Major growth in the law faculty

As a staff attorney for the Legal Aid Bureau of Buffalo for more than three years, doing criminal defense work in Buffalo City Court, Farina Barth ’17 handled over 300 cases a year.

Now, as a lecturer in the LAWR program, her caseload is down to 25—the first-year students she’ll guide through two semesters of building the fundamental skills of lawyering.

Law isn’t made out of thin air, and to understand how it works in society, there’s no substitute for putting the law in context.

That’s Joel Black's historian’s eye at work—and in his teaching in UB Law’s B.A. in Law program, Black is guiding his students toward both a practical understanding of law and its application, and the situations out of which our legal system has arisen.

Jorge Luis Fabra-Zamora’s experience and scholarship are decidedly global. A native of Colombia, he earned a bachelor of laws degree from the Universidad de Cartagena before moving to Canada for master’s and doctoral degrees in philosophy from McMaster University.

At UB Law, he will teach Torts and Conflict of Laws this year, and in the future is looking to offer courses in Law and Jurisprudence, and Theory of Law, in keeping with his scholarly interest in legal philosophy.

“A jurist is a legal chemist,” says Jorge Farinacci-Fernós, who is beginning a yearlong visiting assistant professorship at the law school. “We just put two things together and something interesting happens.”

Such as, he notes, the Ninth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, on which he’ll be teaching a seminar, along with a broader Constitutional Law course. Farinacci-Fernós comes to UB Law from Interamerican University of Puerto Rico Law School, in San Juan, where he has taught since 2017.

At St. Bonaventure University, where Thomas Hare served as an assistant professor of business law, he ushered undergraduates into the world of contracts, torts, securities regulation and legal reasoning. And he mentored many of them as they decided on law school and worked their way through the LSAT and the application process.

“It’s one of the most satisfying aspects of the profession,” says Hare, who joins the UB Law faculty this fall to teach Legal Reasoning and Introduction to American Legal Institutions in the B.A. in Law program.

Professor Tanya Monestier’s students agree on one thing – she expects and delivers excellence in the classroom.  At Roger Williams School of Law in Rhode Island, she was named Professor of the Year by one graduating class, and received the honors Distinguished Teaching Professor of Law and Distinguished Research Professor of Law.

Monestier holds an LL.M. from the University of Cambridge in England and an LL.B. from Toronto’s Osgoode Hall Law School. At UB Law, she’ll teach courses in Contracts, Sales and Transnational Litigation.

With four academic degrees and aspirations toward another, Pamela Newell knows the value of rigorous study in higher learning. She joins the faculty this fall as a lecturer in the LAWR program.

But her wide real-world experience—she has been in private practice, taught at the university and community college levels, worked as an appellate court clerk and in worker’s compensation, and investigated EEO complaints—enables her to bring to the classroom plenty of practical wisdom.