Boston College Law School Digital Commons @ Boston College Law School Boston College Law School Magazine 4-1-2009 BC Law Magazine Spring/Summer 2009 Boston College Law School Follow this and additional works at: http://lawdigitalcommons.bc.edu/bclsm Part of the Legal Education Commons Recommended Citation Boston College Law School, "BC Law Magazine Spring/Summer 2009" (2009). Boston College Law School Magazine. Book 34. http://lawdigitalcommons.bc.edu/bclsm/34 This Magazine is brought to you for free and open access by Digital Commons @ Boston College Law School. It has been accepted for inclusion in Boston College Law School Magazine by an authorized administrator of Digital Commons @ Boston College Law School. For more information, please contact [email protected]. THE TRAILBLAZING MEG CONNOLLY | CHINA’S LEGAL TIGHTROPE | REUNION GIVING REPORT BOSTON COLLEGE LAW SCHOOL MAGAZINE | SPRING / SUMMER 2009 THIRST ~ FOR ~ JUSTICE ONE MAN’S FIGHT FOR CLEAN WATER Contents SPRING / SUMMER 2009 VOLUME 17 | NUMBER 2 DEPARTMENTS 2 In Limine 3 Behind the Columns 4 In Brief 12 Legal Currents MARRIAGE CONUNDRUMS A hard look at intimacy TESTING FREE SPEECH Trial by internet 14 25 Faculty SCHOLAR’S FORUM FRANK CURRAN A lesson from Harry Potter PROFILE: Buzzy Baron BENCHMARKS FEATURES ACADEMIC VITAE 34 Esquire Legal Aide 14 ALUMNI NEWS Nobody questions Meg Connolly’s powers of persuasion. Funny, ferocious, and effective, GENERATIONS this one-woman wonder harvests the best CLASS NOTES volunteer minds to help the legally hungry 45 Commencement By Jane Whitehead 47 Reunion Giving Report 18 Witness to an Awakening 52 Light the World Professor McMorrow’s immersion in China’s Campaign Report legal culture elicits both surprise and sympathy for the challenges young lawyers face 60 In Closing By Judith McMorrow GREAT 20 Into the Drink: CASES One Man’s Triumphant Water Fight How Seattle’s Jan Hasselman ’97 kept hope alive for the nation’s imperiled watersheds and catalyzed a rewrite of regulatory protections By Chad Konecky 47 On the Cover: Illustration by Melissa McGill JAMES YANG SPRING / SUMMER 2009 | BC LAW MAGAZINE 1 [ I N L IMINE] SPRING / SUMMER 2009 VOLUME 17 NUMBER 2 The Bright Side of 2009 Dean John H. Garvey Optimism, moxie shape BC Law character Editor in Chief Vicki Sanders ([email protected]) aybe it’s because in tough times the tough get going or maybe it’s simply that tough times make us eager for good news and there- Art Director Mfore more aware of accomplishment. Either way, there has been Annette Trivette no shortage of either toughness or good news in the BC Law community of late. An ad on the back cover of this issue asks, “What do 1929 and Contributing Editors 2009 have in common? I would amend that to say, “What else do 1929 Deborah J. Wakefield and 2009 have in common?”—apart from the obvious association of a Tiffany Wilding-White national economic meltdown. When looked at purely from the historical perspective of Boston College Law School, what the two dates share is not Contributing Writers dire straits but optimism, a belief in the future, a display of moxie in the Sarah Auerbach behavior of this institution and the people it educates that is as evident Marlissa Briggett ’91 today as it was eighty years ago when the school was founded. Cara Feinberg Meg Connolly ’70, who is profiled on Page 14, is a prime example. Arthur Kimball-Stanley ’10 You don’t spend forty years in the public sector without a thick skin and a Chad Konecky heart of gold. Adversity is your middle name. And yet, as Connolly ap- Michael O’Donnell ’04 proaches retirement from the Volunteer Lawyers Project, where she’s been David Reich for a quarter century, there is not a hint of regret for the life of service Ali Russell ’11 she’s led so capably and good-humoredly. That’s moxie. Jane Whitehead And then we have Jan Hasselman ’97 (see Page 20), whose visionary Jeri Zeder approach to a recent environmental case he won in Washington has impli- cations for the preservation of clean water nationwide. Working for Photographers a small nonprofit agency, Hasselman took on a huge bureaucracy Suzi Camarata and entrenched mindset and emerged victorious in the fight to get Charles Gauthier developers to build so that rainwater runoff from their sites doesn’t carry pollutants to waterways. That’s belief in the future. Jason Liu Professor Judith McMorrow has spent the past year as a Ful- Dana Smith TIFFANY WILDING-WHITE bright Fellow teaching in China, and what she has learned about Design & Printing that country’s legal system could be viewed as discouraging—judges who never studied law, judicial corruption, government suppression of legal Imperial Company activists. Instead, McMorrow has chosen to see the potential in the young