Law School alum goes to high court The 1990 Drake Law School alumnus was in the office of a Denver-area client – a mortgage broker – to help him workout a contract issue. The broker introduced Reichel to Jessica Gonzales, who was there to renegotiate her mortgage. The story Gonzales told Reichel chilled him and motivated the attorney to take on a case that will bring him before the U .S. Supreme Court on March 21. In 1999, Gonzales’ estranged husband, Simon Gonzales, took their three children without permission. Jessica Gonzales had a court-issued restraining order against her husband, who was only to have contact with the children at pre-arranged times. Jessica Gonzales called the police in her Colorado city of Castle Rock, about halfway between Denver and Colorado Springs. Police refused to respond. She took the order down to the police station to show the officers multiple times. Still they refused to act. Hours later, they had no choice but to act. Simon Gonzales showed up at the police station armed and got into a gun battle with officers. He was killed. Police found his car and inside where Jessica and Simon Gonzales’ children – murdered, allegedly by Simon’s hand. Jessica Gonzales wanted to sue the city of Castle Rock, saying that her constitutional rights had been violated by the police department’s inaction. Several large Denver-area firms turned her down. But Brian Reichel – who practices law out of his Broomfield, Colo. home and has no full-time staff – took the case. He has practiced commercial and environmental law most of his 15-year career, but even as a student, he had a passion for civil rights. “Jessica Gonzales deserves justice from the city of Castle Rock,” Reichel says. Gonzales seeks $30 million in compensatory damages and millions more in punitive damages from the city of Castle Rock. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit voted 6 to 5 to allow Gonzales’ lawsuit to go to trial. The Supreme Court agreed to hear Castle Rock’s appeal in November. If successful, the Gonzales case could dramatically change how local law enforcement agencies enforce “no-contact” protective orders and widely expand the liability of cities for the failures of police to enforce those orders. The case has catapulted a solo practicing suburban Denver lawyer into the national spotlight. He fields two or three media calls a day and he and Gonzales were interviewed by Mike Wallace as part of March 20 “60 Minutes” story on the case. More stunning than that, however, it put Reichel – a lawyer with no staff or even fellow law partners – before the most powerful court in the nation. That’s when Reichel went back to school. He called his faculty adviser, law professor Russell Lovell. Reichel told Lovell he needed some help. The Drake Law School sprung into action. Lovell and Mark Kende, director of the Constitutional Law Center, organized a group of nine Drake law students to help Reichel research arguments for his case. The students each took one justice and researched their history, including each opinion authored by justices that is relevant to the procedural due process issues raised by the Castle Rock appeal. The students also looked at protective order laws nationwide. They worked through their winter break on the project and earned one-hour independent study credit for their efforts. “It’s very rare for an attorney to get to argue a case before the Supreme Court, let alone to be a student working on the case,” said second-year law student Erika Wilkins form Des Moines, who researched Justice Ruth Bader-Ginsberg’s history for Reichel. “This is a great opportunity to get a glimpse of a Supreme Court argument from the inside.” Reichel visited campus Friday, March 4 to give a practice run-through of the arguments he plans to make before the high court. Drake law faculty Lovell, Kende and Andrea Charlow grilled him for more than an hour at the Drake Legal Clinic before a debriefing. They went over everything from what time of day Reichel’s case would be presented to how physically close he would be to the justices. “This is just invaluable,” Reichel says. “These are opinions I coming from people I respect. It really helps.” Reichel sat beside Lovell, teacher and pupil together again nearly 20 years after he sat in Lovell’s classrooms – which were then in Carnegie Hall. “Brian was an excellent student and he’s grown into an excellent attorney,” Lovell says. “He has quite a challenge ahead of him, but he is most definitely up to the task.” As for returning to campus essentially for the first time since graduation, Reichel said, “I just feel really old.” Two Drake University students are finalists for the prestigious Truman Scholarship. Brittany Buchholtz, a junior from Cedar Falls, Iowa, and Renae Steichen, a junior from Madison, S.D., are among the more than 200 finalists for the scholarship. The Harry S. Truman Scholarship Foundation awards merit-based $30,000 scholarships to college students who plan to pursue careers in government or elsewhere in public service, and wish to attend graduate or professional school to help prepare for their careers. This year about 800 students from more than 400 colleges were nominated for Truman Scholarships. The foundation expects to award between 75 to 80 Truman Scholarships this year. On Friday, March 11, Buchholtz