Professor Lisa Avalos
LSU Law Center
Professor Avalos joined the Law Center faculty in 2018. Her teaching and research interests are in the areas of criminal law and procedure, with an emphasis on sexual offenses and gender-based violence. She also teaches in the area of legal ethics. Professor Avalos’s publications have appeared in the University of Illinois Law Review (forthcoming), Case Western Reserve Law Review (forthcoming), Brooklyn Law Review, Nevada Law Journal, Michigan Journal of Gender & Law, Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law, and others. Professor Avalos previously taught at the University of Arkansas School of Law and was a visiting assistant professor at Georgetown University Law Center. Prior to entering academia, she worked as an associate at McDermott Will & Emery in New York City and at Neal, Gerber & Eisenberg in Chicago. She earned her J.D. from New York University School of Law. She also holds a Ph.D. and M.A. in sociology Northwestern University, and a B.A. in psychology from Northwestern University. Prior to attending law school, she taught sociology at Grinnell College in Grinnell, Iowa.

Mr. Shelton Dennis Blunt
Partner
Phelps Dunbar, LLP
https://www.phelps.com/
Dennis Blunt is an experienced trial litigator having developed a solid reputation for guiding clients through complex legal disputes. Dennis focuses his practice on commercial litigation, including business torts, products liability, casualty litigation, lender liability and officer and director disputes. He has represented clients across a wide spectrum of industries including public utilities, education, healthcare, insurance and financial institutions. His practice has included the representation of companies in class actions and mass torts in state and federal courts. Dennis has served as lead trial counsel in national class actions including matters involving the TCPA. In addition, he has served as lead counsel in pharmaceutical company litigation. Dennis has also served as lead counsel in several complex high profile cases, assisting clients with developing successful litigation strategies while also providing advice and counsel to clients in difficult disputes that have led to the favorable resolution of “bet the company” litigation. Dennis has also represented a number of clients and matters involving various types of state and local tax disputes in both state and local jurisdictions. Dennis has significant experience in developing creative business solutions for complex client needs. Dennis has served as general counsel to clients assisting them with developing a variety of business strategies that have fostered business growth. He is very active in the philanthropic community in Baton Rouge. He has served as Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Baton Rouge Area Foundation (BRAF), having assisted BRAF with the development of many public-private partnerships that have fostered the revitalization of Baton Rouge. He also serves on the Board of Directors of the Companion Animal Alliance (CAA), having worked to develop CAA’s current public-private partnership with the City of Baton Rouge. He currently serves as Treasurer of the Public Affairs Research Council (PAR) and as Chairman of the Board of the Capital Area Finance Authority (CAFA). In his role as the CAFA Board Chair, Dennis has been actively engaged in the development of creative public-private financing structures that have increased available housing stock in the Baton Rouge region. Dennis has an LLM in litigation, and has served as an adjunct professor teaching trial advocacy for over 15 years. He has also lectured on litigation management, ethics and e-discovery.

Professor Andrea B. Carroll
LSU Law Center
Andi Beauchamp Carroll is the Associate Dean for Student & Academic Affairs and the Donna W. Lee Professor of Family Law at the LSU Law Center. Before joining the LSU Law faculty, Professor Carroll clerked for The Honorable W. Eugene Davis of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. She subsequently worked as an associate at the Dallas law firm of Baker Botts, L.L.P., handling appellate litigation. In 2003, Professor Carroll returned home to LSU Law, where she has been teaching and writing about family law, community property, and property for nearly two decades. Professor Carroll is the author of more than a dozen books and articles in her field. She has recently been published in the Cambridge University Press and her Tulane article on civil law property was honored as outstanding scholarship at the Stanford-Yale Junior Faculty Forum. Professor Carroll is active in law reform in Louisiana, as a Member of the Council of the Louisiana State Law Institute and the Institute’s Children’s Code, Adult Guardianship, Surrogacy, and Property Committees. She has led successful legislative reforms in the areas of child relocation, spousal support, surrogacy, and community property reimbursement rights. As Reporter of the Law Institute’s Marriage and Persons Committee, Professor Carroll continues to work to improve the law related to marriage and the family.

Professor Elizabeth R. Carter
LSU Law Center
Professor Elizabeth R. Carter is the A.N. Yiannopoulos Professor of Law and the Judge Anthony J. Graphia & Jo Ann Graphia Professor of Law at the Louisiana State University Law Center, where she teaches and writes in the areas of trusts & estates, tax, family law, and comparative law. In addition to her teaching responsibilities at the Law Center, Professor Carter teaches the courses in Federal Gift and Estate Tax and in Estate Planning in the University of Alabama’s LL.M. program in taxation. She is also an Academic Fellow in the American College of Trust and Estate Counsel.

