2023 Distinguished Professor
John K. Pierre
Southern University Law Center
Chancellor John K. Pierre has devoted his career to molding lawyer leaders and being a champion of innovation. He received a bachelor’s degree in accounting from Southern University in 1980, a master’s degree in tax accounting from Texas Tech University in 1982, and a juris doctor degree from Southern Methodist University School of Law in 1985.
After graduating from law school, from 1986 to 1990, Pierre served his country as a Judge Advocates General Corps Officer, or JAG, for the United States Army. In 1990, his next assignment led him to the classroom as he began serving as a faculty member at the Southern University Law Center. In 2006, he transitioned to a leadership role within the institution becoming the vice chancellor of institutional accountability and the evening division. Currently, he has been serving as the Law Center’s chancellor since 2016.
Pierre has earned numerous awards for his leadership, innovative strategy, and tireless efforts within the legal and professional realm, including Educator of the Year from the Thurgood Marshall College Fund and Ten Most Dominant HBCU Leaders from The HBCU Campaign Fund.
2022 Distinguished Professor
Andrea Beauchamp Carroll
LSU Paul M. Hebert School of Law
Andrea Beauchamp Carroll is the Associate Dean for Student & Academic Affairs and the Donna W. Lee Professor of Family Law at the LSU Law Center. Before joining the LSU Law faculty, Professor Carroll clerked for The Honorable W. Eugene Davis of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. She subsequently worked as an associate at the Dallas law firm of Baker Botts, L.L.P., handling appellate litigation. In 2003, Professor Carroll returned home to LSU Law, where she has been teaching and writing about family law, community property, and property for nearly two decades.
Professor Carroll is the author of more than a dozen books and articles in her field. She has recently been published in the Cambridge University Press and her Tulane article on civil law property was honored at the Stanford-Yale Junior Faculty Forum.
Professor Carroll is active in law reform in Louisiana, as a Member of the Council of the Louisiana State Law Institute and the Institute’s Property, Children’s Code, and Adult Guardianship Committees. She has led successful legislative reforms in the areas of domestic violence, child relocation, spousal support, surrogacy, and community property rights. As a Reporter of the Law Institute’s Marriage and Persons Committee, Professor Carroll continues to work to improve the law related to marriage and the family.
2021 Distinguished Professor
Dian Tooley-Knoblett
Professor Dian Tooley-Knoblett is the Jones-Walker Distinguished Professor of Law at Loyola New Orleans College of Law. She received her J.D. from LSU Paul M. Hebert Law Center in 1980, where she served as Executive Editor of the Louisiana Law Review and graduated Order of the Coif. Before joining the Loyola faculty in 1984, she served as law clerk to Chief Justice John A. Dixon of the Louisiana Supreme Court and was an attorney in the legal department of Shell Oil Company. She has taught over 20 common and civil law courses at Loyola and has received the “Best Professor” award numerous times. Her areas of expertise are Community Property, Louisiana Sales Law, Conflict of Laws and Civil Law Property. She has published in the areas of Louisiana property, sales and leases, community property, conflict of laws, and Louisiana water law. Since 1987 she has actively participated in law reform in Louisiana by serving as a member of the Council of the Louisiana State Law Institute and as a member of over 25 law reform advisory committees that have drafted legislation, principally revisions of Louisiana’s Civil Code. She is the lead editor of the tenth edition of Yiannopoulos’ Civil Law Property Coursebook, a co-author of a West treatise on Louisiana Civil Law Treatise on Sales and a coursebook on Louisiana Secured Credit. Professor Tooley-Knoblett was also one of the founding members of the Louisiana Lawyer’s Assistance Program, which works with lawyers and their family members to overcome addiction within the legal community and to restore those suffering from addiction to useful and productive lives.
2020 Distinguished Professor
Donald W. North
Vice Chancellor Donald W. North, Colonel North, the Johnny Cochran Endowed Law Professor at Southern University Law Center (SULC) received his Associate Degree in Criminal Justice and Bachelors Degree in Political Science from Grambling State University. He received his Juris Doctorate Degree from the Southern University Law Center in 1983.
Vice Chancellor North accepted a commission in the Army ROTC Program where he was first branched as a military police officer before being selected as an officer to join the Judge Advocate Generals Corp. He is currently retired from the United States Army, where he received numerous acknowledgments and awards. He is one of the first African American Louisiana Army Judge Advocate General Reservists to be promoted to the rank of Full Colonel.
