The Wake Forest University School of Law conferred hoods on 183 graduates on Sunday, May 19, in Wait Chapel. The graduates included the first two to earn the Scientiae Juridicae Doctor degree and the first nine to earn the Master of Studies in Law degree.

The law school’s 39th annual hooding speaker, Thomas L. Sager (’76), Dupont Legal vice president and general counsel, told the graduates and their families that it was because of Wake Forest Law that he has realized the success he has experienced. “It prepared me so well,” he said. “You have matriculated from one of the finest law schools in the nation and you will soon realize how well it has prepared you.”

Sager added that many of the graduates will embark on a career in the legal profession, which remains a noble profession for many. “As lawyers, if we do not take care of the how, the what doesn’t matter,” he explained. “I know you can make a buck, but can you make a difference? Please keep in mind it’s not the position or the money, it’s whether you made a difference. I know everyone of you will make a difference in the years to come.”

Executive Associate Dean for Academic Affairs Suzanne Reynolds congratulated the class of 2013, which received a standing ovation from family and friends in the audience.

Dean Blake Morant described this graduating class as being made up of a group of individuals who are going to contribute to society in a great way.

“I make these comments with mixed emotions because I have bonded with you over the past three years I have seen you grow not only in terms of your intellectual abilities but as individuals who dedicated well over five figures of hours of pro bono legal work,” he said. “I know you will continue to thrive and I know you will do not only for yourselves, but for others.”

Dean Morant added the graduates’ degrees are an investment for a lifetime and that 73 percent of the class donated to Class of 2013 3L campaign. “I thank you and applaud you for all you have done and for all the great things you are going to do.”

A diploma ceremony was held in Wait Chapel this morning following Commencement exercises on Hearn Plaza.

Dean Morant announced that the third-year graduating class chose Barbara Lentz as “Professor of the Year” and Officer Charlie D as “Staff Member of the Year.” Professor Mark Hall conferred the hoods.

The ceremony, which included the bestowing of numerous awards, was followed by the Dean’s Hooding Reception at the Forsyth Country Club. Among the award winners were:

• Melissa Catherine Evett of Apex, N.C., received the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers Award from the North Carolina Chapter.

• Rory P. Agan of Enfield, N.H., received the American Bar Association and The Bureau of National Affairs Award for Excellence in the Study of Health Law.

• Jason Richard Weber of Elkhart, Ind., received the American Bar Association’s Section of Intellectual Property Law and The Bureau of National Affairs Inc. Award for the student who achieves the highest grade among the courses of Intellectual Property, Copyright and Trademarks.

• Dustin Timothy Carlton of Murfreesboro, Tenn., and John William Forneris of Clifton, Va.,  received the American Bar Association and The Bureau of National Affairs Award for Excellence in the Study of Labor and Employment Law, which is given to the students who achieve the highest grades in the course.

• Michael Dinesh Miranda of Morristown, N.J., received the Dean’s Award, which is given to honor the extraordinary contributions of a student leader.

• Matthew Thomas Houston of Beulaville, N.C., received the E. McGruder Faris Memorial Award and $200 cash, which is given to the student exhibiting the highest standards of character, leadership and scholarship.

• Kathryn Elizabeth Hatcher of Fuquay-Varina, N.C., received the Forsyth County Women Attorney’s Association Book Award, which is presented annually to an outstanding female graduate based upon her academic achievements, leadership, service to community, professionalism and commitment to the legal profession.

•  Maria Elizabeth Usher of Charlotte, N.C., received the Laura J. Gendy Award, a new award that was established by alumni, family and friends of Laura J. Gendy (JD’ 00) to provide an annual cash award in the amount of $500 to a graduating law student who exemplifies integrity, compassion for others and strength of character that were the hallmarks of Gendy, who died in August 2008.

• Timothy Pennell Broyhill of Winston-Salem, N.C., and Margaret Ann McCall of Richmond, Va., received the Robert Goldberg Award in Trial Advocacy, which honors the memory of Robert Goldberg, a student at the School of Law, who was killed in World War II. It is an annual cash award in the amount of $3,000 given to the students showing the highest aptitude and ethics in trial advocacy.

