Oklahoma City Mayor David Holt, a 2009 graduate of the OCU School of Law, became law dean on July 1.
Stony the Road: The Road to Execution
In the spring semester, OCU Law and the OCU Law Diversity Council hosted the Third Annual Stony the Road Lecture Series. The panel of experts gathered to shed light on Oklahoma’s capital punishment legal process and the path of a capital case/ defendant from the time of charging through actual execution. Panelists included former Attorney General Drew Edmondson, current Oklahoma County District Attorney Vicki Behenna, First Assistant Federal Public Defender Emma Rolls, and Oklahoma Innocence Project Legal Director (and former Oklahoma County Appellate Public Defender) Andrea Miller.
Swearing-In Ceremony
On September 26, 2023, OCU Law alumni who passed the bar in July were sworn in by the Oklahoma Supreme Court on the floor of the Oklahoma House of Representatives.
Quinlan Lecture Hosted by OCU Law
OCU Law hosted its annual Quinlan Lecture on March 30, 2023, with Helen Norton presenting “When Speakers’ and Listeners’ First Amendment Interests Collide.” Norton is a university distinguished professor and Rothgerber Chair in Constitutional Law at the University of Colorado Law School. She explained the role of listeners’ interests in shaping past Supreme Court decisions, some involving commercial speech and others involving political campaigns. Norton then examined the role that listeners’ interests currently play in disputes that now divide the lower courts, disputes that will no doubt soon reach the Supreme Court. These include ongoing disagreements about how to define “true threats” unprotected by the First Amendment, as well as free speech challenges to recently enacted laws that restrict platforms’ choices about whether to publish certain speakers’ posts on their sites. Throughout this discussion, Norton explored several different “tiebreakers” for resolving First Amendment conflicts between speakers and listeners.
Wrongful Conviction Day Dinner hosted by Oklahoma Innocence Project
The Oklahoma Innocence Project at OCU Law hosted its annual Wrongful Conviction Day Dinner October 2, 2023, at the Skirvin Hotel. Franky Carrillo, a criminal legal reform advocate, exoneree, and congressional candidate in Los Angeles County seeking to become the first-ever exoneree elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, was the keynote speaker.
New Faculty
Ying Zhou joined the faculty of the School of Law as an assistant professor of law in the fall. She earned her LLM and JSD degrees from Cornell Law School and is a member of the bar in both China and New York. Her scholarship lies at the intersection of business law, data privacy and technology law, as well as international and transnational law, with a specialization in both U.S. and Chinese law. In recent years, her research has examined issues that arise in connection with international corporate regulation, with particular emphasis on the U.S. model of corporate enforcement.
Zhou’s scholarly work has been published in the University of New Hampshire Law Review, the Richmond Journal of Law and Technology and multiple peer-reviewed journals in China. Prior to her appointment at OCU, she was a post-doctoral global fellow at New York University School of Law from 2021 to 2022. During her time at NYU Law, Zhou conducted research on emerging trends and new challenges in international business regulation, with a particular emphasis on anti-corruption law.
Trevor Wedman joined the faculty at the School of Law in the fall as an assistant professor of law. He received his JD from the University of San Diego School of Law. After graduating, Wedman began practicing international corporate law with law firms in Europe and the Middle East while working toward his PhD in legal theory from the University of Leipzig. He has been a visiting researcher at the University of Stockholm, Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the University of Vienna. Wedman has published internationally and his monograph, “Inverting the Norm—Law as the Form of Common Practice,” appeared in 2022 with Mohr Siebeck in Germany.
