Features 2025 – University of Baltimore School of Law Magazine

The Lasting Legacy of Professor Jack Lynch

Posted on October 15, 2025 by Juan Soto in Features, Features 2025

By Amy Sloan

Forty-seven years. That’s how long Professor John (Jack) Lynch taught at UBalt Law. He joined the law faculty in 1978, before some of our current faculty members were born! Professor Lynch retired at the end of the spring 2025 semester and was awarded the status of Professor Emeritus.

How could anyone distill such a long and distinguished career in a few short paragraphs? It’s impossible to capture all the ways Professor Lynch influenced UBalt Law, but the highlights demonstrate his lasting impact.

Over the course of his career, Professor Lynch produced an exceptional body of scholarship. His many law review articles have appeared in journals such as Baylor Law Review, Nebraska Law Review, South Carolina Law Review, and Santa Clara Law Review, as well as a number of specialty tax journals. He is also co-author of two books, The Art of Advocacy: Jury Instructions (1989) and Modern Maryland Civil Procedure (2004).

Professor Lynch’s scholarship in the areas of tax law, civil procedure and legal writing is especially noteworthy. In partnership taxation, his work was ahead of its time, according to Professor Walter Schwidetzky. Just a couple of months ago, U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden cited one of Professor Lynch’s articles in support of a proposal to amend partnership tax rules. Professor Lynch’s Modern Maryland Civil Procedure is a definitive work on Maryland procedural law. In the area of legal writing, he published articles to spread the good word about UBalt Law’s writing curriculum. He did much to raise the law school’s profile in the national writing community.

Professor Lynch also provided exemplary service to the law school. It would be impossible to list the many committees on which he served over the years. From 2010 to 2013, he served as associate dean for academic affairs. After his term concluded, he stood in the wings, ready at any time to offer counsel to his successors or take on an extra task as a favor. In 2022, he received the UBalt Law Faculty Service Award for outstanding service.

Teaching was another of Professor Lynch’s strengths. He taught Civil Procedure, Conflict of Laws, Federal Income Tax, Federal Courts, Introduction to Lawyering Skills, Maryland Civil Procedure, Partnership Taxation, and Property. He taught in the evening division almost every semester because he felt a special kinship with the evening students.

From 1993 until 2007, he ran the University of Baltimore School of Law Summer Institute. This was a summer program for conditionally admitted students. Through four weeks of concentrated instruction, conditionally admitted students got the additional support they needed to succeed in law school. He created materials, scheduled activities, recruited faculty, and taught in the program. This is just another example of how he placed student needs front and center.

In recognition of his student-centered teaching, Professor Lynch received a number of teaching awards: Outstanding University of Baltimore Faculty Member, 1981; BLSA Recognition for Support in the Success of Black Law Students, 1994; Women’s Bar Association Professor of the Year, 1996; BLSA James May Award, 1999; Outstanding Teaching by a Full-Time Faculty Member, 2002; Outlaw Outstanding Contribution Award, 2012.

Any account of Professor Lynch’s teaching would be incomplete without an acknowledgment of his contributions to our writing curriculum. He began his academic career teaching writing courses at The George Washington University Law School. After joining the faculty at UBalt Law, he retained his love for teaching analysis through writing. When the law school transitioned from having 1L writing taught by adjunct faculty to full-time faculty, Professor Lynch was first in line to teach the course. The law school would not have been able to develop its outstanding writing curriculum without his leadership.

Professor Lynch has a dry sense of humor and a wry smile. He has been my friend since the day I started at UBalt Law and my neighbor on the 11th floor of the Angelos Law Center for the past several years. I will miss him terribly and wish him all the best in this next step. The law school will not be the same without him. Good luck, Jack!

Amy Sloan is a professor at the University of Baltimore School of Law.

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Paid Externship Program Leads the Way with Groundbreaking Model

Posted on October 15, 2025 by Juan Soto in Features, Features 2025

By Matthew Liptak

During her legal career, Professor Neha Lall has always been an advocate and mentor who meets people where they are. Lall, UBalt Law’s Director of Externships, knows how helpful paid externships can be to students who have to manage both their education and budgeting finances for daily necessities. Lall started out her career as an advocate for victims of abuse. Now she is helping forge a new model of experiential learning that is changing the legal educational landscape in America.