After serving active on duty during Desert Storm One, Professor North returned to Louisiana to serve as a prosecutor in the Criminal Division of the Louisiana Department of Justice, handling cases in all 64 Louisiana parishes.
In 1998 he was offered a position as a Clinical Professor at SULC, before becoming Director of Clinical Education. Professor North left the Law Clinic in 2013 to become the Director of the Pro Bono Project. In 2015 he began serving as the Director of Experiential Learning and in 2019 Professor North was promoted to Vice Chancellor of Student Affairs.
Professor North is a member of the American Legion, a three-time member of the Board of Governors, the Law Institute and the Public Defender Board. He serves the Shady Grove First Missionary Baptist Church as Servant Treasurer and Deacon. He works as a volunteer with the Zachary Food Bank; and has served as an Ad Hoc Judge on many occasions in Baton Rouge City Court and operates a client community service program.
He has been married for over thirty-four years to the love of his life, Dr. Jyotibala Joy North, and has two children, Kimberly and Donald.
2019 Distinguished Professor
John M. Church
Professor John M. Church is an associate professor of law at Louisiana State University Paul M. Hebert Law Center in Baton Rouge. He currently teaches courses in Torts, Products Liability, Antitrust Law, Wine Law, Toxic Torts, and Advanced Healthcare Law. Since 2014, Professor Church has directed LSU Law Center’s Apprenticeship Week, a unique program designed to expose 2L and 3L law students to specialized areas of practice in a concentrated one-week courses. Professor Church also serves as a mentor for the Legal Methods program that is put together in order to help guide some 1L students.
In addition to his teaching at the Law Center, Professor Church travels statewide to teach Continuing Legal Education courses on Torts and Antitrust. He has traveled to Lyon, France on eleven different summers to teach law at the Universite’ Aix-Marseille III, Aix-en Provence, France, and Universite’ Jean Moulin, Lyon, France. He is also co-author of two books “Tort Law: The American and Louisiana Perspectives” and “Louisiana Tort Law.” He is a current member of the Louisiana State Bar Association’s Board of Governors and Strategic Planning Committee.
Professor Church received his J.D. from the University of Colorado and his M.S. in Economics from the University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign and his B.S. in Economics from Central Michigan University. Prior to teaching at Louisiana State University Law Center, Professor Church was an associate at the Denver law firm of Davis, Graham, & Stubbs and also clerked for the Honorable Judge Robert H. McWilliams of the United States Court of Appeals, Tenth Circuit Court.
Professor Church is an active member of Sacred Heart of Jesus Catholic Church. He has been married for seven years to his wife Karen and is the father of four children (Miranda, John Michael, Audrey, and Alex).
2018 Distinguished Professor
Thomas C. Galligan, Jr.
Thomas C. Galligan, Jr., has been dean of the LSU Paul M. Hebert Law Center since July 1, 2016, and holds the James Huntington and Patricia Kleinpeter Odom Professorship of Law.He also teaches Torts and Admiralty: Maritime Torts.
Prior to his appointment as the dean of the LSU Law Center, he served as the President and Professor of Humanities at Colby-Sawyer College. He was formerly the dean and the Elvin E. Overton Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Tennessee College of Law, where he also taught torts and admiralty.
Galligan began his teaching career at the LSU Law Center where he initially taught from 1986-1998, where he was named the Dr. Dale E. Bennett Professor of Law.During his first tenure at LSU the students named him the Outstanding LSU Professor six times. From 1995-1998, he served as the Executive Director of the Louisiana Judicial College.
He holds an A.B. in Political Science from Stanford University, a J.D. from Seattle University School of Law where he graduated summa cum laude and first in his class, and an LL.M. from the Columbia University Law School.
He and his wife Susan have been married for 37 years and are the proud parents of Patrick, Sarah, Aisling, and Jennifer, and the proud parents-in-law of Jeremiah Gould and soon to be parents-in-law of Ethan O’Connell.
2017 Distinguished Professor
Oliver A. Houck
Oliver A. Houck, the David Boies Chair in Public Interest Law at Tulane University, is a graduate of Harvard College (1960) and Georgetown Law Center (1967), with three intervening years of military service.He served as an Assistant US Attorney in Washington, DC and then General Counsel to the National Wildlife Federation, before joining the Tulane faculty in l981 where he has taught and published widely on environmental, criminal, and constitutional law issues.He is the author of two books featuring New Orleans, Down on the Batture, and Downstream Toward Home, and a history of seminal environmental cases around the world, Taking Back Eden, just re-published by the University of Peking Press in Beijing.
