An avid crossword-solver, UW tax law professor Sam Donaldson was looking forward to working the puzzle in the back of his in-flight magazine on a recent trip. To his disappointment, it was a puzzle he’d already solved. In fact, it was one that Donaldson had constructed himself and was first published in the New York Times.

Any fan of crossword puzzles knows how addictive they can be, and the puzzle bug bit Donaldson as a child. He was as an avid reader (and solver) of Games magazine puzzles and his father solved the newspaper crossword puzzle every day.

“As a child, I would peer over his shoulder as he worked the crosswords, and occasionally he’d ask for my help with the clues,” said Donaldson. “I realized later that I don’t think he ever really needed my help.”

A few years ago, Donaldson watched Word Play, a documentary about crossword-solvers and constructors, and was intrigued with the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament featured in the film. He attended the 2008 event to celebrate his 40th birthday. Stressing that he doesn’t consider himself good to enough be truly competitive (“I was ranked 492 out of 699 contestants”), Donaldson said the weekend “was better than I could have ever hoped.”

“The contestants were all very friendly, warm, wonderful people. Even though crossword solving tends to be a solo activity, entire families came to the tournament.”

At the tournament, he talked to other contestants about constructing crosswords. They had recommendations for books and software and on the flight home, Donaldson wondered “Could I be good enough to get a puzzle in the NYT?” When he returned to Seattle, he started to construct his first puzzle.

Constructing crossword puzzles is just as complex as the puzzles themselves. They cannot have more than 78 words of at least 3 letters in length. The words must be recognizable. The grid can have no more than 38 black squares and, for English crossword puzzles, must have 180-degree symmetry (meaning they look the same upside-down as they do right-side up). Words used in clues cannot be found in the answers. And, a good puzzle has a clever theme. For NYT puzzles, the difficulty of the puzzle increases later in the week, meaning a Wednesday puzzle is harder to solve than a Monday puzzle, with Saturday’s puzzle being the most difficult.

Donaldson says he is drawn to puzzles, especially the construction of word puzzles, for much of the same reason he was drawn to tax law.

“Crossword constructors are like tax lawyers: you are limited by a ton of restrictions, but yet you have to have the ability to be creative within the existing set of very strict guidelines. You have to come up with things that work,” he said. They also share the love of words and the complexity of the English language.

“I don’t have the word smarts of most puzzle constructors, but I enjoy the impact each word has on a puzzle. Even the clues make creative use of language.”

Donaldson said the first puzzles he created and submitted were “horrible,” but he kept at it. After several of what he calls “thanks, but no thanks,” letters, Donaldson received a direct reply from none other than Will Shortz, the crossword puzzle editor of the NYT (referred to in Word Play as the Errol Flynn of Crosswords).

“He said, ‘I like this one, but can you fix one corner of the puzzle?'” Donaldson reworked it and, after a few more tweaks and bits of advice from Shortz, he was informed his puzzle was accepted for publication.

“The tricky thing about having your puzzle published in the NYT is you never know when exactly it will appear. They’ll tell you ‘It’s a Tuesday puzzle,’ but it could take up to a year for it to be published.”

On Thursday, October 2, 2008, Donaldson performed his daily routine of turning to the NYT crossword puzzle in the newspaper. After answering the first clue, he was dismayed to find the answer for 1A was the same as 1A for his own puzzle that he submitted. It was when he went to the second clue, however, that he realized this was his puzzle — it turns out that Shortz had slightly changed his 1A clue.

So far, the NYT has published two of Donaldson’s puzzles (the second appeared Wednesday, June 3, 2009) and accepted another four for publication. Law School Dean Emeritus Ron Hjorth, a friend and colleague of Donaldson’s, is also an avid crossword solver. Hjorth popped his head into Donaldson’s office after solving his second published puzzle with this advice: “Don’t quit your day job.”

When he’s not working on or creating puzzles, Donaldson directs the law school’s masters program in tax law and teaches a number of tax and business law courses. He’s popular with law students, who voted him Professor of the Year in 2002, 2004, 2006 and 2008. By student request, he also holds the honored role of auctioneer at the law school’s biggest fundraising event, the annual Public Interest Law Association auction.

As for Donaldson’s first NYT published puzzle, that later appeared in his Delta Sky Magazine, Donaldson admitted to making a few trips up and down the airplane aisles to see who was working on his puzzle.

“Wouldn’t you know it, they were all busy working the darn Sudoku!”

