Across the country, many states use age at the time of proceedings to decide in which court a juvenile is tried. For example: If someone is 17 when a crime takes place, but turns 18 before an arrest is made, the case can start in adult criminal court.

Relying upon numerous policy-based rationales, Assistant Professor Erin Fitzgerald argues against that approach in a new law review article: all states should rely on age at the time of a crime, not the time of proceedings, to determine which court 鈥� juvenile or adult 鈥� has jurisdiction. Doing so ensures uniformity in treatment of youth offenders and honors the national trend of expanding access to juvenile courts.

Fitzgerald鈥檚 article traces the history of the juvenile court system in the United States and the evolving emphasis policymakers have placed on rehabilitation versus punishment for youth found responsible for crimes. She likewise notes the protections to those in the juvenile court systems: confidentiality, a focus on rehabilitation, a decreased reliance on incarceration, and adjudication as a 鈥渄elinquent.鈥�

鈥淭he juvenile court system today, with its formalities and constitutional protections, more closely resembles the adult criminal court system than it did at its inception,鈥� Fitzgerald writes. 鈥淗owever, recent legislative efforts to increase the jurisdictional reach of juvenile courts leave little doubt that the juvenile justice system has returned to its rehabilitative roots.鈥�

Fitzgerald, who teaches criminal law and evidence, also addresses potential arguments against her position – namely, that statutes of limitations in most jurisdictions make it highly unlikely for anyone over the age of 23 to be tried in juvenile courts. Even then, she writes, neuroscience now shows the human brain doesn鈥檛 fully develop until the mid 20s, making rehabilitation and not punishment a worthy goal.

鈥淭oday, it is universally accepted that juvenile offenders, because of their youth and its attendant circumstances, are developmentally different than adult criminals,鈥� she states. 鈥淥ver the last two decades, the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly held that these developmental deficiencies make juvenile offenders less culpable and more deserving of special treatment under the law.鈥�

鈥淒etermining the jurisdiction of juvenile courts based upon the juvenile offender鈥檚 age at the time of proceedings fails to recognize juvenile offenders鈥� lessened culpability, as well as fails to ensure similarly situated juvenile offenders are treated alike, incentivizes the delay in the prosecution of juvenile offenders, increases recidivism, and fails to honor the national trend to increase offenders鈥� access to the juvenile court system.鈥�

Fitzgerald joined the Elon Law faculty in 2023 after serving as a Faculty Fellow for New England Law | Boston where she taught criminal law, incarceration and the law, torts, and insurance law.

Following law school, she clerked first for the New Hampshire Superior Court, and then for the Hon. Carol Ann Conboy of the New Hampshire Supreme Court. She next served as an assistant county attorney in New Hampshire, focusing on sexual assault and domestic violence cases.

Fitzgerald also served as an assistant attorney general and deputy chief of the Homicide Unit in the Criminal Justice Bureau of the New Hampshire Attorney General鈥檚 Office.

Fitzgerald graduated in 2013 from New England Law | Boston where she served as an editor of the New England Law Review. Her current scholarship centers on the intersection of the criminal justice system and juvenile law, with a particular focus on juvenile justice reform.

This lecture focuses on the critical importance of the judicial branch of government in our democratic society. Judge Anna Blackburne-Rigsby will focus her discussion on why a diverse, representative judiciary helps to instill greater trust and confidence in the judicial process and will better ensure that all people, especially those individuals and communities historically disadvantaged, are more likely to feel that they can access justice and be treated fairly.

She will address the issue of guarding against “implicit bias” in our courts, particularly in the aftermath of recent high profile police shootings, where lack of trust in the judicial process has contributed to people’s anger and frustration. In addition, Blackburne-Rigsby will discuss her own personal journey onto the bench and her experience as one of the few African-American female judges on the “state” high court.