Lall is one of a handful of legal subject matter experts who are leading the way in creating impactful paid externships programs, which allow students to earn academic credit for legal work while also being paid. In the three years since UBalt Law began building out its paid externship program, 73 percent of externs have been paid, either directly by the employer or through a public service stipend. She said externships offer law students the opportunity to explore their education in a way that brings them back to the passion that brought them into the profession. Paid externships can also provide some relief from financial stress, as they consider how to juggle daily expenses and school loans.

“What I really love about my role as an externship teacher is that I work with the students to get back to their ‘Why?’ To figure out why they are here. What is it that they really want to do with their law degree, and how do they get there?” says Lall.

Most law students get their first jobs through internship and externship connections they’ve made at organizations they’ve worked for, she says. Just over 10 percent of top students generally get hired by big law firms, many through on-campus interviewing programs. The other 90 percent of students have to hustle to gain experience and connections to land a post-graduate job. Externships teach students to become self-directed learners: Students must lay the groundwork for themselves, identify their goals, and learn to self-advocate. This fosters the kind of initiative that leads students into fulfilling careers aligned with their own skills and values.

Lall believes students who are more invested in their externships will get more out of them. For many students, getting paid for their time helps students feel seen and raises the bar on their performance. When students have a voice, they can find experiential learning opportunities that align with their goals, evoke more commitment, and ultimately make for a better learning experience.

The field placement experience is backed up by an academic course with a seminar and weekly assignments. Externship seminars are relatively small and meet weekly for a 75-minute online discussion. Lall stipulates a maximum of 15 students, but she really would like to see that number limited to a dozen. She says the students and faculty instructor must get to know each other for the externship to be effective. She also encourages all students to speak up in class.

The academic component is required to be qualified as legitimate and educational by the American Bar Association (ABA), which accredits law schools.

“I wanted to be careful about the temptation to just slap credits on any job,” Lall says.

Although the ABA has green-lighted paid externships, there remains institutional resistance to the concept at other universities around the country. UBalt Law’s paid externship program, and those like it, have often faced an uphill battle to find support. Critics believe that the act of including pay with a student’s externship might sully the educational experience, perhaps leading to exploitation by employers, or a lessening of academic standards.

But Lall and her UBalt Law program has shown much of that concern is unfounded, and the law school has curbed the critics by meticulously collecting data on students’ fieldwork..

Lall is invested enough in this field that she completed a groundbreaking, data-driven study on paid externships that was accepted for publication earlier this year, and she is working on a second that she hopes to publish next year. She says the findings were surprising — both the demographics of who was being helped, and who was doing the hiring of paid externs.

“Paid placements were available across all sectors, including public interest placements. And participation by women in externships skyrocketed, especially in law firms,” she says. Her findings from four years of data concluded that law students with directly paid externships received more diverse and higher-quality learning opportunities than their unpaid peers or those receiving public service stipends. This directly contradicts the position of critics of paid externship, who argue that paid students are likely to get worse work because employers would put profit before learning. Directly paid students also received long-term employment offers from law firms, and both state prosecution and public defender offices, at much higher rates than unpaid students.

Lall believes that supervisors pay more attention to people they are paying, as opposed to unpaid volunteers. That leads to better training, more supervision, and ultimately, better learning experiences for students.

In April of 2025, Lall was honored for her work by the American Association of Law Schools with an Emerging Leader Award. Her peers have lauded her, too.

“I think the research and the scholarship that she is doing is among the most important scholarship that is coming out of our community,” said Nira Geevargis, clinical professor and director of externships at the University of California College of Law at San Francisco. “Her research is really of the moment — very cutting edge.”

Ali Trdina is vice president of the University of Baltimore School of Law Student Bar Association and a member of the law school’s Class of 2026. She was a student of Lall’s, and because of her experience with compiling empirical data, she was one of the people who assisted Lall on her study.

“She’s just a great person to work with,” Trdina says. “Having someone analyze my work in real time, and giving me that feedback, also in real time, that was really helpful for me.”

Reflecting on her career trajectory, Lall now recognizes that being an advocate and developer of the paid externship program at UBalt Law is really where she wants to be now. It allows her to push forward with projects and programs that help others, which seems to fit her intuitive passion for the law.

“When I took this job, I thought this would be a great way to get to know the Baltimore community and connect my real-life practice to teaching. But I just really ended up loving this job,” she says.