• Alexander S. Ingle of Wichita, Kan., received the I. Beverly Lake Award, which was established in honor of I. Beverly Lake Sr., professor of law at Wake Forest University, practicing attorney, assistant attorney general of North Carolina 1951-1955, and retired Justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court. The annual cash award in the amount of $500 is given to the student or students in the law school exhibiting the greatest proficiency in the study of Constitutional Law.

• Aretina K. Samuel-Priestly of Saint Croix, Virgin Islands, received the National Association of Women Lawyers Award, which is presented annually to an outstanding law graduate at each American Bar Association-approved law school.

• Kristina Marie Wolf of Westlake, Ohio, received the North Carolina State Bar Student Pro Bono Service Award, which is presented annually to a student who has contributed time and talent to law-related service.

• Morgan Lewis & Bockius LLP received the Wake Forest University School of Law Service award, which recognizes extraordinary contributions to the law school’s program of legal education, faculty or students.

Sager started his career with DuPont in August 1976 as an attorney in the labor and securities group. Sager helped pioneer the DuPont Convergence and Law Firm Partnering Program and continues to have oversight responsibility. Through his leadership, this program has become a benchmark in the industry and has received national acclaim for its innovative approach to the business of practicing law. He was named associate general counsel in 1994. In January 1998 he was named chief litigation counsel, where his responsibilities included oversight of all litigation and IS support for the entire function. He was named vice president and assistant general counsel in November 1999, and to his current position in July 2008.

Law schools hunting for students as their enrollment numbers drop are increasingly trying to attract an unexpected group: people who have no intention of practicing law.

Doctors, environmental consultants and even an urban planner have signed up for the programs, which offer master’s degrees in law and typically cost about the same as one year of law school.

Pitched at midcareer professionals, the programs tend to draw people who work in heavily regulated fields where compliance with a growing body of rules requires an increasingly sophisticated understanding of the law. Some students also hope to gain a competitive edge.

“I thought it would be smart to learn about health law, not just for my day-to-day practice but to help me perhaps get involved in some administrative role,” said Dr. Benjamin Goldman, an obstetrician and gynecologist at North Shore University Hospital on Long Island. He completed an online degree program in health law through Loyola University Chicago School of Law, and graduated over the weekend.

Law schools are also beefing up existing programs for foreign lawyers looking for a primer in U.S. legal practice, and for attorneys who want to burnish their credentials with additional degrees in intellectual property and other hot practice areas.

Student enrollment in programs that don’t offer a juris doctor, or J.D.—the traditional three-year-law degree—has increased 13% since 2010, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of American Bar Association data.

The Wall Street Journal

Last year, Emory University School of Law in Atlanta and Wake Forest University School of Law in Winston-Salem, N.C., both launched master’s-degree programs geared specifically for nonlawyers who want grounding in legal basics.

Fordham University School of Law in New York recently added an LLM, or Master of Laws, program in international dispute resolution and is teeing up another in corporate compliance. About 90% of the school’s 190 LLM students are from abroad, said Toni Fine, an assistant dean at the school, and demand from Asian lawyers in particular has spiked.

The ABA doesn’t track how many law schools launch new non-J.D. programs each year. But legal educators and ABA officials report anecdotally that such programs have mushroomed in recent years, as more schools introduce new offerings or expand existing programs. They say the trend could partly offset the current enrollment slump among first-year law students.

Law schools are grappling with steep declines in applications and enrollment amid a weak legal-jobs market.

As of May 10, applications to law schools were at their lowest level, year-to-date, since 2001, according to the Law School Admission Council, a nonprofit group that administers the Law School Admission Test and compiles admissions data.

Students have submitted 372,225 applications for the fall 2013 semester so far this year, a 19% drop compared with the same time in 2012 and a 37% decline from that in 2010, during the recession, when students flocked to law schools.

“Adding new degree programs is like a company diversifying its product lines. If demand for one sags, you’ve still got alternative sources of revenue coming in,” said Paul McGreal, dean of the University of Dayton School of Law, which now offers master’s degrees for nonlawyers and practicing attorneys alike.

