UBalt Law Prof. Kim Wehle has been named a Fulbright Scholar for 2024-2025. The Fulbright Program’s stated mission is to increase mutual understanding between people of the United States and people of other countries.
Wehle’s Fulbright project, which will be conducted in conjunction with scholars in The Netherlands and the University of Virginia, entails empirical research, analysis, and public-facing discussion regarding how citizens actually internalize constitutional norms and use them, to varying degrees, to reinforce constitutional structures through voting, civic participation, financial support, and other means.
She will visit The Netherlands during the Spring 2025 semester, following a speaking tour for her fourth book, Pardon Power: How the Pardon System Works — and Why, which was published in September 2024.
Wehle says she will work with Prof. W.J.M. Voermans, of the University of Leiden, and other scholars to study how social constructivism informs constitutional law and, in turn, how courts and government actors should consider the public’s internalized values in shaping the rule of law. It will continue their three-year collaboration comparing the two oldest constitutions in the world: the U.S. and Dutch Constitutions.
“In 2019, Professor Voermans and I met when we both spoke at the John Adams Institute in Amsterdam about our recent books, How to Read the Constitution—and Why (Wehle), and The Story of Constitutions (Voermans),” Wehle says. “Thus began a collaboration around Professor Voermans’ ongoing research on how constitutions live in the ‘hearts and minds’ of ordinary people.
Wehle, who has been on the faculty at Baltimore Law since 2009, teaches administrative law, constitutional law, civil procedure and federal courts. She is the author of How to Read the Constitution — and Why (2019), What You Need to Know About Voting — and Why (2020), and How to Think Like a Lawyer and Why: A Common-Sense Guide to Everyday Dilemmas (2022).
“I am truly honored to have been selected as a Fulbright Scholar, one of the world’s most prestigious organizations for fostering intercultural scholarship and community,” she says. “I’m thrilled to continue my research at the University of Leiden on how citizens internalize constitutional norms –and its impact on the interaction among politicians, civil servants, and the voting public.”
For Saman Behbahani, J.D. ’08, personal contacts have helped define a career trajectory.
She started out in real estate law — in 2008 there was plenty of work in that arena. (“The people were lovely, but the work was horrible. I basically was kicking people out of their houses,” she says.) A friend from UBalt Law got her a first clerkship, in the Montgomery County, MD, Circuit Court. From there, a friend from her undergrad days recruited her onto the legal team at National Geographic.
“UB really emphasized the value of networking, and that’s what brought me to where I am today,” she says.
At NatGeo she read 10 years’ worth of television contracts and learned how that industry works. She jumped to Viacom in New York, did a stint at AMC Networks, and two years ago moved to NBCUniversal, where she serves as vice president of legal affairs.
If that sounds like a cool gig … it is.
Behind the scenes …
At NBCUniversal, “I lead a small but mighty team of attorneys, and we license scripted content,” Behbahani says.
“The scripted television content that you see on NBC or on any of the cable networks or streaming on Peacock, anything that our own studio does not make, we license,” she says. “We work closely with our business-affairs colleagues and negotiate these deals, draft contracts, analyze any rights questions. Intellectual property and copyright law are the foundation of what we do, but really it’s about making deals and drafting contracts for long-term licenses of content.”
Entertainment law covers a lot of ground, and some of it isn’t what you would expect. Beyond securing the rights to content, she says, “We make sure that nobody’s injured, that nobody’s rights are infringed on through the process of creating the content.
“We also want to make sure there’s respect in the workplace,” she adds.
“Training for every single person that comes into contact with any of our productions: That’s really big and very important,” she says, and it all has to be written into the contracts. “Everyone needs to feel safe on set, and in writing rooms. Everyone should be valued and their opinions valued. Storytelling also has to be very sensitive. When we license shows, we take that responsibility very seriously.”
A fast-changing field
In the midst of all this, Behbahani gets to be part of the effort to define new legal strategies in an industry that is very much in flux.
Entertainment law has been evolving since she got into the field in 2011, “and in the last four years it has changed even more dramatically,” she says. “The move to streaming is huge. The way people get content, the amount of content available — it has changed everything we do.”
The new landscape has required a legal reset of sorts. “It’s not just the rights, it’s even the definitions: What is streaming? What is VOD (video on demand) versus what are digital rights?” Behbahani says.
