The new director of the Center for Estate and Elder Law Planning has his sights set on a national reputation for the program. After spending eight years in top-tier New York City practices, Professor Lee-ford Tritt (J.D., LL.M., New York University) brings a very practical perspective to the center.

“When the director positions were offered to me, I didn’t think twice about accepting,” said Tritt, who also will direct the Estates and Trusts Practice Certificate Program. Because of Florida’s large population of retirees, UF’s status as the state’s flagship university, the large sector of alumni who practice in the field, and the caliber of the college’s tax program, Tritt believes the center has a great potential to become the premiere academic research and resource institute on estate planning issues.

“The college has a unique opportunity to create a meaningful academic center that will enhance our college’s national reputation, help prepare our students to meet the challenges of an estates and trusts practice, and provide community services for the area’s elderly and poor,” Tritt said.

Tritt has five main goals. First, he will begin to establish ties with alumni who practice in the field in order to get valuable input concerning the development of the center as well as to provide learning and networking opportunities for students. Next, he would like to establish speaking series and conferences that will bring together scholars and practitioners to focus attention on prominent issues that affect our daily lives. Tritt also would like to update the Certificate Program to reflect the evolving nature of an estates and trusts practice, the American family dynamic and the laws that govern family structures. He hopes interested students will provide community services such as clinics for the elderly. Finally, he wants the center to play a part in shaping Florida’s estates and trusts public policy and statutes. Once these goals are achieved, Tritt foresees building a national reputation that will reflect well upon the entire college and university.

It is critical to remain professional and respectful of the legal employers and your classmates during the callback and offer stage of the recruitment process. You do not want to be perceived as having wasted legal employers time and resources without a legitimate reason. To hoard callbacks and hold open multiple offers will not ultimately benefit your reputation in the legal community. Recruiters do talk. Please remember that when you release an offer, it may well be extended to one of your UF Law classmates. Therefore, it is not only unfair but also discourteous to hold offers open that you do not intend to accept.

Timing of Accepting Offers

Student and employer expectations and obligations are listed in the NALP Standards for the Timing of Offers & Decision available at www.nalp.org. For those students who received an offer from their summer employer before Sept. 15, Nov. 1 is the deadline for students to accept or decline the offer of employment. With the permission of the employer, a student with an offer deadline of Nov. 1 who is holding only one other offer may extend to Dec. 1. All other offers must be accepted by or preferably before Dec. 1. Additionally, it is important to advise prospective employers if you are competing for a fellowships or judicial clerkships with late hiring decisions. If you are holding an offer(s), it is to your professional benefit to:

• Make timely decisions.

• Promptly and graciously decline callbacks or offers from firms you are no longer seriously considering.

• Maintain contact with the firm to keep them apprised of your status and to reaffirm your continued interest.

Accepting the Offer

Please remember that accepting an offer from an employer represents a serious commitment. It is highly recommended that you carefully consider an offer before accepting and that you fully intend to honor the commitment once you have made your decision. A Career Services professional counselor can help you assess your options to determine the best fit for you. Rescinding your summer or permanent job acceptance is unprofessional conduct that may impair your reputation in the legal community. If your circumstances change and you are weighing whether to back out of your decision, please talk to Career Services BEFORE calling the employer. UF Law must maintain a solid working relationship with all legal employers and we want to help you do what is in the best interest of your professional career and reputation.

Drafting Powerful Cover Letters

Writing an effective cover letter can seem like the hardest part of your job search. It is worth spending a lot of time on your letters, however, as many employers view them as the most important part of your search.

Network & Research

• As with other aspects of your job search, networking plays a pivotal role in letter writing.

• Extra time spent networking and learning about an employer can really pay off.

• Finding contacts to whom you can address your letters is the essential first step to writing a good letter.

• At the very least, target fellow UF alumni or your fellow undergrad alumni.

• Try to set up your connections so that you not only can address each letter to a person with whom you share some commonality, but so that you can start your letter with “Mr./Ms. X suggested that I contact you.”