Professor John M. Church
LSU Law Center
Professor John M. Church is the Joe W. Sanders Alumni Association Professorship and Allen L. Smith, Jr. Professorship Associate Professor of Law at LSU Law Center. He also serves as Director of the Apprenticeship Program at the Law Center. Professor Church teaches Torts, Products Liability, Toxic Torts, Wine Law, Intellectual Property, and Antitrust Law. He has a master’s degree from the University of Illinois and a law degree from the University of Colorado, where he was a Harlo Fellow, the Case Note Editor of the University of Colorado Law Review and was inducted into the Order of the Coif. Prior to joining the Law Center faculty in 1991, Professor Church clerked for Judge Robert H. McWilliams of the U.S. Tenth Circuit, and practiced law in Denver. He serves as the Law Center’s representative to the Board of Governors of the Louisiana State Bar Association and is active in local and state bar activities. He is one of the founding board members of the Louisiana Civil Justice Center, an organization dedicated to the provision of legal services to those in need. In 2019, he received the Distinguished Professor Award from the Louisiana Bar Foundation. He is the co-author of Tort Law: The American and Louisiana Perspectives and Louisiana Tort Law. He focuses most of his writing in the area of food and wine regulation, tort law and toxic torts.

Professor William R. Corbett
LSU Law Center
Professor William R. Corbett is the Frank L. Maraist Professor of Law and the Wex S. Malone Professor of Law at LSU Law Center, where he teaches and writes primarily in the area of Labor and Employment Law, but he also teaches Torts. He is a Fellow of the College of Labor and Employment Lawyers. Professor Corbett served as Interim Dean at LSU Law Center during fiscal year 2015-2016, and served as Vice Chancellor from May 1997 to January 2000. He was honored by the Louisiana Bar Foundation as the 2013 Distinguished Professor. He received his B.A. from Auburn University and his law degree from the University of Alabama, where he was Editor-in-Chief of the Alabama Law Review and a member of the Order of the Coif. He also received the M. Leigh Harrison Award presented to those graduating in the top 5 percent. He joined the law faculty at LSU in 1991, after practicing in Birmingham, Alabama with Burr & Forman. Professor Corbett has served as Executive Director of the Louisiana Association of Defense Counsel for the last 22 years. Prior to that, he served for several years as Executive Director, and then as faculty advisor, of the Louisiana Judicial College.

Professor Keith B. Hall
LSU Law Center
Professor Keith B. Hall is the Campanile Charities Professor of Energy Law, and the Director of the Mineral Law Institute at LSU Law Center. He teaches Mineral Rights, Advanced Mineral Law, International Petroleum Transactions, and an Energy Law Seminar which focuses on environmental issues relating to the oil and gas industry. Prior to joining the Law Center’s faculty in 2012, he taught Introduction to Mineral Law as an Adjunct Professor at Loyola University School of Law from 2008 until spring 2012, and practiced law for 16 years at Stone Pigman Walther Wittmann LLC in New Orleans. His publications have focused on oil and gas leases, pooling and unitization, hydraulic fracturing, induced seismicity, and the management of produced water. He is co-author of one of the two national casebooks on oil and gas law and also is co-author of a book on the legal issues relating to hydraulic fracturing. He is a frequent speaker at national and international oil and gas, energy, and environmental law conferences, and is a contributing co-author to the forthcoming new edition of the leading textbook on international petroleum transactions. In addition to teaching at LSU, he has taught energy law classes as a visiting professor at Baku State University in Azerbaijan and at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, and as an adjunct professor at Loyola University College of Law. Professor Hall is a member of the Board of Editors for the Oil & Gas Reporter, the Board of Trustees for the Rocky Mountain Mineral Law Foundation, the Advisory Council for the Institute for Energy Law, and the Board of Trustees for the Energy & Mineral Law Foundation. He is a former Chair of the Louisiana State Bar Association's Environmental Law Section and former Chair of the Oil & Gas Committee of the ABA Section of Environment, Energy and Resources. He serves on the Louisiana Law Institute’s Water Law Committee and is a registered professional engineer. He co-authors “Recent Developments: Mineral Law” for the bimonthly Louisiana Bar Journal. Professor Hall received his law degree, summa cum laude, from Loyola University College of Law, where he served as Managing Editor of the Loyola Law Review. He graduated from Louisiana State University with an undergraduate degree in chemical engineering.

Professor Melissa T Lonegrass
LSU Law Center
Professor Melissa Lonegrass is the Harriett S. Daggett-Frances Leggio Landry Professor of Law, Bernard Keith Vetter Professor of Civil Law Studies, and Wedon T. Smith Professor in Civil Law. Professor Lonegrass earned her J.D. from Tulane Law School, where she graduated first in her class. Before joining the LSU Law faculty in 2008, Professor Lonegrass worked as an associate at the New Orleans firm of Irwin Fritchie Urquhart & Moore LLC, specializing in civil defense, with an emphasis on pharmaceutical and medical device defense. Professor Lonegrass has taught numerous civil law courses at the Law Center, including Western Legal Traditions, Obligations, Sales and Real Estate, Security Devices, and Successions, Donations & Trusts. Her scholarship focuses on Louisiana civil law, comparative legal methodology, landlord-tenant law, and contract law. She recently co-authored a textbook on Louisiana’s law of sale and lease, and has published articles in the Tulane Law Review, the Louisiana Law Review, the University of Arkansas at Little Rock Law Review, and the Loyola Chicago Law Journal. From 2016-2018, Professor Lonegrass was appointed as a Scholar-in-Residence of the Louisiana Bar Foundation, and in 2019, she was elected as an Academic Fellow of the American College of Real Estate Counsel. Professor Lonegrass is active in law reform in Louisiana, serving as a member of the Council of the Louisiana State Law Institute, as the reporter of the Institute’s Landlord-Tenant Committee and the Notaries Committee, and as a member of many other committees, including the Committee on Successions and Donations.