And there are pandemic curveballs that linger. The pandemic pushed a lot of television production overseas, where it remains, “and a lot of the production rules change in different countries,” she says. All that impacts the work of the legal team.
Behbahani falls back on her UBalt Law training in order to navigate this complex landscape.
“One of the biggest things that the law school was proud of was the hands-on practical learning. I didn’t come out of law school with just book knowledge,” she says. “I had an externship my first summer after school and then did the immigration law clinic. I also interned at the courthouse because one of my professors, The Hon. John F. Gossart, Jr., was an immigration judge, and I clerked for him.”
All that practical experience in turn supports agility, the capacity to pivot when needed.
“It’s the ability to have a bigger picture view, to see opportunities. That kind of agility is what allows you to work towards ‘yes.’ My clients are creatives,” she says, “and my job is to make sure that what they want to happen, happens. So the answer is always yes: Let’s just figure out how.”
Janet Lord joined the Center for International and Comparative Law (CICL) as executive director in November 2023. Prior to coming to the University of Baltimore, she served as chief legal counsel to the UN Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.
Lord holds a senior research fellowship at the Harvard Law School Project on Disability, where she works to address gaps in international law, policy and practice on the rights of persons with disabilities. She has spent her career as an international human rights lawyer, working globally to advance the rights of persons with disabilities.
A lead drafter of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, she provided legal counsel during the treaty negotiations to governments, the United Nations and civil society organizations throughout the five-year drafting process.
She continues to provide legal counsel on international human rights law and inclusive development to the World Bank, the United Nations Office of Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protection, the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, the United Nations Development Programme, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the United States Department of State, organizations of persons with disabilities and numerous other stakeholders.
Lord began her career working for the World Bank Group, where she served as legal counsel to the Bank’s International Administrative Tribunal and legal secretary to the Bank’s Appeals Committee. Thereafter, she served as legal advisor and advocacy director for an international non-governmental landmine survivor organization, where she worked to monitor the Mine Ban Treaty and led advocacy efforts on the rights of landmine survivors across the UN system.
Lord’s pro bono work and service to the community includes support to litigants appearing before national courts and international human rights courts and mechanisms. She was appointed for two consecutive terms to the board of Amnesty International USA where, in her final two years of service, she was vice chair and chair of the board. She is currently serving on the board of the US International Council on Disabilities and on an expert advisory panel on political participation at the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.
She has published books, journal articles, book chapters and monographs on a variety of international public law, international human rights law, international humanitarian law and disability law issues. Her recent scholarship appears in the American Journal of International Law, the Harvard Journal of International Law, the Virginia Journal of International Law, the International Review of the Red Cross, and the UN Audiovisual Library of International Law.
Lord holds degrees from Kenyon College, the University of Edinburgh (Scotland), and the George Washington University Law School. In 2022, she was awarded an honorary Doctor of Laws degree by Kenyon College for her work in advancing international disability rights and disability inclusive development. She is a member of the New York Bar.
On May 15, 2024, graduates, loved ones, faculty and staff gathered at Towson University’s TU Arena to celebrate the School of Law’s 96thCommencement.
Recipients of theJuris Doctor degree,Master of Laws in Taxation, andMaster of Laws in the Law of the United Stateshad their degrees conferred upon them by University of BaltimoreProvost Ralph O. Mueller.
Heartfelt and encouraging remarks were given by 2024 class representative, Devante Jones, and commencement speaker, State of Maryland ComptrollerBrooke Lierman. Other speakers included University of Baltimore President Kurt L. Schmoke, University System of MarylandRegentWilliam Wood, and University of Baltimore Law Alumni Association (UBLAA) president Jasmine Pope, J.D. ’18. In one of his last acts as dean of the School of Law, Dean Ronald Weich opened and closed the ceremony with gratitude and best wishes.
When F. Scott Fitzgerald said, “There are no second acts in American lives,” he clearly hadn’t bet on Ebony Thompson, J.D. ’13. Thompson, 46, did not even graduate from law school until she was 34. Yet today she is Baltimore’s first woman and first openly gay City Solicitor, sworn in last January, and she has already successfully tackled some of the city’s most pressing issues, including vacant housing and ghost guns.
