Reformist--Law professor honored for 'extraordinary' work

By Sheila Pursglove Legal News The culture of the '60s is far removed from where Michigan State University College of Law Professor Mae Kuykendall finds herself today. Kuykendall, honored in June by the Georgia House of Representatives for her "extraordinary accomplishments" - commitment to higher education and students, expertise in a wide range of legal fields, and scholarly publications and writings - had plenty of uphill challenges. The South Texas native earned a bachelor's degree in political science, summa cum laude, from the University of Houston. Her post-college options were: law school, graduate school, or work - in an era when local ads were organized under "Men Wanted" and "Women Wanted," the latter offering minimal opportunities. "Young women still got lectured they were useless in the work force if they did not learn to type very fast - so I concluded quickly that jobs were not a likely alternative," she says. Kuykendall earned a master's degree and Ph.D. in political science at the University of North Carolina, where a professor told her it was difficult to evaluate women. Another professor wrote, "Mae is a woman who wears well." Her political science subfield - judicial process and judicial behavior - made for a natural transition to law. A professor at Randolph-Macon Woman's College in Virginia, she applied to be one of the first crop of Judicial Fellows at the Supreme Court - parallel to judicial clerks but focusing on administration of the courts and drawing on training in fields besides law. Kuykendall applied to be a staff member at the National Center for State Courts, starting her on an 8-year career in the company of lawyers and on the path to becoming one. Her first two years were spent visiting Virginia courthouses on behalf of the Virginia Supreme Court. She opened the National Center's first office in Williamsburg, Va., on the William & Mary campus. Her first task was spending a week in Tazewell, Va., examining the procedures of the district court. She also helped design a docketing system for the limited jurisdiction courts in Virginia, a caseload reporting system for the circuit courts, a jury system for the territorial courts of the Virgin Islands, and standard forms for the Virginia courts. She produced a juror-orientation film; and wrote reports for both the D.C. court system and the Virginia courts proposing an agenda for administrative reforms, including the creation of an intermediate appellate court for each system. In 1979, when she became the first woman and also the first non-lawyer to serve as a regional director, the National Center's director told her, "You earned it." Women in the 1970s faced an uphill battle, she says. "A term for sexual harassment didn't exist," Kuykendall says. "More than once, I encountered relationships in small offices that created problems, and I was a direct witness to a sexual harassment case that became an item in professional responsibility casebooks." In 1980, she moved to the Office for Improvements in the Administration of Justice, a "think tank" at the U.S. Department of Justice that was replaced during the Reagan presidency with an office that screened candidates for the federal judiciary. "After a short time in a small bureau devoted to gathering and analyzing justice statistics, I decamped to Harvard Law School," she says. "Even in 1982, Harvard Law had only one-third enrollment of women." She clerked for Judge Joseph Hatchett, the first African-American elected to statewide office in the South after Reconstruction, appointed by President Jimmy Carter to the Eleventh Circuit. She had previously met the judge when, as a co-director at the National Center for State Courts of the implementation of the ABA Standards for Judicial Administration, she and a colleague advised the Florida legislature about revising the appellate jurisdiction of the Florida Supreme Court. Kuykendall spent six years in the New York City firm of Debevoise & Plimpton, practicing in corporate finance with a focus on large private placements and occasional public offerings, and a $1.2 billion workout of a Mexican steel company, Hylsa S.A. de C.V. "It was natural when I went into law teaching to offer a corporations class, although I had plenty to learn about the soup-to-nuts menu of basic corporate law for a survey course," she says. "I was assigned to teach corporate finance with it and wound up learning a lot from the complex casebook written by my former professor, Victor Brudney. Kuykendall also taught at Florida State University College of Law, Wayne State University Law School, for Professor David Shapiro in the legal writing class at Harvard University Law School, College of William and Mary (as an adjunct in political science), University of South Carolina College of Criminal Justice, Randolph-Macon Woman's College, and the University of North Carolina. The MSU Law College has gone through numerous changes, starting around the time Kuykendall arrived in 1993. "It's been an interesting period, with the opportunity to see how an institutional culture adapts to significant and continuing change and to the ongoing challenge to find the right approach to legal education under the pressure of jarring disruptions in law practice and in the overall economy," she says. Kuykendall, who helped revise the Michigan Nonprofit Corporation Act and has been the reporter of the Michigan Business Corporation Act, also directs the Legal E-Marriage Project, created with MSU Law Professor Adam Candeub. Last November's symposium "Modernizing Marriage through E-Marriage" held with the MSU Law Review, brought together policy-makers and legal academics, and a couple who had "tried" e-marriage through an expansive reading of the D.C. marriage law. As a result of her outreach on the e-marriage project, a Georgia legislator who found her work impressive introduced a resolution honoring Kuykendall. Published: Mon, Oct 10, 2011

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