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TEACHING STREET LAW
University of Houston Law Center students are gaining teaching experience while
working on their lawyering skills, thanks to a new Street Law class started by Professor
Ellen Marrus.
In addition to classes at the Law Center, the course is being taught at five Houston-area
high schools
“It’s very exciting,” said Marrus, Royce Till Professor of Law and director of the Center
for Children, Law & Policy. “The purpose of the class for the high school students is to
encourage them to think about college and law school. But, studies have also found that
when adolescents are exposed to the law, they’re more likely to obey the law. They have a
better understanding of the process that we go through in making laws, they buy into the
concepts behind our legal system and it becomes much more important to them to become
law-abiding citizens.”
Each Law Center student taking the course is assigned to a high school class and
responsible for developing lessons and administering tests for a semester. They also are
tasked with teaching high school students the skills to participate in a mock trial. In the
first year of operation, the course reached almost 250 high school students.

ROSENBERG LECTURE
NAACP President and CEO Cornell
William Brooks said in March 2016 that
the presence of cameras and social media
can help hold police officers accountable
in incidents of racial profiling. Brooks led
his discussion, “Born Suspect: Tragedies
of Racial Profiling,” as part of the Yale
L. Rosenberg Memorial Lecture at the
University of Houston Law Center.
Brooks discussed several high-profile
cases involving racial profiling against
African-Americans, including the death
of Sandra Bland, who committed suicide
in the Waller County Jail in July 2015,
three days after being arrested near
Prairie View University following a
LINZER RECOGNIZED FOR CONTRACT routine traffic violation.
EXPERTISE “The arc of racially profiling and
University of Houston Law Center Professor criminalizing a generation of African-
Peter Linzer was honored in February 2016 with Americans has some longevity — this
a Lifetime Achievement Award at the 11th Annual is not a matter of recent creation,”
International Conference on Contracts – KCON XI Brooks said. “But what is, is our ability
— held at St. Mary’s University in San Antonio. to capture digitally the brutalization and
He also moderated a panel discussion on the dehumanization of African-Americans.
Tools are being employed by not only
“Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Consumer lawyers but laypeople, people from
Contracts, and Arbitration.” all walks of life who have determined
Linzer was chosen for his “outstanding contributions to contract law and to the scholarly within themselves that we can bring an
community,” according to St. Mary’s School of Law Professor Colin P. Marks, chairman end to this form of racialized violence
of this year’s conference. Linzer, who joined the Law Center faculty in 1983, teaches called racial profiling. The ubiquity of
contract law, contract drafting and constitutional law, among other courses, and has written cameras has created the beginning of
extensively on contracts. accountability.”

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