After graduating from Brown University with a degree in economics, Thompson took a job at UBS in New York City. But after watching the second plane hit the World Trade Center on 9/11, she realized finance was not her passion. Instead, she went into real estate. “I did well, but something was missing,” she says. Through law, she realized she could bring together her interests in real estate, finance and technology. As a career changer who was born and raised in northwest Baltimore, UBalt Law made sense.
“I knew I would get the knowledge and resources to immediately practice law,” she says.
After graduation, she went to Venable LLP, where she was happily heading down the partner track. Although she’d worked on cases with Venable’s chairman, Jim Shea, she was “shocked” when he asked her to become his deputy when he was named Baltimore City Solicitor. When Shea retired, Thompson was his pick for his successor.
“She is smart, she has good judgment, she’s very personable,” says Shea of Thompson. “She’s very strong-willed and can face difficult situations calmly and effectively.”
He adds that while Thompson has a wealth of experience as a lawyer, “she brings a lot of diverse life experience to the work she does.”
While the post meant a major pay cut — no small thing for a single mother of three young daughters — Thompson says it felt like the right time for her to give back to her hometown. It also brought Thompson back to the earliest days of her legal career: as a high school student at Baltimore City College, she was a Law Links intern in the same legal department she now leads.
“They gave me my start, so it was incredibly difficult to say no,” she laughs.
To say her job now is more complex than in those youthful internship days would be understatement. Thompson immediately tackled the city’s vacant housing problem, which she describes as “a public health issue.” Leaning on her passion for tech solutions, she introduced blockchain technology as a way to combat the challenge, making Baltimore the first municipality in the country to do so. Using blockchain and the newly dedicated In Rem docket with the Circuit Court, the city is in the process of creating an immutable ledger that streamlines the foreclosure process on vacant homes and passes the savings on to residents and redevelopment investors. Vacancy rates have dropped from roughly 17,000 to 13,500.
“Not only does this combat vacant housing, it also expedites the renovation process and lays the foundation for fractional ownership for those who have been shut out of homeownership and community revitalization,” she explains.
She’s also proud of the $1.2 million settlement with Polymer-80, the primary manufacturer of ghost guns. While the money was a nice boon, Thompson says the injunctive measures on neighboring jurisdictions with less stringent laws will make a measurable difference in the city’s fight against violent crime. She also helped build the legal framework for the Squeegee Collaborative, balancing the First Amendment rights of young people with the need for public safety, and she stood up for consumer protections by drafting new local ordinances that prevent unfair trade practices.
‘Always on 100’
With a demanding home and work life it’s good she has, by admission, a lot of energy. All three of her daughters are swimmers (like their mother) and in addition to juggling swim meets, Thompson makes time to work out daily. She returned to karate, which she did as a young person, after breaking her leg in a women’s tackle football game. (Her father, a black belt, is her sensei.) She lives within walking distance of her childhood home and weekends are all about entertaining friends and family.
“People joke that I’m always on 100, but I’m excited that there’s always something I can do to make the city better, to solve an issue, or to bring something to implementation,” she says.
Thompson has a visceral understanding of the importance of law and equal protection borne out of her own experience. At Brown, she joined the U.S. Marine Corps as a reservist and went on to Officer Candidate School, graduating first in her class. Yet this was the era of “Don’t ask, don’t tell.”
“That was a very challenging time to go through, knowing that if I said I was gay it would all be taken away,” she remembers. She also had all three children via IVF. Although she had a pre-existing medical condition that should have qualified her for insurance coverage for the procedure, as she had not met the criteria of trying naturally for 12 months with a heterosexual partner, her coverage was denied.
“Those are the things that motivate me, seeing the real-life implications of the laws you are trying to pass,” she says.
She is also motivated by the people she is entrusted to serve, a big change from her Venable days when the lawyer’s responsibility was solely to the client. Now the “client” is the city, which includes the people of Baltimore.
“You have to challenge yourself to often find the best solution for the most people,” she explains. “That has been a big but a good challenge, because having to think about that every day keeps the people top of mind.”
Christianna McCausland is a writer based in Baltimore. Photo by Larry Canner.
To hear Ron Weich tell it, he was the least likely person in his law school class to ever become a law school dean.
“I wanted to do, and not teach,” Weich says in an interview last spring, shortly before wrapping up his 12-year tenure as dean of UBalt Law and assuming the deanship of Seton Hall Law School in Newark, N.J.