As the supply of would-be lawyers declines, some law schools have trimmed staff. Others have opted to limit the size of incoming classes, a cost-cutting move that can also help schools stay selective on the admissions side, and thus maintain their position in the widely followed U.S. News & World Report rankings.

Barry Currier, the ABA’s managing director of accreditation and legal education, said more non-J.D. programs are popping up now for two reasons: They can generate revenue for schools, and they respond to market needs for people with specialized training.

“It preceded the economic downturn,” Mr. Currier said, “but it’s accelerated as the J.D. enrollments have declined, and it’s continuing this year.”

Some educators are skeptical about the new crop of offerings. Nan Hunter, a law professor and associate dean for graduate programs at Georgetown University Law Center, which has long offered LLM degrees in tax, national security, health and securities law, said some schools appeared to be “rushing into the business” because of financial concerns.

At Emory, Dean Robert Schapiro played down the role additional revenue might have had in setting up the new program, which he said was a response to “strong” demand for legal education in the broader population and outside the U.S. The 40 or so students in Emory’s program include physicians, a dentist, a sports-communications staffer at CNN, an environmental-consulting executive and a South Korean patent judge.

But Chris Meazell, head of Wake Forest’s new Master of Studies in Law program, said the program was launched largely to diversify the school’s offerings at a time of shrinking enrollment at law schools nationwide.

Tiffany Kallam is set to graduate on Monday from the fledgling Wake Forest program. A 2012 graduate of Guilford College in Greensboro, N.C., Ms. Kallam wants to develop educational opportunities for prison inmates, and said the one-year master’s program gave her “a better understanding of criminal law and prison culture” without the expense and time of enrolling in a traditional J.D. program.

Technology has also helped drive the growth of programs aimed at students not headed into law careers, as schools roll out online courses that allow distance learning and offer more flexibility for students such as Dr. Goldman, who are juggling legal studies with full-time work.

Loyola University Chicago School of Law began offering online master’s degrees in 2008; since then, online enrollment has swelled from 16 to nearly 350 students, according to Kelley Yaccino, director of enrollment management and marketing for the university’s Beazley Institute for Health Law and Policy.

In January, Washington University School of Law in St. Louis introduced its online LLM program in U.S. law, an offering the school said had been planned before the recent decline in enrollment.

The inaugural class of 10 included foreign attorneys from Brazil, China, India, Japan, Mexico and Pakistan.

n the 1946 classic It’s a Wonderful Life, James Stewart stars as George Bailey, the director of the Bailey Building and Loan Association in the fictional community of Bedford Falls, N.Y. Bailey faces numerous challenges to keep the Building and Loan afloat in order to continue supporting the people and businesses of his hometown. His chief challenge is Mr. Potter, the wealthy slumlord who repeatedly schemes to force Bailey out of business.

Although It’s a Wonderful Life is fictional, the Building and Loan is a prototype of a real, modern institution, the community bank. And in 2013, community banks are finding themselves under significant threats to their existence. Instead of being Pottered, they’re being Franked. Real towns, like the fictional Bedford Falls, will suffer if a miraculous change in policy doesn’t occur quickly.

The Dodd-Frank Act was intended to fix the perceived inefficiencies and failures in the American banking system that supposedly led to the financial crisis. However, my new research with the American Enterprise Institute suggests that it’s having at least one detrimental effect: The act is placing unwarranted and unsustainable pressure on community banks.

A community bank with $100 million in assets serving families, farmers, and small businesses in a rural area bears little resemblance to a $2.1 trillion global behemoth such as JPMorgan Chase. But rather than creating two or more distinct tiers of regulation, appropriately tied to the size, complexity, and risk posed by these two very different kinds of institution, Dodd-Frank builds on the existing system’s one-size-fits-all approach to regulation.

The Dodd-Frank Act was intended, in part, to eliminate “too big to fail.” Ironically, it may have an almost opposite effect, by making community banks too small to succeed. Almost 2,000 small banks vanished in the past decade, due mostly to mergers with larger banks. The number of banks with assets of less than $100 million decreased by more than 80 percent from 1985 to 2010, while the number of banks with assets greater than $10 billion nearly tripled. With an increased regulatory burden, over the next few years it seems likely that many small community banks will continue to merge into larger banks, or simply go out of business. Like Bedford Falls under the thumb of Mr. Potter, many communities will be the worse for it.

