University News

Professors Offer the Stories Behind Their Office Mementos

Amid the rows of legal texts lining faculty members’ offices at the University of Virginia School of Law are artifacts that offer unique insights into professors’ professional endeavors and teaching careers.

And there’s a story behind every memento.

Portrait of a sticker on a bookshelf that says 'No Justice. No Coke!

Professor of Law Sarah Shalf’s bumper sticker is a reminder of a big case she worked on (Photo by Josette Corazza, School of Law).

In 2000, Sarah Shalf, a 2001 Law School graduate, was a summer associate at Bondurant, Mixson & Elmore in Atlanta while the firm litigated a race discrimination class action lawsuit against Coca-Cola Co.

“We had a soda fountain in the kitchen, but this bumper sticker hung on it, so we did not drink Coke products while the suit was pending,” Shalf said.

Later that year, the case resulted in the largest race employment discrimination class action settlement in history – $192 million in total.

Professor Paul Stephan travels widely in Eastern Europe. He displays many posters and objects from the Soviet era in his office (Photo by Josette Corazza, School of Law).

Paul B. Stephan graduated from the Law School in 1977. An international law expert with a focus on Soviet and post-Soviet legal systems, he keeps souvenirs from his travels to the region.

All the pictured posters, except for the one on the far left, “date back to the labor discipline campaign sponsored by Soviet leader Yuri Andropov, Leonid Brezhnev’s successor and a kind of proto-reformer who promoted and, in some sense, prefigured Gorbachev,” Stephan said.

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The other poster, from the 1970s, was a present from the arms control group within the State Department’s Office of Legal Adviser.

The statue is of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the Soviet secret police, which Stephan bought in Yalta in 1989. “Given his appalling history and his embodiment of true evil, I draped him with a Tibetan prayer ribbon I was given in Lhasa, as well as a small Russian Orthodox icon,” he said.

Portrait of Subway Car Passenger Handle.

Josh Bowers, a research professor, keeps a New York City subway car passenger handle in his office, a reminder of his time defending people accused of hopping turnstiles (Photo by Josette Corazza, School of Law).

Josh Bowers keeps the strap, or passenger handle, of a New York City subway car in his office. As a public defender during the era of broken-windows policing – a strategy that focused on addressing minor crimes under the theory it would prevent more serious crimes – he defended numerous subway riders, known as “straphangers,” accused of hopping the turnstiles (“theft of service,” in the eyes of the law).

Portrait of a golden-colored model train.

Law professor Barbara Armacost teaches her students about cases involving plaintiffs injured by trains. Her students gave her model train to commemorate their tort class (Photo by Josette Corazza, School of Law).

Some artifacts are gifts from students, and a tribute to the faculty members’ teaching expertise.

Barbara Armacost, a 1986 Law School graduate, received a model train from her torts class one year because so many of the cases they studied are about trains.

For example, her class covers Baltimore and Ohio R.R. v. Goodman and Pokora v. Wabash Ry., two cases that examine whether a plaintiff who is injured by a train while crossing the tracks in their vehicle is “contributorily negligent as a matter of law if they fail to exit their vehicle and ‘stop, look and listen’ before crossing the tracks,” Armacost explained.

Portrait of doormat written 'Come Back With A Warrant' and a folded US flag.

Professor Anne Coughlin displays a doormat and a folded flag that once flew over the Pentagon (Photo by Josette Corazza, School of Law).

Criminal law expert Anne Coughlin has a doormat at the entrance to her office given to her by a student fellow in the Program in Law and Public Service, a Law School initiative she has taught courses for over the years.

“The doormat actually raises a nice legal question – can posting such a statement remove the implied license that police have to knock on your door?” Coughlin asked.

She also keeps in her office a U.S. flag that was flown over the Pentagon in October 2012 that students in the Molly Pitcher Project, for which Coughlin served as an adviser, gave her. The group helped identify clients for a federal discrimination lawsuit against the military’s policy banning women from combat roles and advised the team of lawyers who were working on the effort. The Defense Department would end up dropping the policy before the lawsuits were heard.

Read on to learn the stories behind a tiny globe and a 19th-century wooden legal brief chest.