Event Title
The Stand-Alone Professional Identity Course
Location
Seminar Rooms 4&5 at the McGeorge School of Law, University of the Pacific, Sacramento, CA
Start Date
6-8-2016 1:40 PM
End Date
6-8-2016 3:00 PM
Aug 6th, 1:40 PM
Aug 6th, 3:00 PM
The Stand-Alone Professional Identity Course
Seminar Rooms 4&5 at the McGeorge School of Law, University of the Pacific, Sacramento, CA
Speaker Bios
Grace Hum, Assistant Dean for Student Affairs, University of San Francisco School of Law
Professor Hum is currently the Assistant Dean for Student Affairs at the University of San Francisco School of Law. Before taking this leadership role, she was Director of the Legal Research, Writing, and Analysis Program and Assistant Professor of Legal Writing at the University of San Francisco School of Law. She has also taught upper-division elective courses, such as Legislation, Contract Drafting, Transactional Skills, Appellate Advocacy, and Sex Discrimination. She was previously a Lecturer in Law of Legal Research and Writing at Stanford Law School. Additionally, Professor Hum has taught courses at Santa Clara University School of Law and University of California, Hastings College of the Law.
Before teaching, Professor Hum worked as a Staff Attorney for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, writing bench memoranda and memorandum dispositions. She also clerked for the Honorable Henry B. Lasky, an administrative law judge for the U.S. Department of Labor, where she wrote decisions and orders. She gained valuable knowledge about writing for the courts in both of these positions. In addition, she worked at Kemnitzer, Anderson, Barron, Ogilvie, & Brewer, a San Francisco-based consumer law firm, where she honed her persuasive writing skills in both the litigation and appellate contexts.
Professor Hum is a member of the State Bar of California. She earned a Master’s in the Science of Law from Stanford Law School; a J.D. from Santa Clara University School of Law, where she was a member of the Law Review; and a B.A. from University of California, Davis, where she double-majored in Sociology and Rhetoric & Communications and minored in English.
Rupa Bhandari, Assistant Dean of Student Services, UC Hastings College of Law.
After practicing employment law and healthcare law for several years, Ms. Bhandari realized her favorite part of law firm life was working with the summer associates and helping make their experience at the firm the best it could be. That opportunity plus her love of education led her to first a career in Career Services, and then a career in Student Services and higher education administration. As the Assistant Dean of Student Services at UC Hastings College of the Law, Ms. Bhandari focuses on helping law students develop into professionals. She and her team also focus on large academic programs (like Orientation and Commencement); ways to have a balanced/healthy life (she also manages Student Health), and individual and group resources and services (like academic planning, student leadership, moral character application questions, and more). In 2011, she won Administrator of the Year, as voted on by the students. Ms. Bhandari is currently serving on the Student Services executive committee for AALS. Prior to attending law school, she interviewed celebrities at red carpet events like award shows and movie premiers. She received her BAs in English and Communication Studies from UCLA and her JD from Santa Clara University.
Jerome M. Organ, Professor, University of St. Thomas A native of Wisconsin, Jerome M. Organ graduated magna cum laude from Miami University and attended Vanderbilt University School of Law as a Patrick Wilson Scholar. At Vanderbilt, Organ served as an editor of the Vanderbilt Law Review and graduated as a member of the Order of the Coif. After clerking for Justice William G. Callow of the Wisconsin Supreme Court, Professor Organ entered private practice with Foley & Lardner in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Organ practiced law for five years, predominantly in the environmental law area. In 1991, Professor Organ left Foley & Lardner to join the faculty of the University of Missouri-Columbia School of Law, where he taught property, environmental law, regulation of hazardous substances, land use controls, and client interviewing and counseling. In 2001, Professor Organ became one of the founding faculty members at the University of St. Thomas School of Law. He has earned a reputation as a gifted classroom teacher who cares deeply about his students, receiving a Gold Chalk Award at Missouri in 2001 and a Mission Award for Professional Preparation in 2005 and the Dean’s Award for Teaching in 2010 here at the University of St. Thomas. Professor Organ believes profoundly in the importance of integrating the skills and values of the profession into the doctrinal classroom and in instilling in students an appreciation of the vocation of being a lawyer. He is co-author of Property and Lawyering, a casebook for first year property that integrates lawyering skills and dispute resolution materials. This text and course received the 2003 CPR Institute of Dispute Resolution Award for Problem-Solving in the Law School.
