After being introduced through a mutual friend on the moot court team in the fall of 1988 at the University of Florida Levin College of Law, Marc Chapman (JD 89) and Tracy Duda Chapman (JD 90), became friends right away.

But it wasn’t until they worked at the same law firm in Orlando that they started dating.

“They didn’t have policy against it,” Tracy said of their relationship at the firm. “But we both were concerned over whether or not that was a smart thing to do.”

Fast-forward to 2013. The Chapmans now have two daughters, aged 12 and 15, and have been married for 19 years.

Tracy is the senior vice president and general counsel of A. Duda & Sons, Inc., a diversified land company with operating divisions and subsidiary companies in agriculture, real estate development and related businesses. She is also the CEO of The Viera Company, a subsidiary of DUDA that manages the commercial and residential development of DUDA’s non-agricultural property in Florida, and is the master developer of the master-planned town of Viera in Brevard County, Fla.

In February, Marc was elected president of Dean Mead, a full service business law firm based in Orlando with three other offices around the state (Ft. Pierce, Viera and Gainesville) and nearly 50 attorneys. He practices in the area of commercial litigation, including banking, construction, real estate, commercial landlord/tenant and probate litigation, as well as creditors’ rights and non-compete/trade secret enforcement.

As a couple of Gator grads with diverse paths in law, Marc and Tracy said passion for a chosen field is recipe for success.

“You have to enjoy and like what you do,” Tracy said. “If you choose a field that you’re interested in, it makes going to work a lot better.”

While Tracy is passionate about agriculture law, working for her family’s company makes her strive even harder for success.

“I have stock in the company. My daughters have stock in the company. So I have a vested interest in its success,” she said. “You feel like you’re continuing the legacy of passing on the business to future generations.”

Tracy also recommends that students continuously seek knowledge outside of their chosen career path as a means of broadening their horizons and as preparation to take on unexpected jobs.

Marc adds that students interested in commercial litigation should take a number of business classes.

“In addition to the litigation issues, you’re going to advise clients on some type of corporate, tax or other business issue impacted by the litigation in most cases,” he said. “You need to at least recognize the business issues so you can refer your client to the appropriate advisor.”

He also gives a simple but crucial piece of advice to law students and recent graduates: Be a good listener. It is the only way to really figure out what a client wants and actually needs, he says.

Marc and Tracy say they have been fortunate for the ability to participate in many philanthropic events. Together they’ve donated to the St. Luke’s Lutheran Church and School, the HOPE Foundation and UF Law, among many others.

They enjoy traveling and taking their daughters to the Keys every summer, which presents Marc a perfect place to enjoy his hobby of fishing and Tracy a lush landscape as family photographer.

They are also huge football fans. Marc, a seven-year Gator, is a Champions Club season ticket holder, and Tracy spends many football weekends at the University of Alabama, her undergraduate alma mater.

“We don’t see each other much on football weekends,” Marc said. “And when the Gators play Alabama, we sit on opposite sides of the stadium.”

Electronic discovery is increasingly becoming a fact of life for all litigators and this conference will feature a wide array of national experts discussing how to competently and cost-effectively handle e-discovery in small and medium cases. The conference will also shed light on the latest developments in Florida and federal e-discovery rules and will feature demonstrations of the latest e-discovery software and tools for each phase of the e-discovery process, for matters ranging from the most humble lawsuit to the largest mega-case.

The conference is part of UF Law’s E-Discovery Project, and is underwritten by the International Center for Automated Information Research, a University of Florida foundation established to promote innovation in information technology. Attendees will be eligible to receive 11.5 CLE credits.

The conference is free for full-time law students and UF faculty and staff. For registration and further information, visit the E-Discovery for the Small and Medium Case website.

Charles Blow, a New York Times op-ed columnist, highlighted the media’s role in the Trayvon Martin case at the 10th Annual Center for the Study of Race and Race Relations Spring Lecture on March 20 at UF Law. (Photo by Haley Stracher)

By Jenna Box (3JM)
Student Writer

A man with a gun. A dead teen. A hoodie.

