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Law notes: Feb. 27, 2023

Law notes: Feb. 27, 2023

New dean for Widener Law

Clark

Widener University announced the appointment of Todd J. Clark as Delaware Law School’s new dean.

Clark will begin his role July 1, after serving as senior associate dean of Academic Affairs and professor of law at St. Thomas University College of Law in Florida.

“We are excited to welcome Todd Clark to Delaware Law School,” Widener President Stacey Robertson said. “His oversight of STU’s academic success, bar preparation, and student health and wellness programs have uniquely prepared him to be dean of Delaware Law. His energetic leadership and vision for legal education aligns with Widener’s relentless commitment to student success. I am confident he is a bold, collaborative leader who will not only engage with students and faculty, but also the Delaware legal community – which is highly populated with our alumni.”

Clark is currently a tenured professor at STU, where he specializes in corporate governance, contracts, employment discrimination, hip hop law, and sports law. He has co-chaired the Center for Pandemic, Disaster and Quarantine Research and was recognized last year as professor of the year for both first-year students and the school’s upper-level division.

Clark said he is excited about the prospect of leveraging the law school’s expertise in corporate law and its focus on diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging, further expanding the scope of the school’s influence.

Before his time at STU, Clark taught at North Carolina Central University School of Law, where he was a tenured professor and taught business associations, contracts, corporate justice, employment discrimination, and hip hop, law and justice.

Cole

Sarah B. Cole, shareholder in Marshall Dennehey’s Wilmington office, has been named Managing Attorney of the office. She inherits the position from Kevin J. Connors who served in the role for 27 years and who will maintain a practice with the firm. The Wilmington office currently houses 18 attorneys who practice in the areas of casualty, professional liability, health care and workers’ compensation litigation.

Cole joined the firm’s Casualty Department in 2014. She focuses her practice in the areas of general commercial liability, premises liability and residential group home liability. She has defended hundreds of clients in personal injury litigation in the Delaware courts, with many cases tried successfully to verdict. She additionally devotes a portion of her practice to insurance coverage and insurance fraud  matters, as well as property damage litigation.

She graduated from Bryn Mawr College and received her juris doctorate from the University of Maryland. She is admitted to practice in Delaware.

Gawthrop, Greenwood elects chair of management committee

Fuller

Gawthrop Greenwood, PC, a regional law firm with offices in West Chester, PA and the Wilmington area has elected attorney and shareholder Stacey L. Fuller as chair of the firm’s management committee. The announcement comes on the heels of two recent mergers that have grown Gawthrop Greenwood to 27 attorneys, the largest in the law firm’s 119-year history.

Fuller has handled some of Chester County’s most high-profile land development and zoning matters during a period of historic growth for the region, representing municipalities, townships, boroughs, planning commissions and zoning hearing boards, as well as individual developers and residents. Fuller’sractice includes ducation and special education law .

Fuller succeeds Patrick M. McKenna, who oversaw two mergers during his leadership.

Wilmington University School of Law announces faculty

Wilmington University annouced faculty for its new law school. The above photos are faulity members in alphabetical order, left to right.

Edson Bostic, Professor of Legal Practice

Bostic is a litigator with many years of criminal and civil litigation experience. He has dedicated himself to zealously representing individuals charged with federal criminal offenses over the last 25 years. He is the former Chief Federal Defender for the U.S. District of Delaware (2006 to 2021) and the U.S. District of the United States Virgin Islands (2012-2014).

Early in his career, he was a staff attorney at the Defender Association of Philadelphia and the Broome County, New York Public Defender’s Office. Bostic was also a senior associate at Cozen O’Connor, representing several Fortune 500 companies and other entities in complex civil matters. Bostic has also served as an adjunct professor and lecturer, teaching trial advocacy at Temple University, Rutgers-Camden, and Widener Law Schools.

Veronica J. Finkelstein, associate professor

Finkelstein is both an experienced litigator and an educator with diverse scholarly interests. Finkelstein currently works as an assistant U.S. Attorney with the U.S. Department of Justice in Philadelphia and will move to a full-time teaching at the Wilmington University School of Law in August.

She served as the civil division training officer and paralegal supervisor for the Civil Division before being selected as senior litigation counsel.

