What do Indiana Fever star Caitlin Clark, record-setting racecar driver and team owner Michael Andretti, Indianapolis Colts owner Jim Irsay, broadcasting icon Pat McAfee, and Indiana Law Dean Christiana Ochoa have in common?

All are among this year’s list of Indiana 250 honorees, recognizing some of the most influential and impactful leaders across the state, a list that also includes a number of Maurer School of Law alumni.

“The evolution of the Indiana 250 over time is one of our favorite things about it—and the reason we update the list annually,” said Nate Feltman, CEO and owner of IBJ Media. “The changes represent the way our state and the people who live and work here are growing and progressing. And as we developed the list, we looked for people who are making an impact now.”

Ochoa made the list for the second year in a row in the Law category, along with Meg Christensen ’07 (managing partner, Indianapolis office of Dentons Bingham Greenebaum), Thomas Dakich ’85 (CEO of Quantum Corridor LLC), Kathy Osborn ’99 (partner, Antitrust and Trade Regulation Group co-chair, Faegre Drinker), the Hon. Loretta Rush ’83 (Chief Justice of Indiana, Indiana Supreme Court), and Marisol Sanchez ’02 (executive vice president of legal affairs, general counsel (North America) and corporate secretary, Endress+Hauser USA).

Melina Kennedy ’95, CEO of the Central Indiana Corporate Partnership, and David Rosenberg ’11, Indiana Secretary of Commerce, were recognized in the Civic Leadership category, while Rafael Sanchez ’02, executive vice president, chief impact officer, and Indianapolis market president of Old National Bank, was honored in the Financial and Business Services category.

Vince Wong ’96, president and CEO of BioCrossroads and Indiana Seed Fund, and Pete Yonkman ’97, president of the Cook Group, made the Health Care and Life Sciences list. United Way of Central Indiana CEO and President Fred Payne ’98 was honored in the Not-for-Profit and Education category. Shane Hageman ’11, president of the Hageman Group, was recognized in the Real Estate, Retail, and Construction list.

Ochoa and Marisol and Rafael Sanchez were also recognized as influential Latino leaders in Indiana.

“The hardest part about creating the Indiana 250 and releasing it publicly is that we know there are incredibly important and impactful people who don’t make it,” said Lesley Weidenbener, editor of the Indiana 250 and the Indianapolis Business Journal. “That’s one of the reasons we make changes every year—not because the people who leave the list are no longer effective leaders but because we strive to continue finding and highlighting people who make Indiana a better place. The 2024 list is the culmination of nominations from readers, suggestions from other leaders and those who’ve been on the list before, and suggestions from our newsrooms.”

The case of an Alabama man convicted of murdering his wife in 1985 will not be reviewed by the U.S. Supreme Court, despite evidence that, nearly 40 years later, has been “wholly discredited.”

The Supreme Court denied certiorari in the case of McCrory v. Alabama, but Justice Sonia Sotomayor cited research from Indiana University Maurer School of Law Professor Valena Beety in her concurring agreement with the court’s decision.

Charles M. McCrory was convicted for the murder of his wife, Julie Bonds, based in large part on expert testimony from an odontologist who matched McCrory’s teeth to two bite marks on Bonds’ shoulder. But the odontologist retracted his testimony later, writing that science has revealed the limitations of bitemark evidence. McCrory had requested a new trial, which was denied by the Court of Criminal Appeals of Alabama.

“This petition raises difficult questions about the adequacy of current postconviction remedies to correct a conviction secured by what we now know was faulty science,” Sotomayor wrote. “One in four people exonerated since 1989 were wrongfully convicted based on false or misleading forensic evidence introduced at their trials. Hundreds if not thousands of innocent people may currently be incarcerated despite a modern consensus that the central piece of evidence at their trials lacked any scientific basis.”

Sotomayor wrote that the issue of due process claims like McCrory’s have “yet to percolate sufficiently through the federal courts.” The justice encouraged legislatures not to wait for a constitutional remedy in cases of wrongful convictions based on faulty science, and instead pass postconviction statutes to address the problem.