• Target your mailings based upon your networking and research. MASS MAILINGS DON’T WORK. Ten targeted letters are better than 100 form letters.

Tone

• Entice your audience. Keep them reading.

• Everything in your letters needs to be relevant, but not boring.

• Maintain a tone that explains to an employer what you can do for them, not what a position with them will do for your career.

• Convince the employer that they need to see you for an interview. Keep enticing them with your relevant skills that fit their needs.

• Be enthusiastic and alive.

• Be confident but not arrogant.

• Don’t be too cute, informal or presumptuous.

Basics

• Be sure that your cover letter is printed on the same paper as your resume.

• Write to a named individual, not to “Hiring Partner” or any other generic term. This is where networking really pays off.

• Edit, edit, edit. Have a friend edit. Have Career Services edit. Read it out loud. Edit it again to ensure that it is flawless.

First Paragraph

• A cover letter should start with the connection you have to the addressee.

• Tell the addressee why you are contacting them.

• Introduce yourself, including your law school, your anticipated date of graduation, and the position for which you are applying.

Middle Paragraph(s)

• Sell yourself!

• Explain why the employer should want to meet and hire you.

• Go through your background and consider what the employer needs. Match your experiences and skills with their needs.

• Use the word BECAUSE and give them EVIDENCE about how you match. Make the connection between your experiences and skills and the skills needed for the position.

• Explain how specific experiences transfer into specific skills. Don’t just tell them what you did, but why what you did is useful to them.

• Give proof for everything you say you are good at.

• Show your research about the firm/employer.

• Express your interest or connection in the city the employer is located. Show your ties.

• Do not just repeat your resume.

Last Paragraph

• Close by making a specific request for an interview.

• Explain how you plan to follow up.

• Re-express your interest in the employer.

• It is not necessary to give them your contact information that can already be found in your letter head and on your resume.

The six-week summer program at the University of Costa Rica in San Jose is unique in the extent to which substance, skills and field work are integrated into a cross-cultural classroom that includes students from law schools throughout the United States and Latin America.

In 2006 the program offered international and comparative environmental law, international environmental justice, environmental dispute resolution and the UF Law Conservation Clinic. These courses came together as students addressed the indigenous right to property in the Americas, the international and comparative law of sea turtle conservation, and the law of transboundary rivers.

Related field trips included a two-day white water rafting trip along a river through indigenous territory threatened by a dam; navigating the Rio San Juan, the boundary river between Costa Rica and Nicaragua that is the subject of a case before the International Court of Justice; and working side by side with sea turtle researchers at the Tortuguero biological station on Costa Rica’s Caribbean Coast. An informational meeting will be held Tuesday, Oct. 24, at noon in Holland 359. Students can also visit the program website at http://conservation.law..edu/summer_costarica and contact the program’s director, Legal Skills Professor Tom Ankersen at Ankersen@law.ufl.edu or 273-0835.

The study co-authored by Christopher L. Peterson, an associate professor at UF’s Levin College of Law, and Steven M. Graves, an assistant professor of geography at California State University, surveyed more than 13,000 zip codes and found that payday loan companies clustered in areas near military bases.

The findings were cited in a report by the Pentagon, and last month Peterson testified before the Senate Banking Committee. On Sept. 29 Congress agreed to legislation prohibiting lenders from imposing an interest rate of more than 36 percent on loans to members of the armed forces or their dependants.

“It’s just fantastic,” Peterson said. “It’s probably the most consumer-friendly legislation Congress has passed in a generation.” Congress may have been moved, he said, by the irony of claiming to support the troops while at the same time allowing them to be preyed upon by the predatory lending practices of the payday loan companies. Payday loans are high-interest loans intended to tide the borrower over to his next paycheck. In a typical payday loan, a lender might give a borrower $100 cash in exchange for a post-dated check for $115. When the loan comes due, typically two weeks later, the lender cashes the check, recouping his $100 plus a $15 “lender’s fee.”

