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.
We hope that you are enjoying reading about so many UBalt Law alumni who are now leading the way in the Maryland and D.C. legal communities and beyond. We also hope that you enjoyed learning more about Dean LaVonda Reed, UBalt Law’s wonderful new leader, who will lead our alma mater into the future.
Our Leadership Issue highlights just a few of the leaders in our community. We know there are many more, and we want to take this opportunity to celebrate our entire vast network of alumni who are leading and making a difference in so many fields, including legal practice, public service, nonprofits, higher education, and business.
At the law school, our amazing students also continue to learn key leadership skills starting at orientation – they, too, will most certainly go on to lead. Our alumni network of leaders is impressive and growing, and UBalt Law will help continue that growth.
As we prepared to celebrate new leadership at UBalt Law and all of our alumni leaders, we started thinking about how lawyers are called upon in great numbers to lead. Whether in practice working with clients and colleagues, or in leadership positions in business and nonprofits, those with a J.D. are often seen as leaders and tapped for leadership roles and positions.
Leadership is a journey, and leaders need learning, mentorship and reflection opportunities along the way. During my own leadership journey – one that began at UBalt Law and most recently led me back to a leadership role at our alma mater – I’ve benefitted from all of the above. Not all lawyers in or considering leadership roles receive the benefit of formal learning and reflection opportunities. In the coming years, UBalt Law will look to offer more opportunities to empower our community members to envision themselves as leaders at every level, and to unlock and develop their leadership potential.
As a first step, whether you are thinking about embarking on your leadership journey or are already in a leadership role, we hope you will join us for our “Lawyers as Leaders” lunch-and-learn series this fall. This three-part series will cover essential leadership topics such as authentic leadership style (Panel 1 – September 13; learn more and register); change management (Panel 2 – October 11, learn more and register); and building and maintaining a positive climate and culture (Panel 3 – November 15, learn more and register).
Our panelists are an impressive group of alumni leaders ready to share their wisdom. Special thanks to two alumni leaders who have worked with me to build out the series and who will moderate panels –D. Jill Green (J.D. ’94; Panel 1, September 13), and Laurie Lyte (J.D. ’92; Panels 2 and 3, October 11 and November 15). Both have deep leadership experience and passion for developing leaders, and we are so grateful they have brought their energy and expertise back to their alma mater.
Congratulations again to all of our alumni leaders – those who are featured in the Leadership Issue and beyond, including all of our Lawyers as Leaders panelists and moderators. Thank you for all you are doing to make your community a better place. Your journeys are inspiring and continue to grow our pride in UBalt Law – a law school where you learn to practice and lead. To all of our alumni leaders and aspiring leaders, let’s continue on our leadership journeys together by continuing to learn from each other and refine our skills. Looking forward to seeing you at our fall Lawyers as Leaders lunch-and-learn panels.
Joy Gaslevic, J.D. ’99, is associate dean for administration at the UBalt School of Law.
Prof. Charles Tiefer appears on C-SPAN in June 2012
If I had to describe Professor Emeritus Charles Tiefer in one word … I couldn’t do it! In his many years at the University of Baltimore School of Law, Professor Tiefer has been a scholar, public servant, teacher, mentor and friend. It would be impossible to reduce his contributions to our community to a single word.
Professor Tiefer began teaching at the law school in 1995. Over the course of his career, he produced an impressive body of scholarship. He has written books, law review articles, and dozens of articles in the popular press and on Forbes.com.
His Congressional Practice and Procedure book is the definitive work on Congressional procedure. His other books include The Polarized Congress: The Post-Traditional Procedure of Its Current Struggles (University Press of America, 2016); Government Contracting Law in the 21st Century (Carolina Academic Press, 2012); and The Semi-Sovereign Presidency: The Bush Administration’s Strategy for Governing Without Congress (Westview Press, 1994).
His articles have appeared in prestigious journals such as Harvard Journal on Legislation, Yale Journal on Human Rights Law and Development,Stanford Journal of International Law, and Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy, to name just a few.