Professor Houck co-founded the Tulane Environmental Law Clinic, Lake Pontchartrain Basin Foundation, and Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana, and continues to provide pro bono assistance to local citizens. He has received several awards from the Law School and the University, and from others including New Orleans City Business, Gambit Magazine, the Young Leadership Council of New Orleans, the Tulane Black Law Student Association, and the American Bar Association.
Professor Houck and his wife Lisa raised two boys in New Orleans, where she has been an educator, school principal and social worker for special needs children.They came to the city for a one-year visit over 35 years ago, which says something about this place we live.
2016 Distinguished Professor
Howard W. L’Enfant, Jr.
LSU Paul M. Hebert Law Center
Howard L’Enfant, the Henry Plauche’ Dart Professor of Law, retired from the LSU Paul M. Hebert Law Center in 2011 following a 40-year career as one of the school’s most distinguished and respected teachers. He graduated from the University of Notre Dame in 1963, and completed his L.L.B. at LSU in 1966. He was the Editor-in-chief of the Louisiana Law Review and a member of The Order of the Coif and Phi Kappa Phi Honor Fraternity.
Following graduation, L’Enfant entered the private practice of law in New Orleans, but soon found his calling as he experienced teaching for the first time at Loyola University Law School. In 1969, he began what would become a lifetime career in teaching at LSU – a career that would influence four generations of students and future lawyers. During his time at LSU, L’Enfant also served as Acting Associate Dean, Vice Chancellor, and Interim Chancellor for the Law Center. He served on a variety of legal committees, having served as Reporter for the Continuing Revision of the Code of Civil Procedure for the Louisiana Law Institute, among other scholarly pursuits. He taught Evidence, Civil Procedure and Federal Courts throughout his teaching career.
L’Enfant was known for his fairness, warm personality, and love of the law. He made learning the law fun, according to his students.
L’Enfant is a native of New Orleans, and he is married to his wife, Jean Ann. They now reside part time in North Carolina. In 2002, he was ordained as an Episcopalian priest. He served as an Associate Pastor of St. Alban’s Episcopal Church in Baton Rouge.
2015 Distinguished Professor
Allain A. Levasseur
Professor Emeritus Alain A. Levasseur was the Hermann Moyse, Sr. Professor of Law; Director, European Studies Program; Associate Director for International Studies, Center for Commercial and Business Law, until he retired in June 2015 from the LSU Law Center. He holds a DESS from the Faculté de Droit de Paris, and an MCL from Tulane University Law School. He was an associate with the Paris firm of Mudge, Rose, Guthrie & Alexander. Professor Levasseur served as a Technical Assistant at the World Bank in Washington, D.C. from 1969 to 1970. In the fall of 1970, he resumed teaching at Tulane University Law School until he joined the LSU Law Center faculty. In 1998, the Université d’Aix Marseille Paul Cézanne bestowed on Professor Levasseur the degree of Doctor of Laws Honoris Causa. In January 2010, Professor Levasseur received a second Doctorate Honoris Causa, this one from the Université de Paris Panthéon Assas. The French government named him Chevalier de l’Ordre des Palmes Académiques. In 2014 he was selected as Scholar in Residence by the Louisiana Bar Foundation. Professor Levasseur is the author of over twenty books in English and French, and some thirty articles in English and fifty in French. He is most proud of his latest book, “Deciphering a Civil Code” (2015) written with the support of the Louisiana Bar Foundation. He has also spearheaded many translations particularly the Dictionary of the Civil Code, and the French Civil Code for the official site of the French government (Légifrance).
2014 Distinguished Professor
Gail S. Stephenson
Southern University Law Center
Professor Gail S. Stephenson is Director of Legal Analysis and Writing at Southern University Law Center. She has been a full-time faculty member at SULC since 2004. She teaches legal analysis and writing and is the adviser for the Southern University Law Review. Her scholarship is primarily in the areas of culturally relevant teaching and Louisiana civil procedure. She was President of the Baton Rouge Bar Association in 2012 and President of the Baton Rouge Association of Women Attorneys in 1995. She has also been a consultant for the Louisiana Notary Public Examination since 2008.