If the borrower doesn’t have enough money in the bank when the loan is due, he can always refinance—by borrowing more money on the same terms. Known as a “rollover,” this practice can quickly turn a small loan into a sizable financial obligation. Charges for payday loans vary, but a typical lender will charge around $17 or $18 for a two-week loan of $100.That’s roughly equivalent to an annual interest rate of 450 percent.

Peterson hopes the limits placed on loans to military families can someday be made on loans to civilians as well.

“These kinds of loans are being made to people from all walks of life,” Peterson said. “If it’s good for military sevice members it ought to be good for everybody else, too. Nevertheless, I think this is a step in the right direction and something to build upon.”

Peterson has been studying predatory lending for years, and is the author of Taming the Sharks: Towards a Cure for the High Cost Credit Market, which received the American College of Consumer Financial Services Attorneys’ Best Book of the Year Award for 2004.

Peterson and Graves mapped payday loan locations in 20 states, including 109 military bases, and found that ZIP codes near military bases consistently had higher numbers of payday lenders than nonmilitary ZIP codes of similar population and demographic makeup.

Military personnel make good targets for the payday loan industry, Peterson said. Junior enlisted personnel often have low salaries and little experience managing money. Because the military frowns on nonpayment of debt—delinquent soldiers can face demotion, loss of security clearances, and even discharge—lenders can be confident they will be repaid. 

Peterson believes the research he and Graves did may have influenced some leaders at the Pentagon, which cited the study in a ground breaking press release and in talking points for its legislative affairs personnel. 

“I got into this business thinking I wanted to make a difference, and then I realized that’s completely a pipe dream,” Peterson said. “But I think we actually made a difference on this one. We kind of helped this happen,”

UF Law students Josh Spoont and Elizabeth Faist took home best team honors at the Moot Court Team’s biannual Final Four on Friday, Oct. 6. Spoont was also named best oralist in the competition, and took the prize for best brief. Jesse McIntyre was named best overall competitor.

The competitors presented oral arguments in front of justices from the Florida Supreme Court, including Justices Harry Lee Anstead, Charles T. Wells, Barbara J. Pariente, and Peggy A. Quince, as well as retired Chief Justice Ben F. Overton, an adjunct UF law professor.

The Fall Final Four is sponsored by the Orlando law firm of Zimmerman, Kiser & Sutcliffe, and is the culmination of a five-week try-out competition, which requires interested students to write an appellate brief and then present two oral arguments before a panel of judges.

The Justice Campbell Thornal Moot Court Team competes each year at over a dozen tournaments throughout the country. The team was founded in 1961, and was named after the prominent Florida Supreme Court Chief Justice. The team’s mission is to promote excellence in appellate advocacy.

Levin College of Law Professor Walter Weyrauch (above, right) is being honored with a new annual lecture in his name presented by the Center on Children & Families.

The inaugural lecture will take place Thursday, Nov. 2, at noon in the Chesterfield Smith Ceremonial Classroom with family law and constitutional scholar David Meyer, Mildred Van Voorthis Jones Faculty Scholar at the University of Illinois College of Law. Meyer’s lecture is titled “Palmore Comes of Age: The PLace of Race in The PLacement of Children.”

A leading scholar at the intersection of constitutional law and family law, Meyer’s recent articles have appeared in numerous journals. In the summer of 2006, he served as United States Co-Reporter on Family Law at the Congress of the International Academy of Comparative Law in Utrecht, The Netherlands.

Meyer received his B.A. in History with Highest Honors and his J.D. magna cum laude from the University of Michigan, where he also served as Editor-in-Chief of the Michigan Law Review. He clerked for Judge Harry T. Edwards on the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and Justice Byron R. White on the United States Supreme Court.

Weyrauch, the Stephen C. O’Connell Chair and Distinguised Professor of Law, joined the UF faculty in 1957. He currently teaches family law and business organizations.

Professor; Sam T. Dell Research Scholar

• Presented a paper entitled “Hedge Funds:The Need for further Regulation” at the Cambridge Symposium on Economic Crime at Jesus College, Cambridge, England in September.