These images have been burned into the minds of Americans as symbols interracial crime, the use of deadly force and diversity in media coverage and crime reporting.

A little more than a year ago, the tragic shooting of a 17-year-old black teen walking home in a hoodie in Sanford, Fla., made waves across national media outlets.

On March 20, the 10^th Annual Spring Lecture put on by the Center for the Study of Race and Race Relations titled “At Close Range: The Curious Case of Trayvon Martin,” brought myriad questions about this case to light through a variety of interdisciplinary panels.

Keynote speaker Charles Blow, a New York Times op-ed columnist, highlighted the media’s role, and experts from nine University of Florida departments offered insight from their unique fields at the all-day event filmed by C-SPAN.

“Academic exploration of public policy issues from a multitude of perspectives cannot only deepen our own understanding but also help build a foundation for thoughtful policy making by those who create the laws, regulations and rules that govern all of us,” Dean Robert Jerry said as he opened the event to a packed audience in UF Law’s Chesterfield Smith Ceremonial Classroom, HOL 180.

The case has all the elements of a good story, Blow said: guns and murder, an unarmed boy and a suspicious man, racial profiling and threat responses. The combination of these raised some tough legal, social and racial questions.

Blow mentioned how the victim’s race has affected news coverage. Outside of Florida, he said, the only journalists who seem to write about the case are relatively young black men like him. Also, he mentioned the common topic of discussion: whether a black teen wearing a hoodie was enough to cause “suspicion.”

The arguments that “the way he behaved, the things that he wore, suggested he was not worthy of life past Feb. 26 fall short,” Blow said. “There is nothing that you can wear that gives someone license to shoot someone in the chest.”

Additionally, Blow spoke passionately about the “cocoon” media consumers place themselves in.

“People prefer to be affirmed in their beliefs than challenged,” he said. “I believe that is what we’ve seen in the Trayvon Martin case. People know what they want to believe and only listen to sources who confirm it.”

Alongside Blow, representatives from the UF departments of African-American studies; anthropology; English; health services; history; journalism and communications; philosophy; political science; and sociology, criminology and law, gave lectures and answered questions earlier in the day.

“[Blow] was an exceptional choice,” said Katheryn Russell-Brown, director of CSRRR, Chesterfield Smith Professor of Law and organizer of the event. “He was pitch-perfect and was able to use the case to discuss broader issues of journalism, politics and justice. This was a chance to talk across race, across disciplines on a wide range of issues.”

University of Arizona Professor Carol M. Rose addresses racially restrictive covenants at the sixth annual Wolf Family Lecture on March 13, 2013. (Photo by Haley Stracher)

By Francie Weinberg
Student writer

The sixth annual Wolf Family lecture drew a capacity crowd in the Martin H. Levin Advocacy Center courtroom at the University of Florida Levin College of Law. This year’s guest speaker, Professor Carol M. Rose, presented her lecture on “Property Law and the Rise, Life and Demise of Racially Restrictive Covenants.”

Up until the 1940s it was not uncommon for property deeds to include clauses that restricted the sale of property to whites only. In 1948, the Supreme Court ruled against these racially restrictive covenants, and the practice was outlawed in 1968 by the Fair Housing Act. The lecture offered valuable insights for property law students, as well as those interested in constitutional law and those  involved with the Center for the Study of Race and Race Relations.

“In the early 20^th century, African Americans started to move to cities,” Rose said at the March 13 lecture. “The hope was to escape the violence and oppression of the Southeast, so Caucasians began to take legal routes to get them out of their neighborhoods.”

She went on to explain that though race-restriction laws were Constitution-proof, they were not property-proof. It became harder and harder to sneak a Caucasians-only clause into property contracts.

“The pool of potential white buyers dried up,” Rose explained. “The only feasible buyers were minority members. This resulted in kind of an odd alliance between the white sellers and the black buyers: both of them wanted to get rid of restrictive covenants.”

