founded in 2006 by Lawrence C. Marshall and Michael Romano ’03 as the main focus of the Criminal Defense Clinic, the Three Strikes Project is the only legal organization in the country devoted primarily to representing individuals facing life imprisonment for nonviolent offenses under California’s “three strikes” law, a voter-approved initiative that was enacted in 1994.
Q&A
October 21, 2009 | Issue 81When David J. Hayes ’78 graduated from law school, he planned to be a trial lawyer, heading off to clerk first for Judge William Jones and then for Judge Louis F. Oberdorfer, both on the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. But that fall something happened that changed the direction of his career.
Law Firm Hiring
October 21, 2009 | Issue 81No one can quite pinpoint when the big U.S. law firms and top-tier law schools choreographed the modern-day dance that is now new associate hiring. Scheduled nearly two years before graduation, summer associate interviewing is the opening gambit of what has become intense competition for the best and brightest new legal talent.