Matthew Liptak is a writer based in Severna Park.

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The Evolving Role of the In-House Counsel

Posted on October 15, 2025 by Juan Soto in Features, Features 2025

By Adam Stone

For Danielle Roland, J.D. ’12, working as in-house counsel means tackling big-picture questions. As general counsel at Michigan-based ANDRITZ Schuler North America, she evaluates risk in everything from hiring practices to leases on buildings, always with an eye toward the company’s overall strategic ambitions.

“It’s about being involved in the strategy and the goals of the company, knowing: What’s our plan 10 years down the road?” she says. By understanding that big picture, “I can then give direction and legal guidance.”

Law firms draw the lion’s share of lawyers– over 445,000, according to the most recent data from the Association of Corporate Counsel. But there are other paths: Over 140,000 lawyers work as in-house counsel. UBalt Law graduates who go the in-house route say the job is both complex and highly satisfying. They often are deeply embedded — not just in a company’s legal work, but in its strategic decision-making.

An evolving role

The work of in-house counsel has increasingly focused on business leadership in recent years. Today the job is “strategic in nature,” says Cory Myers, J.D. ’07, associate general counsel for intellectual property at KPMG in Washington, D.C. In his case, “that can include strategic thoughts about investments in particular technologies and developing an IP portfolio around that.”

The job involves “working with the business team leaders to understand what makes the business tick, then making sure we’re developing legal strategy in accordance with those business goals,” he says.

Roland became ANDRITZ Schuler North America’s first in-house general counsel nine years ago. “When I started, it was mostly reviewing contracts, helping with sales orders. It was very transactional,” she says.

That has changed over time. “It’s really become more of a strategic role,” she says. That includes “being proactive on risk management, being involved with the board of directors and planning for the company’s growth and success.”

To deliver in such a role, “you really have to know a little bit about a lot of things,” says James Beslity, J.D. ’19, who serves as corporate counsel at HomeServices of America and its largest operating company, The Long & Foster Companies.

“I routinely am engaged not just in traditional real estate-related matters, but employment, various types of litigation, intellectual property, transactional work,” he says. “Practically speaking, you need to be able to do it all.”

Challenges and rewards

The increasingly wide-ranging role of in-house counsel comes with unique challenges and rewards.

There are challenges when it comes to the actual lawyering. When you’re in house, “they never want to hear you say, ‘No, you can’t do that,’” Roland says. “Outside counsel can say that: ‘Hey, this is way too risky, you shouldn’t do that.’”

As in-house counsel, “they want to figure out how we can do this,” she says. “The challenge is to figure out how can we do it, but in the best way possible for the company.”

Beslity, meanwhile, finds himself juggling multiple non-lawyerly responsibilities. “I manage my own mail and my calendar,” he says. “Many companies these days are reducing headcount, trying to make the most of the resources they have. If you’re capable of handling administrative tasks — what some in the legal profession might consider grunt work — you’re doing it.”

But the rewards can make it worth it.

“When you’re in private practice, you’re working based on what the client may have as an immediate priority, and you can be working on a singular thing for months,” without ever getting to be part of the bigger picture, Myers says. As in-house, “I really enjoy seeing the full scope of a project.”

Roland likewise takes satisfaction in the big-picture nature of her role. As in-house counsel, “you have an integral role in shaping the company and where it’s going,” she says.

For Beslity, the breadth of tasks gives him a chance not just to utilize his legal skills, but also to build real relationships. As in-house counsel, “you have to be a people person,” he says. “I’m in my office right now and the marketing team is down the hall, the accounting team is down the hall, and I can see Long and Foster’s CEO’s office from here. My clients are sitting all around me.”

Making the transition

Why go in-house? For Myers, who started out in a law firm, it was largely a lifestyle choice. In-house work “is different in terms of the work-life balance,” he says. “It’s still a ton of work, but you have a little bit more ability to control your schedule in an in-house role, which was good for me. I had younger kids at the time, so that was appealing to me.”

For those looking to make the leap, there are multiple pathways from private practice to an in-house opportunity.

Roland, for example, had previously worked at a law firm, setting up corporations and advising clients on business issues. With that background in transactional corporate work, going in-house “wasn’t a huge change for me,” she says. “It wasn’t like I was coming from medical malpractice litigation.”