Lyrissa Barnett Lidsky

Professor, UF Research Foundation Professor

• Published “Are Bloggers the New Lonely Pamphle- teers?” UF Law magazine, 2006.

• Presented her new article, “Authorship, Audiences, and Anonymous Speech,” co-authored by former UF law professor Tom Cotter, to the faculty at a Brown Bag workshop on Sept. 29. The article will be published in the Notre Dame Law Review.

• Participated as a faculty mentor and commenta- tor at the Jurisgenesis conference at Washington University in St. Louis, Summer 2006.

• Spoke on the Florida Bar Media Law Committee’s annual panel discussion of “First Amendment Cases in the Supreme Court,” Summer 2006.

• Spoke at the Southeastern Association of Law Schools conference on recent First Amendment decisions in the Supreme Court.

• Published 2006 Supplement to Franklin, Anderson & Lidsky’s Mass Media Law (7th ed. 2005).

Diane H. Mazur

Professor

• Spoke at Yale Law School during an Oct. 6 forum on “The Judge Advocate General Corps Under ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’: Should Gays Be Allowed to Serve in the Military, and If Not, Should You Serve?” Professor Mazur’s remarks were based on her recent article in the Journal of National Security Law & Policy, “A Blueprint for Law School Engage-ment with the Military.”

Robert C.L. Moffat

Professor; Affiliate Professor of Philosophy

• Delivered a lecture, “Habermas, Rawls . . . and the Future of Europe,” to the Institut Fuer Kriminalwis- senshaften und Rechtsphilosophie, Faculty of Law, Johann-Wolfgang-Goethe University, in Frankfurt, Germany, on July 13.

• Delivered a lecture, “The Entitlements Blackhole: The Transformation of the West,” to the Max Planck Institute for Foreign and International Social Law, Munich, Germany, on July 20.

Lars Noah

Professor

• Received the Simonsmeier Award ($2,500) from the American Society for Pharmacy Law for his previously published article “Ambivalent Commitments to Federalism in Controlling the Practice of Medicine.”

• Spoke at a Federalist Society program on regula- tory compliance as a defense to pharmaceutical product liability held in Ann Arbor, Mich.

• Spoke about developments in biotechnology at the annual meeting of the Florida Bar Association.

Michael Allan Wolf

Professor, Richard E. Nelson Chair in Local Government Law

• Presented a talk on recent developments in eminent domain law at the 2006 Conference of the National Association of Appellate Court Attorneys in Richmond in July.

In the News

Lyrissa Barnett Lidsky

Professor, UF Research Foundation Professor

•USA Today, Oct. 10. Commented on the case in which a Florida woman sued a Koiusiana woman for defaming her on an ionternet blog nd was awarded $11.3 million.

Joseph W. Little

Professor, Alumni Research Scholar

• Orlando Sentinel, Oct. 4. Quoted in an article about th debated that ensued when Florida election officials said they might post signs by election booths to clarify that a vote for former U.S. Rep Mark Foley is a vote for his replacement, Joe Negron. “It sounds problematic to me,” he said.

• South Florida Sun Sentinel, Oct. 4. Quoted in an article similar to that of the Orlando Sentinel onnsignance to flarify the Negron-Foley dilemma.

• The Gainesville Sun, Oct. 9. In an article about Gainesville’s recent panhandling prohibition settlement, he said the change in the rule allowed the city to acknowledge the rule’s shortcommings while “retaining the ability to regulate activities that would impede traffic.”

Michael Allan Wolf

Professor, Richard E. Nelson Chair in Local Government Law

• The Flagler Times, Sept. 27. Quoted in an article about the effect of the Concurrency 360 on school impact fees. “I Don’t think (Concruenccy 360) is the end of school impact fees,” he said.

• Palm Beach Post, Oct. 9. Quoted in an article about Loxahatchee residents’ efforts to become a town in order to stop developers from turning open land into subdivision heaven.