School of Law investiture ceremony
The School of Law honored legal experts with professorships in a ceremony on November 5. University President Kevin Wm. Wildes, S.J., and Provost Walter Harris, Jr., Ph.D., were in attendance to offer the congratulations of the entire Loyola community. Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and Professor of Law Lawrence W. Moore, S.J., gave the invocation, and Dean of the School of Law Brian Bromberger, who also was invested with a professorship, offered his congratulations to other faculty members. Bromberger was invested as the Judge Adrian G. Duplantier Dean's Distinguished Professorship in Law; Gerard A. Rault as the Judge John D. Wessel Distinguished Professorship of Social Justice; and Robert R.M. Verchick as the Wendell H. GauthierMichael X. St. Martin Eminent Scholar Chair in Environmental Law.
Dean Brian Bromberger received a bachelor of law degree with honors from Melbourne University and a teaching certificate from Melbourne Teacher's College in his native Australia before completing an LL.M. at the University of Pennsylvania. While in Australia, he served as director of the Center for the Study of Law and Technology at the University of New South Wales. He also served on boards and a tribunal that focused on mental health issues and was a part-time lecturer at New South Wales Institute of Psychiatry and the School of Medicine.
Louis J. St. Martin, a 1975 graduate of the School of Law, established the Judge Adrian G. Duplantier Dean's Distinguished Professorship in 2004 as a way to honor his friend and former professor.
Gerard "Gerry" Rault, a 1968 graduate of the LSU Law Center, has been a member of the law faculty for more than 30 years. Rault created and was the first chair of the International Client Counseling Competition. He also created the Loyola Death Penalty Clinic, through which he supervised law students assisting his efforts in defending, pro bono, first-degree murder cases in Louisiana and federal trial and appellate courts, including the United States Supreme Court. Rault also worked in China as the Fulbright Distinguished Senior Lecturer in Law for the People's Republic of China in 1997 98 and again in 1999 2000.
The Judge John D. Wessel Distinguished Professorship of Social Justice was established with a gift from Judge Wessel, L'68, a circuit judge in the Fifteenth Judicial Circuit for Palm Beach County in Florida.
Robert R.M. Verchick, J.D., received his A.B. in English from Stanford University and his J.D. from Harvard Law School. He serves as associate co-editor of the ABA's The Urban Lawyer, which is edited at the University of Missouri, Kansas City (UMKC). Verchick has served as a visiting professor at the University of Aarhus in Denmark, and at Seattle University School of Law. Verchick's scholarship mainly concerns environmental law, environmental justice, and legal theory.
In 1998, Michael X. St. Martin, a 1967 graduate of the School of Law and former member of Loyola's Board of Trustees, with his wife, Virginia, made a major commitment to Thresholds: the Campaign for Loyola University New Orleans to establish an endowed chair in the School of Law. Anne Gauthier, widow of the late Wendell H. Gauthier, L'70, and her family made a major gift in late 2002 which was combined with St. Martin's gift to fund the Wendell H. Gauthier-Michael X. St. Martin Eminent Scholar Chair in Environmental Law. The State of Louisiana Board of Regents matched these gifts to create the first endowed chair in the Loyola School of Law and the first $2 million eminent scholar chair at any law school in the state.