Hand-on experience while at UBalt Law helped as well. “One of the things the law school does so well is their practical learning experience,” she says. “I did two internships while I was there, and that gave me such great practical experience, along with having so many faculty members who were practicing attorneys. All that made a big difference for my work, my career.”

Beslity, meanwhile, had also left a law firm and was looking to start his next chapter when he took his first in-house position, as associate counsel with Maryland REALTORS®. With a background in real estate law, “it just seemed like the perfect opportunity,” he says.

It felt like a leap of faith to leave the conventional litigation track, he says. “But honestly, at this point, this is my dream job.”

He encourages law students to get involved early, if they’re interested in an in-house career. “Get out there and find those practical experiences,” he says, noting that UBalt Law can help to make that happen.

“The Law Career Development Office is probably my favorite entity within the law school,” he says. “They do incredible work, really encouraging students to get out there and find those practical experiences.”

Adam Stone is a writer based in Annapolis.

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CFCC at 25: Changing the Narrative

Posted on October 15, 2025 by Juan Soto in Features, Features 2025

By Christianna McCausland

Aubrey Edwards-Luce, left, CFCC executive director, and Prof. Shanta Trivedi, CFCC faculty director, have shifted the Center’s focus to family preservation.

When Prof. Shanta Trivedi became faculty director of the Sayra and Neil Meyerhoff Center for Family, Children and the Courts (CFCC) in 2021, she knew she was building on an incredible foundation laid by the center’s founding director, Professor Emerita Barbara Babb. Rather than find the opportunity daunting, she and executive director Aubrey Edwards-Luce, who joined in 2023, have made CFCC very much their own.

Trivedi explains that for its first 20 years, CFCC’s focus was on creating an environment where people could experience the law with more dignity. “But no matter how kind the legal actors and the legal system seem to be, there’s always some kind of trauma,” she says. “Our shift has been to focus more on preventing people from interacting with legal systems unnecessarily—particularly those systems that have severe consequences for families, including family separation.” Legal systems separate families through foster care, incarceration of adults, and detention or commitment of youth, Trivedi says.

She explains that going forward, CFCC’s work is focused on three key areas: disrupting the school-to-prison pipeline, reducing the harms of the child welfare/family regulation system, and the youth legal system. These are systems Trivedi and Edwards-Luce know well. Trivedi, who is an assistant professor of law, previously represented parents in family regulation cases. Edwards-Luce, who was a social worker prior to becoming an attorney, represented children in those proceedings.

Today, CFCC is evolving its signature program, the Tackling Chronic Absenteeism Program (TCAP). Begun in 2005, TCAP – then known as the Truancy Court Project — engages students, parents, schools and the legal system to tackle the underlying issues of chronic absenteeism before it can lead to truancy court and harmful interaction with the law. Edwards-Luce explains that CFCC made a data-informed decision to shift its work exclusively to middle schoolers, and to work intensively and intentionally in three schools. “We’re also strengthening our relationship with the Maryland Office of the Public Defender,” she says. “We’re starting the process of taking referrals of young people who have been in youth jails and are now released back to the community who are trying to get connected to school and are in need of some educational supports.”

Trivedi is a passionate legal scholar and policy advocate in the CFCC’s focus area of family regulation. Her writings on the topic have appeared in prestigious law reviews and in media outlets including Ms. Magazine and Slate. She explains that too often, a child is removed from a household for reasons that have more to do with poverty and discrimination than safety. Removals lead to extreme and often irreparable trauma for both children and their parents.

“There are estimates that a third of the children in foster care could be reunited with their families if they had secure housing, for example,” says Trivedi. “There are systemic causes that lead parents to be in precarious financial situations that could, certainly, be harmful to their children. But the response, rather than to provide the families with support, is to separate those families and, ironically, pay foster parents to care for those children instead of giving the money to families who need the financial support.”

In addition to writing and advocating around the harm of family removal, CFCC recently conducted a training with approximately 100 Baltimore City School psychologists to help them interrogate the standard of reporting for abuse and neglect to Child Protective Services, and explore alternatives to reporting, such as connecting families with community resources like a food pantry. Through its newest project, the Child Welfare and Racial Equity Collaborative (CWARE), which Edwards-Luce launched in 2020, CFCC also published a free Know Your Rights Toolkit to educate families on how to navigate the family regulation system, and it conducted a nationwide webinar on the toolkit.