will be interviewed in Kansas City, Mo., and Steichen will be interviewed in Minneapolis. If the students receive Truman Scholarships, they will become the sixth and seventh winners at Drake since 1990. Drake’s most recent Truman Scholar was Shelia McCoy, a 2000 graduate. “It’s very exciting to be a finalist,” Steichen said. “It’s also kind of nerve-racking. The interview process is very rigorous.” “The Truman Scholarship is the most prestigious scholarship in the United States,” said Julian Archer, professor of history and the Truman faculty representative at Drake. “Being a Truman Scholar is comparable to being a Rhodes Scholar in England.” Buchholtz is a 2002 graduate of Cedar Falls High School and is majoring in international relations with a minor in anthropology. Her passion is global health issues. She helped found the pro-choice student organization Drake University Voice of Choice. She has worked with NARAL Pro-Choice America, Advocates For Youth Comprehensive Sexuality Education Campaign, and HIV-AIDS education in Iowa’s Black Hawk County Health Department. Her studies have taken her to San Antonio, Texas; Washington, D.C.; Amman, Jordan; South Africa and Mozambique. Buchholtz is also the recipient of a $10,000 scholarship from the National Security Education Program for her work on public health issues in Cedar Falls. “Brittany’s activities at Drake and what she is doing now in Washington, D.C., show a consistency of focus and determination,” Archer said. “She is a poised young woman driven by curiosity to discover all that she can about the wider world.” If Buchholtz receives the Truman Scholarship, she plans to defer her graduate studies for two years and enter the Peace Corps. After her return to the United States, she wants to enroll at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health in Baltimore to earn a master’s degree and later pursue a doctorate in health policy and management. Ultimately, she wants to serve as a policy-maker for the U.S. government or an internationally recognized world health organization. She is currently studying at American University in Washington, D.C., as part of Drake’s Washington Semester program. As part of her studies, she is studying development and environmental issues in South Africa and Mozambique. Steichen is a 2002 graduate of Madison High School in Madison, S.D. and has a double major in environmental policy and politics with minors in environmental science and business studies. Her passion is environmental education and preservation. She crusades for issues as president of the Drake Environmental Action League and co-authors environmental science articles with Drake environmental science professor Keith Summerville while working extensive hours at Zanzibars Coffee Adventure. Steichen has been an intern at the Sierra Club and a research and teaching assistant for Summerville. She has worked for the American Red Cross and is a member of Alpha Phi Omega, a volunteer service fraternity. “Renae’s effectiveness as the principal student environmental activist is due to her very polite manner and methodical persuasiveness,” Archer said. “Her approach is not emotional or accusatory and, consequently, she has moved Drake along a path of environmental sensitivity as no one, faculty or student, has been able to do before.” Upon graduation from Drake, she hopes to enroll in Stanford Law School’s Environment and Natural Resources Law Policy Program. Ultimately, she hopes to pursue a career with the Department of Energy or the Environmental Protection Agency to push for clean, renewable energy sources and address climate change issues. Lynne Cox, who has been called "the best cold water, long-distance swimmer the world has ever seen," will speak about her adventures at 7 p.m. Friday, March 11, at Drake University. The event, which is free and open to the public, will take place in Bulldog Theater in Olmsted Center. Cox has been setting records since she was 15, when she broke the men's and women's records for her 33-mile swim of the English Channel. At age 17, she shattered the men's record for swimming the Catalina Channel. She was the first person to swim the shark-infested waters around the Cape of Good Hope, South Africa. In 1987, she swam the Bering Strait, the channel that forms the boundary between Alaska and Siberia, opening the U.S.-Soviet border for the first time in 48 years. She was then first to swim the Strait of Magellan, reputedly the most treacherous three-mile stretch of water in the world. Not content with these records, she became the first person to swim more than a mile in 32-degree water to the ice-bound shore of Antarctica, where she was greeted by a flock of penguins in 2002. She chronicled that challenge in her book titled "Swimming to Antarctica: Tales of a Long-Distance Swimmer." Cox has overcome many obstacles, including being considered too plump to participate in sports. She trained her body to tolerate many hours of freezing temperatures that might kill a normal person in a matter of minutes. Named one of the notable women of 2003 by Glamour magazine, Cox was inducted into the Swimming Hall of Fame, praised by President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, featured on "60 Minutes" and profiled in People and Biography. Her presentation at Drake is sponsored