Blackburne-Rigsby is an Associate Judge on the District of Columbia Court of Appeals. She was appointed to the court by President George W. Bush in 2006. Prior to that, she was appointed to the Superior Court of the District of Columbia by President William J. Clinton. Blackburne-Rigsby is a former President of the National Association of Women Judges and the current President of the National Consortium on Racial and Ethnic Fairness in the Courts. 

The seminar on “Adaptation and Cross Cultural Appropriation” included a diverse, interdisciplinary and international assembly of scholars. Presentations explored the adaptation of literature and the appropriation of cultural forms in classical, Islamic, European, Asian, Latin American, U.S., and African and African Diaspora literature, philosophy and film.  The panel encompassed the writings of Aristotle, Averroës, Hafez, Rumi, Byrd, Jefferson, Emerson, Dreiser, Hurston, Borges, Alammedine and Coelho, as well as topical discussions of appropriations of Native American and South Korean cultures and adaptation and appropriation in the contemporary films A Better Tomorrow, Haider, and Inception.

Hairston’s paper, “Watching What God(s) Exactly? Classical Influence in the Works of Zora Neale Hurston,” examined Hurston’s classical training and classical allusions in her works. Hairston contextualized her work within the broader African American uses of the classics and tensions between adaptation and appropriation and racial authenticity and identity in 20th and 21st century writing. 

The American Comparative Literature Association, founded in 1960, is the principal learned society in the U. S. for scholars whose work involves several literatures and cultures, as well as the premises of cross-cultural literary study itself.  ACLA also supports Comparative Literature, the oldest journal in the field.

Heather Scavone is the Clinical Practitioner in Residence for the Humanitarian Immigration Law Clinic. Prior to joining Elon, she directed the statewide Immigration Legal Services program of Lutheran Family Services in the Carolinas, which provided representation to hundreds of refugees and political asylees each year. 

There will be light refreshments and all are welcome! Hope you can join in on the conversation!

This is part of a Wednesday evening discussion series, Beyond Faith and Reason, focusing on social and environmental justice concerns while considering how our faiths and worldviews inform response. 

Senior Baron Smith also took home an individual outstanding witness award from the tournament. The UCLAssic was the last in a series of four tournaments that Elon’s mock trial teams competed in over the course of the fall semester.

At UCLA, six Elon students competed in four rounds of trial simulations. To earn the eighth-place finish, Elon won in competitive rounds against teams from Stanford University and the University of California at Berkeley.

Elon’s successes at UCLA’s tournament were reflective of the Mock Trial team’s performance all season. At Elon’s own Carolina Classic Invitational in October, Elon placed in the top six teams, besting teams from schools such as Duke University. Elon also had a member receive an outstanding witness award at the Carolina Classic. Elon’s sucesss continued at Penn State’s Happy Valley Mock Trial Invitational, coming away with a third place overall finish, winning rounds against Penn State, American University and Rutgers University. Elon also competed at Columbia University’s Big Apple Invitational Tournament in New York City this fall. At Columbia, junior David Comerford won an Outstanding Attorney award and Elon had four competitive rounds against teams from Tufts, Northwood, Columbia and Georgetown Universities.

The final tournament Elon competed at during the fall was Duke University’s Tobacco Road Invitational. Elon narrowly missed a top finish overall after a highly competitive final round against Northwood University. However, at the tournament Elon still won in rounds against teams from the University of Pennsylvania and Howard University. Elon also took home an individual outstanding witness award from Duke’s invitational.  

Elon’s two mock trial teams are currently preparing for a regional tournament hosted by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in February. This tournament will determine which teams move on to compete at the national level. Elon has advanced to the national level of mock trial competition in each of the past three years.

Each February, more than 600 mock trials teams compete in 24 regional tournaments around the country, with seven teams moving on from each regional to one of eight opening round championships in March. From each opening round championship, six teams will move on to compete in the AMTA National Championship Tournament.

From the more than 600 registered AMTA teams, only 48 reach the National Championship Tournament.