CFCC wants to ensure that its work is informed by the lived experience of those who understand it best—those who have been in foster care, for example, or parents who have experienced child separation—rather than only by well-intentioned attorneys. Coalition building has been an important expansion area for the center’s leadership. CFCC has worked with families and like-minded organizations to establish Maryland Families Together, a community of advocates who center the innovation and expertise of directly impacted people and communities. CFCC is also part of the Maryland Youth Justice Coalition and the state’s Coalition to Reform School Discipline, among many others.

CFCC is deepening its commitment to service and advocacy. Edwards-Luce serves on Gov. Wes Moore’s Commission on Juvenile Justice Reform and Emerging Best Practices and has been appointed by the American Bar Association’s president to serve on its Commission on Youth and Family Justice. Both women are part of the Maryland Youth Justice Coalition and the state’s Coalition to Reform School Discipline, among others.

Trivedi is a board member for the Maryland Child Alliance and the Redlich Horowitz Foundation. She also provides training and resources on family regulation and family law issues to community organizations, advocates and members of the judiciary, both in Maryland and nationwide. Last year, CFCC submitted written or oral testimony on over 20 bills related to its areas of focus and hopes to increase that advocacy and grow student involvement in this work in future.

Much of what Trivedi and Edwards-Luce want to do is change the narrative around how families and individuals experiencing these legal systems are perceived, away from the negative portrayals common in media to the reality: people facing challenges that drag them into court proceedings are generally doing their very best in difficult circumstances. In so doing, CFCC hopes to keep youth and families away from harmful and often unnecessary legal proceedings so they can be productive parents, caregivers, students and community members and fufill their greatest potential.

Christianna McCausland is a writer based in Baltimore.

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Mentoring Plays Key Role in Student, Alumni Success

Posted on October 15, 2025 by Juan Soto in Features, Features 2025

By Adam Stone

For many attorneys, mentoring is the key to success. The American Bar Association reports that 85 percent of women and 81 percent of multicultural professionals say they need “navigational help” at some point in their careers.

UBalt Law meets that need in part through moot court and mock trial, where alumni coaches typically do more than just fine-tune specific legal skills. They also mentor the student competitors, helping them to develop leadership traits, career-planning skills, and overall self-confidence. And the mentors say these relationships in turn make them better leaders and better lawyers themselves.

Here are a few of their stories.

‘Joy in seeing someone else succeed’

Erek Barron, the former U.S. Attorney for the District of Maryland, greatly increased African American representation in the office. Beatrice “Bea” Thomas, J.D. ’19, became an assistant U.S. attorney in 2022 under his leadership.

“He had been a mentor to me at my previous firm, and he just did not hesitate to support me,” Thomas says. Through UBalt Law, she is supporting others in turn, coaching mock trial and also mentoring first-year students through the Law Career Development Office.

She’s also starting a term as president of the Alliance of Black Women Attorneys of Maryland, a post previously held by all the major mentors in her life: Maryland Supreme Court Justice Shirley M. Watts; Hon. Teresa Epps Cummings, J.D. ’02; and Johns Hopkins VP for Civic Engagement and Opportunity Alicia Wilson.

As Thomas mentors students and others in the skills of leadership, she focuses on communication: Not just what they say, but also “actively listening to other people, which is so important,” she says. She puts a premium on empathy, “understanding that everyone has a different journey … that shapes who they are and how they think.”

And she leans heavily into strategic thinking. “None of us has the capacity to do everything all the time. You have to pick a few things that you know you want to dedicate your time to, the things that are important to you. And then when you do that, do it well,” she says.

Helping others to thrive is a source of personal pride for Thomas, who can appreciate the importance of having strong professional role models early on.

Black women make up a tiny fraction of the legal profession, “and for me there’s a joy in seeing someone else succeed, seeing them forge a path forward,” she says, “I get great satisfaction from problem-solving and helping people become resilient in this thing called the law — because it’s not for the faint of heart.”

‘Incredibly rewarding’

As a law student, Jessica Swadow, J.D. ’16, was on the moot court appellate advocacy competition team. UBalt Law adjunct professor Laurie Bennett showed her the ropes, helping to hone her skills. Bennett went on to become a mentor and a friend.

“I always seek her opinion,” says Swadow, who is contracts associate counsel at Towson University. “She’s been a sounding board for musings on my career, a great person for me to bounce ideas off of.”