The FDIC has determined that approximately 1 in 12 American households don’t have a checking or savings account, and an additional 20 percent are “underbanked” — that is, despite having an account, they also rely on expensive “alternative” financial products such as payday loans and check-cashing services. Lower-income, rural, and minority Americans are much more likely to be unbanked or underbanked. These problems will only increase if community banks merge or disappear entirely.

The relationship-banking model used by community banks puts them in a position to offer financial services to families and small businesses that don’t neatly fit into the profiles used by large financial institutions. Although community banks cumulatively hold only 14.2 percent of total bank assets, they are responsible for nearly half of small-business loans, more than 40 percent of farmland and farming loans, and over one third of commercial-real-estate loans. In rural areas, community banks hold 70 percent of all deposits.

Dodd-Frank was intended to protect consumers and ensure the stability of the financial system, but if more community banks are forced to merge or go out of business, too-big-to-fail banks will get even bigger. And the small businesses and individuals that don’t fit neatly into standardized financial modeling, or are located outside metropolitan areas served by big banks, will find good loans and basic financial services harder to come by.

Before we lose more community banks, Congress must act.

Meaningful reform that distinguishes small, traditional community banks from sophisticated financial institutions requires a two-tiered regulatory framework. By more precisely addressing the risks posed by both types of institution, Congress could actually reduce systemic risk and protect consumers. Rather than devoting time and resources to addressing regulations that have little to do with their operations, community banks would be freed to serve their customers and invest in their communities. In contrast, the largest financial institutions would be subject to regulations and examinations properly tailored to their size, complexity, and role in the American economy and global financial system.

It’s a Wonderful Life may be an idealistic work, but its portrayal of the importance of the Bailey Building and Loan to Bedford Falls is spot on. Farmers, families, and small businesses, particularly in the most challenged parts of this country, depend on their community banks.

Clarence, George Bailey’s guardian angel, gave us a peek at Mr. Potter’s Bedford Falls, and it wasn’t pretty. With proper reform of Dodd-Frank, we can avoid that fate for America.

Find the link here.

The Worcester (Massachusetts) Police Department reports that Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s body was buried in an undisclosed location in the middle of the night, bringing an end to a sad, unprecedented soap opera. This controversy has been resolved — but what happens next time? The Tsarnaev burial saga highlights a fundamental flaw in the American law regarding the disposition of human remains.

Despite the calls of protestors to “feed [Tsarnaev] to the sharks” or “toss him in the landfill,” it is a basic premise of American law that we treat human remains with respect. In fact, it is a general principal of law that every person who dies in the United States is entitled to the decent treatment and disposition of their remains. “Abuse of a corpse” is a crime in many states. A number of state even have statutes forbidding cursing in the presence of a corpse. But while the law promises that remains will be treated with respect, the government has very little power to enforce that promise.

In the United States, the next of kin of the deceased are tasked with the obligation and financial responsibility to properly dispose of their remains. In most states, the decedent himself has the right to have his remains disposed of in the manner and location that he prefers.

But this system assumes two things. The first assumption is that someone will take responsibility for the remains of every person. Although this assumption is generally correct, sadly, bodies are also found from time to time which cannot be identified. Some people die without family, friends, or funds. In those cases, government often has the authority and responsibility to make burial or cremation arrangements.

The second assumption is that the private parties integral to the process (primarily funeral homes and cemeteries) will cooperate and provide needed services.

Since the government plays little to no role, these private parties are essential. Bodies are normally taken from the place of death, or from the coroner’s office, by a funeral director who voluntarily agrees to take custody of the body. Although funeral directors are licensed by the state, in the United States they are private actors and are not government officials. Funeral directors generally prepare bodies for burial or cremation, and make arrangements for final disposition.