Rose is the Gordon Bradford Tweedy Professor Emeritus of Law and Organization and Professorial Lecturer in Law at Yale Law School and the Lohse Chair in Water and Natural Resources at the University of Arizona James E. Rogers College of Law. Her book, Saving the Neighborhood: Racially Restrictive Covenants, Law, and Social Norms (Harvard University Press), co-authored with Yale Law Professor Richard Brooks, will be available in April.

The lecture was streamed via live webcast and can be viewed at http://mediasite.video.ufl.edu/Mediasite/Play/4775d77635a741deb45688dbd080d5fd1d.

The Wolf Family Lecture Series was endowed by a gift from UF Law Professor Michael Allan Wolf, who holds the Richard E. Nelson Chair in Local Government Law, and his wife, Betty. Wolf is the general editor of a 17-volume treatise, Powell on Real Property. The treatise is the most referenced real property treatise in the country and is cited regularly by the courts, including several citations in the U.S. Supreme Court.

The Wolf family’s strong ties to the University of Florida date back to the 1930s, when Wolf’s father, Leonard Wolf, was a UF undergraduate. Since that time, two more generations of his descendants have made their way to Gainesville to study and work.

Past scholars who have delivered the Wolf Family Lecture in the American Law of Real Property include Thomas W. Merrill, Charles Evans Hughes Professor of Law at Columbia Law School; Gregory S. Alexander, A. Robert Noll Professor of Law at Cornell Law School; Lee Fennel, Max Pam Professor of Law at the University of Chicago; Joseph William Singer, Bussey Professor of Law at the Harvard Law School; and Vicki L. Been, Boxer Family Professor of Law and director of the Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy at New York University School of Law.

Electronic discovery is increasingly becoming a fact of life for all litigators and this conference will feature a wide array of national experts discussing how to competently and cost-effectively handle e-discovery in small and medium cases. The conference will also shed light on the latest developments in Florida and federal e-discovery rules and will feature demonstrations of the latest e-discovery software and tools for each phase of the e-discovery process, for matters ranging from the most humble lawsuit to the largest mega-case.

The conference is part of UF Law’s E-Discovery Project, and is underwritten by the International Center for Automated Information Research, a University of Florida foundation established to promote innovation in information technology. Attendees will be eligible to receive 11.5 CLE credits.

The conference is free for full-time law students and UF faculty and staff. For registration and further information, visit the E-Discovery for the Small and Medium Case website.

He attended UF Law on a whim and ditched his job as a commercial litigator for seminary. The Rev. Kurt Dunkle (JD 87), a lawyer-turned-priest, described his career path as nothing short of “unexpected.”

Dunkle takes over July 1 as dean and president of The General Theological Seminary, the Episcopal Church’s flagship seminary in New York City.

When he returns as leader to his alma mater, the challenges will be monumental. In 2009 the institution faced about $42 million in debt, an almost non-existent endowment and an eroding student population, he wrote in an email.

After selling valuable excess real estate in Manhattan and turning a guest house into a conference center, the seminary brought itself out of the hole but “not out of the proverbial woods,” Dunkle said.

“The rethinking of our particular place in the life of The Episcopal Church and the growth we need as a church and a seminary will be my assignment,” he added. “UF skills and experiences are still at work.”

Dunkle said UF Law’s greatest gift was critical and creative thinking skills. He’s used these not only as a commercial litigator, but to help him face the myriad challenges he’s been presented with at unexpected turns.

“One of the obstacles I have had to overcome on this journey was not relearning how to think — those UF skills have served me well,” Dunkle said. “Rather, it was getting used to uncertainty.”

Those experiences, and Dunkle’s history after UF Law, set the stage for what he will accomplish as dean and president.

When Dunkle graduated from UF Law, he spent several years working in commercial litigation. He began at Holland & Knight in Lakeland and then moved on to Rogers Towers in Jacksonville for 13 years, where he became a partner and co-head of the litigation department.

“I always felt called by God to be a lawyer. Not by some booming voice in the sky, but by that still small voice of peace and calm that comes from being just where you are intended,” he said.

But one day in 2000, things began to change unexpectedly. He felt called to become an Episcopal priest. The idea was unwelcome, he said, and he tried to fight it at every turn.

