UGA & School of Law honors

Rodrigues named UGA’s interim vice provost

Usha Rodrigues picEarlier this year, University Professor & Kilpatrick Chair of Corporate Finance and Securities Law Usha Rodrigues was named UGA’s interim vice provost for academic affairs. In this role, she assists with all matters of academic administration, policy and planning at the university level, while continuing to lead classes at the law school.

Rodrigues testified before a U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee on Investor Protection, Entrepreneurship and Capital Markets last year. She also provided expert commentary for high profile media outlets such as The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Forbes and Bloomberg in addition to presenting her scholarship at the University of California, Berkeley; Cornell University; Fordham University; Vanderbilt University and Washington University in St. Louis.

She joined the faculty at UGA in 2005 and has taught Corporations, Contracts, Lifecycle of the Corporation and Business Ethics. Rodrigues was the associate dean for faculty development at the law school from 2015 to 2018 and has served as the University Council’s parliamentarian since 2014. Three years ago, she was awarded the title of University Professor, which was then awarded to no more than one UGA faculty member per year.

Phillips Sawyer awarded tenure

laura phillips sawyer picAssociate Professor Laura Phillips Sawyer, who joined the School of Law faculty in 2020, has been granted tenure.

She teaches in the area of antitrust law at the law school and holds a courtesy appointment in UGA’s Department of Economics. She also leads courses in UGA’s Honors College and the Terry College of Business. In 2021, she received Terry College’s Nourse Outstanding MBA Teacher Award for the MBA elective curriculum. More recently, she received a Stanton Foundation grant to support teaching an applied history course, “Antimonopoly and American Democracy: Case Studies in American Capitalism.”

The author of American Fair Trade: Proprietary Capitalism, Corporatism, and the ‘New Competition,’ 1890–1940 (Cambridge, 2018), Phillips Sawyer’s work has appeared in the Law and History Review, the Business History Review, the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era and the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History. She also has an article forthcoming in the University of Chicago Law Review.

Over the past 18 months, Phillips Sawyer has presented her work at the U.S. Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division, the University of Southern California Gould School of Law, the University of Utah Eccles School of Business as well as at the annual meetings of the American Historical Association and the American Society for Legal History.

 

Howard joins legal writing faculty

anna howard picAnna White Howard (J.D.’10), who joined the law school in 2019 as a counselor in residence, has become a legal writing instructor.

In addition to teaching Writing for Judicial Clerkships, she will now teach First-year Legal Writing and LL.M. Legal Writing and Research. She will continue to volunteer with the Appellate Litigation Clinic and will serve as the law school’s judicial liaison, working to bring judges to campus in various capacities and nurture the school’s relationship with the judiciary.

Previously, Howard assisted with the school’s advocacy program and the Appellate Litigation Clinic. She helped several advocacy law school teams capture national and international honors and aided clinic participants with cases before the federal circuit Courts of Appeals, the Supreme Court of Georgia, the Board of Immigration Appeals and the U.S. Supreme Court.

Howard holds multiple leadership positions in the Federal Bar Association, the premier organization for federal practitioners.

Faculty award winners

Faculty honored by the 2021–22 student body were:

  • Lonnie T. Brown Jr. – holder of the Cleveland Distinguished Chair of Legal Ethics and Professionalism & Meigs Distinguished Teaching Professor – Student Bar Association Professionalism Award and Graduation Faculty Marshal.
  • Jean Goetz Mangan (J.D.’11) – Legal Writing Instructor – Watson Award for Outstanding Legal Research or Writing Instructor.
  • Carol Morgan (J.D.’79) – Clinical Professor & Business Law and Ethics Program Director – Lanier Award for Excellence in Clinical Education.
  • Usha Rodrigues – Interim UGA Vice Provost for Academic Affairs, University Professor & Kilpatrick Chair of Corporate Finance and Securities Law – Ellington Award for Excellence in Teaching and Graduation Faculty Marshal.
  • David Shipley – Georgia Athletic Association Professor in Law – O’Byrne Memorial Award for Significant Contributions Furthering Student-Faculty Relations.