For more information, please contact:
Gwen Osborne, director of public affairs, (312) 906-5251
ADVISORY TO PRODUCERS, COLUMNISTS, AND ASSIGNMENT, LEGAL, PLANNING, BUSINESS, POLITICAL, BOOK, CITY DESK, FEATURES AND DAYBOOK EDITORS
CHICAGO–May 16, 2007–Chicago-Kent College of Law and Stuart School of Business have experts available to discuss current issues. To reach any of our experts, call Gwen Osborne, director of public affairs, at (312) 906-5251. Press releases and earlier advisories are available on our Web site: www.kentlaw.edu/news/advisory.
Illinois Supreme Court justice and Chicago-Kent alumna Anne M. Burke will deliver the commencement address at Chicago-Kent College of Law’s 2007 ceremonies. A 1983 graduate of Chicago-Kent, Justice Burke began her judicial career in 1987 when Governor Jim Thompson appointed her as the first woman to serve in the Illinois Court of Claims. She was later reappointed to the Court of Claims by Governor Jim Edgar. Justice Burke was appointed to the Appellate Court in 1995 and was elected the following year to the Appellate bench, where she served until her appointment to the Illinois Supreme Court’s First District on July 6, 2006. She has long been active in civic, social, cultural and educational endeavors. A complete biographical sketch is located at http://www.kentlaw.edu/depts/alums/commencement/keynote.html.
Chicago-Kent’s Class of 2007 comprises a diverse group of more than 300 individuals. Students were selected from among 3,177 applicants and represented 112 colleges and universities. The top feeder schools were the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, University of Michigan, DePaul University, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Northwestern University, and Miami University-Oxford. Twenty percent were members of racial minority groups, 43 percent were female and 37 percent were from out of state. Five students -- permanent U.S. residents -- were citizens of foreign countries. Several are profiled below. They are available for interviews.
-- Valedictorian John Michael Greifzu, Jr. will deliver the student commencement address. A native of Madison, Connecticut, Greifzu earned undergraduate degrees in English and philosophy at Tulane University in New Orleans. After graduation, he will join the New York law firm of Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft as a litigation associate.
-- National Trial Competition champion Keya Rajput will join the Michigan law firm Dickinson Wright PLLC after graduation. Rajput and her teammate Joshua Jones are the winners of the 2007 National Trial Competition, the premier trial advocacy tournament in the United States. She also won the competition’s Best Advocate Award. At Chicago-Kent, Rajput was also an active member of the South Asian Law Student Association.
-- Matthew L. Lash is a six-year cancer survivor who has undergone numerous treatments and surgeries during his time in law school. He is a guest speaker for the American Cancer Society, the Children’s Oncology Group and other cancer organizations. Lash is enrolled in Chicago-Kent’s Labor and Employment certificate program and has aggressively pursued a career in sports law – "as a player representative or with a team." In 2004, he completed a summer internship with the Detroit Tigers. Lash also worked as a volunteer in the Office of the Commissioner of Major League Baseball to help with preparations for the 2005 All-Star Weekend. That summer, Lash also completed a summer abroad program in International Sports and Entertainment Law in Santander, Spain. As a visiting student at Fordham College of Law in the fall of 2006, he took courses on sports law and collective bargaining agreements, while completing an internship in the baseball commissioner’s office. Lash has served as class representative to the Student Bar Association since 2004 and as a writer/correspondent for the law school’s student newspaper.
--Student Bar Association vice president Joel E. Roberson helped coordinate three trips to Mississippi and Louisiana by Chicago-Kent students who provided pro bono legal assistance to Gulf Coast residents victimized by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. A former Eagle Scout, Roberson served as a Cabrini Green Legal Aid volunteer where he assisted individuals attempting to expunge or seal their criminal records under Illinois law. In the summer of 2005, he worked as a law clerk to former House Judiciary Committee chairman F. James Sensenbrenner (R-WI), where he researched amendments to the USA Patriot Act. After graduation, Roberson will join Holland & Knight in Washington, D.C., as an associate in the firm’s Government/Public Policy practice.
--Bhairav Radia is a J.D. candidate in Chicago-Kent’s Labor and Employment Law certificate program. He is the first member of his family to attend college and law school. Before emigrating to the United States, Radia was owner and president of Laktari Pvt. Ltd., a specialty tea company with worldwide sales and 735 employees in Darjeeling, India. At Chicago-Kent, he served as student editor of the Employee Rights & Employment Policy Law Journal, worked on a nationwide Fair Labor Standards Act in the Employment Law clinic, and was the 2005 co-winner of the Charles Evans Hughes Moot Court Competition. Radia served as a legal extern with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, as a judicial extern with Judge James T. Moody of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Indiana, and as a law clerk for Trilegal, a corporate law firm in New Delhi, India.
