Congratulations to third-year students Simone Ford, Thomas Grantham and Timia Skelton for winning the Hunton Andrews Kurth Moot Court National Championship. The team defeated William & Mary Law School in the final round. This invitation-only tournament is for the top 16 moot court programs from law schools across the country based on performances from the previous academic year.

The University of Georgia School of Law has announced the establishment of The Be Kind Fund, in memory of the late Georgia Supreme Court Chief Justice P. Harris Hines. The fund will: sponsor a Georgia Jurist-in-Residence, where a Georgia judge or justice will spend a period in residence at the School of Law teaching and interacting with students each year; support semester/summer fellowships for students, with preference given to those who will work or serve as judicial clerks at the Supreme Court of Georgia; and fund scholarship aid for law students.

The School of Law was recently awarded a Self Represented Litigant Grant from the Judicial Council of Georgia to support the efforts of the Athens Access to Justice Initiative, which seeks to provide community members, who are unable to afford legal representation, with access to attorneys. The initiative operates through a partnership between the School of Law, the Western Circuit Bar Association and the Athens-Clarke County Superior Court, and includes monthly legal pop-up clinics and a Self-Represented Litigant Center and Library.

Notable scholars and national leaders in politics, business, higher education and several other fields will visit the University of Georgia this semester as part of the Signature Lecture series. The law school's 117th Sibley Lecture to be delivered by the University of Chicago's David A. Strauss on the topic of U.S. Supreme Court decisions is included in this special series. Signature Lectures denote campus talks by speakers with broad, multidisciplinary appeal and compelling bodies of work. Many of the lectures are supported by endowments, while others honor notable figures and milestones in the university's history.

Three School of Law third-year students - Danielle Goshen, Julia M. Shelburne and Benjamin "Ben" Wilde - are serving as Georgia Sea Grant Legal Fellows and are conducting research to address critical environmental, economic and social concerns primarily affecting coastal Georgia.