Student Success Stories

Mary Anne Bobinski's professional journey, which began as a Gilbert Moore fellow at UB Law School, ultimately led her back to the law school classroom. After a clerkship at the U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals in Pennsylvania, she went on for an LL.M. degree at Harvard Law School. She began her law teaching career at the University of Houston Law Center in 1989, where she eventually became the John and Rebecca Moores Professor of Law and Director of the Health Law and Policy Institute. Since July 2003, she has been the Dean of the Faculty of Law at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.

Mary Anne has always been fascinated by health law, a field that has taken center stage in national policy debates, as well as by the challenge of fostering interdisciplinary work within legal education. At UB Law, she was introduced to an interdisciplinary approach that broadened her understanding of health law and led her to a topic that has become one of her specialties: HIV and the law. At Harvard, she used her interdisciplinary perspective to analyze the tensions between federal legislation and state efforts to reform health care. Her LL.M. research led to her appointment to the law faculty at Houston:

I had high hopes about entering academia, and all my hopes have been realized. As a joint J.D./Ph.D. student at UB, I learned more than what the law is at the moment. UB's program of interdisciplinary study taught me about the before and after of law: the political struggles that produce legislation and the real life effects, often unintended, of our system of laws. I use these insights to teach law students about issues such as the impact of health care finance on the physician-patient relationship and the development and regulation of new reproductive technologies.

Bobinski's work with Houston's Health Law and Policy Institute and her health law scholarship led her to national prominence in the health law field. At the same time, she applied her interest in interdisciplinary legal education to work in a number of national organizations. The end result her recruitment to serve as Dean at the University of British Columbia, reportedly as the first academic from the U.S. invited to lead a Canadian law school.

My broad, interdisciplinary course of study at UB Law was the perfect preparation for what I think is the best job in the world: teaching law students. Today, I teach and write about some of the most interesting and controversial health policy issues confronting our society. I also have the opportunity to apply my strong interest in innovative and interdisciplinary legal education in one of Canada's leading law schools.

After completing her J.D. and Ph.D. degrees, Elizabeth Beiring Kim became an environmental protection specialist for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in Washington, D.C. Her position in the Oceans and Coastal Protection Division of the Office of Water is the ideal career for a student who divided her time among the law library, the biology lab, and the coral reefs of Panama and Florida. Elizabeth used her Gilbert Moore Fellowship to create a unique dual degree program in law and ecology.

Summers were crazy. It looks really fun. You're in your bathing suit most of the time. But particularly in Panama, there's no electricity, there's no running water, and physically it's very demanding. You're in the water a lot—two dives a day for two or more hours. It's dark at night when the corals are actually spawning, and it's freezing down there.

As a law student, Elizabeth took hands-on, clinical courses in environmental advocacy, wrote a prize-winning law review article on used oil regulations, and founded the Buffalo Environmental Law Journal on which she also served as the first editor-in-chief:

That was a real feat, to get all the people together, to get the contract, get the space, get the articles and have them edited and published. I'm really proud of it. I still have the cover framed over my desk!

Drawing on her outstanding skills in writing and oral advocacy, Elizabeth and fellow student Dan Spitzer also won the nation's largest environmental moot court competition.

I had a great time while I was in law school. I did a lot of things. I thought that the atmosphere really fostered what I wanted to do. Whenever I needed something, there was always an avenue somewhere. I received lots of help and support from Dean Boyer and Professors Meidinger and Olsen; and the Baldy Center was great. Every time I had a problem or needed anything, Laura and Anne would think of a way to solve the problem and help me. I could have gone to other law schools, but I'm really glad I came here.

For Jiangxiao Hou, an international student from China, the Gilbert Moore Fellowship made it possible to bridge cultures, as well as disciplines. Already an outstanding graduate student in the Department of Sociology at UB, Jiangxiao applied to the Law School to gain additional skills and experiences that would help her to participate in the dramatic changes underway in her country.

I was born in Hohhot, Inner Mongolia, where I attended high school and college. My parents were both university professors who had been assigned to Inner Mongolia from big cities during the Cultural Revolution. In college, social transformations, political events, and contacts with professors from the United States contributed to my interest in the interrelationships between the individual, culture, and society. Because sociology in China at that time was still recovering from the ban imposed during the Cultural Revolution, I decided to study for a Ph.D. at UB. The Gilbert Moore Fellowship allowed me to pursue a J.D. and a Ph.D. at the same time. Following her first year in law school, Jiangxiao returned to Beijing for a summer internship at the largest private law firm in China, a joint venture with lawyers from China, the United States, Germany, New Zealand, and Singapore.

The L & A Law Firm represents a variety of international clients, such as Nokia, the World Bank, and the Beijing Municipal Government. I participated in such legal practices as intellectual property protection, tort litigation, joint venture law, and sports agency. I observed not only the current social and legal changes in China, but also the diversity of opinions about these changes.

During her dual degree work at UB, Jiangxiao had the opportunity to teach basic sociology courses, work as a research assistant for professors in the Law School and the sociology department, and serve on the editorial board of the Journal of Public Interest and the Environmental Law Journal. She hopes to promote cross-cultural exchanges on such issues as intellectual property protection, international law for peace and development, human rights, market access, and world trade.

 

To be an advocate for the environment: This was a goal Marty Spitzer set for himself in college and pursued through a J.D./Ph.D. program at UB Law to his current position with the Environmental Protection Agency in Washington, D.C. Marty is temporarily "on loan" to the White House, working with the President's Council on Sustainable Environment. His approach to policy making draws heavily on the interdisciplinary traditions he absorbed in his J.D./Ph.D. studies at UB Law.

We've mistakenly believed that specialization by narrowly trained experts is the answer to society's problems. As a result, we've built walls and divided problems into pieces that don't make any sense, and then we ask the experts to fix them. The real answer is to look at multiple facets of any particular issue or problem. At the EPA, I've worked on nearly every program, including enforcement, permits, rule-making, cost benefit analysis, and multimedia pollution prevention. This work by its very nature is interdisciplinary. For an advocate of pollution prevention, the walls need to be broken down if you want to find the best ways to get people to change behavior.

Marty endorses the interdisciplinary approach to education at UB Law. In class, we might read statutes, cases, and regulations, but also economics, sociology, and philosophy. Law was not just something that appeared in a book but was really a social process.

He came to law school with an interest in economics, but he also learned to appreciate the insights offered by sociology, anthropology, and organizational behavior. His dissertation examined how hazardous waste inspectors actually conducted their work "where the rubber hit the road in regulatory policy." His immersion in the real world of environmental enforcement proved invaluable when he got to Washington. n

Because I had done an empirical study, my opinions were given credibility in the ivory tower of the Washington EPA even though I was young and fresh out of school. If I'd had the same opinions just on the basis of what I had read in books, I would have been ignored. Instead I had personal experiences that could not be easily refuted, and they proved to be invaluable. There is nothing more important than interdisciplinary training that immerses you deeply in major policy issues and gets you out of the library doing fieldwork or community work.

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