She previously worked as a construction litigator at Duane Morris, LLP and Cohen Seglias Pallas Greenhall & Furman, PC. Finkelstein taught at the U.S. Department of Justice’s National Advocacy Center on ethics, appellate advocacy, legal writing, and trial practice. She frequently serves as a program director for the National Institute for Trial Advocacy, where she teaches depositions, motion practice, and trial advocacy programs. She serves as adjunct faculty of law at Drexel Law, Emory Law, and Rutgers Law.

Michael Hornzell, assistant professor

Hornzell will teach Property and Legal Writing.

He attended Harvard Law School, where he received his J.D. cum laude. While at Harvard, he was a supervising editor of the Journal on Legislation. Hornzell clerked for the Honorable Joshua Wolson of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania and D. Michael Fisher of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.

Alisa Klein, associate professor

Klein a senior-level career appellate attorney at the U.S. Department of Justice in Washington, D.C. She will join the full-time faculty at Wilmington University Law School in August 2024, after leaving the DOJ. Klein began working for the DOJ’s Civil Division appellate staff in 1995, after clerkships with Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Judge Louis H. Pollak.

Klein is responsible for her own work and for supervising dozens of other attorneys’ work. Recent cases include the defense of Covid-19 vaccine and mask mandates and the CDC’s eviction moratorium

Klein has argued over 100 cases in federal appeals courts, briefed hundreds of appellate and Supreme Court cases, and supervised hundreds of briefs and oral arguments. She has been co-teaching a constitutional law seminar about federalism — the relationship between the federal government and the States — as an adjunct professor at Georgetown Law School since 1998 and is currently teaching a federalism seminar as a visiting professor of Political Science at Haverford College. Klein is a graduate of Harvard Law School.

Nicole Mozee, assisant professor

Mozee advocates for civil liberties, civil rights, and social justice. She works as a Deputy Attorney General for the Delaware Department of Justice Division of Civil Rights and Public Trust to investigate and prosecute civil rights violations, incidents and crimes of bias and hate, public official misconduct, and law enforcement use-of-force cases.

Mozee successfully prosecuted the Division’s first hate crime conviction and the state’s first-ever conviction of a sitting elected official. Before joining the Delaware DOJ, Mozee worked in government and policy, family law, and employment discrimination. She was associate legal counsel for Gov. John Carney, a staff attorney at Delaware Volunteer Legal Services, and a labor enforcement officer for the Delaware Department of Labor Office of Anti-Discrimination. Mozee is transitioning to a full-time teaching role at the Wilmington University School of Law. She is a graduate of the New York Law School.

Lawrence Ponoroff, professor

Ponoeoff is both a professor at Wilmington University and professor emeritus at Tulane University Law School.

He also served as professor and dean at Michigan State University College of Law, where he successfully negotiated the agreement leading to the full integration of the College of Law with Michigan State. From 2009 to 2016, Ponoroff was the Samuel M. Fegtly Chair in Commercial Law at the University of Arizona James E. Rogers College of Law, where he was also dean. Additionally, Ponoroff served as the dean of Tulane Law School and held the Mitchell Franklin Professorship in Private and Commercial Law.

A graduate of Stanford Law School, Ponoroff has taught as a visitor at the University of Michigan Law School, Wayne State University Law School (Detroit), and as a faculty member at the University of Toledo College of Law, where for two years, he was associate dean for Academic Affairs.

Patricia Wise, associate professor

Wise is a nationally known employment law practitioner. She has been interviewed by NPR, quoted in the Wall Street Journal and The Economist, and has contributed to publications from San Francisco to Atlanta.

 Wise was appointed by former EEOC Chair Jenny Yang to its Select Task Force on Workplace Harassment and is a past member of the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) Labor Relations Special Expertise Panel, which she co-chaired in 2014-2015. She has trained thousands in civil rights and employment law, including state banking associations throughout the country, and has been a part-time professor for the University of Toledo College of Law for 20 years.

Wise is a member of the Graduate School of Banking at the University of Wisconsin in Madison faculty. She has published books on harassment and retaliation. Wise previously served as in-house counsel to a multi-billion-dollar bank holding company and was appointed as special counsel by the Ohio Attorney General from 2003-2007.

Wise is a graduate of The University of Toledo College of Law.

Paxton

Paxton joins Pottery Anderson

Potter Anderson & Corroon LLP, Wilmington,  has hired Hannah Paxton as a new associate to the firm’s general litigation group. She is a graduate of the University of Delaware and Widener University Delaware Law School. Her practice focuses primarily on complex commercial and corporate disputes in the state and federal courts of Delaware.