News Archive

Two IU McKinney professors will be celebrated by the Indianapolis Bar Association and Indianapolis Bar Foundation at the groups' annual Recognition Breakfast in November. Professor Emeritus James P. White will receive the Dr. John Morton-Finney Jr. Award for Excellence in Legal Education, and Professor Carrie Hagan will be honored with the IndyBar Pro Bono Award.

Professor Emeritus James P. White has devoted over 50 years to educating tomorrow's lawyers at the Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law. He joined the faculty in 1966, and became Professor Emeritus in 2002. He served as Consultant on Legal Education to the American Bar Association for 26 years and was instrumental in bringing that office to the IUPUI campus for the duration of his tenure at the ABA. His work included a complete restructuring of the law school accreditation system. Because the accreditation process and the work of the ABA’s Section of Legal Education and Admission to the Bar is driven by volunteers, one of his most important roles was the recruiting, training, and nurturing of hundreds of volunteers. Under his leadership, the ABA strengthened its quality and diversity standards for accreditation. The ABA held workshops for deans and other faculty, strengthened clinical legal education, and initiated programs to assist law schools in development.

When Professor Emeritus White retired from the ABA, the members of the ABA Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar and others established an endowed annual lecture series at IU McKinney in his honor. Professor Emeritus White maintains an office at IU McKinney, and plays an active role in inviting speakers to deliver this lecture. He has used his vast professional connections to bring 4 U.S. Supreme Court Justices (Sandra Day O'Connor, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Anthony Kennedy, and Chief Justice John Roberts), along with jurists and legal scholars from around the world to Indianapolis to interact with students, faculty, and the legal community.

The award is named for alumnus John Morton-Finney, '44, who was a civil rights activist, lawyer, and educator who earned 11 academic degrees. He taught in Indianapolis Public Schools for 47 years, and practiced law for 53 years.

Professor Hagan is a Clinical Professor of Law at IU McKinney, where she is the Director of the Civil Practice Clinic. Expungement can help those who have a criminal record to move forward in rebuilding their lives. She began offering traveling pop-up expungement clinics with her students in 2018, and the effort to date has resulted in students helping dozens of people. Students get to meet and screen clients to determine their eligibility, then work with the client throughout the process to get the records expunged. As part of a partnership between IU McKinney and Ivy Tech Community College, Professor Hagan and her students offered a pop-up expungement clinic on the Ivy Tech campus in Indianapolis in April 2019. Other pop-up expungement clinics have taken place in Indianapolis at SENSE Charter School and Coburn Place, with the Indiana Coalition Against Domestic Violence in Kokomo, and in Washington, Indiana. On average, a successful expungement can take about three months, sometimes longer. Law students need to be part of the Civil Practice Clinic to take part in the expungement pop-ups, but students who volunteer in one of the three rooms the Clinic staffs at the Re-Entry Job and Resource Fair -- licensing, expungement screening, or expungement drafting -- are eligible to help, too.

Professor Hagan also is one of the volunteer organizers, along with Professor Lahny Silva, of the Re-Entry Fair, which has been staged by IU McKinney students, faculty, staff, and alumni every spring since 2016. Professor Hagan does pro bono work and organizes students and others doing pro bono work as part of this effort. Nearly 400 people were helped with resume reviews, expungement information and advice, driver's license information, child support, food assistance, health insurance, and voter registration at the April 2019 event. Over the four years the fair has taken place, Professor Hagan and her students have assisted hundreds of people with determining their eligibility for expungement, and should they be ineligible, giving them the information and the tools they need to understand why and what they can do to move forward.

Professor Emeritus White and Professor Hagan will receive these honors at the IndyBar and Indianapolis Bar Foundation's annual Recognition Breakfast on November 19. The event will take place at Meridian Hills Country Club.