Stephenson earned her B.A. from Northwestern State University of Louisiana and her J.D. from LSU Paul M. Hebert Law Center, where she was a member of the Louisiana Law Review and Order of the Coif. Her experience before joining the SULC faculty includes serving as Administrative General Counsel for the Louisiana First Circuit Court of Appeal and as law clerk for First Circuit Judge Melvin Shortess and U.S. District Judge Frank Polozola, and practicing insurance and corporate defense law.
2013 Distinguished Professor
William R. Corbett
LSU Paul M. Hebert Law Center
William R. Corbett is the Frank L. Maraist and Wex S. Malone Professor of Law at the Paul M. Hebert Law Center of Louisiana State University. He has been a faculty member at LSU since 1991. He teaches and writes primarily in the areas of labor and employment law and torts. He served as Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs at the Law Center from 1997 through 1999. He has served as the executive director of the Louisiana Association of Defense Counsel since 2001 and served as executive director of the Louisiana Judicial College from 1998 through 2000. Corbett earned his B.A. from Auburn University and his law degree from the University of Alabama School of Law, where he was editor in chief of the Alabama Law Review and a member of the Order of the Coif. Before coming to the LSU Law Center, he practiced labor and employment law in Birmingham, Alabama with Burr & Forman.
2013 Distinguished Professor
Robert Force
Tulane University Law School
Robert Force is the Niels F. Johnsen Professor of Maritime Law and Director Emeritus of the Tulane Maritime Law Center, of which he was the founding director. He has taught at Tulane Law School for 45 years. Before coming to Tulane, he clerked for state and federal judges in Pennsylvania, practiced law in Philadelphia, and taught law at Indiana University. Although he currently teaches courses in admiralty and civil procedure, he has over his career taught a wide range of subjects, including criminal law, criminal procedure, evidence, transnational litigation, international commercial arbitration and international sale of goods. He was a co-reporter for the Louisiana Evidence Code and was a consultant on the project to study the Louisiana judicial system.
2012 Distinguished Professor
George W. Pugh*
Professor Emeritus
LSU Paul M. Hebert Law Center
Professor George W. Pugh received his B.A. and J.D. degrees from Louisiana State University, his J.S.D. from Yale Law School, and an honorary doctorate from the University of Aix-Marseille III, France.
He began teaching law at Louisiana State University in 1950, and after graduate work at Yale Law School, rejoined the LSU law faculty in 1952 and taught from 1952 to 1994. He was made full Professor in 1959 and Julius B. Nachman Professor in 1984. On retirement, he was awarded Professor Emeritus.
He was admitted to practice in Louisiana in 1950 and before the United States Supreme Court in 1967. His major areas of interest are evidence and administration of justice (civil and criminal.
He is a longtime member of the Council of the Louisiana State Law Institute and beginning in 1981. He was Coordinator and Co-Reporter for the Institute’s project for a Code of Evidence for Louisiana. The code was adopted by the Louisiana Legislature in 1988. Professor Pugh served as Louisiana’s first Judicial Administrator from 1954-56 and as Judge ad hoc on the Louisiana Court of Appeal on a number of cases in 1960.
Professor Pugh is a member of the Baton Rouge, Louisiana and American Bar Associations. He is a past chairman of the Criminal Law Section of the Louisiana State Bar Association, and served as chairman of the young lawyers section and several times on the Board of Governors of the State Bar. He was a member of the Grand Jury Committee and the Committee on Rules of Criminal Procedure and Evidence of the Criminal Justice Section of the American Bar Association. In 1984 he was Chairman of the Committee on the Future of Criminal Justice of the Criminal Justice Section of the American Bar Association. Professor Pugh is a member of the American Law Institute and is listed in Who’s Who in America.
2011 Distinguished Professor
Robert A. Pascal
Professor Robert A. Pascal obtained his J.D. from Loyola University, New Orleans in 1939, a Master of Civil Law from Louisiana State University in 1940, and a Master of Laws from the University of Michigan in 1942. He joined the law faculty of Louisiana State University in 1945, where he taught with distinction for 35 years until he became Professor Emeritus in 1980. He has taught at the University of Chicago Law School, at the University of Rome, Italy, and at Loyola University, New Orleans.