The Elon team is coached by Michael Koeltzow, L’10, and Kristen DelForge, a former Elon mock trial member and current 3L at Elon Law. 

Capel presented parts of her lengthy research paper at the National Conference on Undergraduate Research, SURF, and the Baker University Undergraduate Art History Conference. Capel, also an Elon College Fellow and Women’s and Gender Studies Minor, is now a first-year student at UC Berkeley’s Law School.

In addition to developing this project with mentor Associate Professor Kirstin Ringelberg over three years, Capel assisted Ethan Moore, coordinator of the university’s art collection, with several exhibitions as well as collections management of the collection. She took a course on the problematics of art collecting with Dr. Evan Gatti; these experiences led to and enriched her research into the gendered nature of Gilded Age and Progressive Era art collections, a very small portion of which is showcased in this publication, titled “.

Very little has been written about the classical influence on black American writers, and an 福利亚洲国产精品 professor is helping to fill that gap with a new book exploring the words of four prominent African-American scholars and writers: Phillis Wheatley, Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. DuBois and Anna Julia Cooper.

“The Ebony Column: Classics, Civilization, and the African American Reclamation of the West” by Associate Professor Eric Ashley Hairston was published this summer by the University of Tennessee Press. It serves as the inaugural volume of the press’s new Classicism in American Culture series.

In the nation’s younger years, politicians like Thomas Jefferson, as well as scholars of classics, philosophy and literature, ignored or dismissed the study of black authors because of stereotyping and racism. Hairston contends that such oversight was necessary for whites, who saw classical training as the highest sign of intellectual ability. Should the influence of antiquity be acknowledged in the works of African-Americans, it would have shown that blacks were just as intellectually capable as whites and that black writers were just as steeped in knowledge central to the idea of Western civilization.

“The classics, when deployed by African-Americans, really disrupted the American alchemy of race,” Hairston said of a time in American history when a perceived lower intellect was used to justify slavery and the inferior treatment of blacks.  “It was exceptionally inconvenient for an allegedly uncivilized race to object to their enslavement using Virgil, Terence, or Ovid, or worse, remind whites of the multiethnic Mediterranean ancient world.”

But even in the 20th and 21st centuries scholars have overlooked or shown little interest in studying the classical influence on top African-American writers. “We’re running the risk of losing an understanding of how African-Americans used the classical tradition, and why they were using it,” Hairston said. “In some ways, this book is the story of how it all fits together – the literature, the philosophy and the history central to the African-American intellectual tradition and part of the broader American tradition.”

Hairston’s book demonstrates how the myths, cultures and ideals of antiquity, crafted in a time before Euro-American racism, helped African Americans re-conceive their role and value in a white culture that was determined to make them commodities and symbols of moral and intellectual decay.

Hairston is the founding director of the Center for Law and Humanities at 福利亚洲国产精品 and regularly teaches undergraduate courses in American literature, African-American literature, classical literature, law and literature, Asian-American literature and Southern literature. He has also taught courses in the Western literary tradition.

At the graduate and professional level, he also teaches law and humanities at the 福利亚洲国产精品 School of Law. His research areas include intersections of classical literature and American literature, especially classical influences on African American and Southern writers, as well as the interdisciplinary study of law, literature, and the humanities.

Hairston has regularly presented his work at professional conferences and has served as a panelist and commentator on issues of law, politics and policy. He will lead a panel on literature and law at the 2014 Modern Language Association conference. His next research projects will detail further considerations of classical influences on contemporary African-American literature and examine the challenges and opportunities for traditional American legal principles posed by Western and global humanities traditions.

Hairston earned his bachelor’s degree in English and politics from Wake Forest University before attending the University of Virginia for his master’s and doctorate in English language and literature. Hairston also earned a law degree from the University of North Carolina School of Law.

Hairston contributed the major historical and analytical entry on African-Americans, as well as entries on The Fugitive Slave Act of 1793, The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, and the Chinese Exclusion Act.  