There are a wide variety of cemeteries in the United States. In some states, like Massachusetts, state law requires each town to have a municipal cemetery. But most cemeteries are owned by private parties — religious organizations, nonprofit organizations, families, fraternal organizations, as well as for-profit enterprises. The law recognizes cemeteries as essential public services. They are exempt from property taxes (even if owned by a for-profit company) and generally may not be mortgaged. But with the exception of cemeteries owned by municipalities, cemeteries are not under the management or control of the government.

The assumption that these private parties would play their role every time was so ingrained that no one had cause to question it before the Tsarnaev burial saga began. After all, many people have committed heinous acts in American history, and there was little controversy about the disposition of their remains. But this time, we discovered, the system absolutely breaks down when nearly everyone refuses to provide services.

The assumption that people will cooperate is so essential that the law does not even contemplate what happens if they do not. This incident has highlighted this fundamental flaw in the law. The government has no power to force a funeral director, cemetery, or crematory to accept a body. Tsarnaev’s family was lucky that Peter Stefan agreed to take the case in the first place, although his business has undoubtedly suffered a heavy price for his willingness to do what he considered to be the right thing. “I’m not burying a terrorist, I’m burying a dead body,” Mr. Stefan said at the beginning of the debacle. “We’re trying to exercise some character here.”

People have every right to be angry with Tamerlan Tsarnaev. He took deliberate action to cause death and misery, to terrorize the people of Boston. But Tamerlan Tsarnaev is dead. Protesting the disposition of his remains did nothing but cost the taxpayers of Worcester money and fed several news cycles. Nothing positive resulted.

It is sad that a system that is dependent upon everyone exercising character has shown such a fatal weakness. It is also sad that the only way to ensure that this will not happen in the future is for state legislatures to adopt laws which give the government power to interfere with what has always been the exclusive province of families, religious communities, and other private actors: the treatment and disposition of human remains.

Coming of age in Serbian-controlled Kosovo, Kreshnik Radoniqi risked everytCategorieshing for his education.

To be taught by Albanian teachers, Radoniqi gathered with just a few other students in private houses instead of traditional school campuses. To avoid detection, they had to move from house to house, never staying too long in one place. Had Serbian authorities discovered his independent education, he would have faced beatings, confiscation of his education materials, and possibly worse.

But the risks were worth it, Radoniqi said.

“We didn’t want to be occupied. We wanted freedom,” Radoniqi said. “We struggled for education but we achieved that.”

Serbian law was no less systematically oppressive to Albanians than the educational system. But when the Serbian occupiers were finally driven out in 1999, the legal system was left in a shambles that is still struggling for reform.

That’s why Radoniqi and two fellow Kosovars – Shqipdon Fazliu and Valon Kurdaj – are taking part in a unique program for Kosovo legal professionals at Wake Forest University School of Law.

“We are still fighting for that, we are still trying to improve” the court system in Kosovo, Fazliu said. “That is why we came here.”

The three men – Radoniqi and Kurdaj are judges, Fazliu a prosecutor – said bearing witness to the injustices and human right abuses that Albanians faced during the 10-year occupation motivated them to enter the legal field.

“That made me think that in the future, I could become a lawyer and treat every person equally and without discrimination,” Fazliu said.

Kosovo – on the Balkan Peninsula in Southeast Europe – is home to 1.8 million people. About 92 percent of them are Albanians, according to U.S. estimates.

The Kosovar men are here for one academic year and will earn LL.M. degrees on Monday, May 20. Two more jurists from Kosovo are scheduled to arrive for the fall semester.

“The idea is they’ll take this experience and education and take it back to Kosovo, to be in a better position to see some of the reforms that country is desperately trying to keep in place,” said Richard Schneider, associate dean for international affairs at the School of Law. The program at Wake Forest is the only one in the country focused on providing further legal education for Kosovo attorneys.

Part of the problem in Kosovo is the sheer newness of the legal system, which has been in place for fewer than 15 years. What’s in place now, Radoniqi said, sprang from a hodgepodge of local rules as well as laws cobbled together from the United Nations’ Mission in Kosovo. Laws about who holds property are somewhat uneven because the country – once part of communist Yugoslavia – had been under a system in which property was held by the state.

“Changing from a social system to a Democratic system is a big challenge,” Radoniqi said.