Tammy Pruet Northrup
LA Attorney Disciplinary Board
Tammy Pruet Northrup, a native of Baton Rouge, Louisiana is a 1988 graduate from Louisiana State University with a Bachelor of Science degree in Accounting and a 1991 graduate of the Paul M. Hebert Law Center at Louisiana State University. After receiving her law degree, she served as a judicial law clerk for the State of Louisiana Third Circuit Court of Appeal for two years. Following her clerkship, she served as staff and later senior attorney for the Louisiana State Police. She drafted the original version of the Louisiana CODIS law, the first piece of legislation in the country to authorize DNA sampling of arrestees, as well as the expansion of that law authorizing the collection of all convicted offenders and arrestees for felony offenses. In June 2001 she was promoted to Manager of the DNA Unit for the Louisiana State Police Crime Laboratory. Ms. Northrup left the Louisiana State Police in November 2006 to serve as Executive Director of the St. Tammany Parish Forensic Center, a position she held until March 2008. Ms. Northrup currently serves as a Deputy Disciplinary Counsel for the Louisiana Attorney Disciplinary Board. Ms. Northrup is also active in the National Organization of Bar Counsel (NOBC). She is the current NOBC Immediate Past President and has served on the NOBC Board of Directors in the positions of Director at Large, Secretary, Treasurer, President-Elect, and President.

Michael H Rubin
McGlinchey Stafford
Mike Rubin is a veteran appellate lawyer who has handled hundreds of appeals in state and federal courts, including before the U.S. Fifth, Seventh, and D.C. Circuit Courts of Appeal, on a wide variety of issues affecting the entire Gulf region. As a trial litigator, Mike has handled ground-breaking cases in the areas of finance and secured lending and major multimillion-dollar commercial transactions, as well as trials of national importance concerning federal voting rights, bankruptcy, environmental law, and constitutional issues. Mike served as an adjunct professor at the LSU, Southern, and Tulane law schools for 40 years teaching courses in security devices and ethics. He is a prolific writer; his numerous legal publications on real estate, finance, and ethics have been cited as authoritative in state and federal courts around the country and have been used in law schools across the nation. A nationally known speaker and humorist who has given over 475 major presentations throughout the USA as well as in Canada and England, Mike also is an author of legal thrillers that have won national awards and have been translated and sold internationally.

Professor Greg Smith
LSU Law Center
Professor Emeritus Greg Smith retired as the Professional Ethics Professor of Law, and the G. Frank & Winston Purvis Professor of Law at the LSU Law Center. He taught common law property, civil law property, payment systems, and legal profession. He did his undergraduate work at Yale, where he majored in Political Science and graduated with honors. Professor Smith earned his law degree from Brigham Young University, where he was an article editor for the BYU Law Review and was designated as a J. Reuben Clark Scholar. Following law school, Professor Smith served as a law clerk to Judge Monroe G. McKay of the United States Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals. He practiced law for eleven years in Phoenix, Arizona before joining the LSU law faculty in 1991. His published writings have dealt with legal ethics, judicial conduct, and property law.

Professor J. Randall Trahan
LSU Law Center
Professor J. Randall Trahan is the Louis B. Porterie Professor of Law and the Saul Litvinoff Distinguished Professor of Law at LSU Law Center. Professor Trahan is a civil law specialist and presently teaches Sales & Real Estate, Security Devices, Civil Law Property, and Successions & Donations. He has also taught Family Law, Obligations, Matrimonial Regimes, Legal Traditions & Systems, and Western Legal Traditions, and is co-author, along with Professor Ken Murchison, of Western Legal Traditions & Systems: Louisiana Impact. He has written a new book entitled: Louisiana Law of Property: A Précis, published by LexisNexis. Professor Trahan received his B.A. in Political Science from LSU in 1982, and his law degree in 1989, with high honors, from LSU Law Center where he was Articles Editor of Louisiana Law Review and was inducted into The Order of the Coif. Before joining the Law Center faculty in 1995, Professor Trahan served as law clerk to the late Judge Alvin B. Rubin in the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals for one year and then practiced law with the firm of Phelps Dunbar in Baton Rouge for five years. He serves as Reporter for three committees of the Louisiana State Law Institute: the Adult Guardianship Committee, the Birth Certificate Committee, and the newly established Legion Beyond Moiety Committee.