Professor Organ's scholarship initially focused on environmental law; in particular, on developing more efficient means of resolving environmental disputes and on considering questions of the appropriate locus for environmental regulation -- that is, the balanceof authority in environmental matters as between the federal government and state and local governments. More recently, he has begun to write about issues associated with the culture of law school and the formation of professional identity. A strong believer in pro bono activities, Professor Organ tries to model servant leadership for students. He has invested hundreds of hours in a variety of social justice activities over the last two decades, from providing legal services to people who lack the financial resources to gain access to the legal system to serving as a member of the board of the Central Missouri Food Bank and St. Stephens Human Services, to coaching youth soccer. Having served for four years as Associate Dean of Academic Affairs, Professor Organ has recently taken on responsibilities as the Associate Director of the Holloran Center for Ethical Leadership in the Professions. His current research is directed toward transparency in financial aspects of the decision to attend law school – addressing both scholarship programs for students and employment and salary data of graduates. In addition, he is working on obtaining funding for a survey of law students to assess the extent to which alcohol consumption, drug use and mental health issues are prevalent among law students. He also is working with the Holloran Center on developing assessment tools to document the development of professional identity among law students.
Jeffrey E. Proske, Professor of Lawyering Skills, University of the Pacific, McGeorge School of Law
Jeffrey E. Proske is a Professor of Lawyering Skills who joined the faculty of Pacific McGeorge School of Law in 2009 after 20 years of legal practice, both as in-house counsel and in private practice. Professor Proske is also a co-creator and a co-instructor of a required first year professional identity development course called The Legal Profession.
Prior to coming to Pacific McGeorge, Professor Proske served as the General Counsel for National Commercial Ventures, Inc., a Los Angeles, California based national commercial real estate investment company and developer. Prior to that, he served as Associate General Counsel for The Ryland Group, Inc., a Calabasas, California based, Fortune 500, NYSE-listed, high-volume home builder. Before joining The Ryland Group, Inc., Professor Proske also served as Corporate Counsel for PMC Global, Inc. in Sun Valley, California, a Fortune 500 international plastics, machines, chemical and pharmaceutical manufacturing company.
Before going in-house, Professor Proske was in private practice in San Francisco and Los Angeles, assisting clients with issues involving finance, business combinations, securities offerings, as well as matters related to real estate, intellectual property and entertainment. Professor Proske has been a member of the State Bar of California since 1989. Professor Proske is a contributing author of Global Lawyering Skills (West Academic Publishing). He is also the author of "The Proposition 8 Sausage Factory" for About.com. Professor Proske has acted as a consulting professor with the U.S. Russia Foundation for Economic Advancement and the Rule of Law ("USRF") providing training to professors of business law at the Russian Foreign Trade Academy of Moscow, Russian Federation, in connection with USRF's Legal Education Exchange Program ("LEX"). The LEX program aims to strengthen legal education in Russian and U.S. universities by the exchange of experience and best practices in modern teaching methodologies, including practice-based and interactive teaching techniques and those based on modern IT technologies. Courses: Global Lawyering Skills, Business Transactions: The Art of the Deal, The Legal Profession, Introduction to Legal Analysis (M.S.L.)
Clifford Zimmerman, Clinical Associate Professor of Law, Associate Dean and Dean of Students, Northwestern, Pritzker School of Law
Professor Zimmerman’s specialties are legal analysis, writing, and research, civil rights, and government accountability. He has taught legal analysis, civil rights, and evidence, and speaks and writes widely on each. Professor Zimmerman is also consulted nationally in cases involving civil rights and government liability. His years of teaching legal analysis, research, and writing has sparked many specific areas of interest, including collaborative and cooperative work, cultural differences in reasoning methods, and the development of basic reasoning abilities. He is particularly interested in exploring and testing innovative methods by which students can learn the often elusive skills necessary to analyze and reason. He is nationally recognized for his work on collaborative and cooperative learning in legal education and his article, “Thinking Beyond My Own Interpretation:” Reflections on Collaborative and Cooperative Theory in the Law School Curriculum. He also speaks widely on other issues related to legal analysis.
Professor Zimmerman has written and spoken widely on the issue of government responsibility. In particular, he has addressed the role of informants and their impact on the criminal justice system. His writings on the subject have appeared in the Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterly and in the text, Wrongly Convicted: Perspectives on Failed Justice (Rutgers University Press). Professor Zimmerman is also the editor of the Police Misconduct & Civil Rights Law Report and regularly contributes articles to the publication. He also writes and speaks nationally on these issues. His recent article on municipal liability, The Scholar Warrior: Visualizing the Kaleidoscope that is Entity Liability, Negotiating the Terrain and Finding a New Paradigm, appears in the DePaul Law Review. Prior to teaching, Professor Zimmerman was an associate at the Chicago firm of Singer & Stein, specializing in federal civil rights litigation, particularly under 42 U.S.C. § 1983