The University of Pittsburgh School of Law is pleased to welcome four new additions to the permanent faculty and two new visitors for the 2020-21 academic year. Their scholarship, teaching, and advocacy span a wide range of areas, including family law, legal writing, constitutional law, criminal law, and law and literature.
NEW FACULTY APPOINTMENTS
Jabeen Adawi, Clinical Assistant Professor of Law
Before she was appointed the Clinical Teaching Fellow in Georgetown’s Domestic Violence Clinic, Jabeen Adawi served as the Victim Legal Network of D.C. Project Coordinator at the Network for Victim Recovery of D.C. (NVRDC). There she coordinated legal service providers to create an enhanced referral network serving victims of crime with any legal needs stemming from their victimization. Prior to joining NVRDC, she worked as a staff attorney at the Sexual Assault Legal Institute of the Maryland Coalition against Sexual Assault, where her responsibilities included providing civil legal services to survivors of sexual assault. Adawi received her JD from the American University, Washington College of Law, where she participated in the International Human Rights Law Clinic as a student attorney, focusing on immigration and refugee law. She received her BS in Applied Physics from the New Jersey Institute of Technology. Adawi is a native Urdu speaker and is proficient in Hindi.
Adawi will teach in Pitt Law’s Family Law Clinic.
Andrele Brutus St. Val, Assistant Professor of Legal Writing
Andrele Brutus St. Val comes to Pitt Law from Mitchell Hamline School of Law, where she taught legal writing as a visiting professor. Her experience teaching and supervising legal writing also includes teaching Legal Research and Writing in the Paralegal Studies Program at the Henry Ford College and supervising law students as a staff attorney in the University of Michigan Unemployment Insurance Clinic. Brutus St. Val found her passion for legal writing during an internship as a law student with the Florida Second District Court of Appeals, where she returned after law school and became a career law clerk. At the court of appeals, she drafted opinions, orders, and memoranda and became an expert on criminal and post-conviction appeals. She has nearly ten years of experience working in the judiciary, most recently as a Court Attorney with the Wayne County Probate Court in Detroit, MI. In 2014-15, Brutus St. Val was selected to be an Academy Fellow in the Florida Bar William Reece Smith, Jr., Leadership Academy. She received her JD from Florida A&M University College of Law, her LLM in Labor and Employment Law from Wayne State University Law School, and she is licensed to practice law in Florida and Michigan.
Brutus St. Val will teach Legal Writing.
Jacqueline Lipton, Assistant Professor of Legal Writing
Jacqueline Lipton has been a visiting professor at Pitt Law since 2017, teaching a variety of domestic and international courses, including Contracts, Commercial Transactions in Goods, the International Digital Transactions Seminar, Trademark Law, Cyberspace and the Law, and the International IP Seminar. Lipton has previously held faculty positions at the University of Houston Law Center, Case Western Reserve University School of Law, the University of Akron School of Law, the University of Nottingham School of Law, and Monash University Law School. She has also visited previously at the University of Florida and Melbourne University. Before her academic career, she worked in commercial and finance law in Australia.
Lipton has published extensively on law and digital technology, as well as law and the creative arts. She is the co-author of multiple editions of a leading cyberspace casebook, Cyberspace Law: Cases and Materials (with Professor Raymond S. R. Ku), and the leading casebook on The Criminal Law of Intellectual Property (with Professors G. Moohr and I. Manta). She also authored Rethinking Cyberlaw (Edward Elgar, 2015), Internet Domain Names, Trademarks and Free Speech (Edward Elgar, 2010), and Security Over Intangible Property (L.B.C. Thompson, 2000). Her articles have been published in leading law reviews, including the Northwestern University Law Review, Boston College Law Review, Washington University Law Review, Wake Forest Law Review, Hastings Law Journal, UC Davis Law Review, Washington and Lee Law Review, Iowa Law Review, Florida Law Review, Maryland Law Review, and Harvard Journal of Law and Technology.