Eventually, with assurance from fellow lawyer friends and his wife, he retired from practicing law in 2001, uprooted his family and moved to New York City to attended seminary at General.

After his ordination, he said he continued to use the skills he learned in law school to resolve issues in the midst of a changing world and church.

“I keep reading about the changes facing the practice of law and how law schools, like Florida, must adapt,” he said. “The church is not exempt from change, either.”

In 2004, a partnered gay man was elected Bishop of New Hampshire. That issue was enough to tear the almost 500-year-old fabric of The Episcopal Church, and Dunkle’s church, Grace Epsicopal in Orange Park, was not exempt.

On the day after Easter in 2006, Grace Epsicopal — sitting on seven acres with 21 buildings — lost almost all of its 1, 200 members en masse over the same issues that separated the greater church in 2004. When Dunkle became priest immediately after, he said it had $62 in the bank, about $500,000 in debt and 35 people left in its pews.

“I saw that not as a tragedy, but as a challenge,” Dunkle said. “I was called to build something — a new Episcopal Church congregation.”

Again, he attributed much of his success in re-establishing the congregation to UF Law-learned thinking. He used critical and creative methods to build the church to what it is today: Grace has more than 500 people, money in the bank and has reduced its debt to less than $200,000, he reported.

“Kurt is a terrific example of how preparation for the practice of law at UF Law, and in his case some years of experience in the practice, develops leadership skills that make a talented person like Kurt highly sought after and valued for important leadership positions — in this case, serving as the dean and president of a major seminary,” Dean Robert Jerry wrote in an email. “Shouldering the burdens of others and providing support and service to them is the essence of lawyering, so the overlap with service in a ministry is substantial.”

The University of Florida Levin College of Law is up in U.S. News & World Report rankings released March 12. Among the nation’s 201 public and private ABA-accredited JD-awarding law schools, UF’s law school is 23rd among public schools and 46th overall.

The publication places the school in two top specialty program rankings: first among public law schools and third overall in tax, and fifth among publics and 12th overall in environmental law. UF Law also continues to be highly rated in terms of reputation – 10th among publics and 26th overall in the assessment of practicing lawyers and judges, and 15th among publics and 35th overall in the assessment of academics.

“We are pleased that we continue to be one of the best values available in legal education,” said UF Law Dean Robert Jerry, referring to UF Law’s high placement for quality and equally low placement for cost among all U.S. law schools. “We’re among the three most affordable law schools in the US News top 50, when taking tuition and cost of living into account.

“At the same time, I caution every year that U.S. News and other rankings need to be considered in context and weighed along with other factors in evaluating institutional quality and fit, particularly when one considers the many factors not reflected in this ranking that make UF Law a leading law school,” Jerry said. “For example, we have a proven track record in providing leaders for the profession at both the national and state levels, and the prominence of our alumni in the federal and state judiciaries also sends a strong statement about our quality.”

In other national rankings, UF Law was fourth among public law schools in 2011 (eighth among all law schools in the nation) in the number of its graduates serving as federal district and circuit court judges.  More than 250 graduates serve as state appellate and trial judges in Florida, and many serve in those roles in other states as well. A 2012 Journal of Legal Education article titled “Where Do Partners Come From?” surveyed the National Law Journal 100 law firms and found that UF Law ranked 11th among publics and 29th overall in the number of alumni graduating from 1986 to the present serving as partners. A ranking by Super Lawyers magazine placed UF Law first in Florida, fourth among public schools, and eighth overall in “output,” i.e. the caliber of a school’s graduates. A 2012 article from Legal Metrics ranking law schools based on the number of arguments by their alumni before the U.S. Supreme Court since 2000 placed UF Law in the top 10 nationally.

“That a large number of law schools hire our graduates as law professors is also a sign of the college’s strength,” said Jerry.

A study published in the August 2011 Journal of Legal Education ranked UF Law in the top 33 (17 percent) of law schools nationwide, and as high as 22nd (11 percent) in one calculation, for the impact of its faculty on the law.

