New and Retiring Faculty
New Faculty
Professor Evan Absher (J.D. ’15)
joins the School of Law as an assistant clinical professor. He received a B.A. and J.D. from the University of Missouri-Kansas City. He was previously a senior program officer at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation and the co-founder and CEO of Folks Capital.
Professor Pat Brayer
is our former advocacy fellow. He joins the faculty now as an associate professor of law to teach criminal law and criminal procedure. Before joining the faculty, Professor Brayer served for more than 30 years in the Missouri State Public Defender System Trial Division. His last post in that system was as the deputy district defender (first assistant) in St. Louis County. He received his B.A. from St. Louis University and his J.D. from Loyola University in New Orleans.
Lisa Gooden
joined the Law Library as the circulations and operations librarian. She received a B.A. from Tulane University and an M.A. from the University of Missouri-Columbia. She was formerly a senior collection development librarian at the Kansas City Public Library.
Professor Sergio Alberto Gramitto Ricci
received his LL.B. and J.D. equivalents from the Università degli Studi di Milano, and a Ph.D. from the Università Bocconi. He joins the School of Law as an associate professor of law and will teach business organizations and courses in corporate governance. He previously taught at Cornell Law School, Monash University, New York University School of Law and Hofstra University School of Law Capital.
Professor Wendy Ross
received a B.A. from Texas Tech University and a J.D. from the University of Missouri-Columbia. She joins UMKC as a clinical professor of law and will direct the Child & Family Services Clinic. She was previously a professor of law at Texas Tech University, where she was the director of the Family Law and Housing Clinic.
Professor Barbara Zabawa
joins the faculty as an associate professor of law. She will teach a coterie of health law courses. She received her B.A. from Lawrence University, her M.P.H. from the University of Michigan and her J.D. from the University of Wisconsin. Before coming to UMKC, Professor Zabawa taught at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee’s School of Biomedical Sciences & Health Care Administration.
Retiring Faculty
Cary Powers
After 14 years serving the UMKC School of Law as its alumni and constituent relations officer, Cary Powers celebrated her retirement in December 2023. Although Cary has served the law school for 14 years, she has worked in the Kansas City legal community for 40 years. Cary has always put law alumni first because she values the relationships she has with alumni and wants to ensure that their connection to UMKC Law remains strong. She created and implemented The Big Event to honor and recognize law alumni annually and proudly developed a fun theme year-after-year complete with wearable costume props! She has organized countless socials and reunions to ensure alumni stay connected with their classmates and colleagues. Cary also worked with the Law Alumni Association, the Young Lawyers, and the Diverse Alumni Network, which allow for alumni to volunteer in leadership roles. From her organization of the Pat Kelly Poker Tournament to the Professor Downs Scholarship Golf Tournament and her behind-the-scenes work to support the Young Alumni’s Lunch at the Bar fundraiser, there’s much work that Cary has done that not everyone sees. This work has made an impact because most importantly, Cary is deeply grateful for all of the alumni who have become her lifelong friends, and those relationships are indications that Cary’s work achieved its goal — to ensure and strengthen alumni connections to the UMKC School of Law. At Kansas City Metropolitan Bar Association 139th Annual Meeting on Dec. 8, 2023, Cary was honored with a KCMBA Presidents’ Award. The Presidents’ Award is given based upon service to the legal profession, reflecting favorably upon the mission and objectives of KCMBA. Congratulations, Cary!
Professor Meg Reuter
Professor Meg Reuter, clinical professor of law and director of field placement programs, retired in December 2023. UMKC School of Law has been incredibly fortunate to have Professor Reuter here for the better part of a decade developing a nationally recognized experiential education program. Professor Reuter joined UMKC Law in 2016 after having served as clinical professor, research faculty, assistant dean and director at three different law schools (Brooklyn Law, Indiana University-Maurer Law, and New York Law School). She is a nationally recognized expert in law school curriculum design, professional development and externship teaching. This past year she served as co-chair of the American Association of Law Schools Externship Committee. She is the co-author of Learning Law Through Experience and by Design (2019), a ground-breaking clinical education textbook, and she helps to direct a regular national survey of applied legal education through the Center for the Study of Applied Legal Education.