Drawing on cases from California and Texas, Sotomayor noted the power state legislatures have in passing statutes to address wrongful convictions. Adding those tools to the state courts’ arsenal would allow innocent people to attain freedom sooner, the justice wrote.

Sotomayor cited Beety’s 2020 Houston Law Review article, “Changed Science Writs and State Habeas Relief,” which reviewed the growth of state-level changed science writs and examined how other states can adopt those tools to review habeas petitions based on scientific evidence.

“The adoption of these changed science writs empowers courts in state habeas proceedings to reverse wrongful convictions, rather than be hindered by procedure,” Beety wrote.

Beety, a former federal prosecutor and innocence litigator, has written extensively on wrongful convictions, forensic evidence, prosecution, and incarceration. She is the co-editor of The Wrongful Convictions Reader, and author of the award-winning book Manifesting Justice: Wrongly Convicted Women Reclaim Their Rights. She is also a co-author of the treatise Scientific Evidence and the litigation guide Miscarriages of Justice: Litigating Beyond Factual Innocence.  She is a founding board member of the new Indiana Innocence Project.

The John Paul Stevens Foundation has chosen four Indiana University Maurer School of Law students to serve as 2024 Stevens Fellows this summer. The Foundation made the announcement today (June 26).

Selection as a Stevens Fellow comes with $12,000—half from the Foundation, half from the Law School—to help offset the cost of unpaid public interest work over the summer. This year’s Stevens Fellows are Kristal Davis ’25, from Lansing, Michigan; Allegra Maldonado ’25, from Indianapolis; James Monroe ’25, from Naperville, Illinois; and Niara Wakaba ’26, from Louisville.

“The Law School is proud to have four of our students selected as 2024 Stevens Fellows,” said Indiana Law Dean Christiana Ochoa. “These fellowships allow students to perform public interest work that is vital to so many across the country. We continue to be inspired by the incredible work our students do every year.”

Davis is spending the summer with the South Carolina Commission on Indigent Defense, Maldonado is with the U.S. Department of Labor in Chicago, Monroe is also in Chicago, working for the Cook County Public Defender, and Wakaba is serving with the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Kentucky in her native Louisville.

Named after the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice, the John Paul Stevens Foundation is dedicated to promoting public interest and social justice values in the next generation of American lawyers. Through its unique fellowship program, the Foundation supports law students who spend the summer working in unpaid public interest law internships. The Fellowship Program reflects Justice Stevens’ deep belief that a dynamic and effective justice system depends on a cadre of trained and committed lawyers committed to public interest work.

According to the Foundation, approximately 74 percent of Stevens Fellows go on to work in public interest and social justice positions, including public defenders, civil rights attorneys, and advocates for children, youth, survivors of violence, families, immigrants, seniors, and others. Past Stevens Fellows now work in local, state, and federal government on housing, health care, child welfare, community services, and racial justice.

The Maurer School of Law is one of 38 law schools—and the only one in Indiana—that participates in the Stevens Fellowship program.

For the third time in history, a faculty member of the Indiana University Maurer School of Law will be honored with the university’s Sonneborn Award.

Donna Nagy, the C. Ben Dutton Professor of Law and executive associate dean, will be recognized with a number of other distinguished award-winners at a ceremony this fall. She follows Leandra Lederman, William W. Oliver Chair Emerita in Tax Law (2019), and Walter W. Foskett Professor of Law Susan H. Williams (2014) as law faculty who have earned the honor.

The Tracy M. Sonneborn Award honors faculty for accomplishments in the areas of teaching and research. The award, named for the late eminent scientist Professor Tracy M. Sonneborn, is given to an exemplary researcher who is also well known as an exemplary teacher.

“These faculty members have reined their pedagogy, research, and modes of engagement to the highest standard, serving as inspiration not only for our campus but for their fields and every community influenced by their endeavors,” said Rahul Shrivastav, IU Bloomington provost and executive vice president. “I am immensely proud to work alongside these trailblazing scholars.”

