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2010
Crystal Shin is the 2017 co-recipient of the R. Edwin Burnette, Jr. Young Lawyer of the Year Award, awarded by the Virginia State Bar’s Young Lawyers Conference. The award honors an outstanding young Virginia lawyer who has demonstrated dedicated service to the Young Lawyers Conference, the legal profession and the community. Shin was the director and a clinical assistant professor of law at William & Mary Law School, where she supervised and instructed law students enrolled in the Parents Engaged for Learning Equality Special Education Advocacy Clinic and the Advanced Special Education Advocacy Clinic. On July 1, Shin joined UVA Law as an associate professor and the director of the Program in Law and Public Service.
Corrie Sirkin recently founded the Sirkin Law Firm based in Manassas, Va. The firm specializes in family law and domestic relations matters, including divorce, separation, child custody, visitation, child support, equitable distribution, spousal support, military divorce, premarital agreements and separation.
Dan Sullivan was included in the 2017 Virginia Super Lawyers Rising Stars list. He practices litigation with Gentry Locke in Roanoke.
2011
Matthew Gambale joined Cranfill Sumner & Hartzog in Wilmington, Del. Gambale’s practice focuses on civil litigation defense.
Caroline Klocko joined the Dallas office of Winstead. Her practice focuses on commercial transactions involving procurement and disposition, distribution, technology and intellectual property, licensing, outsourcing of business processes and professional services.
Gary Lawkowski was named counselor to the solicitor at the U.S. Department of the Interior. Lawkowski previously served as counsel to Federal Election Commission Chairman Lee Goodman ’90 and Vice Chairman Donald McGahn.
Adam Milasincic recently announced his campaign for the Texas Legislature in 2018. Find the latest news on his efforts on Facebook under “Adam for Texas.”
2012
Seth Beckley joined Cranfill Sumner & Hartzog’s Raleigh, N.C., office as an associate in the firm’s litigation practice group. He practices in construction, premises, product liability, professional liability, and trucking and commercial transportation. He has litigated matters in state and federal court, in Financial Industry Regulatory Authority and American Arbitration Association arbitration, and before the North Carolina Court of Appeals. He is also experienced in the pre-suit investigation of racing and commercial trucking accidents.
Allison Huebert joined Quinn Emanuel’s Chicago office. She was previously a litigation associate at Kirkland & Ellis in Chicago. Her practice focuses on complex commercial litigation and arbitration.
As Public Housing Becomes Privatized, UVA-Trained Advocates Stand Up For Tenants
Kim Rolla ’13 and Helen Hardiman ’13 have a message for any company in Virginia that seeks to take advantage of a new government program to redevelop old public housing for low-income residents: Follow the law, or face a challenge.
Hardiman is vice president of law and policy for the advocacy group Housing Opportunities Made Equal of Virginia. Rolla is housing team coordinator and staff attorney at the Legal Aid Justice Center. The two groups, along with UVA Law students, are working together to challenge violations of federal housing law in the wake of privatization.
“Nearly 50 years since passage of the federal Fair Housing Act, housing discrimination is alive and well,” Hardiman said. “While it might not be as overt, it is just as insidious.”
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development opened an investigation in March into allegations of discrimination by Hopewell Redevelopment and Housing Authority and its corporate counterpart, Community Housing Partners, which in 2014 razed the Hopewell, Virginia, public housing community formerly known as Langston Park. The entities built new apartments on the site, now called the Summit at Hopewell. Hardiman and Rolla’s groups are representing nine current or former residents whose rights were violated during relocation for construction, or who returned to experience discrimination at the Summit.
The redevelopment was the site of a tragedy last year.
“A woman with disabilities died from complications of a heart problem that her housing provider refused to accommodate by transferring her from an upper-level unit to a first floor unit,” Hardiman alleged.
Another woman lost custody of her infant child at a hearing in which the child’s father pointed to uninhabitable conditions of the unit she was transferred into during redevelopment, Hardiman and Rolla said.
Letting children play outside unsupervised was also problematic under the new lease terms, they said.
“Once the new housing was complete and some families were allowed to return, single mothers had to make an impossible choice: Let their kids play outside and risk notices of lease violation with threats to call Child Protective Services or force their kids to stay cooped up inside new apartments that were smaller than before,” Hardiman said. “The fair housing rights of people with disabilities and families with children were effectively ignored both before, during and after conversion of the property.”
The Summit project was Virginia’s first under the Rental Assistance Demonstration program, an initiative that allows housing authorities to offer tax incentives to private investors who finance the redevelopment of some of the nation’s rundown public housing stock.
Rolla said the RAD program, which is attractive to officials because it leverages private equity, could expand beyond its current “pilot program” cap of 185,000 units of public housing.
“Leveraging private equity means permanently privatizing these units of public housing, which has a profound impact on tenants’ lives and the long-term affordability of this housing,” Rolla said. “If the cap is lifted, the problems at the Summit at Hopewell could be the tip of the wave, unless we act now to ensure the greatest possible protections for tenants.”
—Eric Williamson
2014
Alexandra “Alex” Meador recently talked, in-depth, with the host of Charlottesville’s “Sunday Morning Wake-Up Call” about child sex abuse and trafficking. Meador is an assistant commonwealth attorney in Augusta County, Va., and prosecutes a range of felonies and misdemeanors — primarily specializing in the prosecution of child sexual abuse, adult sexual assault and domestic violence cases. Meador has also completed specialized training in a variety of areas, including forensic interviewing, sexual assault nurse examinations, strangulation, adult non- stranger sexual assault, domestic violence, juvenile court practice and procedure, child abuse, economic crimes and DUIs.
2016
Claire Collins joined the intellectual property litigation group at Fish & Richardson in Boston.
Hillary Taylor was elected to the board of directors of the Minnesota Lavender Bar Association. The MLBA is the primary association of lawyers, judges and other legal professionals in Minnesota that works to promote justice in and through the legal profession for the LGBT community, and has successfully worked in collaboration with other organizations to expand LGBT equality. Taylor practices with Maslon’s litigation group in Minneapolis, focusing on tort and product liability and general commercial litigation. Taylor maintains an active pro bono practice, volunteering with the Children’s Law Center of Minnesota and Volunteer Lawyers Network. She also serves as an attorney- mentor for law students with the MLBA and was recently elected to the board of directors of the Minnesota Justice Foundation, which creates opportunities for law students to perform public interest and pro bono legal services.
2017
When Clayton “Tex” Pasley and Rachel Ellen Simon graduated in May, the engaged couple were happily surprised to learn they were co-recipients of the Law School’s Pro Bono Award. The two met as 1Ls while doing pro bono work at the Legal Aid Justice Center in Charlottesville. The duo left town headed for Knoxville, Tenn., where both will be clerking for U.S. District Judge Pamela Reeves of the Eastern District of Tennessee. Simon’s clerkship starts this September, while Pasley’s starts in 2018. The couple were wed Aug. 19 on a farm outside Lexington, Ky.
