The AALS Nominating Committee for 2019 Officers and Members of the Executive Committee met at the AALS office in Washington, D.C. in September to consider nominations from faculty members and deans at AALS member schools. The committee is proud to recommend three individuals whose careers exemplify dedication to teaching, scholarship, and service to AALS and to legal education. At the second meeting of the AALS House of Representatives on Friday, January 4 at 5 pm, the committee will present the following nominations:
Darby Dickerson
Photo courtesy of The John Marshall Law School
Darby Dickerson is dean and professor of law at The John Marshall Law School. She received a B.A. in 1984 and an M.A. in 1985 from the College of William and Mary. She received a J.D. from Vanderbilt Law School in 1988, where she served as senior managing editor of the Vanderbilt Law Review and as a member of the Moot Court Board.
After law school, Dean Dickerson clerked for the Honorable Harry W. Wellford of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. She then worked as a litigation associate at the firm now known as Locke Lord in Dallas. In 1995, she was named both Outstanding Director of the Texas Young Lawyers Association and the Outstanding Young Lawyer in Dallas. Before joining John Marshall, Dean Dickerson served as dean and W. Frank Newton Professor of Law at Texas Tech University School of Law from 2011 to 2016. Dean Dickerson served as vice president and dean at Stetson University College of Law, where she also served as director of legal research and writing, associate dean, vice dean, and interim dean.
She teaches or has taught legal writing, ADR, pretrial practice, litigation ethics, and torts, and has supervised various externship and advocacy programs and law journals. She was the author of the first four editions of the ALWD Citation Manual: A Professional Citation System, and has written articles on topics including legal writing, litigation ethics, and higher education law and policy.
Dean Dickerson has also held a number of positions within AALS, including her most recent term as chair of the Deans Forum Steering Committee. She also chaired the 2015 and 2016 Planning Committees for the Deans Forum at the Annual Meeting. Concurrent with her membership on the Deans Steering Committee, Dean Dickerson also served a three-year term on the Executive Committee from 2015 to 2018.
She has also been associated with AALS through her leadership on the Membership Review Committee as well as chair of the AALS Sections on Part-Time Division Programs (2007), the Law School Dean (2012), and Institutional Advancement (2016).
Her work with AALS is not her only service to the legal community. Dean Dickerson is an elected member of the American Law Institute and a Director and Past President of Scribes—The American Society of Legal Writers. She is a past director of the Association of Legal Writing Directors and has served as a director of Inn of Court chapters in both Tampa and Lubbock. She has been a member of the Law School Administration Committee of the ABA’s Section on Legal Education and Admission to the Bar, managing editor of Legal Writing: The Journal of the Legal Writing Institute, and an academic contributor for the eighth edition of Black’s Law Dictionary. She has received a variety of awards and honors, including the 2005 Burton Foundation Award for Outstanding Contributions to Legal Writing Education, the 2013 Inaugural Darby Dickerson Award for Revolutionary Change in Legal Writing, presented by the Association of Legal Writing Directors, and the 2018 AALS Lifetime Achievement Award from the Section on Legal Writing, Reasoning, and Research. She has volunteered significant time with the Red Cross and Big Brothers Big Sisters of Lubbock-Plainview. She is currently a volunteer loan editor with Kiva.org
D. Benjamin Barros
Photo courtesy of The University of Toledo College of Law
D. Benjamin Barros is dean and professor of law at the University of Toledo College of Law. Professor Barros is a graduate of Colgate University (A.B., 1991) and Fordham University School of Law (J.D., cum laude, 1996), where he was an editor of the Fordham Law Review and a member of the Order of the Coif. He teaches and writes in the areas of property law and theroy, regulatory takings, property law reform, and the philosophy of science. He is the founding editor of the Journal of Law, Property, and Society, and in 2015, he released a casebook on property law with Aspen/Wolters Kluwer.
Previously the associate dean of academic affairs and professor of law at Widener University School of Law, Dean Barros practiced as a litigator before teaching. Immediately after graduating from law school, Barros clerked for Judge Milton Pollack of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. He then worked at the law firms of Latham & Watkins LLP and Debevoise & Plimpton, both in New York City, while teaching International Arbitration as an adjunct at Fordham. Dean Barros has been associated with AALS in several capacities. He was one of the youngest educators to serve on the Executive Committee when he served a one-year term in 2014-15. He has served many terms on the Committee on Sections and the Annual Meeting, with two years as its chair. One of the programs Dean Barros planned for the Annual Meeting culminated in the publication of a book which he edited with the program papers as its core. Barros’ other AALS service includes, chairing the AALS Property Section; membership on the Committee on Special Programs for the Annual Meeting, the Professional Development Committee and the Planning Committee for the MidYear Workshop on “Poverty Law, Immigration Rights, and the Politics of Property” (2012); and service as the AALS Reporter on three ABA/AALS site teams.
L. Song Richardson
Photo courtesy of University of California, Irvine School of Law
L. Song Richardson is Dean and Chancellor’s Professor of Law at the University of California, Irvine School of Law. She received an A.B. from Harvard University and a J.D. from Yale Law School. An award-winning teacher and scholar, Dean Richardson’s interdisciplinary research uses lessons from cognitive and social psychology to study criminal procedure, criminal law, and policing.
Her scholarship has been published by law journals at Yale, Harvard, Cornell, Northwestern, Southern California, and Minnesota, among others. Her article, “Police Efficiency and the Fourth Amendment” was selected as a “Must Read” by the National Association of Criminal Defense Attorneys. Her co-edited book, The Constitution and the Future of Criminal Justice in America, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2013. She is a co-editor of Criminal Procedure, Cases and Materials published by West Academic Publishing. Currently, she is working on a book that examines the history of race in the U.S. and its implications for law and policy.
Dean Richardson’s legal career has included partnership at a boutique criminal law firm and work as a state and federal public defender in Seattle, Washington. She was also an Assistant Counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. Immediately upon graduation from law school, she was a Skadden Arps Public Interest Fellow with the National Immigration Law Center in Los Angeles and the Legal Aid Society’s Immigration Unit in Brooklyn, NY. She has been featured in numerous local and national news programs, including “48 Hours.”
Dean Richardson also has a long-standing involvement in AALS. She spoke at various programs during the 2015, 2016, and 2018 Annual Meetings as well as at the 2014 Faculty Recruitment Conference. Dean Richardson has also been a member of the AALS Sections on Teaching Methods, Scholarship, New Law Professors, Minority Groups, Litigation, Law and the Social Sciences, and Criminal Justice.
Dean Richardson is the 2011 Recipient of the AALS Section on Minority Groups Derrick A. Bell Jr. Award, which recognizes a junior faculty member’s extraordinary contribution to legal education through mentoring, teaching, and scholarship. She frequently presents her work at academic symposia as well as at non-academic legal conferences. She is a member of the American Law Institute.