Lipton is the founder and director of Authography LLC, a company focused on assisting authors and creative artists in understanding their business and legal rights.
Now a member of the permanent faculty, Lipton will teach Legal Writing.
Alice L. Stewart, Clinical Assistant Professor of Law
Alice L. Stewart has taught in Pitt Law’s Low-Income Tax Clinic and in the Securities Arbitration Clinic as a visiting professor of law since 2011, and now joins the Pitt Law permanent faculty as Clinical Assistant Professor of Law. Previously, Stewart was Director of Practicums and Clinical Professor of Law at Duquesne University School of Law from 1998-2010. Since 2008, Stewart has served in United States District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania as a Mediator and Arbitrator for cases involving the Department of Justice and individual and corporate parties in litigation involving various tax issues. Stewart is a seasoned litigator with extensive trial and appellate experience in the U.S. District Courts, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, U.S. Tax Court, and numerous other state and federal tribunals. Stewart received her JD from the Duquesne University School of Law and a BSBA in Finance and Accounting from Robert Morris University. She has been admitted to practice before the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania, the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania, the U.S. Tax Court, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.
Stewart will continue to teach and direct Pitt Law’s Low-Income Tax Clinic and Securities Arbitration Clinic.
VISITING PROFESSORS
Jalila Jefferson-Bullock, Visiting Associate Professor of Law
Jalila Jefferson-Bullock comes to Pitt Law from Duquesne University, where she is an Associate Professor of Law. Her teaching experience includes courses in Constitutional Law, Criminal Law, and Criminal Procedure. Jefferson-Bullock’s research interests include constitutional law, criminal law, criminal procedure, federal sentencing, legislation, and civil rights. Her current work focuses on sentencing law and policy reform and the need to de-emphasize traditional incarceration.
Before entering academia, Jefferson-Bullock enjoyed a varied law practice for ten years. She represented plaintiffs at a litigation boutique firm in California, and in national class action cases in Louisiana. In 2005, she opened a successful practice with her sister, specializing in personal injury and general business matters. She also served as a public defender in Orleans Parish Municipal Court, where she represented indigent criminal defendants in matters ranging from simple misdemeanors to domestic violence. Jefferson-Bullock was elected to the Louisiana State House of Representatives in 2003, where she was appointed to the powerful Appropriations Committee, which oversees the state’s budget. Post-Katrina, she was a champion for the rights of the displaced, most notably, the right to vote. Jefferson-Bullock received her JD from Harvard Law School, her MA in the Humanities from the University of Chicago, and her BA from Harvard College.
Jefferson-Bullock will teach Criminal Law, Criminal Procedure, and Race and the Law.
Richard H. Weisberg, Visiting Professor of Law
Richard H. Weisberg is the Walter Floersheimer Professor of Constitutional Law at Cardozo School of Law, and the founding director of Cardozo’s Holocaust, Genocide and Human Rights Program, and of the Floersheimer Center for Constitutional Democracy. He was appointed by President Obama to the Commission on the Preservation of America’s Heritage Abroad and received the Legion of Honor award from French President Nicholas Sarkozy in 2008. Weisberg’s published books include Vichy Law and the Holocaust in France, The Failure of the Word, Poethics, and In Praise of Intransigence: The Perils of Flexibility. He has been a visiting professor at many undergraduate institutions and law schools around the country, and in France, Denmark, and China, where he is an honorary professor of law at Wuhan University.
Weisberg has been a Guggenheim Fellow and recipient of Rockefeller Foundation, NEH, and ACLS grants. Weisberg holds a BA from Brandeis University, and his PhD from Cornell is in French and comparative literature. While teaching those subjects on the graduate faculty of the University of Chicago, Weisberg earned his JD from Columbia Law School, where he was an editor of the Columbia Law Review.
Weisberg will teach the Literature and Law Seminar, Estates and Trusts, and Legal Institutions and The Holocaust.