Suzi Morales

The Roger Williams University School of Law Class of 2028 arrived in Bristol for orientation on August 13, 2025. Already the new class has made a big impact on campus.
At 191 students, the incoming class is 15% larger than last fall’s new class. The number of accepted students who enrolled also jumped from around 23% in 2024 to 31%.

The first edition of “Race and the Foundations of American Law,” a new casebook by a group of Roger Williams School of Law professors, makes the resources from RWU Law’s first-of-its-kind course on the same subject available to schools and students around the U.S. and sheds light on the role of race and racism in everything from property ownership to the child welfare system.

Deborah Gonzalez L’07 began her legal career on the cleaning staff.
Long before she stepped into Roger Williams University School of Law as a first-year evening student, Gonzalez was cleaning a law office at night to earn extra money.
“I would go to the office, and I always found the work seemed like it was super interesting, and I knew I wanted to be a part of that,” recalls Gonzalez.

Nate Reid L’26 is not an emotional person.
And yet, Reid found himself deeply impacted by the real-life stories of the justice system and wrongfully-incarcerated people during a short-term volunteer project at the Innocence Project’s New York headquarters.

There’s a cliché that some people are drawn to law school because they like to argue. For Sara Jane Pruell, it was because she enjoyed reading contracts.
As a marketing executive for a decade for brands like Brooks Brothers and Tarte Cosmetics, she recalls, “I really started to find that I liked reading the contracts and implementing a lot of the negotiations from those marketing contracts, more so than the marketing."

As the chief legal counsel of the Rhode Island Public Transit Authority, Steven Colantuono is helping to lead the organization through the high-profile development of its new mixed-use transit hub.
Prior to becoming the head lawyer for a state agency, Colantuono worked in small firm and solo private practice as well as for nonprofit organizations in the disability space. Throughout his career, Colantuono has been willing to take chances and change course, while always pursuing excellence.

When Gina George started her first year at Roger Williams University School of Law, her family worried about her. She earned her undergraduate degree from John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan, not far from her hometown of Uniondale, New York. She was moving to a new town where she didn’t know anyone, to start her first year of law school, an experience that can be not only challenging but also isolating.
Turns out, they didn't need to worry.

In 2022, U.S. grocers wasted 5 million tons of food, with 35% of it going to landfills, according to the food waste nonprofit ReFed. More than half of that waste — 2.7 million tons — was past the labels’ expiration dates.
But there’s a potential technological solution to the waste problem, according to new research.

Sarah Katz has been an advocate, scholar, and teacher engaging with the child protection system, which she and other scholars and advocates say is more aptly called the family policing system, for more than two decades. Despite the advantages of excellent education and training, and her scholarly knowledge of the role of racialized trauma and injustice perpetrated by the system, she says her most important influences are impacted families.

Craig Green loves history. He has two advanced degrees in history that he says changed his life. He frequently studies the impact of history on how the practice of law is carried out today. According to Green, “The past is all over the law.”

But Green’s version of history isn’t about stale facts. As the Charles Klein Professor of Law and Government at Temple University Beasley School of Law, he applies his boundless curiosity to studying and teaching how the past informs the present and future.

Surrounded by a stock ticker, a wall of TVs broadcasting financial newscasts and rows of
computers, a group of students engages in an enthusiastic discussion about which stocks to choose. One gives a presentation on market trends and investment recommendations. Others ask questions. They choose some stocks in which to invest and others for further research.
This is MSU’s TVA Investment Challenge team, led by Dr. Brandon Cline, the John “Nutie” and Edie Dowdle Professor of Finance.
And yes, it’s real money.

Leadership and service are woven into the fabric of St. Mary’s University, so it’s no surprise that two alumni have recently helmed the state’s top organization of attorneys.
In Spring 2024, Santos Vargas, J.D. (B.A. ’99), began a three-year term at the State Bar of Texas in which he will serve as president-elect, president and immediate past president. Vargas followed in the footsteps of El Paso-based Sylvia Borunda Firth, J.D. (B.B.A. ’81).

More and more, investors want to know what companies are doing about sustainability: for example, how a company’s operations depend on natural resources or how it manages its human capital. In 2024, according to KPMG, 96% of the world’s 250 largest companies did some form of sustainability reporting.
But investors don’t always trust what companies are telling them. In a 2024 Ernst & Young survey, 85% expressed concern about greenwashing: making deceptive sustainability claims.
One way to bridge that trust gap might be voluntary reporting standards, says Jeffrey Hales.

Since the National Association of Realtors (NAR) agreed in March to pay $418 million to settle an antitrust lawsuit, researchers at Texas McCombs see potential to curb artificially high real estate commissions.
The class-action suit is one of several claiming that real estate agents have conspired to inflate commissions. Typically paid by sellers, commissions average around 6% and usually get split between buyers’ and sellers’ agents.
The settlement would prevent including information about commissions on multiple-listing services (MLSs), the databases on which homes are posted for sale.