However, after decades of doing, in government and private practice, “it turned out that deaning is my thing,” Weich says. “This is my jam.”
The path to UBalt Law
Dean Weich with U.S. Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., during a visit to the law school in September 2024.
Weich took a roundabout course to the corner office on the seventh floor of the John and Frances Angelos Law Center.
After graduating from Yale Law School in 1983, he worked for four years as an assistant district attorney in Manhattan, earning the sobriquet “Dis Con Ron” for his tendency to allow sympathetic defendants to plead guilty to disorderly conduct.
Moving on to Washington, D.C., Weich served for two years as special counsel to the U.S. Sentencing Commission before going to work for Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.), ultimately serving as his chief counsel on the Judiciary Committee from 1995 to 1997.
A seven-year stint as a partner at Zuckerman Spaeder ended when Weich returned to government in 2005, as senior and then chief counsel to Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.). In 2009, Weich was appointed by President Barack Obama to serve as the assistant attorney general for legislative affairs, a position he held until 2012, when he left government for UBalt Law.
Raising the profile
Weich’s connections in government and the law helped raise the profile of the law school, says Vicki Schultz, J.D. ’89, former associate dean at UBalt Law and currently executive director of Maryland Legal Aid.
“He saw the law school as a place that should be vibrant, dynamic, and deeply engaged in the issues of our time, and he sought to make it a place that was open and welcoming to those who were interested in discussing and tackling those issues,” Schultz says, citing the range of guests Weich invited to speak at UBalt Law over the years, including U.S. Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan, former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, U.S. Rep. Jamie Raskin, then-U.S. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.), among others.
Schultz said the willingness of top government leaders to come to Baltimore reflected Weich’s skill and genuine interest in creating relationships.
“There’s a deep affection that people who work with Ron have, which of course is unusual,” Schultz says. “Ron was able to work with all kinds of people, and they maintain a deep sense of respect for him, so when he made a call to ask someone to speak at our law school, they were very willing to come.”
In 2015, when Baltimore exploded after Freddie Gray’s death from injuries sustained in police custody, UBalt Law became a locus of activity, with attorneys from the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice meeting in the moot courtroom with community members as part of an investigation into Baltimore’s police department.
Venable Professor of Law Michele Gilman cites Weich’s commitment to the law school’s clinical program, which during his tenure rose to No. 5 in the nation in U.S. News & World Report’s annual rankings – and which expanded with the addition of several new clinics, including The Bob Parsons Veterans Advocacy Clinic, the Criminal Defense and Advocacy Clinic, and the Legal Data and Design Clinic.
“All the deans before were supportive of clinics, but I think Ron helped us move to another level, as shown by our increasing rankings,” says Gilman, who has been at UBalt Law since 1998.
Weich’s support for fresh initiatives was particularly notable, Gilman adds.
“Whether you were faculty or student and you were proposing a new program or a new idea or a new event, Ron said yes,” she says. “(He’d say) ‘Great, tell me about it, what do you need, how can we make it happen?’ That recognizing and rewarding initiative — I think it was really healthy and good for the law school.”
Weich’s warm and welcoming style was appreciated by many. “He has a great sense of humor. He’s hilarious,” says alumna Julianne Tarver, J.D. ’15. “He has this great balance in his personality and in his life, to be able to be very strong as well as very humble and down to earth.”
“One thing that made it great to work for him is that, on matters large and small, his fundamental decency shows,” says Dean Joseph Curtis Professor of Law José Anderson. The longtime faculty member also hailed Weich’s commitment to securing state judicial clerkships for UBalt Law students, even with a soft legal employment market early in his tenure.
“That he was able to sustain one of the great hallmarks of our success as a law school, that’s really a major accomplishment,” Anderson says.
UBalt Law ranks highly among law schools nationwide for the number of graduates who secure state judicial clerkships, with nearly 27 percent of the Class of 2023 securing the coveted positions in state courts.
‘Put your money where your mouth is’
Larry Greenberg, J.D. ’94, chair of the Dean’s Development Circle, remembers meeting Weich years ago at an alumni event.