Shrivastav announced the Sonneborn, Burgan, and Venkat awards and the recommendation of IU Provost Professors and Herman B Wells Professors today (June 11).

All of the award recipients were recommended by a faculty committee sponsored by the Office of the Vice Provost for Faculty and Academic Affairs and will be celebrated at a reception in the fall 2024 semester. Nagy will deliver a campus-wide lecture in spring 2025.

“This is such a well-deserved honor for Professor Nagy and all of us at the Law School are so proud that she’ll be honored with a Sonneborn Award by the university,” said Dean Christiana Ochoa. “Professor Nagy has been an invaluable part of our school for nearly two decades, and her service to our campus, school, faculty, and students as a teacher, scholar, and administrator are simply unparalleled.”

Nagy is the C. Ben Dutton Professor of Business Law and executive associate dean at the Maurer School of Law. She teaches and writes in the areas of securities litigation, securities regulation and corporations, and she has served in her administrative role for most of the past decade. Her internationally recognized scholarship includes two co-authored books: one on the law of insider trading and a casebook on securities litigation, enforcement and compliance. She has published extensively in distinguished law journals on matters including insider trading, government officials and financial conflicts of interest, and securities enforcement remedies.

Nagy has been invited to testify on multiple occasions in hearings before U.S. congressional committees and is also a frequent speaker at law schools and professional conferences. She is an elected member of the American Law Institute and served as an appointed member of the National Adjudicatory Council of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority and the Corporate Laws Committee of the American Bar Association. She has held numerous leadership positions in the Association of American Law Schools and received an Outstanding Mentor Award from its Business Associations Section.

Nagy began her teaching career in 1994, after working as an associate with Debevoise & Plimpton in Washington, D.C.

The Law and Society Association will honor an Indiana University Maurer School of Law professor this week at its 2024 Annual Meeting in Denver from June 6-9.

Professor India Thusi will receive the John Hope Franklin Prize, recognizing exceptional scholarship in the field of Race, Racism and the Law.

Thusi’s winning work, “The Racialized History of Vice Policing,” was published in the UCLA Law Review in 2023.

“The article provides an enduring scholarly contribution at the intersection of policing, abolition, and legal history,” according to the LSA. “Thusi adopts an abolitionist framework and provides a much-needed analysis of vice policing as a mechanism to sustain racism and racialized marginalization. This well-written and compelling article is the beginning of a rich and important project that will continue to open up new avenues in research on race, racism, and law for years to come.”

The Franklin Prize is awarded for an article published in the two calendar years prior to the award year. The competition is open to all forms of law and society scholarship, to authors at any stage of their careers, and to authors from any country of origin. Articles may be published in any scholarly journal, including socio-legal journals, journals in other disciplines, and law reviews, or may be a chapter in a book volume.

Thusi is the Charles L. Whistler Faculty Fellow at the Law School, and a senior scientist at Indiana University’s Kinsey Institute. Her research examines racial and sexual hierarchies as they relate to policing, race, and gender. Thusi’s research is inextricably connected to her previous legal experience at organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union, Human Rights Watch, the Center for Constitutional Rights, and—most recently—The Opportunity Agenda, a social justice communication lab that collaborates to effect lasting policy and culture change.

She was selected as a Fulbright U.S. Global Scholar for 2020-2023.

“I am so pleased to see Professor Thusi’s scholarship recognized by the Law and Society Association,” said Indiana Law Dean Christiana Ochoa. “The John Hope Franklin Prize is a prestigious honor won in the past by scholars at Northwestern, Harvard, and UC-Berkeley, and I am proud Professor Thusi will join them.”

The Law and Society Association is an interdisciplinary scholarly organization committed to social scientific, interpretive, and historical analyses of law across multiple social contexts.

Prospective law students across the United States are paying less attention and giving less credence to the annual U.S. News & World Report rankings of American law schools, according to new research from scholars at the Indiana University Maurer School of Law and University of Kentucky Rosenberg College of Law.

