In the Journal cover story titled “The Future of Medicine” we detail the remarkable efforts of five alumni who, armed with their legal educations, have been thinking about and putting into action new paradigms for healthcare.

Aretha Delight Davis L’97, CGS’05 created a comprehensive and collaborative model for end-of-life decision-making; Marie Hurabiell L’96 helped devise a transformative new method for mental health treatment using artificial intelligence and the power of speech; Anthony Mazzarelli L’03, GR’03 imagined a more efficient and cost-effective way to deliver hospital services; Kiran Musunuru ML’19 developed a potential magic bullet for heart disease; and Adam Vandervoort L’99 helped pave the way for the rapid growth of telemedicine.

Over the last year we have seen how crucial it is to have a well-functioning, creative healthcare system. The pandemic stretched resources to the limit. The Law School was not immune. Our students, faculty, and staff were tested as we scrambled to put in place a reliable infrastructure that would allow the Law School to continue to provide a world-class legal education. (See page 6 for a recap of some of our efforts.)

In crafting our constitutional arrangement, the Framers chose a political union that divides power between a central government and member sovereigns. Federalism, they believed, was the best way to ensure a harmonious union between separate states with distinct cultures and political preferences. Yet over the past century, our political system has become increasingly centralized, with the federal government prescribing one-size-fits-all policy in some of the most contested areas of public discourse, like healthcare, education, and entitlements. The consequences of this consolidation are palpable — our country is politically fractured, with diverse sectors of society straining under the weight of policy dictated by distant lawmakers unacquainted with the needs of their constituents. By returning power to the states — those same powers expressly reserved to them under the Tenth Amendment — we can hope for some semblance of harmony.

While the Constitution clearly envisions a federal system, American federalism is, in part, the result of historical happenstance. Our democratic republic took form from thirteen colonies that came together as thirteen independent states. But the Framers were intentional in their decision to preserve the arrangement, believing that government that is closer to the people it serves is more effective.

“Conviction review units help promote the highest ideals of our criminal justice system, and jurisdictions across the country want to know how to create them and make them effective,” said Marissa Bluestine, Assistant Director at the Quattrone Center. “Convictionreview.net fills the need for a single, comprehensive resource where prosecutors can go to learn about best practices to implement, find templates they can use to develop strong policies, or even just to help them think through the difficult issues that exist in this space.”

The site is a one-stop-shop for materials and templates, a wide variety of information regarding best practices, and guidance for working with victims and surviving victims’ families. All resources and materials available on the website are free to anyone interested in reviewing best practices, although particularly aimed at prosecutors who need them.

Fox received the ABA Medal at the virtual General Assembly on August 4, the opening day of the ABA 2021 Hybrid Annual Meeting.

The ABA Medal recognizes exceptionally distinguished service by a lawyer or lawyers to American jurisprudence and is given only in years when the ABA Board of Governors determines a nominee has provided extraordinary service to the legal profession.

“As a practitioner, pro bono volunteer, law professor and national bar leader, Larry Fox has distinguished himself as one of the giants of the legal profession,” ABA President Patricia Lee Refo said. “In addition to his decades of service to the American Bar Association, Larry has been a leading voice on legal ethics and professional responsibility, has taught and mentored countless law students, and consistently done impactful pro bono work, particularly in the area of death-penalty representation. In more than a half century of legal work, Larry has exemplified the highest standards and ideals of the legal profession.”

The ABA also recognized Fox’s distinguished record of service to the association, which includes longtime membership in the House of Delegates and helping to launch the forerunner to ABA Day in D.C., the association’s annual grassroots lobbying event on Capitol Hill. Fox also has held top leadership posts of the Standing Committee on Ethics and Professional Responsibility, the Commission on the Evaluation of the Rules of Professional Conduct, the ABA Death Penalty Representation Project and the Section of Litigation.

Fox is recognized nationally as one of the most active ABA participants in contributing to issues relating to lawyer and judicial conduct and has taught professional responsibility for three decades, lectured at more than 35 law schools on the same topic and written or co-written eight books on professional responsibility with Professor Susan Martyn. He is a longtime veteran of securities regulation and litigation matters and former partner at Drinker Biddle & Reath LLP before joining Schoeman Updike Kaufman & Gerber LLP in New York. He is also a Fellow of the American College of Trial Lawyers and the American Bar Foundation and serves on multiple corporate boards of both for profit and not-for-profit entities.

The veteran Philadelphia Inquirer journalist, however, had limited knowledge of the city’s legal affairs. “When I was at the Inquirer, I did a lot of things, but never courts and never government,” Schaffer said.

That quickly changed as the two collaborated on The Defender: The Battle to Protect the Rights of the Accused in Philadelphia, recently published by Temple University Press. Although Madeira, longtime Chairman of the Association’s board died in May 2020 at the age of 92, he was pleased with the final manuscript of the book, Schaffer said.