“The conversation was along the lines of, ‘Why don’t you hire interns from (UBalt Law)?’” says Greenberg, whose firm, Greenberg Law Offices, was then getting its interns from the University of Maryland’s law school because, as he put it, he didn’t think UBalt Law students were good enough.
“I remember Ron said something along the lines of, ‘Put your money where your mouth is: Why don’t you teach?’ And I said, ‘I’m not a teacher and I’m so busy,’” Greenberg recalls.
But resistance was futile. Greenberg just finished his ninth year as an adjunct professor at UBalt Law — and he’s hired several UBalt Law students as interns and associates.
Weich says the law school has come a long way in 12 years, thanks to his UBalt Law team.
“This place was teetering, the budget was unsteady and the relationship with the university was fraught,” he says of his early years in the role. “Enrollment was down, and over the years we’ve righted the ship in each of those areas. I think we’ve gotten the law school to a stable place, and I’m looking forward to watching the next dean take it to the next level.”
Hope Keller is a writer based in Connecticut. Photo by Juan Pablo Soto Médico.
Prof. Odeana Neal has an unmistakable laugh that serves many purposes. Sometimes, it is a spontaneous response to the funny moments life presents. Sometimes, it’s the laugh of a person with a truly flawless B.S. detector. And sometimes, it’s a laugh that radiates a beautiful kind of empathy.
It’s the laugh of someone with a singular combination of intellect, insight, kindness and a gift for timing, and is always rooted in honesty. Because our offices were next to each other, I frequently got the benefit of laughing with Odeana, and I, and so many others, will miss it.
My proximity to Odeana meant that I saw regularly that I was far from the only person who was touched by her generous spirit. Odeana was “student-centered” long before that was a priority in legal education, and she spent countless hours teaching, mentoring, supporting, supervising and otherwise helping to usher students into the legal profession as well-trained, healthy and whole individuals. As she ends her 35-year career at the University of Baltimore School of Law, that will certainly be one of her most important legacies.
She worked closely with the Fannie Angelos Program for Academic Success, making UBalt Law’s access mission real for the many talented students who participated in the program. She took over leadership of the law school’s LL.M. in Law of the United States program, connecting with and supporting students from around the world to help them realize their dream of an American law degree.
She worked in an informed and deliberate way on bar exam and academic success efforts, and I was frequently told her ability to teach Property was unmatched. She created courses in Juvenile Justice and in Sexual Orientation and the Law, and whatever she taught, she was always innovative in her approach. Most recently, she provided significant support in the effort to reform UBalt Law’s unique Introduction to Lawyering Skills course. I could go on.
Rather than simply reciting Odeana’s many accomplishments, however, I think it better to highlight through the words of colleagues and former students a few of the many ways she made an impact on this law school — not just as an institution, but as a community, as so many of us benefitted from her brilliant mind, boundless warmth and unsparing wisdom.
Prof. Margaret Johnson recalls that she “always admired Odeana for her strength and principled stance on issues. Her collaborative spirit in helping to found and maintain such intersectional feminist initiatives as the Special Topics in Applied Feminism course, the feminist book club, and the strategic planning for women faculty, helped make UBalt a more intellectual and inclusive space.”
Prof. Elizabeth Keyes notes that Odeana “knew what was what,” and “cared in such a profound way about the students.” Odeana was often “a voice of wisdom and reason for all of us, on issues big and small,” and “she couldn’t walk five feet around the building without being warmly greeted by this student, having a quick check-in with another, or being drawn into a deeper conversation about succeeding in law school and the profession with yet another.”
Prof. Neal Kempler states, “I first met Odeana through her work with bar studiers, and it was clear she had a unique ability to make complex topics accessible and engaging. When I later had her as my 1L Property professor, I saw firsthand how she approaches teaching with a mix of rigor and wit that truly resonates. Odeana is that rare type of educator who prioritizes her students’ professional and personal growth. Her impact on our students and our institution will be felt for years to come.”
Prof. Jaime Lee fondly recalls her long, late-night talks with Odeana when Lee was new to UBalt Law. “Odeana’s commitment to justice, and her intellectual might, fearlessness, generosity and kindness have given me and so many others endless inspiration and joy over these many years, and will always continue to do so.”
Prof. Angela Vallario explains that “25 years ago, Odeana was on the appointments committee that hired me. She supported me being hired, and I’ll never forget how valued she made me feel. I am grateful for her service to the law school in so many ways.”
