Fourth Annual Emerita Chancellor & Dean Mary Kay Kane Excellence Awards

Zach Price, Eucalyptus Foundation Professor of Law.  Professor Price has taught at UC Law SF since 2013 and holds the Eucalyptus Foundation Endowed Chair. Since he joined the legal academy, most of Professor Price’s work has focused on finding constructive legal solutions to political polarization. His book Constitutional Symmetry: Judging in a Divided Republic was published by Cambridge University Press in November 2024, to widespread critical and public acclaim. His scholarly articles include “Trumpian Impoundments in Historical Perspective” in the Stanford Law Review Online, “Appropriations Presidentialism” (written with Matthew Lawrence and Eloise Pasachoff) in the Georgetown Law Journal Online, “Faithful Execution in the Fifty States” in the Georgia Law Review, “Congress’s Power Over Military Offices” in the Texas Law Review, “Funding Restrictions and Separation of Powers” in the Vanderbilt Law Review, “Enforcement Discretion and Executive Duty” in the Vanderbilt Law Review, and “NAMUDNO’s Non-Existent Principle of State Equality” in the New York University Law Review Online.  Professor Price has also contributed to publications including the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Scotusblog, Notice and Comment, Administrative and Regulatory News, Law and Liberty, Balkinization, the Supreme Court of California Blog, the State and Local Government Blog, and the Take Care Blog. 

 The selection committee was particularly grateful for Professor Price’s prominence in the national discourse and in on-campus panels to help our community understand and contextualize current events, and for his generous support of UC Law SF faculty colleagues’ scholarship through insightful comments and conversations. 

Nira Geevargis, Clinical Professor and Director of Externship Programs. Professor Nira Geevargis has taught at UC Law since 2019 and serves as the Director of Externship Programs, overseeing UC Law SF’s program for developing students’ practical legal capabilities through placements in qualifying judicial, government, or corporate counsel offices. As director, Professor Geevargis provides guidance to students, teaches course classroom components, and provides oversight of placements and supervising attorneys. Professor Geevargis also leads the law school’s popular and innovative Corporate Counsel Externship Program, in which students work in-house at for-profit and non-profit companies. Professor Geevargis has generously shared her pedagogical expertise with colleagues on the faculty and has demonstrated her dedication to creating a culture of teaching excellence within externship programs. The committee was also struck by Professor Geevargis’s inspirational and skilled classroom teaching. Students describe her as being passionate about teaching, genuine, caring, and an expert in her field. As one of Professor Geevargis’s students recently put it in an end-of-semester course evaluation: “YOU ARE THE GLUEEEEE.” As another student wrote: “Professor Geevargis has a God-given gift to be able to uplift students, provide constructive feedback, and make her students perform at their highest levels.” 

Professor Geevargis is a national leader in externships and experiential education. She is an active member of the Bay Area Consortium on Externships, a network of local externship faculty who collaborate on placement oversight and student development. She regularly presents to externship and clinical faculty on pedagogy and program administration, and trains attorneys on effective supervision and feedback techniques. She currently serves as the co-chair of the Executive Committee of the Association of American Law Schools (AALS) Clinical Section, which is the second-largest section in AALS. From 2021 to 2023, she served as the co-chair of the AALS Clinical Section’s Externships Committee. She also co-teaches the annual AALS Clinical Section’s Teaching Methodologies Committee’s Externships Case Rounds and has published scholarship on this work. Last year, the AALS Clinical Section Externships Committee honored Professor Geevargis with its inaugural Mentorship Award to recognize her commitment and dedication to the externship community.  

Teaching Excellence (Part-Time Faculty)