Bennett’s model of leadership has helped Swadow to become a leader herself: Since 2017, she’s partnered with her former mentor to co-coach the moot court team.

“We work with the students to enhance their skills in brief writing, and their oral advocacy skills for competition,” Swadow says. And the relationships go deeper than that. “It always expands well beyond the competition. I provide a lot of mentoring and feedback on everything from things to do with law school classes, to what they want to do after law school, thinking about different career options.”

The mentoring relationship “is incredibly rewarding,” she says. “I get to see those skills develop, to see them become better advocates, better critical thinkers. It is fantastic.”

‘The attorney personality that fits them’

As an assistant public defender in Baltimore County, Amanda Sirleaf, J.D. ’23, knows it takes inner strength to succeed in the courtroom. As she coaches and mentors law students in mock trial, she looks to share that strength with others.

“The first thing that’s super important is making sure their confidence is up, because there’s a lot of self-doubt in this profession — for everyone,” she says. “As a leader, I try to shine a light on things that are specific about them: ‘You’re really good at making people feel emotions,’ or, ‘You’re really good at describing things and breaking things down.’”

When Sirleaf was in law school, husband-and-wife coaches Ashley Bond Beasley, J.D. ’16, and Benjamin Beasley, J.D. ’14, offered more of a tough-love mentoring style. “They didn’t sugarcoat, and they definitely made sure I had some tough skin,” she says. “There are still things I do to this day — or things I will not do — because of their coaching. They were always there to pick me up after a mistake.”

Mock Trial coach Annemarie Duerr, J.D. ’22, a UBalt Law adjunct professor, further helped her to build both her legal chops and her leadership skills, and Sirleaf went on to co-coach with her. Other mentors in her life have included her first boss, Shawn Bartley, as well as family law and immigration attorney Shari Hoidra, J.D. ’12. “She helped me learn to maneuver as a woman of color in the legal world,” Sirleaf says.

As Sirleaf leads students through the mock trial experience, she looks to help them find their authentic selves. When attorneys model themselves after classmates or TV characters, “it can come off as unnatural, not genuine,” she says. “I’m trying to help them find the attorney personality that fits them. That’s huge, especially for litigators.”

A launching pad

Nick Szokoly, J.D. ’03. knows from experience just how impactful a moot court mentorship can be.

Now a partner with Murphy Falcon Murphy, he started his first year as an evening student at UBalt Law while still finishing his undergrad degree. He tried out for the moot court consolidated competition, “and the professor who led it at the time, Byron L. Warnken, took an interest in me,” he says. “It changed the entire trajectory of my career.”

Warnken, who passed in 2022, taught him how to be a lawyer and a leader. “Everything I ever learned about how to practice law and run a law firm, I learned from Byron,” Szokoly says. Along with Warnken, faculty members Ernie Crowfoot and the late Richard “Dick” Bourne helped guide his path.

Now Szokoly is doing the same for others. As a moot court coach and mentor, he tells students that moot court can be a launching pad: “This is your opportunity to circulate with practicing lawyers and judges, to make relationships that can really make a difference in your life.”

It certainly did in Szokoly’s case. As he reflects on the impact that Warnken had on his career, he says, “I can’t think of a single outcome that would have been the same if it hadn’t been for Byron’s mentorship and moot court.”

Adam Stone is a writer based in Annapolis.

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Santana Has Feet on the Ground, Future in Space

Posted on October 15, 2025October 15, 2025 by Juan Soto in Features, Features 2025

By Adam Stone

As a high school student, Starla Santana read Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson. A number of cases in the book involved kids facing death row and life sentences. At the same time, her parents worked in law enforcement.

“Hearing from them that a lot of what happened was out of their hands once it was given to the courts, it piqued my interest. I thought: Clearly the court is where all the major decisions are being made,” she says.

Now a UBalt Law student, class of 2026, she has come a long way since that initial realization.

During a quick undergrad (she’d already earned an associate’s degree while in high school) her interest migrated from criminal to national security law, and then she herself migrated — from Florida to Baltimore, to attend law school in proximity to the D.C. area.

Smart move, as it turns out. She promptly landed an internship at the White House’s National Economic Council. Two weeks in, she was hired at the National Space Council, after getting herself in front of Tahara Dawkins, who was then working as chief of staff at the space council.