There is also wide variability in the country in terms of sentencing guidelines. Because there are no plea bargains or other legal expediencies that we have here, there is a huge backlog of cases, Radoniqi said, with some non-serious cases taking up to two years for resolution.

Having a chance to see how the courts operate in the U.S. will help them bring reforms in Kosovo, Fazliu said.

The program started with discussions between the School of Law and U.S. Attorney’s Office for Eastern North Carolina, based in Raleigh. Assistant U.S. Attorney Robert J. “Bobby” Higdon  (’85, JD ’89) had made several trips to Kosovo as pat of a federal Department of Justice effort to help the nation develop its court system. As part of his efforts, Higdon brought the three Kosovo attorneys to Winston-Salem, where Schneider told them about the LL.M. program. After the three men finish their degrees, they will return to Kosovo with the goal of reforming its fledgling system.

The federal government is helping the Wake Forest program by finding and screening potential applicants from Kosovo, Schneider said.

The Kosovo students aren’t the only ones who benefit from the program, Schneider said. Other law students get a chance to learn from them.

“They’re sharing things that American law students won’t hear anywhere else…It’s adding a huge amount of depth to the discussion,” Schneider said. “It becomes a real cross-cultural, cross-legal experience for everyone involved. They’re able to contribute a kind of raw, visceral experience with criminal justice issues.”

Brad and Carole Wilson have given $1 million to the Wake Forest School of Law. The Wilsons’ generosity will address two priorities for the law school: transforming The Worrell Professional Center to meet the changing needs of law students, and providing endowed scholarships.

Brad Wilson (’78) is a graduate of the Wake Forest University School of Law. He has served on the Law Board of Visitors and will return as a member of that board in July, as well as chair the law school’s capital campaign committee. The Wilsons’ son, Alex, received his undergraduate degree from Wake Forest in 2008.

“We support Wake Forest University and the School of Law because of our strong belief in their approach to educating the whole person and preparing students to give back to the world,” said Brad Wilson. “We are grateful for what Wake Forest has meant to our family.”

Specifically, the Wilsons’ gift will establish the Brad and Carole Wilson Career and Professional Development Center, a key enhancement within The Worrell Professional Center, the home of the law school. The Career and Professional Development Center will dedicate space for mentoring and employer recruitment visits, and also serve as a focal point for law students to develop professional and leadership skills.

Dean Blake D. Morant said, “The provision of the most effective resources and opportunities for career and professional growth ensures that our students will have a positive impact on their clients and communities.”

The Brad and Carole Wilson Law Scholarship will also help Wake Forest address the burden of student loan debt through an endowed scholarship.

“Wake Forest competes with the nation’s top law schools for the brightest students,” Morant said. “The Wilsons’ generosity will allow us to attract top applicants and help extraordinary students who otherwise could not afford to attend law school.”

Many small banks will close or be forced to merge as a result of the regulatory costs and burdens of the Dodd-Frank Act, according to a new report.

“If community banks are forced to merge, consolidate, or go out of business as a result of Dodd-Frank, one result will be an even greater concentration of assets on the books of the ‘too-big-to-fail’ banks,” the American Enterprise Institute report stated. “Another result will be that small businesses and individuals who do not fit neatly into standardized financial modeling, or who live outside of metropolitan areas served by larger banks, will find it more difficult to obtain credit.”

St. Louis bankers have been complaining about Dodd-Frank for months.

The authors of the report are Tanya Marsh, an associate professor at Wake Forest School of Law, and Joseph Norman (’12), an attorney in Charlotte, N.C. You can read it here.

Read the full story here.

BOSTON — The body of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the suspect in the Boston Marathon bombing who died after a shootout with the police last month, has been interred in an undisclosed location, the Worcester Police Department said in a statement on Thursday morning.

“A courageous and compassionate individual came forward to provide the assistance needed to properly bury the deceased,” read a statement published on the department’s Web site and read on Thursday morning in front of the funeral home that handled Mr. Tsarnaev’s body.

An official at the Worcester funeral home that stored Mr. Tsarnaev’s body for most of the past week said the body was moved late Wednesday night and had been interred outside Massachusetts.

