Rush to be inducted into IU Maurer Academy of Law Alumni Fellows

Indiana Chief Justice Loretta Rush is among five Indiana University Maurer School of Law alumni who will be inducted into the school’s Academy of Law Alumni Fellows this week.

Rush, along with Rodolfo Chapa Jr., Julia Lamber, Larry A. Mackey and Carl E. Ver Beek, will be recognized by their alma mater at an induction ceremony Friday on the school’s Bloomington campus. The academy was created in 1985 to recognize Maurer alumni whose careers have been defined by “exceptional personal achievement and dedication to the highest standards of the profession.”

“Members of the academy have brought honor to the legal profession through their accomplishments in the practice of law, business, the judiciary and public service,” Dean Austen Parrish said in a statement released through the law school. “This year’s inductees continue the tradition of accomplishments that they share with the most distinguished alumni of our 175-year history.”

After graduating from IU Maurer in 1983, Rush spent 15 years in general legal practice in northern Indiana before being elected to the Tippecanoe Superior Court, where she helped create the county’s Court Appointed Special Advocate Program. Rush was then appointed to the high court by Gov. Mitch Daniels in 2012, the second woman to sit on the Supreme Court bench, and became the state’s first female chief justice in 2014.

Mackey is a partner at Barnes & Thornburg LLP in Indianapolis, where he has helped to grow its nationwide white collar and investigations practice group since 1998. He was the federal prosecutor on the 1995 bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City.

Lamber is a professor emerita of law at IU Maurer, where she pioneered courses in employment discrimination, women and the law, and civil rights statutes.

Chapa is the former global director and vice president of Nike Inc., and Ver Beek is of counsel at the Grand Rapids, Michigan, law firm Varnum.