Professor Pascal has been a corresponding member of the International Institute for the Unification of Private Law, and consultant on trust law reform for the Louisiana State Law Institute. His expertise extends itself over the fields of Institutions of the Law, Family Law, Matrimonial Regimes, Anglo-American Real Property, Conflicts of Law, and Philosophy of Law. His notorious position as defender of the civil law of Louisiana, as teacher and scholar, are legendary. The merits accumulated in the course of his brilliant career obtained public recognition through the conferment on him of the degree of Doctor of Laws, honoris causa, by Loyola University New Orleans in 1995.
2010 Distinguished Professor
Russell L. Jones
Russell L. Jones, the Jesse N. Stone Endowed Professor, was named SULC vice chancellor of academic affairs in January 2007. The 1982 cum laude graduate of the Southern University Law Center and former articles editor of the Southern University Law Review joined the SULC faculty in 1984.
In 1992, Jones earned an LL.M. in labor law from Georgetown University School of Law. He is the co-author of two books: Harges and Jones’, Louisiana Evidence, 2007 (Thomson-West Publishing Co., Lawyers Practice Series) and Harges and Jones’, Louisiana Evidence: Problems and Materials. Jones has written several articles on Louisiana Evidence and the Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution. He is a member of the Louisiana State Bar Association Board of Governors.
Jones established the Marshall-Brennan Constitutional Literacy Project at the Law Center in January of 2009. He is the recipient of the 2010 Louis A. Martinet Legal Society’s Outstanding Community Service Award; the 2009 Kean Miller Hawthorne, D’Armond, McCowan & Jarman Diversity Award; the 2001 Baton Rouge Bar Association President’s Award; the 2000 Freeport-McMoRan Community Service Award presented by WAFB and Freeport-McMoRan Company; and the 1984 Pro Bono Attorney Award presented by the Capital Area Legal Service Corporation.
Recognized for his teaching, research and writing, and service to the legal community, Jones has been named the SULC Student Bar Association Professor of the Year annually from 1997-2004; the SULC Alumni Association Distinguished Professor in 2004; and the Black Law Students Association, Outstanding Law Professor at Nova University-Shepard Broad Law Center, Fort Lauderdale, Florida, in 1994.
2009 Distinguished Professor
Lucy S. McGough
Professor Lucy S. McGough is the Vinson & Elkins Professor of Law at the Paul M. Hebert Law Center of Louisiana State University. Prior to teaching at LSU she was the Charles Howard Candler Professor at the Emory University Law School, A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Agnes Scott College. Professor McGough graduated with distinction from Emory Law School. She was a member of the Law Review and the Order of the Coif. She was one of only two women in her class in 1966. She holds a master’s of law degree from Harvard University. She was named a Kellogg National Fellow, from 1981-84.
Professor McGough has written several books and many law articles on family law and children’s law topics, from delinquency to adoption. She has also written interdisciplinary work on the cognitive development of children and their fragility as witnesses. Since 1991, she has served as the Reporter for the continuous revision of the Louisiana Children’s Code for the Law Institute. She is a member of the State Public Defender Board. She has received the Distinguished Alumni Award, Emory University Law School, the Judge Richard Ware Award, the National Adoption Excellence Award for Individual Contributions, an Angels in Adoption Award from Congress and was named (Louisiana) Adoption Advocate of the Year for 2009. She has served on numerous committees of the Association of American Law Schools and the American Bar Association, currently on the Committee charged with rewriting the Accreditation Standards for American law schools. She has been actively involved in creating and sustaining a clinical program at LSU.
Professor McGough is a Reading Friend in the East Baton Rouge school system and for the past four years, has taken up the cello. She and her husband-colleague, James Bowers, came to LSU 25 years ago, they’ve raised seven children and ten dachshunds and made their personal and professional home in Baton Rouge.
2008 Distinguished Professor
Cheney C. Joseph, Jr.
Professor Cheney C. Joseph, Jr. is currently the Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs for the Paul M. Hebert Law Center at Louisiana State University. He holds the Erick V. Anderson Professorship in Law. In January, 2000, he returned to full-time teaching after serving as Executive Counsel to Louisiana Governor M. J. “Mike” Foster, Jr. during the Governor’s first term (1996-2000).
Professor Joseph received his A.B., cum laude, in 1964 from Princeton and his J.D. in 1969 from the LSU Law Center, where he was a member of the Law Review and Order of the Coif. He served as administrative assistant and special counsel to the district attorney in the 19th Judicial District before joining the LSU faculty in 1971. He was Vice Chancellor of the Law Center from 1981 to 1989.
