Suzi Morales

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.

Alice Abreu is changing perceptions about tax law.
As the Honorable Nelson A. Diaz Professor of Law at Temple University Beasley School of Law, Abreu is known for challenging assumptions about the U.S. tax system and who benefits from it, and helping her students fall in love with the subject.
According to Abreu, there is a misconception that tax law is “for the rich and only for the rich” and many students who attend law school with a public interest focus aren’t enrolling in tax classes. But she points out that tax law is inextricably intertwined with the U.S. social safety net.

One writing assignment Associate Professor of Law Meghan Morris gives her first- year property students sets the tone for the class and illustrates Morris’ unique approach to the subject.
Morris asks students to interview a family member or friend about the role property plays in their lives and write a short reflection about their findings. She says students come into the class with certain assumptions about the class or about property generally, including that the subject matter is dry or that property is an exclusive, absolute right.

Jonathan Lipson often has a creative and controversial take on business law issues. One might even say he marches to the beat of a different drummer, which makes sense for someone who says – at least partially in jest – that as a young college graduate in the late 1980s, he went to law school because “my band sucked.”
“Everybody I knew was in law school at the time, and I couldn’t think of anything else to do so I just went to law school,” Lipson continues. “Obviously,” he concedes, “the more common approach would have been to find a better band.”

There are antitrust scholars. There are privacy scholars. Erika Douglas is both, studying the intersections of competition and privacy in an evolving digital economy.
“Most scholars write about either antitrust or privacy, not both,” she comments. “I have the joy of being the one person who is steeped in both, and how they interact. Both are massively growing and incredibly intellectually interesting areas of the law that are experiencing unprecedented change in the United States.”

Assistant Professor of Law Gilat Juli Bachar always loved writing, but when she pictured her career, she thought of a very different kind of writing than what she does now.
“Initially, I thought it was going to be more like novel writing and maybe it will still happen at some point,” she says, “but my passion for law grew from that and the love of writing and how to put things in a way that will be most persuasive and most interesting and gets the reader’s attention.”

Shanda Sibley has the elite credentials that one might expect of a law professor, with degrees from top-tier universities, experience with major multi-national law firms, and a clerkship with a federal appellate court.
But make no mistake, Sibley’s feet – not to mention her work – are firmly planted in the real world.

Nate Ela is an assistant professor at Temple University Beasley School of Law, where he teaches courses on constitutional law and land use. He studies human social behavior through a lens of law, including how democracy works and how cities rebound from adversity.
Prior to law school, Ela taught English in Mozambique as part of the Peace Corps. In the wake of September 11, 2001 and the presidential administration of George W. Bush, he decided to go to law school because he was interested in both foreign policy and holding people in power to account.

Structural racism has evolved and changed over time, often alongside and in lock-step with our immigration system, and yet our analysis of how these systems interact has not kept up. Evelyn Rangel-Medina is changing that.

Assistant Professor of Law Edith Beerdsen thrives on figuring out why things are the way they are.
Currently, she teaches courses at Temple University Beasley School of Law including civil procedure and evidence and studies how the structure of the adversarial system affects lawyering.
But Beerdsen didn’t always plan to be a lawyer and legal scholar. She holds a master’s and a doctorate in computational chemistry. She started her career studying the shape of zeolites, which she describes as highly absorbent “microscopic sponges” – like the silica packets in shoeboxes.

Omeed Firouzi went to law school for the same reason many law students do: to make a difference in the world.
A self-described political junkie with an undergraduate degree in political science and government, Firouzi found a niche for his altruism early in his career: helping low-income individuals navigate the seemingly arcane area of U.S. tax law. Today, Firouzi is a practice professor of law and director of the Low Income Taxpayer Clinic at Temple University Beasley School of Law, where he represents clients in matters before the Internal Revenue Service.