SALT to Honor Phoebe Haddon and Prison Law Office at 2011 Annual Dinner

SALT's Annual Dinner, Friday, January 7, 2011, from 7:00-10:00 pm at Delancey Street Foundation, 600 The Embarcadero, San Francisco is currently SOLD OUT!

SALT is proud to announce the Platinum Sponsors for the upcoming SALT Annual Dinner!

University of Maryland School of Law; University of Oregon School of Law;  and University of the Pacific, McGeorge School of Law

Gold Sponsors:

American University, Washington College of Law; University of Denver, Sturm College of Law; Fordham University School of Law; Golden Gate University School of Law; University of Hawai’i, William S. Richardson School of Law; University of Miami School of Law; Michigan State University College of Law; University of Nevada, Las Vegas, William S. Boyd School of Law; Northeastern University School of Law; Pennsylvania State University, The Dickinson School of Law; University of San Francisco School of Law; Santa Clara University School of Law, Center for Social Justice and Public Interest; Seattle University School of Law; Suffolk University Law School; Touro College, Jacob D. Fuchsberg Law Center; Valparaiso University School of Law; Vermont Law School; and Wayne State University Law School.

The Society of American Law Teachers—SALT—is proud to announce that Phoebe A. Haddon, Dean of the University of Maryland School of Law, is the 2011 recipient of the SALT Great Teacher Award.

Since SALT’s inception, its progressive law teachers have worked for justice, diversity, and academic excellence.  Throughout her career as a professor and now as a dean, Dean Haddon has been at the forefront of this effort as a scholar, leader, advocate, and teacher.  In her scholarship, in her work with organizations dedicated to improving legal education, and in her classroom, Dean Haddon has articulated a compelling vision of the law as a public calling.  In so doing, she has inspired generations of lawyers who uphold a commitment to public service and community engagement while pursuing careers grounded in an abiding commitment to equal access to justice and fairness.

In this, her inaugural year as dean at the University of Maryland School of Law, Dean Haddon demonstrated her leadership commitment to these ideals when she safeguarded the autonomy and funding of the law school’s environmental clinic.  After the Maryland legislature considered withholding funds in response to lawsuits filed by the clinic, Dean Haddon enlisted support from the legal academy and legal organizations nationwide to protect the Clinical Law Program’s mission of providing legal services to the poor and underrepresented.  This success was a testament to her intelligence, courage, and ability to forge strategic partnerships.  Characteristically, Dean Haddon also seized the situation as an opportunity to teach. Through a series of educational events, students learned about the issues at stake, deliberated their options, then organized and undertook effective actions of their own to support the clinics’ efforts to expand access to justice.

Dean Haddon has demonstrated similar leadership throughout the years preceding her appointment as dean.  She has promoted a more racially and ethnically diverse legal profession by opening the academy to new faces, new ideas, and new conversations.  In her committee work with the Association of American Law Schools (AALS) and American Bar Association (ABA), she has insisted upon including individuals from a diversity of backgrounds who might not otherwise find an audience for their work.  She has dared to teach about diversity and inclusion to audiences who might not want to hear about it, changing minds as she proceeded.  And throughout, she has sought to build an intellectual climate to enable dialogue and progress regarding diversity issues in the classrooms and conference rooms of the legal academy. 

At  AALS, Dean Haddon has been instrumental in expanding inclusion and diversity by opening invitations to new participants of color, bringing their voices onto panels organized to educate the educators.  Through her work on the ABA Council on Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar, Dean Haddon has advocated for and helped shape a legal profession that reflects the rich diversity of this country, not in a formulaic way, but so that the ideas of young, rising legal academics of color will be heard, critiqued, and become a part of our nation’s jurisprudence. 

Dean Haddon served, along with Stephanie Wildman, as co-president of SALT from 1997-1999. Under their leadership, SALT sought to bring new professors with new ideas into law teaching, to support law professors who wanted to learn and teach about race and diversity, to advance a bar admissions project, and to build the pipeline for those who wished to join the profession.  She played a significant role in several SALT teaching conferences: Re-Conceiving Legal Pedagogy: Diversity in Classrooms, Clinics, Theory & Practice; Power, Pedagogy & Praxis; Moving the Classroom to Action; and Teaching, Testing and the Politics of Legal Education in the 21st Century.