He served as reporter for the Louisiana Code of Juvenile Procedure and currently serves as reporter for the Committee for Continuous Revision of the Louisiana Criminal Code and the Louisiana Code of Criminal Procedure for the Louisiana State Law Institute. He is also a reporter for the Louisiana Supreme Court’s Advisory Committee for the Louisiana Judges’ Benchbook (Louisiana Judicial College). He also served as reporter for the Speedy Trial Advisory Committee and as chairman of the Magistrate Selection Committee, both for the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Louisiana.
He has been a member of the Louisiana Commission on Law Enforcement, the Louisiana Sentencing Commission, and the Advisory Committee for the Louisiana Code of Evidence (Louisiana Law Institute).
Professor Joseph served as First Assistant District Attorney and District Attorney in the 19th Judicial District from May, 1989 until January 1, 1991. He served from July, 1976 until August, 1977 as court appointed United States Attorney for the Middle District of Louisiana. In 1992 and 1993, he served on the 16th and 40th Judicial District Courts as Judge Pro Tempore by appointment of the Supreme Court of Louisiana.
He formerly served and again serves as Executive Director of the Louisiana Judicial College.
2007 Distinguished Professor
Cynthia Ann Samuel
Cynthia Ann Samuel, W.R. Irby Professor of Law at Tulane University in New Orleans, received her Bachelor of Arts degree from Louisiana State University in 1969 and her law degree from Tulane University in 1972, where she was a member of the Order of the Coif and Associate Editor of the Tulane Law Review. She spent the next year studying comparative family law at King’s College, University of London before returning to her home town of New Orleans to practice law with Stone, Pigman, Walther, Wittmann, and Hutchinson. In 1975 she began her career in law teaching on the faculty of Tulane Law School, where she has been fully and contentedly engaged for thirty-three years. She served as Associate Dean from 1984-87.
Professor Samuel’s primary teaching fields are the Civil Law subjects that concern family property: successions, donations, trusts, and community property. In these areas she has written numerous articles and is the co-author with William A. Reppy, Jr. of Duke Law School of Community Property in the United States, now in its sixth edition, and with Katherine Spaht and Ronald Scalise of the Paul M. Hebert Law Center of LSU of Successions, Donations, and Trusts: Cases and Readings. She has been a speaker on these subjects under the auspices of Tulane, LSU, The New Orleans Bar Association, The International Academy of Trust and Estate Law, The International Bar Association, and many other organizations. She also introduced the subject of intellectual property to the Tulane Law School curriculum and has written, spoken, and consulted on copyright law.
Early in her career she became active in law reform projects. She served in 1977-79 as a member of the Advisory Committee to the Joint Legislative Committee on Louisiana Community Property Reform that produced the change in the law giving wives authority equal to that of husbands in the management of the community property. In 1982 she served in a similar capacity to the Joint Legislative Committee on Partition of Community Property and as a member of the Governor’s Advisory Committee on Women’s Issues, 1982-85. She is the reporter for the Louisiana State Law Institute’s committee on trusts and subcommittee on charitable trusts, and a long-time member of the Institute Council. She is a member of the American Law Institute and an academic fellow of the American College of Trust and Estate Counsel. As a private citizen and professor she has sought to improve the law by volunteering many hours at the state capitol to offer information and opinion on issues within her areas of competence.
Professor Samuel has served as board member of The Riverside of Magazine Neighborhood Association, The Louise S. McGehee School, and the New Orleans Institute for the Performing Arts. She was also president of the St. Louis Cathedral Concert Choir, a fifty-year-old community choir dedicated to performing the works of the renaissance, baroque and classical periods.
2006 Distinguished Professor
Katherine Shaw Spaht
Katherine Spaht, Jules F. and Frances L. Landry Professor of Law at the Paul M. Hebert Law Center at LSU, graduated from the University of Mississippi in 1968 with a B.A. and from Louisiana State University Law School in 1971. In 1972 she began her teaching career at the LSU Law School, concentrating on Civil Code subjects that impact the family–Family Law, Matrimonial Regimes, and Successions and Donations. She also taught the course in Obligations for twenty-six years. During the calendar years of 1990-91 she served as vice chancellor of the Law Center.