Two UW School of Law students have brought the issue of climate change as it relates to human rights to the forefront and recently went on the road presenting their work at Stanford Law School and in Europe.

Third-year law students Jen Marlow and Jeni Krencicki Barcelos were invited to present at Stanford Law School one day prior to the school’s conference focused on social and environmental justice, “Shaking the Foundations.” From California, Marlow and Barcelos traveled to Geneva, Switzerland to meet with the United Nations Human Rights Council and other NGO and U.N. agencies.

The two will then travel to Bergen, Norway, where they have been invited to present ideas and results from a conference they coordinated last May. Called Three Degrees: The Law of Climate Change and Human Rights, the conference was a law student-led effort to develop a legal system addressing the impacts of climate change on human rights. The City of Bergen invited Marlow and Barcelos to talk at a conference convened to develop the Bergen Charter of Climate Change and Human Rights.

“We are very excited to participate in this exciting and ambitious collaboration in Bergen,” said Marlow.

Marlow and Barcelos presented “Climate, Water, Ethics and Equity: Imagining a Three Degree World” at the First International Undergraduate Conference on Climate, Water, Weather and Society last July at East China Normal University in Shanghai, China. Information from their presentations is being incorporated into a slide show for The Climate Project (TCP), former Vice President Al Gore’s grassroots organization, as a result of the Three Degrees conference. Barcelos, a Gates Public Service Scholarship recipient, is a current TCP presenter who was trained by Gore to deliver a slide show based on his Academy Award-winning documentary, An Inconvenient Truth.

Marlow and Barcelos are currently working on drafting recommendations to present to international policy makers at the United Nations Climate Change Conference Copenhagen 2009 later this year.

One of the newest faces on campus is also the face of a new era in legal education. Kellye Testy, the UW School of Law Dean and James W. Mifflin University Professor of Law, is one of the top leaders across the country looking at how the law school curriculum needs to respond to match the rapidly changing demands facing legal practitioners.

“Legal education is at an important crossroads, one that more resembles the complexity of LaGuardia than a traditional town square,” Testy recently wrote, and she plans to lead the UW School of Law through this labyrinth to emerge as a national leader.

Growing up in the shadow of Indiana University, education became important to Testy, a first-generation college graduate.

“I’m not from a family of educated persons in a formal sense and my going to college was lucky — we just happened to live in Bloomington,” she said. “At Indiana, I fell in love with the whole university environment. I was compelled by education because it transforms so many lives and helps people achieve their dreams and be what society needs then to be.”

After her undergraduate days, Testy launched a successful career in business in Northern California. Her next step was law school — not a surprising choice given her love of language and the written word — and that’s the step that would lead her to Seattle.

Testy applied to only one law school — Indiana, of course — and as a first-year law student, she took a civil procedure class taught by David Skover, a professor visiting from the University of Puget Sound Law School. (The school is now at Seattle University.) Skover, the Frederic C. Tausend Professor of Law at SU, said when he first met Testy, he realized she had extraordinary talent and aptitude.

“Kellye’s performance in the classroom so far exceeded that of her classmates, I explained to her that I couldn’t call on her as often as she raised her hand, since her astute and thorough commentary left too few opportunities for other students to contribute.”

Reflecting on the advantages teaching in the Seattle metropolitan area would have vis-à-vis remaining in Bloomington, Skover recalled that he told Kellye: “Kiddo, I’ve got to get you out of here.” Skover returned to Seattle, but stayed in touch with Testy. When a faculty position opened on the SU faculty nearing the time of her graduation, Skover asked her to apply.

Testy was at a point where she was looking at several different paths. She had clerked for Judge Jesse E. Eschbach, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. Her position at Kirkland & Ellis in Chicago, an internationally renowned corporate and tax law firm, could lead to a promising career. She had been offered, and was on the verge of accepting, a faculty position with a public university in the Midwest. But, in the end, it was the charm of Seattle that sealed her fate.

She woke up the morning of her interview to fog horns and walked down to Pike Place Market. “Indiana is a long way from any mountains or oceans. I absolutely fell in love with this city. I haven’t been a bit sorry I came.”

Once in Seattle, Testy moved quickly up the academic career ladder. She was tenured in six years and installed as the Patricia Wismer Professor of Law and promoted to associate dean in less than 10. Testy was hired as the dean of SU’s law school in 2005 and is widely credited for significantly increasing the school’s reputation, not just locally, but across the nation. Academics look to her as a resource and guide for legal education. The bar recognizes Testy’s many accomplishments. Members of the bench respect her leadership and national reputation.