Telling the Defender’s story, Schaffer discovered, not only put the spotlight on the organization that today operates as Philadelphia’s public defender office, but also on the Law School.

“One of the most fascinating things was that Penn Law School had a very important role,” he said. “In the early days in the ’60s, Penn Law School had a lot to do with the direction the Defender took.”

During the webinar titled “The Future of Racial Equity in the Profession,” fellow panelist and high-profile trial attorney Don Prophete discussed a call to action he issued in a letter to general counsels, asking, “Will they again provide my people of color scraps and meaningless amounts of work or will they step up and offer real and lasting change? Do you hear the chimes of the changing times? Will you stop your complicity in the asphyxiation of black legal careers? Right now is the time for action. Please, no more shallow excuses.”

The letter was his attempt to convey his disappointment and anger at the profession, said Prophete, a partner at Constangy, Brooks, Smith & Prophete LLP. Breaux, Associate Counsel at Vanguard and Co-Lead of the firm’s Diversity Committee, moderated the panel discussion, which, in addition to Prophete and Caine, Vice President of Burford Capital, included journalist Vivia Chen and Ulrich Stacy, CEO of the Diversity Lab.

“I walked out of the party at that point. The notion that it was an accomplishment for a member of any group, let alone my own group, to simply breathe past their 21st birthday cut me like a knife,” said Jealous, a 2021 Honorary Fellow in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School and President For The American Way.

That birthday party started Jealous, who in 2008 at age 35 was chosen as the youngest-ever president and CEO of the NAACP, on a lifetime of advocacy for the Black struggle for equality and freedom. He shared his story as a guest speaker during the Law School’s Annual Public Interest Week, organized by the Toll Public Interest Center, the hub of public service at the Law School. Soon after the party Jealous met with his family’s griot, his now 104-year-old grandmother, Mamie Todd SW’53, for counsel.

Why, he asked, after the promise of the Civil Rights movement, did his generation find themselves the most incarcerated people on the planet and the most murdered in the country.

She explained: “We got what we fought for but we lost what we had. We got the right to send our children to any school in town. We lost the right to assume that they would be loved or welcomed the way that I was welcomed at the one-room schoolhouse that [my] grandfather built for his children, and his grandchildren and those of other people who had been born into slavery.”

She added Black people gained the right to work in law enforcement but lost the right to live in safe communities.

On the bus back to Columbia, Jealous determined to make his cause ending the injustice in the justice system. That’s how he found himself in Mississippi at age 20 working as an organizer with Stacey Abrams and others.

(Abrams, former Georgia gubernatorial candidate, minority leader of the Georgia House of Representatives and activist against voter suppression, joined Jealous during the spring semester for a conversation sponsored by the Annenberg School for Communication, the Law School, the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Paideia Program, and the Penn Provost’s Office. See page 16.)

After Stacey Abrams lost the 2018 Georgia governor’s race, she said she was “the saddest I’ve ever been and the most worthless I’ve ever felt.” She gave herself 10 days to grieve, watch TV, feel depressed and mad, and then she transformed those emotions into action.

“Ambition doesn’t allow itself to be rewarded by not getting what you want. Sometimes it’s an opportunity to expand how you think about it, or understand what you need to do differently,” she told the virtual audience in a conversation at Penn. “I got through those bouts by remembering why I do it, remembering my job isn’t to win; it is to move forward.”

Four distinguished faculty members retired from the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School at the end of the 2021 academic year: William A. Schnader Professor of Law Regina Austin L’73; David Berger Professor for the Administration of Justice Stephen B. Burbank; Charles A. Heimbold, Jr. Professor of Law Charles W. Mooney Jr.; and John J. O’Brien Professor of Law & Professor of Philosophy Stephen R. Perry.

Each of these professors has contributed immensely to the Law School community during their time; three have served for over 30 years. Their work embodies a wealth of scholarly and experiential expertise that has greatly enhanced the academic programming, education, and mentorship of our students, while their achievements in research and scholarship stand as valuable additions to the legal landscape.

Regina Austin L’73
William A. Schnader
Professor of Law
Austin began teaching at the Law School as an Assistant Professor in 1977. Her scholarship focuses on the impact of law on cultural conflicts arising from race, gender, and class inequality, with much of it revolving around the critical analysis of ethnographies and law-genre documentary films and photography.

“To be an academic is to be a perpetual student,” said Austin. “Thus, I expect my education to continue in retirement. By both doing and writing, I hope to learn more about visual legal advocacy, critical participatory qualitative research in the law, and the ethical implications of both.”

With pandemic safety precautions still in place preventing in-person events on the Law School campus, Reunion took place in a virtual setting, providing an opportunity to host events beyond the weekend timeframe as held in the past.