“The Decline and Fall of the U.S. News Rankings” was published this week on the Social Science Research Network by Indiana Law Professor CJ Ryan and Brian Frye, Kentucky’s Spears-Gilbert Professor of Law.

Contrary to what many in the legal education community believe, a rise in the U.S. News rankings one year does not mean the school becomes more attractive to prospective students in the next, according to Ryan and Frye.

“Changes in a law school’s U.S. News ranking don’t seem to affect the revealed preferences of prospective law students very much at all,” the authors wrote. “In fact, changes in a law school’s U.S. News ranking are apparently almost irrelevant to the revealed preferences of prospective law students.”

In other words, if a law school’s U.S. News ranking increases one year, then it should become more attractive to prospective students in the next, and vice versa.

Or so the thinking went.

Long considered the definitive source on a law school’s prestige, the U.S. News rankings have undergone significant change over the past three years, as some schools, frustrated by the magazine’s consistently changing methodology, have simply refused to provide any data beyond what is required by the American Bar Association. A switch from an input-weighted ranking (where a school’s ranking was heavily influenced by the credentials of its entering classes) to an output-weighted ranking (including employment after graduation and Bar passage results) has led to a shakeup in where schools fall every spring.

But with more sources of information available to prospective students—including a number of other rankings by other media outlets—U.S. News’ reputation as the premier independent resource of information for future law students is on the decline, Ryan and Frye said.

And it turns out, no one’s really paying attention anyway.

Ryan and Frye developed a methodology in 2017 that resulted in the first objective ranking of U.S. law schools, using only LSAT scores and undergraduate grade-point averages (GPAs) of matriculating students. The “Revealed Preference Ranking” asks which law schools prospective students choose to attend, all else equal—rather than subjective rankings, which attempt to tell prospective students which law schools they should attend.

The researchers created a decade’s worth of revealed preferences rankings, then tracked annual changes in a law school’s U.S. News ranking over the same time period, and finally examined annual changes in a school’s revealed preference ranking. The changes in U.S. News rankings were then correlated with annual changes in law school revealed preferences the following year. If a law school’s ranking in U.S. News changed in a given two-year period, its incoming class in the subsequent two-year period should reflect these changes. But the authors found otherwise.

“The results were surprising,” Ryan and Frye wrote. “We expected changes in a law school’s U.S. News ranking to be strongly positively correlated with changes in its revealed preferences rankings, at least most of the time.”

But for the past decade, changes in a law school’s ranking in U.S. News hasn’t affected the revealed preferences of prospective students much at all.

“In fact,” Ryan and Frye wrote, “changes in a law school’s U.S. News ranking are apparently almost irrelevant to the revealed preferences of prospective law students. This is a surprising result, because it suggests that changes in a law school’s U.S. News ranking at best weakly affect the preferences of prospective law students.”

So, while law school administrators are overcome with anxiety every spring as they await that year’s U.S. News rankings, the very population the rankings are produced for seem to care less and less about how high—or low—a school moves in any given year.

“If the U.S. News law school rankings are salient to prospective law students, they are at best weakly salient,” Ryan and Frye wrote. “And the positive correlation is so weak that it could easily be coincidental. In other words, maybe the U.S. News law school rankings are occasionally right about the relative prestige of law schools, but no one actually notices or cares.”

An environmental law professor at the Indiana University Maurer School of Law has been elected to the board of directors of a national conservation organization dedicated to the protection and restoration of imperiled species and their habitats in North America.

Rob Fischman, the George P. Smith, II Distinguished Professor of Law and an adjunct professor at the O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs, was elected to the Defenders of Wildlife board on Tuesday, May 21.

His teaching, research and service align closely with the organization’s conservation vision of a future where diverse wildlife populations in North America are secure and thriving, sustained by a network of healthy lands and waters.

“Prof. Fischman has been a fierce advocate on behalf of the environment and our natural wildlife throughout his entire career,” said Indiana Law Dean Christiana Ochoa. “His election to the board of Defenders of Wildlife is an outstanding recognition of all that Rob does to help make our world a cleaner and safer place.”