His many posts on Forbes.com have received hundreds of thousands of views. Receiving 10,000 views was just a regular day at the office for him. One post on Hillary Clinton’s emails received over 250,000 views. Consequently, in 2018 he was recognized with the faculty scholarship award for Excellence in Public Discourse.
His work extended beyond the academy. Throughout his career he has been a dedicated public servant. Before he became a law professor, he was acting general counsel and solicitor and deputy general counsel to the U.S. House of Representatives. After he joined the law faculty, he continued his public service. He provided testimony to Congress on a wide range of issues. From 2008-2011, he served as a commissioner on the congressionally chartered federal Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan. He took a lead role in two dozen televised hearings, and he went on official missions to Iraq and Afghanistan concerning wartime procurement.
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Professor Tiefer has also been a devoted classroom teacher. He taught Contracts I and II, Government Contracts Seminar, Legislation, and Secured Transactions. Numerous students expressed appreciation over the years for his clear explanations of the law. (They were somewhat less enthusiastic about his infamous multiple-multiple-choice questions that required figuring out two right answers instead of just one!)
More recently, during the COVID19 pandemic, he devoted many hours to preparing PowerPoint slides to transition his teaching from the in-person classroom to Zoom. Teaching effectively online was a challenge for many law professors, but Professor Tiefer was more than equal to the task. His students so appreciated his efforts that they created a video tribute that they presented to him at the end of one semester.
This long list of accomplishments does not fully capture what Professor Tiefer has meant to the UBalt Law community. He is more than a scholar, public servant, and teacher. He has been a mentor and a friend.
When I was assigned to teach Contracts for the first time, Professor Tiefer took the initiative to reach out to me about the course. He generously shared all of his teaching materials, everything from notes to old exams to supplementary materials. He patiently answered my many questions. Over subsequent semesters, we became teaching partners, sharing materials, hypotheticals, and entertaining stories. (And for those who may be wondering, yes, contract law can be entertaining, like the case that addressed whether an emoji can manifest acceptance.) Professor Barbara White had a similar experience when she began teaching Secured Transactions.
These examples typify the ways Professor Tiefer supported his colleagues. He would send notes of appreciation when someone helped him with a task. He made a point of seeking people out for lunch or coffee to talk about politics, scholarship, teaching, and life. And when those conversations inspired him, as they often did, he would jot down notes in a small notebook he carried in his shirt pocket so he would be sure to remember the ideas.
In the spring, the faculty voted to award Professor Tiefer the status of Professor of Law Emeritus. It’s an honor he unquestionably deserves. I and the rest of the faculty wish him all the best in his retirement. Charles, we will miss you!
Amy E. Sloan is a professor at UBalt School of Law.
In January 2024, Katie Curran O’Malley, J.D. ’91, became the executive director of the Women’s Law Center (WLC). Within a week she was in Annapolis with another colleague, advocating for bills related to access to women’s reproductive healthcare and wage equality. Despite O’Malley’s extensive legal career, it was the first time she had ever testified in front of a legislative hearing.
“I could tell that the legislators really respected the opinions of the Women’s Law Center,” she says. “I think it’s because we’ve had such great lawyers who have been there over the years for really important bills, and when we go, they pay attention. I want to make sure we continue to do that.”
Being at the forefront of women’s rights has been a hallmark of O’Malley’s career. She began as a law clerk and then a prosecutor in Baltimore County, working for 13 years on “every case imaginable,” from robbery to white-collar crime. But she had her sights set on the bench.
“I appeared before so many judges that set a good example for me, I knew I wanted to do that,” she says. “The judges I wanted to be like afforded the parties the opportunity to be heard, were respectful, were knowledgeable of the law, and made sure everyone had a fair chance.”
In 2001, when Gov. Parris Glendening appointed her an associate district court judge for Baltimore City (a position she held for 20 years), she wanted to model the best of what she’d seen in the courtroom, having witnessed the worst, particularly in cases of intimate partner violence.