Milestone Reunion Classes included those who graduated from the Law School in 2016, 2011, 2006, 2001, 1996, 1991, 1986, 1981, 1976, and 1971. In addition to substantive virtual programs and individual class year events, digital viewbooks were made available for participants to share personal and career highlights with their classmates.

“It was great to connect with my classmates, even virtually,” said Sierra Shear L’16. “While nothing can replace seeing each other in person, it was so nice to be able to reminisce and catch up after five years.”

Those classes celebrating major milestone anniversaries displayed resilience in making the most out of virtual gatherings, with some excitement around the potential to combine the best elements of utilizing new technology to add new layers to future, in-person events.

eter Marvin C’68, L’72 saw the writing on the wall when President Johnson eliminated the graduate school deferment. Indeed, Marvin received a notice from his draft board before he even completed his undergraduate studies at Penn informing him of his 1A status upon graduation. Until then, he had planned to enter Penn Law School in the Fall. Instead, he took what we would now call a gap year and joined the Army Reserve, committing himself to a six-year hitch. He would submit to six months of basic training, monthly meetings and two weeks of drills every summer. In his mind, a fair exchange if it kept him out of Vietnam.

He arrived on campus a year later as a “conscientious acceptor,” a term of art coined in The New York Times to describe reservists who made their peace with part-time military service. In a matter of months, the war and accompanying protests turned deadlier with the invasion of Cambodia and the killing by the National Guard of four Kent State students who were protesting the war on campus.

It all reached a boiling point with the approach of final exams in the Spring of 1970. Marvin remembers the conflicting emotions swirling at the Law School. The escalation and murders consumed the energies of many Penn Law students, to the point where they felt exams were an afterthought, especially with a huge protest planned in Washington around the same time.

“There was a significant feeling among a number of students that this was an important time to be demonstrating, to be lobbying our senators and representatives,” recalled Marvin, a longtime small firm and solo practitioner and former adjunct professor at the Law School who taught Common Law Contract for Civil Lawyers to LLM students. “There were more important things going on than taking law school exams.”

SPAC Master

A pivotal moment of rejection in the summer of ’66 would inspire her to trailblaze a path in business, finance and law. Cohen was concluding her term as a summer associate at a big law firm, where she had excelled. She remembers sitting in the hiring partner’s office. “He looked three shades of green and said to me that … our senior partner says he’s not ready to have a woman work at the law firm as a professional,” Cohen said. “I was simply astounded. It had never occurred to me that such a thing could happen to me, so I just looked at him and said, ‘I think it’s your loss.’ And I walked out.”

While it’s not a particularly fond memory for Cohen, the experience taught her an invaluable lesson: “I really determined at that moment that … I really would do better not working for somebody else that could make decisions on my behalf, so I didn’t. And I never have.”

The Hon. Harold Berger EE’48, L’51, PAR’80 was honored by a Special Philadelphia City Council Resolution recognizing his public service and contribution to academia and the national legal community. At Penn, Judge Berger, a World War II Army veteran, serves on the Board of Advisors of the School of Engineering and Applied Science, as Chair of the Friends of Biddle Law Library, and as a member of the Executive Board of The Center of Ethics and The Rule of Law at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School. He was the recipient of the inaugural Lifetime Commitment Award of Penn Law. Among items recognized were his service as Chair of the National Committee on the Federal and State Judiciary of the Federal Bar Association, his service as a Judge of the Common Pleas Court of Philadelphia and his receipt of the Special Service Award of the Pennsylvania Conference of State Trial Judges. Judge Berger also served as Chair of the Aerospace law Committees of the American, Federal and Inter-American Bar Associations, chaired the International Conferences on Global Interdependence at Princeton University and was elected to the International Academy of Astronautics in Paris. A Co-Founder and Managing Partner Emeritus of Berger & Montague, Judge Berger is a recipient of a National Achievement Award from Marquis Who’s Who in America and Marquis Who’s Who in American Law. He is a lifetime Honorary Trustee of the Federation of Jewish Charities of Philadelphia and the recipient of the “Children of the American Dream” award of HIAS for leadership in the civic, legal, academic, and Jewish communities.

t is a truth universally acknowledged that women in want of strong leadership skills often face difficulties in their endeavors.

Or so Jane Austen might say.

Thus, Andrea Kayne L’93, a self-described “complete Jane obsessive freak,” was delighted during a 2016 Jane Austen convention in Washington, D.C., when she had a revelation.

She was sitting in a restaurant with a fellow “Jane-ite” friend. “I told her Jane Austen just so crystallizes my interests in leadership and interests in women in corporate culture,” Kayne said of her “aha” moment. “Honestly, it was a back-of-the-napkin list.”

She’s referring to the list of Austen heroines she details in her book, Kicking Ass in a Corset: Jane Austen’s 6 Principles for Living and Leading from the Inside Out, to be published in September by The University of Iowa Press.