In 1977 she was appointed by the Louisiana State Legislature to chair an advisory committee to draft revisions to Louisiana’s community property law, resulting in the enactment in 1979 of a comprehensive reform of that law. Professor Spaht was subsequently appointed to chair two other legislative advisory committees and one legislative task force on the topics of the rights of illegitimate children and child support. She remains the reporter for the Marriage/Persons Committee of the Louisiana State Law Institute, serving since 1981, and as such retains responsibility for the ongoing revision of Book I of the Civil Code. As a member of the American Law Institute she was an active participant during the 1990s in meetings and discussions of the Consultative Group for the project entitled Principles of the Law of Family Dissolution (published in 2000). Her other public service also includes serving on several task forces created by Louisiana governors to study such issues as women’s rights and the manner of judicial selection.
In an unofficial capacity, Professor Spaht drafted Louisiana’s covenant marriage law and since its enactment in 1997 she has consulted and spoken widely in this country and abroad on the subject. As an active member of the informally recognized “Marriage Movement”, she has taken part in numerous Smart Marriages conferences and consultative groups created by the Institute for American Values in New York. She served as a paid consultant to the Institute for Marriage and Public Policy in Washington, DC, drafting model legislation.
She is the author of a treatise on Louisiana community property (three editions), three textbooks in her subject matter areas of teaching, seven book chapters, and more than seventy articles and essays for law reviews and journals in the United States and overseas.
2005 Distinguished Professor
Dean Brian Bromberger
Brian Bromberger was educated in his native Australia where he earned a bachelor of laws degree with honors at Melbourne University. He also completed an LL.M. degree at the University of Pennsylvania. He began his teaching career in law in 1969 and has taught or served as a visiting professor at law schools in Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States including the University of Pennsylvania, Syracuse University, the University of Utah, and William and Mary College.
While in Australia, he was the director of the Center for the Study of Law and Technology at the University of New South Wales. He also served on boards and a tribunal that focused on mental health issues and was a part-time lecturer at New South Wales Institute of Psychiatry and the School of Medicine.
He came to Loyola from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where he was associate dean for academic affairs and professor of law since 1995. An accomplished scholar, Bromberger has written four books and numerous articles. His scholarship was recognized with a prestigious Ford Foundation Graduate Research Scholarship and a graduate scholarship to the University of Pennsylvania.
In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Bromberger relocated Loyola Law School onto the campus of the University of Houston for the fall 2005 semester-an unprecedented feat in America’s legal education. More than 300 students from Loyola and Tulane participated in the Loyola Houston curriculum. For the first year law students Loyola’s Houston program was the only way they could commence their legal education this year, and for a number of Louisiana students planning to graduate, taking Louisiana’s unique civil law courses at other schools was not an option. Brombergers leadership kept Loyola Law School on track and boosted morale with a much needed “can-do” attitude.
2005 Distinguished Professor
Chancellor Freddie Pitcher, Jr.
Freddie Pitcher, Jr, (Judge Ret.) was appointed Chancellor and Full Professor of Law at the Southern University Law Center (SULC) in November 2002. Chancellor Pitcher’s more than 25 years of teaching experience has included adjunct professorships at the Southern University Law Center and at LSU’s Paul M. Hebert Law Center. Pitcher has been appointed to a three-year term of the American Bar Association Law School Legal Education Section’s Committee on Professionalism and has been named to two ABA Site Evaluation Team for Reaccrediting Law Schools, one of which he serves as chair.
Under his leadership, the SULC has thrived. He has initiated a part-time evening division, created a distance learning partnership with New York Law School to offer an on-line curriculum; established a certificate program in Public Interest Law; added a Low-Income Taxpayer Clinic and a Domestic Violence Law Clinic to its successful Clinical Education Program; offered its first Summer Studies Abroad Program to London, England; attracted a donation to establish the J.J. McKernan Distinguished Lecture Series; significantly increased in size and number faculty summer research stipends; and increased the Law Center’s endowed professorships from two to eight.
Chancellor Pitcher is a member of the American Bar Association, National bar Association, Louisiana State Bar Association, and the Baton Rouge Bar Association. He is admitted to practice before the United States Eastern, Middle, and Western District Courts of Louisiana and the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.
He received his undergraduate degree in political science from Southern University in 1966 and his Juris Doctor Degree from Southern University School of Law in 1973. While in law school, he was elected president of the Student Bar Association and won distinction as an outstanding moot court competitor. Chancellor Pitcher was also the founding vice president of the Southern University Law Center’s American Inns of Court Chapter.