“Starla actually contacted me shortly after she started her internship at the White House and told me of her interest in space,” Dawkins says. She invited Santana to help with an upcoming event on short notice, “and she volunteered for anything and everything she could. She ended up being invaluable to the event.”

When Dawkins invited Santana to apply for an opening, she jumped at that chance. “Space is such a cool frontier,” Santana says. “It’s emerging and it’s new, and there’s no case precedent. What does it look like to even create that roadmap?”

As the space council was being chaired by Vice President Kamala Harris at the time, Santana got the chance to help move that process along, assisting various directors with their research. “We had to attend meetings and conferences and make statements and push out policy,” she says. “I made sure those talking points were accurate, were up-to-date.”

National security played a big role in the work, since satellites factored into the war in Ukraine. “We were getting agencies to agree on how we were going to operate. We conducted a lot of inter-agency meetings…we met with generals at the Pentagon, people who headed different intelligence community agencies,” she says.

If it isn’t already obvious: Starla is a powerhouse who puts her hand to everything with gusto. From serving on UBalt Law’s Student Bar Association, to working in the dean’s suite, to externing with the Air Force Judge Advocate General (JAG) Corps, where she’s currently helping to ensure military members have portability in their professional licenses as they move from state to state on assignment.

Juggling all of that seems to come naturally. “While I was in the midst of getting my associate’s degree in high school, I was a three-time national team member for the sport of tae kwon do, along with having a job as a swim instructor,” she says. “It’s in my nature to juggle a multitude of things at a high level. That’s sort of one of my gifts.”

UBalt Law Professor David Jaros concurs. Santana took his Criminal Law, Evidence, and Introduction to Legal Writing courses. His letter of recommendation helped her land her White House internship.

“She is incredibly motivated and is working hard to accomplish her professional dream,” Jaros says. “In many ways, she embodies some of the best attributes of our students. She’s intellectually excited by the material, and particularly interested in how the material can then be applied in the real world.”

Right now, Santana is planning to apply that material in a future career with Air Force JAG. She says the UBalt Law experience has set her up for success.

“I took a leave of absence when I got politically appointed, and the university was nothing but supportive in that journey,” she says. “They have been supportive of all my endeavors.”

Adam Stone is a writer based in Annapolis.

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When Lawyers are Veterans: Devotion to Serving Others

Posted on October 15, 2025 by Juan Soto in Features, Features 2025

By Adam Stone

Military service and the practice of law have more in common than one might suppose. Soldiers and lawyers alike are sworn to uphold the Constitution. Both fields involve an element of selfless service. And there are other similarities.

“Nothing in the military happens without orders. For veterans, the legal community offers a system of law and order that they can find comforting,” says Hugh McClean, UBalt Law associate professor and director of The Bob Parsons Veterans Advocacy Clinic.

In addition, “there’s a belief that the military has a higher standard of professionalism, of morals,” McClean says. “That is an ideal that both military members and members of the bar share: That we’re fighting a just fight.”

Veterans who’ve explored that intersection via a UBalt legal education have found success inside and outside the military: In intelligence law and international law, as JAG officers, and as civil litigators. Here are a few of their stories.

Kristina Sargent, J.D. ’16

In 2012, Kristina Sargent earned a UBalt master’s degree in Legal and Ethical Studies. But that wasn’t enough for her. An enlisted Army National Guard soldier at the time, she deployed to the Gaza Strip, then came back to UBalt for a law degree.

“My last day of active duty with the National Guard was August 11, 2013, and my first day of law school was August 13,” she says. A service-related disability kept her from making officer, so she didn’t become a JAG. But Sargent found other ways to put her law degree to work after leaving the service with the rank of sergeant. (Yes: That’s Sgt. Sargent!)

The Bob Parsons Veterans Advocacy Clinic at UBalt Law introduced Sargent to her mentor, Maryland District Court Judge Halee Weinstein. “She opened the first Veterans Docket, and I helped her develop the mentor program through that,” Sargent says. “When I couldn’t get the medical clearance to be a JAG, she said: Be a prosecutor. You’ll love being a prosecutor!”

Sargent did love it. She worked as a prosecutor in Baltimore City for five years and calls it “the most fulfilling job that I’ve ever had.” She has since moved to Florida, where she is a partner with Burger, Meyer & D’Angelo. She says her military experience has been a key driver of her success as a lawyer.