The move ends a saga that began when Mr. Tsarnaev, 26, was shot by the police and run over by a car driven by his brother, Dzhokhar, 19, after the two attempted to elude the authorities during a police chase that began on April 18. Mr. Tsarnaev’s body was claimed by an uncle, Ruslan Tsarni, and mistakenly taken to a funeral home in North Attleborough, Mass., before being transported to Graham Putnam and Mahoney Funeral Parlors, in Worcester.

The funeral director at Graham Putnam, Peter A. Stefan, struggled for six days to find a place to inter Mr. Tsarnaev after cemeteries near and far refused to accept the body. The police set up a detail while a handful of protesters admonished the funeral home for accepting the body.

“This is what we do, this is the right thing to do,” Mr. Stefan, who was unbowed by the criticism, said earlier this week. “We’re burying a dead body.”

The body presented something of a legal quandary, as the interment of a terrorism suspect is rare on American soil and unprecedented for Massachusetts. Mr. Stefan considered sending the body to Russia, as Mr. Tsarnaev’s mother had requested, but he could not ensure that the authorities there would accept it.

At one point, Mr. Stefan also weighed burial in the municipal cemetery in Cambridge, where Mr. Tsarnaev had lived — an option that his uncle, Ruslan Tsarni, suggested earlier this week. But the city’s manager, Robert Healy, swiftly urged the family not to make such a request.

“This has never happened before — that a town has just refused to have a person to be buried there,” said Tanya Marsh, an assistant professor of law at the Wake Forest University School of Law. “It’s an interesting mess.”

Read the full story here.

Wake Forest Law Professor Beth Hopkins has written a chapter in a new textbook, “Trauma and Resilience in American Indian and African American Southern History.”

Hopkins’  chapter, “The Making of an African-American Family,” was published on April 30, 2013, in Anthony Parent’s and Ulrike Wiethaus’ new textbook which outlines the historic struggles in the south.

“The chapter chronicles the story of the survival of my mother’s family during the depression, the determination of my grandfather who was the father of eight  children and who walked 20 miles a day to work to keep his family from starving, and the family’s daily struggles which led to a gradual emergence into a successful middle class African-American family,” Hopkins explained.

Hopkins serves as the director of outreach for the law school. Her broad legal experience includes serving as an Assistant United States Attorney in Virginia and Louisiana, an Assistant Attorney General in the Commonwealth of Virginia, an attorney providing legal assistance to various units of Wake Forest University, and an associate in a private law firm.

Hopkins has taught courses for the Wake Forest History Department and the American Ethnic Studies Program as well as a course in Business Drafting for the law school.

The book is now available for purchase on Amazon.

Interring the remains of the infamous has always been controversial. Which is why what remains of the most heinous humans is frequently destroyed. Timothy McVeigh, Columbine shooters Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, and Newtown killer Adam Lanza, were all cremated.

Martin Luther King’s assassin, James Earl Ray, was cremated and flown out of the country, sprinkled over Ireland. After accused Boston murders Sacco and Vanzetti were executed, their remains were cremated and flown back to their native Italy for disposal as well.

But there are other cases, with more earthly markers: The Boston Strangler is buried in Puritan Lawn Memorial Park cemetery in Peabody. And Charles Stuart, accused of shooting his pregnant wife in 1989, is six feet under Woodlawn Cemetery in Everett.

The legal issues around the burial of human remains is a tricky area of the law, as the case of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, is proving. Part of the reason, is that there simply isn’t much law covering what happens to us after we die.

Guests

Deborah Becker, reporter, WBUR

Tanya Marsh, professor of law at Wake Forest University. You can read her recent piece on thee legal issues involved in the burial of Tamerlan Tsarneav here.

More

Huffington Post “This situation raises several important questions regarding the disposition of human remains. After a person dies, we clearly need to make decisions regarding final disposition, for public health reasons as well as closure for the family and community. But what happens when the remains are those of a person believed to have committed a horrific, recent crime?”

ABC News “While there has been no formal application for a burial permit there, Cambridge City Manager Robert Healey said Tsarnaev wasn’t welcome to be buried in the American city he called home.”

Listen to the interview here.