--Susan Clark came to Chicago-Kent with an undergraduate degree in forestry, graduate work in forest management and professional experience at Silicon Valley software firms. In law school, Clark was a Westlaw student representative and spent a year working in the Chicago Legal Clinic’s Environmental Law program. She has served as executive editor of the Intellectual Property Law Society’s Journal of International and Comparative Law and contributed articles to the law school newspaper. Clark was a legal intern at the Zhong Lun Law Firm in Shenzhen, in the People’s Republic of China, during the summer of 2006. With classmate Joel Robertson and other law students, she made three trips to the Gulf Coast region to provide pro bono legal assistance to residents adversely affected by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Clark also raised funds, coordinated student activities and raised awareness for the Student Hurricane Network. In the 2005-06 school year, she served as president of the Chicago-Kent chapters of the Student Hurricane Network and Lambdas.
--Veronique Tousignant’s interests include employment-based and family-based immigration law. A native of Canada, Tousignant has worked in Chicago-Kent’s Immigration Law Clinic and as a law clerk in Chicago-based firms Scott M. Beller & Associates and Asonye and Associates. She has also worked in the law school’s Criminal Defense Clinic and as a law clerk in the Office of the Cook County Public Defender.
--Tamara Lee is interested in international labor and employment law. Lee earned undergraduate degrees in industrial engineering and management science from Northwestern University and a master’s degree in industrial relations at Loyola University of Chicago. She is a labor management relations examiner with the National Labor Relations Board and serves as district vice president of the NLRB Union where she represents attorneys, investigators and support staff in Chicago, Peoria, Milwaukee, Fort Worth, St. Louis, Kansas City, Denver and Minneapolis. Following graduation, Lee will complete her doctoral course work at Cornell University in the area of international and comparative labor studies, with a focus on Latin America.
Downtown Campus Events:
May 18: Back to the Future of Legal Research. How can law schools stay abreast of the rapid changes in legal research techniques? How can they best pass this knowledge on to their students? This intensive one-day conference will bring together law librarians and legal writing professors from across the country to continue conversations on important issues begun in 2005. For a schedule and registration information, please visit http://www.kentlaw.edu/academics/lrw/future/ on the Web.
May 20: Chicago-Kent Commencement. Illinois Supreme Court justice and Chicago-Kent alumna Anne M. Burke will deliver the commencement address. Commencement ceremonies begin at 2 p.m. and will be held in the Arie Crown Theatre at McCormick Place’s Lakeside Center, 2301 S. Lake Shore Drive, in Chicago. More than 300 students are expected to receive Juris Doctor degrees, and approximately 38 Master of Laws degrees will be conferred.
May 21: Who Owns Your Body?: Legal and Social Issues in Michael Crichton’s Next. Best-selling author Michael Crichton and a panel of experts from the legal, judiciary, medical, bioethics and social science communities will convene at Chicago-Kent to explore a variety of thought-provoking questions raised in Crichton’s latest techno-thriller Next. The novel presents a genetics industry Crichton says is "fast, furious and out of control." In Next, the author imagines a world in which blondes are threatened by extinction and it is possible to design one’s pets. And, while tissue donors and their families are not yet being pursued by bounty hunters intent upon harvesting genes for biotech companies, there are battles currently being waged in the courts and Congress that will determine who owns an individual’s genes and other body parts.
Mr. Crichton will speak from 4 to 5 p.m. Other participants in the day-long program include: Chicago-Kent distinguished professor, author and bioethicist Lori B. Andrews; Pepperdine University professor and former California Supreme Court justice Armand Arabian; health law professor Timothy Caulfield of the University of Alberta; Professor John Conley of the University of North Carolina School of Law; Professor Michele Goodwin, director of the DePaul University Health Law Institute; Debra Harry, executive director of the Indigenous Peoples Council on Biocolonialism; science and technology studies professor Stephen Hilgartner of Cornell University; and award-winning journalist and author Seth Shulman.
The program is free and open to the public, but registration is required. However, for Illinois lawyers seeking mandatory continuing legal education credit (4.0 hours), a $20 fee applies. To register and for more information, please visit www.whoownsyourbody.org.
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