by the Chrysalis Foundation, Drake's Women's Studies Program and Women's Awareness Coalition. Thrill to death-defying flight of the ping-pong ball fired from moving catapult! Dazzle at the amazing strength and stamina of ordinary household straws! Astonish as mousetraps spring to life and drive at top speed! A carnival of strange and bizarre sights involving the mad genius of high school students is scheduled for exhibition at the 27th Annual Physics Olympics from 9 a.m. to noon at Drake University on Wednesday, March 9. The competition will be held in Parents Hall in Olmsted Center. The event, which is free and open to the public, is sponsored by Drake’s School of Education and the Heartland Area Education Agency. Using only household items and their creative minds, students will be constructing devices for events such as Toy racecar mousetraps, falling mass-powered cars, toothpick bridges, Ping-Pong catapult and student-powered water heater. Winners in each event will advance to the state competition, which will be held at Drake on April 13. The Drake University Law School Environmental Moot Court Team finished in the quarterfinals of the Environmental Law Moot Court tournament last week at Pace University in White Plains, N.Y. Drake lost to a team from the University of North Carolina, but continued its string of solid finishes in the 17-year-old event. In the last 14 years, Drake has reached the quarterfinal round 12 times, advancing to the semifinals three times and the finals once. The team, consisting of Drake second-year law students Jessica Braunschweig-Norris, Megan Tooker and Tim Lillwitz, wrote a 30-page brief on the environmental problem of a case involving water pollution caused by diverting a river. Each member of the team argued twice during the three preliminary rounds, where Drake competed in a field of 72 teams including law schools such as Columbia University, Georgetown University, the University of Minnesota and Temple University. Braunschweig-Norris earned a best oralist award in the first round. The students were aided in their efforts by practice rounds with Des Moines-area attorneys, including Drake Law School alumnus Mark Landa and Jane McAllister. Drake law professor Jerry Anderson, who co-coaches the team with Drake alumna Jennifer Smithson, said the team is poised for more success next year. “Because all three competitors are second-year students, we look forward to competing next year with this year’s experience to build upon,” he said. Jan R. Schlichtmann, the plaintiff's attorney about whom the critically acclaimed book "A Civil Action" was written, and later made into a movie, will give the keynote address at Drake University Law School's Supreme Court Day Banquet on Saturday, March 12, at the Downtown Marriott. Schlichtmann's speech is titled "Confessions of an Environmental Lawyer." "A Civil Action" details a toxic tort case in which Schlichtmann represented eight families in Woburn, Mass., who claimed that W.R. Grace and Beatrice Foods had polluted the city's drinking water with carcinogenic chemicals, causing a variety of health problems, including a dozen cases of childhood leukemia, several resulting in death. The nine-year legal battle ended in an $8 million settlement from W.R. Grace, despite the firm never admitting wrongdoing, and a not-guilty verdict for Beatrice Foods. Later the Environmental Protection Agency announced a $70 million reclamation plan for the area, and W.R. Grace was indicted for and pleaded guilty to lying in statements it made to the EPA. "The Law School is honored to have one of the country's best known plaintiff's attorneys specializing in complex civil litigation, particularly environmental litigation, give the keynote address at our annual banquet and share his thoughts about how those cases should be approached," said Drake Law School Dean David Walker. The banquet will begin with a reception at 6 p.m. and dinner at 7 p.m. Schlichtmann's speech is scheduled to begin at 8:50 p.m. The dinner costs $50 per person or $20 per student. For reservations and more information, call the Drake Law School at x1877. The Drake University Choir and Chamber Choir will perform a concert titled "This World is not Conclusion" at 8 p.m. Sunday, March 13, on the Jordan Stage in Sheslow Auditorium in Old Main, 25th Street and University Avenue. The title comes from an Emily Dickinson poem that grapples with issues of faith, hope, peace and immortality. "The concert features a number of works that address these issues, each from a different perspective," said Aimee Beckmann-Collier, director of the choirs and professor of conducting at Drake. The Drake Choir will premiere a setting of "This World is not Conclusion," which was written by New York composer John Armstrong, who will conduct the premiere. The Chamber Choir will sing contemporary settings of Renaissance texts, including "Three from Shakespeare" by Minnesota composer David Dickau and "From an Unknown Past," a song cycle in seven movements by American composer Ned Rorem. All works on the program are pieces written within the past 60 years. The concert will begin with the first movement of John Rutter's "Gloria" for brass, percussion, organ and chorus. The concert is free and open to the public. |
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