“As a young prosecutor, I didn’t like the way the victims were being treated. I thought they were being revictimized by going through the criminal justice system,” she says. “When someone would take the step and be willing to testify to the abuse they were receiving, they would be treated so poorly [by the court], they weren’t going to come back.”
O’Malley says that while judges must always be unbiased, domestic violence cases require context and special scrutiny because, if handled poorly, it could mean someone’s life. “You need to balance a person’s need for safety and some else’s need for liberty, and you don’t want to get the balance wrong,” she says. She saw such a need for judges to understand how to approach these cases that she, along with judges (all now retired) and fellow UBalt Law alumni Christopher Panos, J.D. ’89, Joann Ellinghaus-Jones, J.D. ’81, and Alexandra “Sandy” Williams, J.D. ’81, created best-practices training for new judges. Working with the National Council for Juvenile and Family Court Judges, she taught best practices in domestic violence cases around the country.
A Way of Life
O’Malley speaks at an ERA rally in Annapolis
O’Malley is a woman who likes to be busy. It’s a work ethic she says she got from her parents. She has raised four children and balanced her own career with the demands of that of her husband Martin, who was both mayor of Baltimore City and governor of Maryland, as well as a candidate for U.S. president. (He’s now the commissioner of the Social Security Administration.)
When she opted for law school, UBalt was the only school she applied to, not just because her father, J. Joseph Curran Jr., LL.B. ’59, was an alumnus, but because she needed a night school option so she could balance school and her job in finance. It’s not surprising then that when she retired from the judiciary in 2021, she was not planning to slow down.
In 2022, she ran for Maryland attorney general (the position her father once held). When she lost the election, the job at WLC emerged, and it seemed to her the perfect blend of her interests in advocacy and law.
Hon. Barbara Baer Waxman, J.D. ’80, now retired, has known O’Malley since she was a prosecutor and has watched her emerge as an expert in the field of domestic violence. She says O’Malley “is passionate. She cares. This is not a job, it’s a way of life for her.”
Waxman says the WLC job is a perfect fit for O’Malley because she brings so much knowledge to the position and is no longer constrained by a position in the judiciary. “As judges, we are hugely limited in how much we can do in advocacy,” Waxman explains. “Katie brings passion and the background of all she’s seen and learned, and now she has the ability to effectuate real change — both legislatively and one-on-one with victims’ rights.”
At the Women’s Law Center, O’Malley oversees a staff of 20. In addition to legislative advocacy, the center has numerous programs and services, including free legal representation for those seeking protective orders, and no-cost access to family law attorneys, which would be cost- prohibitive for many of WLC’s clients. There are programs specific to the needs of foreign-born victims of domestic violence and sexual assault, to ensure equal protection under the law, and WLC’s statewide hotlines—one for employment law, one for family law—are staffed by experienced attorneys who provide information free of charge to callers.
Interesting given O’Malley’s background, WLC is also part of the state’s judicial selection process, which means they interview prospective new judges and make recommendations to the selection committee.
O’Malley says she loves that WLC gives her the opportunity to interact with other attorneys, and she particularly loves the energy of young lawyers. She should, as three of her four children are lawyers. Although she and Martin are both very busy, she says they love to travel. And her garden and rescue chihuahua help keep her balanced.
O’Malley says the world of law, both for young female lawyers and for clients, has changed since she first walked into a courtroom. But it’s still far from an equitable place, and one gets the sense O’Malley sees a lot of improvements she’d like to see in the legal system.
“I do think things have gotten better,” she says, “but you can never be complacent.”
Christianna McCausland is a writer based in Baltimore.
We hope that you are enjoying reading about so many UBalt Law alumni who are now leading the way in the Maryland and D.C. legal communities and beyond. We also hope that you enjoyed learning more about Dean LaVonda Reed, UBalt Law’s wonderful new leader, who will lead our alma mater into the future. 