That’s probably why joining the UW appeals to Testy, adding another chapter of challenges and exciting opportunities to her professional biography.

“The UW is wonderful. It is very much a culture of discovery, innovation, and entrepreneurial activity and I love all of those things,” said Testy. “That’s what’s great about being part of a great research university.”

A big research university does have its challenges, Testy points out, as does legal education.

“When you first hear the word ‘research’, you envision a scientist in a lab with a microscope saying, ‘Aha!’ But there’s so much more to it than that, just like in law,” she said. “People tend to think of law as a guy in a courtroom arguing. What’s often missing are the stories about why research or the rule of law is so important to society.”

So much of what society takes for granted — that contracts are enforced, property rights are respected, judges aren’t crooked, and there are remedies for people who have been wronged — is the result of how fundamental the rule of law is, she said.

“We need to tell that story better,” said Testy. Among her first-year priorities are finding and telling these stories about the UW’s law school, including student accomplishments, curriculum reform, faculty research, or program highlights. She also believes that the school’s vital role in the state of Washington is underappreciated. “The amount of public service this law school generates — between the work of its faculty, its law clinics, its students, and its alumni — is immense.”

“Our task is to make the whole more than a sum of its parts, to unify the law school around a common thread, then communicate that to the entire world,” she said, listing some of the UW law school’s strengths: Asian law, tax, global health, public service, Indian law, and law, technology and the arts. She then points out that there are many areas that could shine even brighter with a little work.

The other priority for Testy is the integration of curriculum, so it provides law students with a sensible progression during their legal education. “Theoretical, doctrinal, and skills courses (such as trial advocacy, the clinics, legal writing, and externships) need to be sequenced in a way that makes sense for a student’s professional development. Law schools across the country are doing better in adding skills courses, and the UW is way ahead of the curve on that, but there is still a lot we can do.”

“If we focus on building quality programs and excellence throughout the school, the rest, including reputation and resources, will take care of itself.”

Its clear great things will come with Testy at the helm of the law school. Skover, who readily admits he’s an “unabashed Kellye Testy fan” says here’s what UW can expect from her: fairness, integrity, respect of all, and high standards and expectations.

“If you trust her ability to lead and you listen carefully to her insights and assessments, the school will be much stronger for having had her as a dean.”

The UW School of Law recently announced the selection of the inaugural five recipients of the William H. Gates Public Service Law Scholarship for 2006-07. They are Emily Alvarado, Vanessa Torres Hernandez, Illana Mantell, Colleen Melody, and Michael Peters.

Gates Public Service Law Scholars have the opportunity to attend the UW School of Law and then pursue public interest law without the crushing burden of educational debt. The scholarship program covers tuition, books, room and board and incidental expenses during law school. In exchange, students make a commitment to work for five years in public service.

Each of the first recipients say the chance to earn a law degree from one of the finest schools in the nation, free of any debt, is a dream come true. The financial assistance provided by the scholarship allows them to move directly into jobs doing what they love — providing public service to those in need. Brief biographies of each of the first five Gates scholars appear below:

A 2004 graduate of the UW, Colleen Melody received degrees in Spanish and Law, Society and Justice. Since graduation, she has completed a volunteer internship with The Defender Association and currently works for the American Civil Liberties Union of Washington.

Melody has always been interested in the law and public service — her senior project at the UW was a policy analysis. The connection to public service law, she said, is clear because “it provides justice in the public forum. There is something very satisfying about working with people and providing them access to justice, public justice.”

To be able to walk out of law school with no debt, said Melody, means you can go directly to work in public service. “It’s difficult to accept a lower paying job when you have a large student loan debt. The Gates PSL Scholarship gives you a lot more freedom in choosing a job that speaks to your passion.”

Melody is “excited about getting to know the other scholars” and immersing herself into the existing public interest offerings at the law school, such as the Public Interest Law Association. “I can’t think of a better way to spend three years!”

Vanessa Torres Hernandez received her undergraduate degree from Amherst College and her masters of education. in Teaching and Curriculum from Harvard University. She currently teaches at Soundview School in Lynnwood, Washington.

A native of Guam, Torres Hernandez said her family has always been involved in public service. Her grandfather was the first elected governor of Guam and was instrumental in pushing the U.S. to give the Guam people the right to self-govern and her father is a justice on the Guam Supreme Court. After graduating from Harvard, Torres Hernandez taught at Roxbury Preparatory Charter School in Boston, a school serving low-income students of color. She was inspired to see how kids who faced steep academic and socioeconomic challenges excelled in an environment focused on student achievement. After hearing about the creation of the Gates scholarship, she took the LSAT and applied to the UW law school within two weeks.