Defenders of Wildlife was founded in 1947. The organization is dedicated to the protection of all native animals and plants in their natural communities by transforming policies and institutions and by promoting innovative solutions. Its Board of Directors is comprised of professionals from all walks of life—academic, scientific, legal, financial and business—who share a common love for our nation’s wildlife and natural heritage. Their combined experience and dedication play an extremely important role in charting the future of Defenders and the wildlife conservation movement.

Fischman, one of the country’s leading environmental law scholars, joins more than a dozen other board members who help advance the organization’s mission.

Fischman’s research explores the relationship between law and conservation implementation. He is one of very few professors to publish in high-impact, peer-reviewed scientific journals as well as law reviews. He is a co-author of the leading casebook on public land and resources law and his book on management of the National Wildlife Refuge System has become the standard reference in the field. He writes about public land management, endangered species recovery, federalism, adaptive conservation, climate change, and environmental impact analysis.

The American Constitution Society has named Indiana University Maurer School of Law second-year student Allyson McBride a Next Generation Leader—one of 34 across the United States—the organization announced April 11.

She is the third Indiana Law student in as many years to earn the prestigious recognition.

Launched in 2007, the Next Generation Leaders (NGL) program recognizes and supports law school students who have shown exceptional leadership in their work with their ACS student chapters. The program offers various opportunities that empower the students to develop their leadership skills and make a long-lasting impact in their communities.

McBride was elected president of the Indiana Law ACS chapter for the 2023-24 academic year, and has led the organization’s educational and social activities since August. That includes organizing a chapter breakfast with several Law School faculty members, hosting numerous internal and external speakers, and connecting current students with alumni of the ACS chapter.

“I am excited for the opportunity to meet more people in the ACS network and strengthen my involvement with ACS on the national level,” McBride said. “I am particularly grateful for the chance to participate in trainings and receive additional career advice; I have found ACS’s clerkship programming to be immensely helpful as I prepare to apply for post-graduation clerkships.”

In addition to the American Constitution Society, McBride is also active with the Indiana Law Journal, the Protective Order Project, the LGBTQ+ Project, Public Interest Law Foundation, and was a winner of the 2024 Sherman Minton Moot Court Competition earlier this month.

ACS President Russ Feingold noted, “I’m excited to introduce this year’s class of Next Generation Leaders, whose achievements represent the future of the progressive legal movement and the promise of a multiracial democracy. The Next Generation Leaders program was created to develop and support future progressive lawyers, judges, and policymakers, and this impressive class will contribute to the growing number of Next Generation Leaders alumni, already over 400 strong, across the country.”

McBride is the third consecutive Next Generation Leader selected from the Maurer School of Law, following Laura Rusk in 2023 and Ethan Dawson in 2022.

“We’re grateful to the American Constitution Society for recognizing the outstanding leadership qualities embodied by our students,” said Indiana Law Dean Christiana Ochoa. “Allyson has made remarkable contributions to our Law School in a number of ways, and I’m excited to see the opportunities she will have through the Next Generation Leaders program.”

Five members of the Indiana University Maurer School of Law faculty—including two who are in their first full year at Indiana Law—were honored today (March 22) with Teaching Awards, recognizing exceptional teaching over the course of the academic year.

Professor Luis Fuentes-Rohwer was honored with the Leon H. Wallace Teaching Award, the highest teaching recognition a faculty member can be awarded, while Professors Christian Freitag, Andrew Hammond, and Jenn Oliva were each awarded Trustees’ Teaching Awards.

Don Knebel, a retired partner at Barnes & Thornburg LLP, received the Adjunct Faculty Teaching Award.

“Our faculty are world renowned leaders in their fields, as researchers and scholars,” said Dean Christiana Ochoa. “They are shaping the conversations that are most vital to the country and to the world, and for that we could not be more proud. But these faculty who dedicate so much their time to their research and to their writing, and to being out shaping the world, are among all the other things fabulous teachers. And that is something that is so important for us to come together once a year to commemorate and to note and to cherish.”