Hairston’s next work, The Ebony Column: Classics, Civilization, and the African-American Reclamation of the West, is slated for publication in early 2013 by The University of Tennessee Press.

The image of Thomas Jefferson as passionate gardener and man of the soil is firmly entrenched as an aspect of the myth of the great sage of Monticello. But a deeper look at the generation of the “founding farmers” reveals a more complex portrait, as Jefferson’s “chosen people,” his celebrated yeoman farmers, were, in fact, abandoning the state in droves, unable to cope with the combination of ruined soils and adverse market forces. Placing the multiple dependencies produced by tobacco cultivation at the center of her inquiry—dependencies on the drug itself, on plantation slavery and a ruinous method of cultivation, on fickle global market forces—Hamilton explores these “hidden wounds” and evaluates anew the powerful counterexamples provided by Jefferson peers such as George Washington and John Hartwell Cocke: men who were able to “kick the tobacco habit,” restoring and nourishing their soils with diversified, sustainable cultivation methods, while creating new relationships within the plantation “family” with their rejection of slavery.

Kendra Hamilton is a poet, essayist, and a scholar of the literature and culture of the South. Hamilton has degrees from Duke University, Louisiana State University, and the University of Virginia and is published in journals such as Callaloo, the Southern Review, Southern Cultures, and Shenandoah. Hamilton’s research, writing, and advocacy related to fragile (coastal) environments and endangered indigenous communities have attracted the interest and support of foundations such as the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities (2012-2013), the International Center for Jefferson Studies (2011), the Skinner Foundation (2008-2009), and the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio program 2006. Recent work on the Gullah/Geechee from her scholarly book in progress, Code-Switching: Vernacular Visions in the Age of Porgy and Bess, is forthcoming in Mississippi Quarterly. In addition, she has a poetry collection, The Goddess of Gumbo (2006)  and is featured in such recent anthologies as Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry (2012), Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry (2009), and Shaping Memories: Reflections of 25 African American Women Writers (2009).
 
 

This year marks the fifth consecutive season that Elon will make the trip to MTSU. Last season, Elon Mock Trial earned a top-10 finish at the MTSU tournament, one of the largest tournaments in the country. For the second straight year, Elon is sending three squads to this invitational tournament. The Elon team members in attendance represent students from all majors and departments.

This will be the second tournament of the season for the team. In October, Elon Mock Trial hosted its own tournament on Elon’s campus. At this tournament, while not placing in the top five, Elon Mock Trial defeated teams from Harvard University, Duke University and Vanderbilt University.

Among the teams in competition with Elon this weekend will be Rhodes College, Emory University, Vanderbilt University, the University of Georgia and the University of Tennessee.

Elon’s team has been preparing since the beginning of the August, meeting three times a week for more than two hours per practice. Elon students in attendance this weekend are:

Andrew Stevenson, President
Parker Tobin, Vice President
Amanda Stearns, Secretary
Elayne Monjar, Treasurer

Matt Brekus
Alex Cuculici
Morgan D’Arcy
Will Galleher
Adrienne Greenberg
Jordan Greene
Ryan Griggs
Aubrey Kaplan
Ryan Lasnick
Christine Layer
Claire Long
Noah McCarn
Michael McFarland
Jenny McRobert
Michael McFarland
Patrick Morgioni
Rebecca Mutty
Tyler Nikola
Kelsey O’Connell
Jillian O’Donnell
Ricky Rosati
Julia Schast
Alex Schuler
Baron Smith
Shannon Temlak

The team is coached and accompanied by William Warihay ’07 L’10, a practicing attorney in Greensboro with Ogletree, Deakins, Nash, Smoak & Stewart and an adjunct faculty member of 福利亚洲国产精品.  Warihay is assisted by Elon Law students Michael Koeltzow L’13, Marquis Barnett L’14 and Kristen DelForge ’11 L’14.

For more information on Elon Mock Trial, please visit the web site listed to the right of this page.