I'm devoting Wednesdays to profiling my former students, alternating between Baylor and St. Thomas (since I have now had ten years at each).
Dustin Benham was an intellectual force from the moment he came to law school from undergrad at Texas Tech (and probably before). He was the kind of person who was quoted in classes he wasn't taking by students in that other class. When I got the chance to teach him I was struck by his straight-up smarts, his humility, and his genuine good character.
I asked Dustin to help me with my briefing in the crack/powder cases, and it turned out that he was a great writer. When the Kimbrough case was argued in 2007 before the Supreme Court, he worked with me on an amicus brief and contributing to the defenders' brief. I took him and another student who worked on it, Matt Acosta, to watch the argument. We got to see something remarkable: Chief Justice Roberts use our words almost verbatim in pressing the government's lawyer, Michael Dreeben (who is one of the best appellate advocates in the country). I recounted that here.
After he graduated and began working for a firm, he kept helping me with those cases-- including prepping me for arguments on consecutive days in the 9th Circuit and the 8th Circuit. That 8th Circuit case, Spears, we eventually won in the Supreme Court, and the Court held that sentencing judges could categorically reject the 100-1 ratio between crack and powder embedded in the sentencing guidelines. I had the help of one person in that-- Dustin Benham, and we worked as equals.
He ended up accepting a job teaching at Texas Tech at the same time I took the offer at St. Thomas (summed up here). Dustin has positively crushed it at Tech, and is now a Full Professor. He was the Professor of the Year there for advanced-level classes in 2014. And 2016. And 2017. And 2018. And 2019. And last year, he was given Texas Tech's campus-wide Distinguished Teaching Award.
Though I didn't have much to do with it, I'm really proud of what Dustin has done. I believe in academic legacies: I am, for example, the product of Dr. Joanne Braxton's teaching, and she learned from John Blassingame, who studied under C. Vann Woodward, who met and was influenced by W.E.B. DuBois, who learned from William James, who was influenced by his godfather, Ralph Waldo Emerson (and that is just one of many lines of legacy from just one of my mentors). Who teaches us matters, but so does who we teach; there is no doubt that teaching people like Dustin and Joy Tull and Gordon Davenport at Baylor made me better as a teacher and as a person.
# posted by Mark Osler @ 1:00 AM
