On Friday, May 3, master’s degrees will be conferred at 6 p.m., and Saturday, May 4, baccalaureate degrees will be awarded at 9 a.m. in Bloomer Sullivan Arena. Both ceremonies be available for viewing online at www.SE.edu/live and on the SE Facebook and YouTube pages. More information is available at www.SE.edu/graduation.
Southeastern Oklahoma State University assistant professor of criminal justice and special assistant to the president Dr. Mike Davis has been announced as a 2023 winner of the Maurice Merrill Golden Quill Award by the Oklahoma Bar Association.
Davis will receive the award at the OBA’s annual meeting in Oklahoma City on November 3. The OBA gives this award to “the author of the best-written article published this year in the Oklahoma Bar Journal.” The Golden Quill Award is named in honor of Maurice Merrill, a professor at the University of Oklahoma College of Law from 1936 to 1968.
Davis receives the 2023 award for his article “Skinner v. Oklahoma: How Two McAlester Lawyers Derailed Criminal Sterilization in America and the U.S. Supreme Court Invented ‘Strict Scrutiny’ as a Result”, which was published in the May 2023 issue of the Oklahoma Bar Journal.
“I am deeply honored to receive this award from my fellow attorneys,” Davis said. “I am glad that research about Oklahoma’s contributions to American legal history is getting this attention.”
Davis is also a prior winner of the Maurice Merrill Golden Quill Award in 2018, for an article he authored on disability accommodations in higher education.
Davis recently served a term on the Board of Governors of the Oklahoma Bar Association from 2020 to 2022, and now serves the lawyering profession as an Associate Bar Examiner, grading Bar Exams once each year. He was recently appointed to the Continuing Legal Education Commission, a board that regulates ongoing education requirements for practicing attorneys.
More information on 2023 Oklahoma Bar Association award recipients can be found at https://www.okbar.org/annualmeeting/awards/.