Student Kamryn Washington, Class of 2025, stated that “it is hard to come up with words that express what she has done for me. She brought the excitement back to law school. She was a tough professor who demanded excellence from her students. She also was the school auntie who was always available to listen and give tough, but much needed, advice. I am extremely blessed to have had her as a professor and mentor.”
And finally, Prof. Emeritus Robert Lande wishes “Kippy” a happy retirement (and thinks she will laugh when she reads this).
In legal education, we often refer to what we do as teaching students to “think like lawyers.” For me, Odeana Neal’s most important legacy is that she not only taught students to think like lawyers, but to think like lawyers who know that to effectively secure justice for others, lawyers must also value their own well-being. An important part of that, Odeana showed us, is being unafraid to say the things that need to be said — and never forgetting the many benefits of a well-timed laugh.
Dionne Koller is a professor at UBalt School of Law.
The 2024 Distinguished Alumni Awards were held the evening of April 11, 2024. Alumni and esteemed guests celebrated the deserving honorees and thanked Dean Ronald Weich for his 12 years of leadership at UBalt Law.
Award winners were chosen by the UBalt Law Alumni Association based on nominations submitted by alumni and the public. Congratulations to the 2024 honorees!
The winners were:
Byron L. Warnken Memorial Alumni Award: Sen. Jill P. Carter, J.D. ’92
Dean’s Award: Sayra Wells Meyerhoff, J.D. ’78
Distinguished Judicial Award: Hon. Alex Allman, J.D. ’00
Judge Robert Bell Award: Vicki Schultz, J.D. ’89
Rising Star Award: Dionne Hopkins, J.D. ’19.
Sen. Jill P. Carter, left, Hon. Alex Allman, Vicki Schultz
Just four years out of Harvard Law School, a young Federal Trade Commission attorney named Robert Lande took on Robert Bork, the mandarin of U.S. antitrust thought whose 1978 book, The Antitrust Paradox, had become the foundational text of conservative competition policy.
In a 1982 Hastings Law Journal article, Lande contested Bork’s premise that the purpose of the antitrust laws was to promote economic efficiency, or what Bork – misleadingly, Lande says – called consumer welfare. A study of the legislative history of the main antitrust acts, including the 1890 Sherman Act, had shown Lande that Congress’ overriding concern was not efficiency but protecting consumers from exorbitant prices imposed by monopolies and cartels.
“You can find dozens and dozens of comments by Sen. (John) Sherman and the other members of Congress saying, ‘We really don’t like it when the mo
nopolies and cartels raise prices,’” Lande said in a recent interview. “And (Bork) now said, ‘What’s wrong with raising prices so long as it’s efficient?’”
Lande, who retired in June 2024 as Venable Professor of Law after 37 years at UBalt Law, also dismisses Bork’s use of the term “consumer welfare.”
“It had nothing to do with the welfare of consumers,” he says. “It was brilliant marketing.”
Neil Averitt, a former colleague of Lande’s at the FTC and an opinion columnist at FTC: Watch, remembers thinking at the time that Lande was crazy for tilting at antitrust orthodoxy.
“I thought, Bob, why are you writing that silly article?” recalls Averitt, who contributed a chapter to the most recent issue of the University of Baltimore Law Review, which was published as a Festschrift in honor of Lande and his scholarship.
Now, he says, “it turns out that Bob was entirely prescient.”
Arriving at UBalt Law
In 1987, after leaving the FTC and working briefly at Jones Day in Washington, D.C., Lande arrived at the UBalt School of Law. He had just published another law review article that again challenged Bork, by now a federal judge, who had recently been nominated by President Ronald Reagan to the Supreme Court.
“I published this article saying that Bork claims to be a strict constructionist, and all he wants to do is implement the will of Congress. But if you look at what he did in antitrust, it’s the opposite,” Lande says.
Lande gave the article to UBalt Law’s then-Dean Laurence Katz, who was, he knew, “on the other side of the ideological spectrum.”
“With a little bit of trepidation, I gave Larry Katz a copy of that article saying Bork is a hypocrite, don’t confirm him to the Supreme Court,” Lande says. “I had never taught a class yet.”
Katz was effusive in his praise.