UF Law is also one of the top 10 law schools in the nation for Hispanics, according to Hispanic Business Review (seven times in nine years), and was ranked in 2012 as one of the top six schools for blacks in the South by On Being a Black Lawyer magazine.

It is unusual for a school to be so affordable, successful in both academia and the profession, and highly rated in such diverse areas.

“Thanks to our exceptional faculty and outstanding graduates, the UF Law Graduate Tax Program has ranked at the top of the U.S. News specialty tax area for as long as they have published the list, and remains the No.1 public school in this area,” said Associate Dean for Graduate Tax Mike Friel. “We are always gratified to see the program’s quality recognized in this way.”

ELUL Program Director Mary Jane Angelo said, “We are proud that UF’s Environmental and Land Use Law Program continues to be distinguished as a top program in this critical area. We have a large and dynamic program, and the faculty and students work very hard through projects like our annual Public Interest Environmental Conference, which attracted 250 participants to Gainesville this year, to make a genuine impact on current environmental issues.”

Jerry concluded, “The University of Florida is a quality school that cares about our students and offers them multiple paths to career satisfaction and success. We have state-of-the-art facilities and a beautiful campus, and we are part of one of the best and most comprehensive universities in the nation. The loyalty and influence of the Gator Nation’s law alumni cannot be overstated. Rankings like those published in the Journal of Legal Education and elsewhere offer interesting information for prospective students to consider and can help guide us in our continuing efforts to improve, but should be used as only one data point among many.”

The following blog post is published with permission by Don Barry, executive vice president of the Defenders of Wildlife, who participated in the 19th Annual Public Interest Environmental Conference at UF Law Feb. 21-23. The blog is viewable here: http://www.defendersblog.org/2013/02/reflections-on-40-years-of-the-endangered-species-act/. 

Last week, I participated in one of the most enjoyable and illuminating environmental conferences that I have attended in the last 20 or 30 years. The students at the University of Florida law school organized and hosted a riveting two-day conference on the 40th anniversary of the Endangered Species Act (ESA) and it resulted in a reunion of some of the legal and scientific pioneers who helped shaped the ESA into what it is today: the strongest federal environmental law in the country.  I was asked to be one of the opening keynote speakers, having worked on the ESA for more than 39 years in a variety of positions in the Executive Branch, on Congressional staff and with the non-profit conservation community.

When I arrived at the Department of the Interior in 1974, right out of law school, and started working as a career lawyer for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), the ESA was only a few months old, having been enacted with overwhelming bipartisan support in Congress in December of 1973. Once on board at Interior, I had the incredible good fortune of being assigned the task of helping FWS draft the core implementation regulations that to this day guide the Service’s methods for protecting wildlife with the prohibitions and inter-agency consultation sections of  the ESA.  Given that 2013 is the 40th anniversary of the ESA, my part at the law school conference was to look backwards and describe the early years under the ESA, and then take a look at where things stand today.

There were several things that made this conference extraordinary from my perspective.  First was the chance to listen to such iconic early ESA litigators like Zyg Plater and Pat Parenteau, now both law professors at New England law schools.  Zyg was the attorney that took the famous snail darter case against the Tellico dam all the way to the Supreme Court where he won a resounding victory. His case set the precedent that federal agencies MUST avoid putting endangered species in jeopardy of extinction.  Pat was similarly involved in some of the earliest, most important court victories under the ESA that reaffirmed the obligations of federal agencies to avoid actions that would jeopardize such iconic species as endangered whooping cranes and Mississippi sandhill cranes.  In addition to Zyg and Pat, there were other riveting keynote presentations made by some of the country’s most renowned conservation biologists like Dr. Carl Safina and Dr. Reed Noss.

But the most rewarding part of the conference was getting the chance to spend time, as brief as it was, with the law students who had spent so much of their time organizing and hosting the event on top of their already crushing workloads at school. When I asked a number of the conference organizers what had motivated them to take this heavy responsibility on, and what had attracted them to the ESA, the answers were always the same:  that they had grown up loving nature and wanted to apply their developing legal skills to help preserve this country’s disappearing natural heritage.  To a person, despite a discouraging job market and crushing levels of debt coming out of law school, they hoped that they would be able to embark on a career of environmental law.