In addition to her articles, Dean Haddon is the co-author of two important casebooks: CONSTITUTIONAL LAW: CASES, HISTORY AND DIALOGUES (2nd Ed. 2000) with Glennon, Lively, Roberts, and Weaver and TORT LAW: CASES, PERSPECTIVES, AND PROBLEMS (4th Ed. 2007) with Galligan, McClellan, Marais, Rustad, Terry, and Wildman. 

Dean Haddon earned an LLM from Yale Law School and a Juris Doctor, cum laude, from Duquesne University School of Law, where she was editor-in-chief of the Duquesne Law Review.  She received a bachelor's degree from Smith College and served as Vice-Chair of the Smith College Board of Trustees until her appointment as dean.  She served as a law clerk for The Hon. Joseph F. Weis, Jr., United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, and practiced at Wilmer Cutler & Pickering in Washington, D.C., before joining the faculty at Temple law school in 1981, where she taught courses on constitutional law, torts, products liability, and race and ethnicity for more than 25 years.

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The Society of American Law Teachers—SALT—is proud to announce that the 2011 M. Shanara Gilbert Human Rights Award will be given to the Prison Law Office at SALT’s Annual Dinner, Friday, January 7, 2011, at the Delancey Street Foundation, SF.   Under the direction of executive director Don Specter, the Prison Law Office has passionately strived to improve the living conditions of California state prisoners and juvenile offenders through legal services.

The Prison Law Office, a small non-profit public interest law firm, recently won a major victory before a three-judge federal court, when, in January 2010, the court ordered the State of California to reduce the prison population by approximately 40,000 prisoners over two years.  The order was the culmination of litigation arising out of two cases - Plata v. Schwarzenegger and Coleman v. Schwarzenegger - challenging inadequate medical and mental health care in the prisons.  The court found that overcrowding was the primary cause of the constitutional violations in those cases, and that no relief other than reducing the prison population could remedy the violations.  The United States Supreme Court has agreed to hear the State’s appeal of this decision.

Prison Law Office Director Don Specter led the Plata trial team of Rebekah Evenson, Sara Norman, Steve Fama, and Alison Hardy.  Specter and Evenson are handling the appeal for Plata before the United States Supreme Court.  The law firm of Rosen Bien and Galvan, with partner Mike Bien in the lead, and Ernie Galvan, Jane Kahn, Maria Morris, Amy Whelan, Lisa Ells, Lori Rifkin, and Tom Nolan handled issues specific to the Coleman (mental health) case at the trial level. The Coleman lead counsel in the appeal to the United States Supreme Court is Paul Clement, with Mike Bien and his team from Rosen Bien, and the Prison Law Office, as co-counsel on the brief.  The Prison Law Office was further aided by Fred Heather and Ed Sangster of K & L Gates, LLP, working as pro bono counsel at the trial.
 
For over 30 years, the Prison Law Office has been in the forefront of legal efforts to enforce the Constitution and other laws inside the walls of California's prisons. With a small staff of attorneys and support personnel, the Prison Law Office represents individual prisoners, engages in class action and other impact litigation, educates the public about prison conditions, and provides technical assistance to attorneys throughout the country. 

California's prisons remain dangerously overcrowded at 180% of design capacity with over 165,000 prisoners crammed into 33 institutions, plus another 9,000 prisoners housed out-of-state and in community facilities.  Basic necessities of life, such as medical and mental health care, are often lacking.  Prisoners with disabilities are not recognized as disabled, and many are not provided reasonable accommodations as required by the Americans with Disabilities Act.  Through both individual and impact litigation, the Prison Law Office has changed many California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation policies and practices, and has alleviated many of the cruel and unusual conditions that have been inflicted upon tens of thousands of state prisoners.

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For more information on how to attend the SALT Annual Dinner, click here.