About this year’s Teaching Award recipients:

Luis Fuentes-Rohwer is the Harry T. Ice Faculty Fellow at the Indiana University Maurer School of Law, where he teaches and writes in the areas of civil rights and legal history, with a particular emphasis on constitutional law and the Reconstruction Era. His scholarship focuses on the intersection of race and democratic theory, as reflected in the law of democracy in general and the Voting Rights Act in particular. He is interested in the way that institutions—and especially courts—are asked to craft and implement the ground rules of American politics.

What our students said: “His passion while teaching demonstrates his skill as an excellent educator. He is patient and open to explaining more in-depth cases and hypotheticals. His teaching style is entertaining and exciting and he makes class interesting. He goes above and beyond to serve as an advisor to us students, and to a number of student organizations such as the American Constitution Society, the Latinx Law Student Association, and the Indiana Journal of Law and Social Equality. He is an invaluable part of the Maurer community, one that truly cares about his students.”

Christian Freitag is a clinical associate professor of law and president and executive director of the Conservation Law Center. He joined the Conservation Law Center in 2019 as its second executive director, replacing founder and longtime director W. William Weeks III. For the previous 18 years, he served as executive director of Sycamore Land Trust, a nonprofit land conservation organization in Southern Indiana. Freitag graduated from the Maurer School of Law in 1997 and clerked from 1997–1999 for former Indiana Chief Justice Randall T. Shepard. He received his PhD from IU’s O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs in 2010, where his research focused on the implementation of the National Environmental Policy Act on public agencies including the US Forest Service.

What our students said: “When I arrived at law school I didn’t think any of my professors would be talking about Jedi, but during the initial interest meeting for the Conservation Law Clinic, Jedi were one of the first things Professor Freitag mentioned—he wanted to train us to be Jedi in the world of conservation law. He genuinely celebrates your successes and encourages you to continue pushing, beyond idealism and in demonstrating that well-crafted arguments and carefully choosing one’s battles make all the difference. That attitude translates directly into the outlook he takes on conservation and environmental justice, and it is passed on directly to the students, whether or not they intend to pursue a career in environmental law.”

Andrew Hammond joined the Maurer faculty in 2023. Before that, he was an Assistant Professor of Law and then an Associate Professor of Law at the University of Florida Levin College of Law. Hammond also taught in the College and the Law School at the University of Chicago. Before entering academia, Hammond practiced as a legal aid attorney at the Sargent Shriver National Center on Poverty Law in Chicago, first as a Skadden Fellow and then Of Counsel. He writes and teaches in the areas of administrative law, civil procedure, and poverty law. His scholarship focuses on how agencies, courts, and legislatures respond to poor people’s claims.

What our students said: “You would never know about his already impressive career by the way he carries himself or speaks to his students. His combination of friendliness and humility make learning from him that much easier. He consistently engages his classes with thought-provoking questions and his passion has been visible to anyone who has taken his courses. The quality of his teaching is evident by the fact that he was one of the most-nominated professors for these awards.”

Jenn Oliva is a United States Army veteran who serves as a Research Scholar at Georgetown Law’s O’Neill Institute for National & Global Health Law, a Senior Scholar with the UCSF/UC Law Consortium on Law, Science & Health Policy, and on the National Pain Advocacy Center’s Science & Policy Advisory Council. Her research and teaching interests include health law and policy, privacy law, evidence, torts, and complex litigation.

What our students said: “Professor Oliva is always happy to talk to her students about their academic and professional development, all while excelling in her teaching. Her teaching style is both entertaining and engaging—it works. She pushes students to refine their critical thinking skills while giving constructive feedback and doing so in a way that is respectful and helpful. She goes above and beyond to keep her students engaged as she lectures in class.”

Since 2011, Don Knebel has been an adjunct professor and senior Advisor to the Center for Intellectual Property Research. He teaches courses on antitrust and intellectual property law. One course seeks to teach law students the principles and techniques of intellectual property litigation by engaging them in the preparation and trial of a hypothetical patent case, tried before a jury and an actual federal judge. This course, thought to be the first of its kind in the United States, now includes law students from the National Chiao Tung University in Taiwan, where Don is an adjunct professor.

