Lifetime Achievement Award

Stetson University College of Law awards a lifetime achievement award for excellence in advocacy to a deserving member of the legal community. This award recognizes excellence in all facets of advocacy, from teaching others to representing clients. The recipient exemplifies the legal profession's commitment to furthering the art, science and skill of advocacy instruction.

2010 Lifetime Achievement Award for Excellence in Advocacy

Recipient: Barbara Bergman

Barbara Bergman joined the University of New Mexico School of Law faculty in 1987, bringing years of experience as a criminal defense lawyer with the Public Defender Service in Washington, D.C. She also spent a year as associate counsel to President Jimmy Carter and had practiced for three years with an employment law/union-side labor law firm.

Her teaching remains focused on criminal law, but once a year, she leads students through an intense Evidence and Trial Practice course. On leave in 2000-2001 and the spring of 2004, Bergman put her teaching into practice when she worked on the defense team in the State of Oklahoma v. Terry Nichols, a state death penalty case. Nichols was prosecuted for conspiracy and murder in connection with the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma City. Bergman has lectured and published extensively, including serving as editor of the Fourth Edition of the D.C. Criminal Jury Instructions. She also is the co-author of Wharton's Criminal Evidence, 15th edition, and The Every Trial Criminal Defense Resource Book, which deals with emergencies that may arise in criminal trials.

Bergman is a past president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. In 2001, Bergman received the Robert C. Heeney Award, the highest honor given by the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. The Roscoe Pound Foundation also honored her with the Richard S. Jacobson Award for excellence in teaching of trial advocacy.

2009 Lifetime Achievement Award for Excellence in Advocacy

Recipients: Professor Thomas A. Mauet and Hon. Warren D. Wolfson

Professor Thomas A. Mauet directs the Trial Advocacy Program and teaches Evidence, Pretrial Litigation, and Trial Advocacy. For ten years, Professor Mauet practiced as a trial lawyer in Chicago. He was a prosecutor with the Cook County State's Attorney and the United States Attorney offices. He was a commercial litigator and specialized in medical negligence litigation with the firm of Hinshaw & Culbertson. During these years he also was an adjunct faculty member at Loyola and Chicago-Kent law schools, teaching criminal law and trial advocacy. Professor Mauet is a leading authority on trials. His latest book is Trials: Strategy, Skills, and the New Powers of Presentation (2d ed. 2009). His other books include: Trial Techniques (7th ed. 2007), Materials in Trial Advocacy (6th ed. 2007), Pretrial (7th ed. 2008), and Trial Evidence (4th ed. 2009), all published by Aspen Law & Business. Trial Techniques is the leading text in the field and has Canadian, French, New Zealand, Australian, and Chinese editions.

Professor Mauet was an Arizona Superior Court Judge Pro Tempore in 1987-88 and in 1988-89 taught at George Washington University as the Howrey Professor of Trial Advocacy. He has also served as a visiting faculty member at Harvard Law School's trial advocacy program and at Washington University. He is a former regional director of the National Institute for Trial Advocacy (NITA) and has taught in numerous NITA programs throughout the United States since 1976. Professor Mauet's research interests center on the application of social science research, particularly in psychology and communications, to the jury trial process.

The Honorable Warren D. Wolfson graduated from Gregory Grammar School and John Marshall High School. He received a B.S. degree in journalism from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1955 and his bachelor of law degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1957. He was admitted to practice law before the Supreme Court of Illinois in 1957, the United States District Court, Northern District of Illinois, in 1963, the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in 1965 and the United States Supreme Court in 1970.

He was appointed as a Judge of the Circuit Court of Cook County in 1975, elected to a full term in 1976 and retained in 1982, 1988 and 1994. Judge Wolfson was assigned to the Appellate Court, First District, in December 1994. Judge Wolfson, co-author of Trial Evidence, 2d ed., and Materials in Trial Advocacy, 5th ed., has been director of the Trial Advocacy program at Chicago-Kent since 1971. He taught trial advocacy at the University of Chicago Law School from January 1985 to May 2000 and has taught and lectured for the National Institute for Trial Advocacy. He currently teaches an Advanced Evidence Seminar at Chicago-Kent. He is married to Lauretta Wolfson.

2007 Lifetime Achievement Award for Excellence in Advocacy

Recipient: Terence MacCarthy

For over 37 years, MacCarthy has been the federal defender in Chicago, an office with an outstanding record of dedication and achievement. As a defender, his only client with national name recognition was Al Capone, whom he successfully represented in 1991 at an ABA retrial of the 1931 income tax case. He has served on the faculty of National Criminal Defense College every summer since its inception in the early 1970s. He is also a member of the faculty of the Western Trial Advocacy Institute, the Northwestern Short Course, the University of Virginia Trial Advocacy Institute, and has taught at the Gerry Spence Trial Lawyer's College.