I am now in the twilight of my long and rewarding professional career and I often wonder – and sometimes worry – about who will eventually step up and become the new advocacy voices for our voiceless imperiled species, once veterans of past ESA battles like Zyg and Pat and Carl and Reed and I are gone?  My time spent among the law school students at the University of Florida has now given me my answer: A whole new generation of advocates is ready – they are eager, they are committed, they care. Whether as future citizen activists in their communities or as attorneys for the environmental community, the Florida law school students and other wildlife activists like them across the country are ready to take on the challenges of the next 40 years of the ESA, and to leave their mark for conservation.  This issue is ultimately about this country’s values as we stand at a conservation crossroads: one road leads to extinction, the other leads to recovery, and the choice that needs to be made is so painfully clear. It is reassuring to me – and should be to all who care for the future of imperiled wildlife – that the values that enabled us 40 years ago to commit so fully to protecting wildlife, are still present in today’s young men and women, and they will ultimately find their way to help this country once again make the right choice.

Tickets are now available to see five Florida governors who will convene in Gainesville to discuss critical issues impacting the future of the Sunshine State for the Florida Law Review’s second installment of the Allen L. Poucher Legal Education Series. The event, entitled “Florida’s Future: A Conversation with Florida Governors,” will be held on Oct. 12 at 10 a.m. at the Phillips Center for the Performing Arts. Doors will open at 9:15 a.m., and the event is free and open to the public. Tickets are required and available for students from the UF Law Office of Student Affairs, Doris Perron for faculty and staff, and the CPA box office.

Gov. Reubin Askew, Gov. Charlie Crist, Gov. Bob Graham, Gov. Buddy MacKay and Gov. Bob Martinez are confirmed to participate on the panel. Former Florida Law Review editor-in-chief and University of Florida Law alum Ben Diamond (JD 03) will serve as moderator.

No backpacks or large bags will be permitted at the event. For more details and to submit a question to the panel of governors, visit the Florida Law Review’s website, or contact the office at 352-273-0670. The parking garage next to the Phillips Center is available to attendees for event parking. Additionally, parking restrictions at the Park & Ride Lot #2 (behind the Hilton) and at the Bledsoe Drive lot (adjacent to the University Village field) will be lifted for the event.

The Allen L. Poucher Legal Education Series was established by Betty K. Poucher in honor of her late husband, Allen L. Poucher Sr. A humanitarian who lived a life dedicated to service, Allen Poucher graduated from UF Law in 1942 and practiced law for more than 60 years. The Poucher Legal Education Series seeks to provide a venue for prominent legal, political and business leaders to discuss important issues facing our nation and world today.

On the general bar exam, UF Law’s pass percentage was 91.2 percent (259 passing out of 284 takers) compared to an overall pass rate of 80.2 percent (2,433 passing out of 3,034 takers). This was the largest spread between the UF Law pass rate and the overall pass rate on a July bar exam since 2000.

Dean Robert Jerry noted that these are the first July bar results for UF Law’s smaller graduating classes (approximately 300 students vs. approximately 400 students), as the first of the college’s smaller classes graduated in May 2012.

For the calendar year (which combines the July results with the results of the February exam, which has a small number of test takers), UF Law’s pass rate was 89.5 percent (274 passing out of 306 takers). This pass rate placed UF Law first among Florida law schools for the year.

In the past, Jerry has cautioned against looking at the February results in isolation because of the small sample of test takers, which can produce results that are unrepresentative, much like what can happen when one calculates a Major League Baseball player’s batting average by looking at seven or eight games instead of the results over an entire 162-game season.

UF also placed first among Florida law schools in the number of successful takers of the August 2012 MPRE exam. The UF pass percentage on the MPRE was 92.9 percent (92 passing out of 99 takers) against an overall pass rate of 89.1 percent (1,090 passing out of 1,224 takers).