“He said, ‘I’m so glad you published this article, this is wonderful. The point is, you publish what you want, and it makes the university look good and the law school look good,’” Lande recalls. “And I’m thinking, ‘Oh my goodness, this is called academic freedom!’”
Law Review Symposium Editor Kaitlin O’Dowd, J.D. ’23, left, with Prof. Matthew Lindsay, Prof. Emeritus Robert Lande and Dean Ronald Weich at the 2023 antitrust symposium.
Public intellectual
Professor John Bessler said he thinks of Lande as a public intellectual, one who has continued to carry the torch for an antitrust policy that “protects the little guy who doesn’t have the resources to hire lobbyists.”
“You could see it almost through the framework of human rights in a way, because if people can’t afford stuff, whether it’s products or services, they’re suffering,” says Bessler, who contributed a chapter to the Festschrift.
Bessler emphasizes that Lande’s competition policy scholarship also focused on consumer choice.
“A lot of what Bob’s work is all about is not just about the price alone,” Bessler says. “It’s also about having different options,” or real competition.
Continues Bessler: “If you’re going to have true capitalism, you have to have competition policy that’s effective. Bob wants actual competition, actual capitalism, not crony capitalism –or what some people call monopoly capitalism.”
Antitrust eminence and ‘delightful human’
Today, Lande has six national awards and 45 law review articles under his belt, as well as a textbook, several book chapters and 75 other articles published in mainstream outlets, including The Washington Post and The Atlantic, plus articles published in foreign legal publications. He has been on the SSRN list of the 15 most-downloaded antitrust scholars almost every year since 2008, and he is sought after by journalists covering antitrust cases, sometimes speaking with more than 20 reporters a day.
A former student recalls him fondly.
William Atkins, J.D./MBA ’92, who worked as Lande’s research assistant, says Lande cautioned him to beware the siren song and the trap of corporate law.
“He told me, ‘You’re going down to D.C.; be careful,’” says Atkins, a partner at Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman in Northern Virginia and Washington, D.C., who specializes in intellectual property law. “He said the first thing new lawyers do is they go to Fahrney’s, to buy an expensive pen, and wear it proudly in their chest pocket. Next, they lease a Mercedes. And then they buy a house in Bethesda. And they don’t even hear the handcuffs go click-click-click.”
Says Atkins, who might not have followed his professor’s advice to the letter: “He’s such a wonderful, delightful human.”
Happy warrior
Lande says he will miss interacting with students.
“One thing that would always give me a thrill is to compare how they do at the very beginning of the semester, when they can’t read the case, they can’t understand anything about it, to how well they can perform — even at the end of the first semester. It’s thrilling to watch,” he says. “To think that I might have had something to do with their progress is just wonderful.”
Lande’s colleagues will miss his upbeat nature in addition to his erudition.
“I guess you could call him the happy warrior of antitrust, because he doesn’t get jaded,” Bessler says. “He just accepts what’s happening at the moment and says, ‘Well, how can we make it better going forward?’”
Lande was honored at the law school on March 10, 2023 with a daylong symposium, “The Quest for Progressive Antitrust: A Symposium Honoring Professor Robert H. Lande.” Speakers included U.S. Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust Jonathan Kanter and U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), chair of the Senate Judiciary Antitrust Subcommittee. Also present were the authors of articles contributed to the Festschrift, including colleagues from the American Antitrust Institute, where Lande is a founding member of its board of directors.
The Festschrift was published as the Spring 2024 issue of the University of Baltimore Law Review and, at 514 pages, is its largest issue ever.
A gymnast in her youth, Dionne Koller knew intuitively what her career in the legal-academic world would look like.
“Sports was a very important part of my life experience. When I got into academia, that led me to have an interest in sports law, to see what sports law was all about,” she says.
But is there even such a thing as “sports law”? When Koller joined the UBalt Law faculty in 2006, the answer was a definite maybe. Since then, she has helped to put sports law on the map, and earned a reputation as one of the leading scholars in the field.
An emerging discipline
In the early 2000s, sports law wasn’t fully recognized within the legal academy as a separate academic discipline. “People would say: Certainly, there’s a lot of law that applies to sports — antitrust law, labor law, contract law. We apply a lot of law to sports, but there’s not a lot of law about sports,” Koller says.