Pitcher has a career of many firsts. He became the first African American elected to a judgeship in Baton Rouge with his election to the City Court in a citywide election in April 1983. He was the first African American elected to the 19th Judical District in a parish-wide election in 1987. In 1992, he achieved another first with his election to the Louisiana First Circuit Court of Appeals, without opposition. Pitcher has also served as an associate justice ad hoc on the Louisiana Supreme Court. Chancellor Pitcher authored close to 200 judicial opinions while serving on the Louisiana First Circuit Court of Appeal.
Upon his retirement from the bench in May 1997, Pitcher was named a partner in the Baton Rouge office of Phelps Dunbar LLP, an international law firm. His practice focused on the areas of commercial, casualty, and employment litigation. He was also a member of the firm’s appellate practice group.
Prior to his election to the bench, Judge Pitcher was the principal partner in the firm Pitcher, Tyson, Avery and Cunningham. He has also served as a special counsel in the Office of the Attorney General for the State of Louisiana, and as an assistant district attorney for East Baton Rouge Parish.
Chancellor Pitcher has been honored as a recipient of the Brotherhood Award by the Baton Rouge Region of the National Conference for Community and Justice.
2004 Distinguished Professor
Paul R. Baier
Paul R. Baier is the George M. Armstrong, Jr. Professor of Law, Paul M. Hebert Law Center, Louisiana State University, and a member of the Louisiana Bar. He has taught constitutional law for over thirty years at L.S.U. Law Center and for the past seven years he has taught a course he created in L.S.U.’s Honors College, “The Constitution and American Civilization. Professor Baier is a graduate of the University of Cincinnati and of Harvard Law School, where he was editor of Harvard Legal Commentary. In 1975-76, he worked inside the Supreme Court of the United States as a Judicial Fellow, where he scripted, narrated, and appears in the first film ever made inside the Court, featuring Chief Justice Warren E. Burger, Justices Tom Clark and Lewis Powell. The film aired nationally on P.B.S. and at the Court for a decade. He served as Executive Director of the Louisiana Commission on the Bicentennial of the U.S. Constitution, 1987-1991. Professor Baier’s article, “The Court and Its Critics,” published in the American Bar Association Journal (vol. 78, 1992) sounded his voice on the national stage of constitutional scholars. He is the editor of the Memoirs of Justice Hugo L. Black and Elizabeth Black, published by Random House (1986), and of Lions Under the Throne: The Edward Douglass White Lectures of Chief Justices Warren E. Burger and William H. Rehnquist, published by the Louisiana Bar Foundation (1995).
Professor Baier was the L.B.F.’s first Scholar-in-Residence, 1990-1992, and Editorial Chair of the Report of the Louisiana Bar Foundation Conclave on Legal Education and Professional Development (1995). He has taught courses on Constitutional Interpretation with Justice Harry A. Blackmun at Aix-en Provence, France, and Berlin, Germany, and for Tulane Law School with Justice Antonin Scalia in Siena, Italy. Professor Baier arranged a symposium, “The Bill of Rights and Judicial Balance: A Tribute to Lewis F. Powell, Jr.,” which brought Justice Powell and Harvard Law School Dean Erwin N. Griswold to New Orleans to inaugurate the Bill of Rights Section of the L.S.B.A. Baier is a published playwright—”Father Chief Justice”: Edward Douglass White and the Constitution, sponsored by the L.B.F.—which played most recently at Louisiana’s Old State Capitol. He is the author of over thirty-five books, contributions to books, and teaching materials and over thirty-five published legal articles. He has rendered over fifteen appellate arguments in civil rights cases from the Montana Supreme Court to the Bar of the Supreme Court of the United States as Special Assistant Louisiana Attorney General. The Silver Anniversary Edition of Professor Baier’s little book, The Pocket Constitutionalist, with a foreword by Justice John L. Weimer of the Louisiana Supreme Court, was published by Claitor’s in 2003. “By the Light of Reason,” Act IV of his play, will be published in the next no. of the Loyola Journal of Public Interest Law.
2003 - 1997 Distinguished Professor
2003- William E. Crawford*
2002- Kathryn V. Lorio
2001- A.N. Yiannopoulos
2000- Saul Litvinoff*
1999- William D. Hawkland*
1998- Frank L. Maraist*
1997- Marcel Garsaud, Jr.
*Deceased
