Notables
UNM Professor
of Law James W. Ellis has been named Lawyer of
the Year by the National Law Journal (NLJ).
The NLJ
selects recipients for the award based on an attorneys
impact on the law and society. The 2001 recipient
was U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft.
In February,
Ellis successfully argued before the United States Supreme Court
that the nation agreed executing people with mental retardation
violated the Eighth Amendment prohibition on cruel and unusual
punishment. The court had ruled in 1989 that those executions
were constitutional. Ellis represented Virginia death row inmate
Daryl Atkins in the case Atkins v. Virginia.
The NLJ
noted that Ellis not only convinced justices that a national
consensus existed, he helped build it through his writing on
mental health and the law, through his work with organizations
such as the American Association on Mental Retardation and The
ARC of the U.S., through numerous appearances before legislative
and congressional committees and his prior friend-of-the court
briefs filed in 13 U.S. Supreme Court cases.
While Ellis
was working on an American Bar Association project in the 1980s
to revise criminal standards for the mentally ill, the capital
defense bar took notice and contacted him for help with their
cases.
The clients,
Ellis told NJR, were individuals whose understanding was,
in fact, so limited that it was inconceivable they deserved
death.
Ellis credits
the AAMR and The ARC, in particular, for leading the campaign
to ban the death penalty for the retarded in the United States,
in addition to attorneys and others who long trumpeted the cause.
The June
Supreme Court decision, the NLJ noted, was the culmination
of 30 years of his work on behalf of the mentally retarded and
mentally ill persons in the civil and criminal justice systems.
Ellis has
been at UNM since 1976.
***
Professor Norman F. Roderick, Department of Chemical
and Nuclear Engineering, has been named American Institute of
Electrical Engineers (IEEE) Grade of Fellow.
Roderick
was named for his contributions to the modeling and understanding
of high energy density plasmas. The IEEE Grade of Fellow is
conferred by the Board of Directors upon a person with an extraordinary
record of accomplishments in any IEEE field of interest.
A
brief citation is issued to new fellows describing their accomplishments
and the total number selected in any one year does not exceed
one-tenth percent of the total voting Institute membership.
Roderick
joined UNM full time in 1982 after he retired from the U.S.
Air Force.
His
present research interests are in theoretical and computational
plasma physics related to producing and understanding high energy
density plasmas, and the application of plasmas for space power
and propulsion.
***
Anthropology
Professor Lawrence Guy Straus prehistoric archeological
research in El Miron Cave in northern Spain with Universidad
de Cantabria Professor Manuel Gonzalez Morales will soon be
featured in a full-color article in the Athena Review
and in the National Geographic Magazine Spain Edition.
Straus,
editor of the Journal of Anthropological Research, was also
recently featured in a BBC TV program on the controversy concerning
the peopling of the Americas.
Straus
considers work at El Miron Cave one of his major projects in
his 30 years of archeological research.
He
has received another grant to continue El Miron Cave excavations
from the L.S.B. Leakey Foundation.
Past
work at El Miron has been funded by the Fundacion Marcelino
Botin headquartered in Santander, Spain, with support from the
National Science Foundation, the National Geographic Society,
L.S.B. Leakey Foundation, UNM and the Spanish and Cantabrian
Governments.
Thousands
of sediment samples and hundreds of thousands of artifacts have
been uncovered at El Miron.
Straus,
Gonzalez and their team of researchers have generated 51 radiocarbon
dates from El Miron.
UNM
undergraduate and/or graduate students have participated in
the excavations every year since 1996. Straus has conducted
excavations and surveys in Spain, France, Portugal and Belgium
almost every year since 1972.