“I knew I eventually wanted to go to law school,” said Torres Hernandez. “My fear was that some law schools say they are interested in public service law but when you look closer, it’s just not a priority.” But she said the Gates Public Service Law Scholarship, a focus on public service in externships, the variety of service-oriented clinics, the Street Law program, and a 60-hour service requirement for graduation all pointed to the UW law school’s true commitment to public interest.

Torres Hernandez hopes the experience and education she gains at the law school will lead to work advocating for K-12 education reform either in the non-profit or public policy sector. “I love teaching, but what drives me to work outside of the classroom is when I see an excellent classroom. I think, ‘There should be more great classrooms…and there can be!'”

Ilana Mantell grew up in Toronto, Canada, and graduated from Stanford University in 1998. She said her excitement about “everything” led to her work as a freelance journalist, contributing articles on human rights issues from around the world. Mantell returned to Toronto to work at Interval House, an non-governmental organization with one residential shelter serving at-risk women and children. Over the course of six years, Interval House expanded to eight shelters to become Ontario’s largest private social service agency for women.

“I have always been interested in being an advocate and want to represent the underdog,” she said. “I became interested in public policy because most of the people we served had very little knowledge of how the system worked. They were immigrants and refugees — the most underserved. I watched what the in-house legal clinic lawyers were doing and I became increasingly interested in the legal aspect.”

As for the Gates scholarship, Mantell says, “I’m incredibly grateful. I hope it will inspire other civic leaders and foundations to make a similar gift for public service.”

An acting assistant professor of communication at the UW for the past five years, Michael Peters was raised in Grants Pass, Oregon, and received his undergraduate degree from the University of Portland. After graduating from the University of Arizona with a doctorate in communication, he has focused his scholarly work on health communication, persuasion, quantitative research methods, and interpersonal communication.

Peters’ commitment to community and public service is a result of his upbringing as the son of an educator and a nurse, and his own experiences growing up with cerebral palsy. He has extended that commitment in a variety of ways, including serving as vice chair of the United States Olympic Committee’s Athletes’ Advisory Council. As a Paralympic soccer athlete, he feels strongly that “Olympians and Paralympians have a lot to give back to the community. It is important for us to look for opportunities throughout the year to get involved and touch people’s lives more than just once every four years.”

An increasing interest in health and human rights law and advocacy led Peters to apply to the UW School of Law and, later, the Gates scholarship. “The opportunity to contribute to the legacy of the scholarship’s namesake [William H. Gates] and his great work with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is a tremendous honor. The foundation addresses the kind of issues I’m interested in, particularly global health.” Peters was also attracted to the UW’s strong faculty and connections with other institutions in the broader Seattle community that address global health and justice issues.

“I feel that the UW law school will give me the skills to advocate for those who don’t have a voice, particularly disadvantaged women and children. For me, it’s vitally important to serve others in a way that respects their rights and promotes equal opportunities.”

A native of Brooklyn, New York, Emily Alvarado said it was her experience as a student in the public school system and her mother’s influence, which instilled in her a sense of social awareness. She attended Scripps College in Claremont, California, and after graduation, began her social justice career working for California Peace Action, a grassroots peace and justice organization. Alvarado then interned in the campaign office of U.S. Congresswoman Barbara Lee (9th District, California).

For the last year and a half, Alvarado has worked for Planned Parenthood of Southwestern Oregon as a public affairs field organizer. It was there she solidified her passion for reproductive health and women’s rights advocacy.

“I firmly believe that women are unable to fully participate in society if they cannot control their own fertility,” she said.  “I want to ensure that all women have the right and ability to access reproductive health care services regardless of their race, socioeconomic status or citizenship.” Alvarado would like to continue to work with the reproductive rights movement as an advocate.

“I am committed to use my personal opportunities to create a more just and equitable society.”

The Gates Public Service Law Scholarship Program is named in honor of William H. Gates (Bill Gates) and his commitment to public service. Bill Gates has had a distinguished career in law and many years of public service and presently serves as Co-Chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The Scholarship Program was announced on the occasion of his 80th birthday in November of 2005.

Five scholarships will be awarded on an annual basis to first year students entering the UW School of Law J.D. program.