This episode of Illinois LawCast examines the experiences of three first-generation college students enrolled in the JD program at Illinois Law. We pride ourselves on offering the services and support that help all of our students, and with 85% of our newest JD students being first-generation law students, it is important to provide support for the unique challenges of law school. Our robust student support, career counseling, and sense of community have helped make Illinois one of the top destinations among Big Ten schools for first-generation college students: those who are the first in their family to receive any degree. In 2025, our 1L class included 21% first-generation college students; that number in 2026 is 19%. In this episode, I am joined by three first-generation college students in their second year of law school, Brian Rodriguez, Alex Nevarez, and Zaccheus Ng-Posey. Each of them share about their backgrounds and what made them want to continue their journey in higher education by pursuing a law degree from Illinois.

Professor Robin Kar recently published a co-authored article in CHI, the #1 journal for Human-Computer Interaction. The article, “Living Contracts: Beyond Document-Centric Interaction with Legal Agreements,” explores a future where contracts educate users on legal rights not in the contract, transform legal language to help understanding, and proactively supply contractual information as needed; the authors refer to these interfaces as living contracts.

“You can imagine some really drastic scenarios in which, for example, federal officers think that there’s some funny business going on, and they decide to seize ballots or make arrests. That would be tremendously disruptive of the midterm elections,” Professor Jason Mazzone told ABC 7 while discussing a hypothetical future in which Department of Justice election monitors cause more trouble than they prevent. His remarks came as part of a segment on the Trump administration’s plans to deploy monitors during the midterm election.

Recently, several states have enacted laws to provide redress in state courts for persons who have suffered violations of federal constitutional rights at the hands of federal officials. A new version of this law, from California, avoids some of the mistakes of previous efforts in states like Illinois, as Professors Jason Mazzone and Vikram Amar write in an article on Justia Verdict. However, the law includes an “unhelpful blend of the serious and the theatrical, in which the latter often obscures the former and thus distracts from what should be a careful and civil conversation about helpful legal innovations that actually might matter.”

Our first episode of season three focuses on the College of Law’s Office of Career Planning and Professional Development. Led by Executive Assistant Dean Greg Miarecki, the office offers students a strategic approach to finding the jobs they desire through changing employment climates via counseling, networking, marketing, and a variety of formal programs. Miarecki joins the podcast for the first half to provide an overview of the office and the work they do; in the second half, Director of Career Planning Matthew Clegg shares some specifics of the work he does as a career counselor as well as how he focuses on public interest and helping students who want to work for the public good find their place.

As a land-grant institution, the University of Illinois was founded on the idea it should provide education to the people of the state of Illinois, no matter their background or socioeconomic level. In addition, the College of Law’s mission includes advancing justice and the public good. To marry these goals, the College of Law and Pre-Law Advising Services created the I Am Ready program, which supports students from any institution in central Illinois to enhance participant success in the law admissions process and the first year of law school. 

The University of Illinois College of Law is proud to share that third-year student Gavin Sepanik has been named a 2026 recipient of The American Bankruptcy Law Journal Prize. The award recognizes students who have earned the highest grade in a bankruptcy class at any ABA accredited United States law school. Sepanik was nominated for the award by Professor Robert Lawless, making him the second recipient from the College of Law in the last two years, following Mary Hudson, who was nominated by Professor Ralph Brubaker in 2025.

In the Summer/Fall 2026 issue of “The Learning Curve,” published by AALS, Professor Michael Loch shared an article on how to increase focus on how students learn. Centered around Hermann Ebbinghaus’s forgetting curve, the article details why individuals forget things and how law schools can help their students overcome the nature of forgetting to maximize success.

In the search for new means of sustainability in agriculture, genome-edited microbes represent a promising tool. In a new paper, Professor Jacob Sherkow investigates the regulatory issues and differences between the US and EU approaches, including recent EU legislation. The article suggests that there are lessons to be learned on both sides and provides recommendations for future regulations.