Others took a different view. There were legal scholars who felt there was important work to be done to make sports law a field. Koller saw a professional window open up in that transitional moment. “My personal love for sports intersected with an opportunity to really take on important issues,” she says.
“When the University of Baltimore hired me, I made clear that I would want to go up for tenure with a sports law portfolio, that my scholarly record would be built on sports law and not some other recognized area,” she says.
She’s gone on to do just that, addressing urgent issues, especially around youth participation in sports. She was quoted widely when Larry Nassar, the former U.S. Women’s Gymnastics team doctor, was convicted of abusing hundreds of athletes. She recently co-chaired the Congressional Commission on the State of United States Olympics and Paralympics, and she was a member of the Aspen Institute Sport and Society’s Children’s Rights in Sports Work Group.
When it comes to youth sports, she says, there is much that needs fixing, and colleagues say Koller is uniquely qualified to drive those changes.
“She has been a pioneer in her teaching and her scholarship,” says Prof. Margaret Johnson, co-director of UBalt Law’s Center on Applied Feminism and director of the Bronfein Family Law Clinic.
Johnson notes that Koller has won the UBalt President’s Award for her teaching, scholarship and service, and has been recognized with the Association of American Law Schools’ 2024 award for significant contributions to the field of sports law.
“She models professionalism, hard work and commitment,” Johnson says. In her work at the law school, “She sees everyone for who they are, in a way that makes everyone feel good about being together in this shared enterprise.”
Koller leads a hearing in Congress in September 2023 as chair of the Commission on the State of U.S. Olympic and Paralympics.
Focus on Youth
Koller’s first book, More Than Play: How Law, Policy, and Politics Shape American Youth Sport, is due out in 2025.
“The book mirrors my approach to sports law generally, which is to take something that we take for granted and illuminate areas that we maybe haven’t been paying attention to,” she says. The book challenges the unspoken assumption “that youth sport is good, it’s healthy, every kid should participate.”
The truth is somewhat more nuanced, she argues.
From a legal standpoint, there’s an operating assumption that sports should not be regulated. That has real-world impact. “We’re over-training kids, overworking them, burning them out. It has physical consequences, and it has mental consequences,” she says.
While Koller doesn’t lay out a program for fixing all this, she has some strong thoughts on the subject, guided in part by her understanding of how sports in other countries are regulated.
“There are countries like Norway that do things very, very differently,” she says. “They give children some rights, meaning children can decide how much time they’re going to spend on their sport. They’re going to decide if they want to travel to compete. Children have some say.”
A better system would also reflect the fact that “parents can’t always be neutral judges or arbiters of their children’s youth sport experience,” she says. “Parents get swept away in their children’s performances and youth sport experiences. They lose that healthy mental distance they might be able to use in other contexts.”
That’s an argument for more government regulation. Koller would like to see a national standard, with “baseline levels for safety, including regulations for those who coach, making sure that there are background checks, that there are minimum competencies that coaches have to possess,” she says.
That’s easier said than done.
There’s a general mindset that government has no place regulating the creative and competitive world of athletics. “That might make sense when you’re talking about professional football, where athletes are protected by their union. But to take that mentality and apply it to youth sports is problematic,” she says.
At the same time, parents’ rights advocates are for the most part in knee-jerk opposition to government involvement in youth sports. But the idea here isn’t to rob parents of their decision-making authority, Koller says: It’s to protect the kids.
“I regularly hear from parents who are shocked that nobody’s regulating this or making sure the coach has any ability to coach,” she says. “The government doesn’t need to run Little League in order to set some minimum safety standards for the people who do run Little League.”
As Koller looks to elevate these issues within the legal community, and with the public at large, she expresses gratitude to UBalt Law for giving her the freedom to pursue this once-unrecognized field.
“I have been able to do this scholarship because of the University of Baltimore law school’s support,” she says. “Because the University of Baltimore believed in me, I’ve really been able to develop as a scholar, and to contribute to the field. All of that is a result of the University of Baltimore’s standing behind me and encouraging me. I have the career that I have because of this institution.”
Adam Stone is a writer based in Annapolis. Photo by Larry Canner.
UBalt Law Prof. Kim Wehle has been named a Fulbright Scholar for 2024-2025. The Fulbright Program’s stated mission is to increase mutual understanding between people of the United States and people of other countries. 