In uniform, “a large part of my life was just trying to stay alive, while taking care of the welfare of others,” she says. That gives her some perspective, she says.

Tom Jones, J.D. ’99

For Tom Jones, legal practice and military service are naturally complementary.

“They both entail wanting to do things for others and being a part of something bigger than ourselves,” he says. “My time at UB was filled with participation in student organizations, and that set me up with a great foundation of serving others when I joined the Navy. If I’m not serving people, I don’t feel fulfilled, and that started at UB Law.”

Serving others took many forms over the course of Jones’ 20-year military career. He worked first in the Trial Service Office Southeast Detachment in Jacksonville, Fla., and went on to do tours at Naval Legal Service Office Pacific and the Naval Amphibious Base on Coronado Island in San Diego.

The game changed when Jones signed on to do legal work with the SEALs, a job he asked for after the events of 9/11. “I felt like I wanted to be as close to the tip of the spear as I could,” he says. In repeated tours in Iraq, he helped legal authorities there to hold insurgents accountable for their actions. As one of the first JAG officers to be embedded with tactical SEAL teams and Task Force, he was “a bit of a trailblazer.”

At UBalt Law, Professor Mortimer (Tim) Sellers, director of the Center for International and Comparative Law (CICL), “was a great mentor to me,” Jones says. Sellers offered advice as Jones steered toward international law, “and throughout my career. I’d also ask what I could do to help any other CICL fellows to get into the field.”

Jones recently completed an advanced degree at the University of Cambridge under the Faculty of Law, where he studied Baltimore’s homicide issues. “I intend to return to Baltimore and get involved wherever the city needs me most,” he says.

Shane Bagwell, J.D. ’16

Before law school, Shane Bagwell served as an enlisted Army soldier. After graduation, he returned as a military lawyer. He served as a trial defense counsel and later national security law attorney in Hawai’i, deployed with the Special Operations Joint Task Force – Afghanistan during Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Allies Refuge, and worked most recently as a JAG recruiting officer.

On Jan. 21, 2025, he had his resignation letter drafted. “I saw a potential drift towards a casual approach to the rule of law,” he says. But a sense of duty, and a happy coincidence, kept him on board. His husband recently started law school at the University of Hawai’i, and Bagwell was recently promoted to major and is now serving as the chief of national security law for the 25th Infantry Division.

“You take care of other people in the military, it’s comrades-at-arms. There is an expectation that we look out for each other,” he says. Even as he pondered resigning, comrades still looked out for him, working hard to get him back to Hawai’i.

With the 25th Infantry Division, he’ll be handling intelligence law, international law, administrative and fiscal law. “We’re pivoting back to the Pacific as our main potential theater of conflict, so it’s going to be a pretty busy job,” he says.

As for his ethical concerns, Bagwell has decided he can help from the inside. “As a lawyer, you are in a unique place to be the voice of reason, and the voice of what the law requires.” he says.

Loui Villanueva, J.D. ’26

In the course of 21 years of service to the Navy, Loui Villanueva wore many hats. He deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, led human resources within the Navy’s radiation protection program, and served as senior medical liaison in an explosive ordnance and disposal training unit.

When he retired in 2020 as chief petty officer, “I had had a long career following orders from different leaders, different political motivations, different wars. I just wanted something different,” he says. The law felt like a natural fit.

As a young man, he’d encountered lawyers and judges who encouraged him to join the military and get his life on track. He came away with a positive feeling about what those in the legal profession can do. He also wanted the sense of personal empowerment that comes with an understanding of the law.

“When I was in the military, I had the power of keeping people or kicking them out,” he says. Sometimes he had to kick them out simply for failing their fitness requirements, and then those requirements would later change. Rules seemed arbitrary; in hindsight, he wishes he had asked more questions.

He especially laments not having taken a more skeptical eye toward Mideast wars that were perhaps dubious in their justification, and that certainly went on too long. “I regret being in a mindset of adhering to the rules, without challenging why those rules were in place,” he says.

Now he’s studying the law with a skeptical eye, asking why things are the way they are, and he’s looking toward a future as perhaps a public defender or a prosecutor.

“I’m leaning into challenging the validity of a lot of law, instead of just following the letter,” he says. “I want to see where the limits are.”

Adam Stone is a writer based in Annapolis.