Bringing this expertise to UMKC, Professor Reuter curated an exceptional array of field placement positions available for students in the region. In addition to long-standing externships in prosecutors’ offices, public defenders’ offices and courts, she helped students find specific niche placements in areas that met their individual interests, such as the front offices of the Royals and Sporting Kansas City or the general counsel’s office of Truman Medical Centers.
Professor Reuter’s design of the externship program provided two critical components that set UMKC Law School’s field placement program apart. First, Professor Reuter provides training and consultation to supervising attorneys to not only provide students with rich experiences but to give those students regular feedback on the wide variety of legal and professionalism skills they are developing. Second, Professor Reuter added a curricular component, the Learning from Practice series of courses, required of all students in the semesters in which they are engaged in externships. These courses, co-taught with a team of adjuncts trained by Professor Reuter, educate students about the expectations of practice and guide them in the skills needed to fully learn from experience. Students are encouraged to think beyond the day-to-day work they are doing to connect their experience to the professional responsibilities of lawyers to fulfill their roles not only as representatives of clients, but also as officers of the court and public citizens with a special duty to justice.
UMKC Law has been exceedingly fortunate to have such a creative and scholarly leader of the experiential education program.
Professor Wanda Temm
It is difficult to capture in a few words the impact Professor Wanda Temm has made over the course of her 32 years at the UMKC School of Law. The Elanore C. Blue Professor of Lawyering Skills first joined the School of Law as a member of our legal writing faculty and soon stepped in to assume the role of director of legal writing. During her 14 years leading that program, UMKC School of Law gained a national reputation for excellence in legal writing. That reputation is largely due to Professor Temm’s extraordinary aptitude and work ethic in continually reshaping and improving that program to meet increasing demands for skills instruction and her leadership in the community of lawyering skills professors, most especially in her leadership of the Association for Legal Writing Directors. All first-year students over the course of decades were shaped by her leadership of that program. In addition to building the overall program for legal research and writing, she directed what has become, for most students, one of the most memorable and significant moments in the first year of law school – the spring mock appellate arguments. Generations of legal writing teaching assistants will tell you of how their experience teaching in Professor Temm’s legal writing program transformed their career – teaching them leadership, teaching, counseling and, of course, research and writing skills. In recognition of her extraordinary skills and accomplishments, Professor Temm was honored as the inaugural recipient of the Eleanore C. Blue Lawyering Skills Professorship, named after the first full-time female faculty member at the then-University of Kansas City School of Law.
Professor Temm’s impact has gone far beyond the writing program. In 2003, Professor Temm stepped in, built and began directing a bar preparation program that has transformed law students' performance on the bar, and has once again elevated the School of Law to national prominence. Professor Temm early on recognized that there are critical aspects of bar preparation that went beyond merely memorizing elements of the law. She built a program that addressed these neglected but critical aspects: teaching students test preparation skills, providing intensive opportunities for practice and feedback on essay writing, and coaching students to maintain their stamina, resilience, confidence and self-discipline through the preparation and testing process. Today, participants who take part in the program have a bar passage rate of over 90%. In recognition of her innovation and effectiveness, she received the 2021 President’s Innovative Teaching Award, the university system’s highest teaching award. Her book, Clearing the Last Hurdle: Mapping Success on the Bar Exam, the leading textbook on bar preparation, was recognized with the 2022 Marvin Rich Prize.
Professor Temm's retirement was made official as of January 2024; however, she will continue to direct the bar preparation program. UMKC will be embarking on a new phase in that program that will guarantee all law students a comprehensive bar preparation program without additional cost at graduation. Professor Temm will be building out that program, in partnership with Access Lex’s Helix Bar Preparation program, to meet the demands of the new NextGen bar, which today’s first-year students will be taking in three short years.
Few faculty members have shaped the legal careers of so many students from the first day of law school to the last day of the bar exam. UMKC School of Law has been extremely fortunate to be able to count Professor Temm among its faculty.