Boston College Law School of minds she’s shaping and to view the accomplishments of the system thus Newton, Massachusetts 02459-1163, far as harbingers of things to come. “The young people pouring out of publishes BC Law Magazine two times a year: in January and June. BC Law Chinese law schools are impressive,” she writes in her article on Page 18. Magazine is printed by Imperial Company “We have reason to hope that they will be part of the solution to the in West Lebanon, NH. We welcome readers’ comments. Contact us by phone challenges facing modern China.” That’s optimism. at 617-552-2873; by mail at Boston Elsewhere in this issue we find heroes of another sort. A number of College Law School, Barat House, 885 Centre Street, Newton, MA 02459-1163; alumni in business stepped into pedagogical roles this past year, offering or by email at [email protected]. Copy- their knowledge of business and finance to students eager to understand right © 2009, Boston College Law what brought America to the brink of economic depression (see Page 37). School. All publication rights reserved. Opinions expressed in BC Law With a law school community like this, 2009 should be a very good Magazine do not necessarily reflect the year indeed. views of Boston College Law School or Boston College. Vicki Sanders Editor in Chief 2 BC LAW MAGAZINE | SPRING / SUMMER 2009 [ B EHIND THE C OLUMNS] Sotomayor Tests Religious Clause Nominee’s faith is a new sign of tolerance by Dean John Garvey was a young boy when Kennedy was elected President, but I well recall the enthusiasm that swept St. Joseph’s grade school. For the more devout, the event was tinged with an almost religious significance. My teacher, Sr. Mary Stephen O.S.B., had a medal featuring St. John the Baptist, Pope John XXIII, and John F. IKennedy. I sensed the same excitement in the Catholics, Jews, and atheists from office. Assigning African American community at the election of Supreme Court seats to members of these formerly Barack Obama, right down to the messianic over- disdained faiths may once have helped to change the tones of the “Obama as Jesus” artifacts that popped culture of exclusion. I don’t know how it was for up. If you had told my school in 1960 that we Chief Justice Taney, the first Catholic on the Court; would some day see six Catholics on the Supreme but Justice McReynolds refused to speak to Justice Court, Sr. Mary Stephen might have said hallelujah. Brandeis, the first Jew, for three years after his ap- I don’t feel that way, and I think that’s a good thing. pointment. And yet, it is hard to distinguish a seat In 1960 Justice Brennan sat in what was then that only a Catholic can sit in from an office that referred to as the “Catholic seat” on the Court. only an Anglican can hold. I’m glad we have Justice Frankfurter held the “Jewish seat.” The evolved to the point where Sonia Sotomayor’s other members of the Court were Protestants (three Catholicism is not a reason for nominating her. Presbyterians, a Baptist, an Episcopalian, a If faith is irrelevant to appointment, though, how Methodist, and one—Chief Justice Warren—who does it happen that Sotomayor will be, if confirmed, was uncommitted to any particular denomination). I the sixth Catholic on a nine-member Court? It can’t understand the impulse we once felt to assign seats be just random selection. The odds are too long. I to religious minorities. It proclaims a sense of inclu- think there are political reasons for this phenome- sion and tolerance, especially important on a Court non. But the faith of the justices, while predictable, that must provide equal justice for all. But I can’t is a side effect of other choices, not an outcome escape the feeling that it violates the letter, if not the desired for its own sake. President Obama made no spirit, of the religious test clause. secret of his desire to appoint a Latina to the The only mention of religion in the original Con- Supreme Court. The day after he chose Sotomayor stitution (before the addition of the Bill of Rights) he nominated a Cuban American, Miguel Diaz, as appears in Article VI. Clause 3 binds all government Ambassador to the Holy See. The nominees were officials by oath or affirmation to support the Con- both Catholic because most Hispanics are. Thirty- stitution. It goes on to say, “but no five percent of all American religious Test shall ever be required Catholics, and more than 50 percent as a qualification to any Office or of Catholics under age twenty-five, public Trust under the United are Hispanic. Obama would have States.” In England the Test Act and had to look hard to find equally well the Corporation Act limited office- qualified Hispanic nominees who holding to members of the Church of were not Catholic.