15 September 2011
Supreme Court of Missouri honors volunteer faculty fellows
JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. – The Supreme Court of Missouri today honored its first faculty fellow, Prof. Mary V. Moore Johnson, who just completed her service to the Court. The Supreme Court established its faculty fellowship program in 2010 to give public-service oriented college or university professors in a wide variety of fields to help promote the administration of justice by enhancing the efficiency, effectiveness and integrity of the state judicial process and enhancing public understanding of that process.
Moore Johnson, a professor of business law at Southeast Missouri State University in Cape Girardeau proposed the concept of a Supreme Court of Missouri faculty fellowship modeled after the highly successful faculty fellowship program at the United States Supreme Court. She spent her full-year sabbatical helping the Court establish its faculty fellowship program and developing a civic education program for the judiciary. She will continue to serve on the Court’s new civic education committee, which she helped the Court establish. Appointed as the Court’s first faculty fellow in August 2010, Moore Johnson earned her bachelor of arts degree from California State University, San Diego; her master’s degree in business administration, with an emphasis in finance, from Missouri State University in Springfield, Mo.; and her law degree from Washburn University School of Law in Topeka, Kan. In addition to her teaching duties, Moore Johnson is licensed to practice law in Missouri and before the United States Supreme Court.
“We appreciate Prof. Moore Johnson’s vision and efforts to help the Court establish this faculty fellowship program, which we are confident will continue to flourish,” Supreme Court Judge Patricia Breckenridge said. “Prof. Moore Johnson has spent many hours working with the Court to develop civic educational programs, including putting together the Court’s first-ever Law Day program, held earlier this year. She also helped establish a framework within which we hope to continue fostering ongoing relationships between the state’s judiciary and higher education institutions. We believe this will allow us to continue providing an integrated professional development opportunity for Missouri faculty in a diversity of fields, including law, business, economics, social sciences, information systems, communications, education, liberal arts and the humanities.
“This support of volunteer faculty fellows dedicated to serving the citizens of Missouri is especially important to the state’s courts during this current fiscal climate,” Breckenridge said. “As less funding is available for the state to address the ever-changing needs of its court system, the willingness of outstanding faculty to lend their expertise is especially valuable.”
The Supreme Court also is proud to announce its two new faculty fellows, Dr. Jennifer L. Leopold and Prof. S. David Mitchell. Leopold, an associate professor of computer science at the Missouri University of Science and Technology in Rolla, Mo., plans to spend a full year helping to develop streamlined technological processes for the judiciary, including improving ways to transfer documents onto iPads as well as to improve the national data interchange model in which the Missouri courts have participated since 2002. Mitchell, an associate professor of law at the University of Missouri-Columbia School of Law, plans to spend a full year doing quantitative and qualitative analysis of reentry programs in Missouri on a county-by-county basis to help prison offenders on release to have a more favorable chance of succeeding and avoiding reoffending as well as assisting the state in its efforts with the Pew Foundation to help reduce prison populations and reduce recidivism in Missouri generally.
Leopold earned her bachelor of science degree in mathematics, her master of science degree in computer science and her doctorate degree in computer science all from the University of Kansas in Lawrence, Kan. She is a member of a task force working to identify and solve near-term and long-range technological problems of Missouri’s citizens, industry and government. Her research focuses on end-user programming environments, including database accessibility and analysis as well as scientific visualization. She also has earned numerous teaching awards. Leopold has taught at MS&T since the fall of 2002.
Mitchell earned his bachelor of arts degree in political science and sociology from Brown University in Providence, R.I., his master of arts in sociology from the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and his law degree also from the University of Pennsylvania. He is licensed to practice law in both New Jersey and Pennsylvania. His research focuses on the reentry into society of former felony offenders, including their disenfranchisement, the disproportionate impact of certain criminal laws on members of the African-American community and theories of criminal punishment. He also has earned several teaching awards. Mitchell has taught at MU since the fall of 2006.
The Supreme Court currently is accepting applications for its faculty fellowship, scheduled for the 2012-2013 academic year. A fellowship may last one or two semesters or up to a full year to coincide with the sabbatical from the fellow’s college or university.
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