What our students said: “Professor Knebel has an ability to create an approachable environment in class, and an ability to constantly engage students in interesting discussions. He is a master at distilling down complex topics, and many students felt confident their classes with him have prepared them well for practice.”

Four distinguished alumni will join the Indiana University Maurer School of Law’s Academy of Law Alumni Fellows during a ceremony on April 12.

The 2024 inductees include a former airport manager and tennis executive, a longtime private practitioner, and two alumni dedicated to education and protecting the environment.

Induction into the ALAF is the highest honor the Law School can bestow on an alumnus. This year’s recipients are:

Gary L. Davis ’82. After graduating from Indiana Law, Davis started his career in Indiana before moving to the East Coast, where he began a career in airport management. He became an accredited airport executive and his varied roles would include managing airport operations at both Newark Liberty International and Ronald Reagan Washington National Airports. Following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Davis was responsible for standing up and managing The Port Authority’s Family Assistance Center in Newark. The center aided hundreds of Port Authority employees and families affected by the attacks. He took a two-year hiatus from airport management to serve as president and CEO of the New York Junior Tennis League, the largest youth tennis and educational program in the country. Davis now focuses on providing affordable and workforce housing in the Washington, DC area.

Renee R. McDermott ’78. McDermott began her career as a high school English and journalism teacher before enrolling in law school. While at Indiana, she served as the editor-in-chief of the Indiana Law Journal, and graduated with honors in 1978. She earned a clerkship with the Hon. Jesse E. Eschbach in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Indiana before spending 13 years with Indianapolis law firm Barnes & Thornburg. There she pursued environmental regulatory law, with experience in both trial and appellate courts. Renee served as president of the Indiana Bar Foundation, and when she moved to North Carolina, she remained active in environmental issues, dedicating considerable time and resources to a number of local causes and initiatives. Renee passed away in March 2023 and will be inducted into the ALAF posthumously.

Ted A. Waggoner ’78. Waggoner joined the Rochester, Ind. law firm of Peterson & Morton after graduating from Indiana Law, and his career would span an incredible 45 years there as a county seat attorney focused on estate planning, probate, business, and educational law. All the while he was a dedicated alumnus of the Law School, serving the school for three decades—12 years on its Alumni Board and 18 years on its Board of Visitors—under three different deans. Deeply involved in his community, Waggoner has served as an attorney for two denominational districts, serving as lay leader of the National Conference, the Christian Church Foundation, and on the Boards of Trustees for Eureka College and the Christian Theological Seminary. He also founded and led the multi-county Community Foundation and the local Hospital Foundation.

W. William Weeks ’79. Weeks enrolled at Indiana University after graduating from West Lafayette High School in 1971. He was a member of IU’s football team and earned an undergraduate degree in history. He graduated from Indiana Law in 1979 and spent four years at the Indianapolis law firm of Sommer Barnard PC, before following his passion to become the Indiana State Director of The Nature Conservancy. Four years later he became the organization’s chief operating officer and in 1994 moved to Virginia to co-found The Nature Conservancy’s Center for Compatible Economic Development. Weeks returned to Bloomington in 2005, where he helped found the Conservation Law Center. He served as director of the center and the Law School’s Conservation Law Clinic up until 2018. He was appointed the Glenn and Donna Scolnik Clinical Chair in 2018. Weeks is the author of Beyond the Ark: Tools for an Ecosystem Approach to Conservation and was a recipient of the Law School’s Distinguished Service Award in 1997.

“The Law School is proud to welcome Gary, Renee, Ted, and Bill into our Academy of Law Alumni Fellows this spring,” said Dean Christiana Ochoa. “Each honoree has demonstrated a profound commitment to their careers, communities, families, and the legal profession, and they join Indiana Law’s most accomplished alumni as academy members.”

The induction ceremony will occur on Friday, April 12, at a ceremony inside the Indiana Memorial Union.