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Health Law, Products Liability, Torts


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Biography

Professor Dark joined the faculty at the Howard University School of Law in the fall of 2001. She teaches Torts I, Torts II, Products Liability and Health Law. She is a member of the law school committees on Student Affairs, Law Journal and the Clyde Ferguson Lecturer. She also is Chair of the Law School’s Brown@50 Committee.

Professor Dark came from the United States Attorney’s Office in Portland, Oregon where she was an Assistant United States Attorney in the Civil Division and the supervisor of the Community Relations Unit. She joined the United States Attorney’s Office in May 1995 and remained until July 2001. At the time that Professor Dark joined the USAO in Portland, she was a full professor of law at the T.C. Williams School of Law at the University of Richmond, in Richmond, VA. She joined that office because she wanted the opportunity to work with Kristine Olson, the newly appointed United States Attorney, who wanted the USAO to become an effective community partner with a variety of constituencies throughout the district of Oregon. Ms. Olson also had litigation priorities that included affirmative civil rights work; hate crimes enforcement, prosecution of Violence Against Women cases and the development of environmental justice cases. In order to achieve these objectives, Professor Dark developed a unit known as the Community Relations Unit within the office to oversee these initiative areas and to work cooperatively with constituencies.

CRU managed statewide initiatives on Violence Against Women’s Act, Hate Crimes, Environmental Justice and Weed and Seed (a comprehensive multi-agency approach to law enforcement, crime prevention, and community revitalization projects). There was one Weed and Seed site when she started in 1995 and there were four Weed and Seed sites (including one site on an Indian Reservation) with three possible sites pending at the time she left the USAO. Each of these initiatives required working with state and local law enforcement agencies as well as community groups to ensure that the objectives of a particular initiative was accomplished.

In addition to her work with CRU, Professor Dark was responsible for the affirmative civil rights litigation in the district of Oregon, which included Fair Housing and Americans with Disabilities Act. She also carried some civil cases where she defended the United States in her caseload, which included the Federal Tort Claims Act and Habeas Corpus cases. Some of the significant cases that she handled included a sexual harassment housing case involving eight low-income women who lived in a Portland downtown hotel which resulted in the largest settlement for that type of case in Oregon; a fair housing case based on discrimination against families in a large mobile home park in southern Oregon on behalf of two families and a Fair Housing Organization that resulted in the largest settlement for that type of case in Oregon; and a case involving the Americans with Disabilities Act that established that a sign language interpreter must be provided to a significant partner of the patient in a private physician’s office (first case of its kind in the country). Before she left the USAO, she filed a fair housing case arguing that there was discrimination based on sex when a landlord interpreted its policy against violence between tenants to include the eviction of a female tenant who was the victim of domestic violence. This case was recently settled with the landlord changing the policy. For her work, both as supervisor of the CRU and the litigation that she handled, Professor Dark received three Special Achievement Awards in official recognition of her achievements and contributions to the Department of Justice. In 1997, she received the 1997 Public Service Award to honor her contributions as a federal employee both on and off the job. She was nominated by her office, the Office of the United States Attorney, for this award.

Prior to joining the USAO, Professor Dark was on the faculty at T.C. Williams School of Law at the University of Richmond. She joined the faculty in 1984, and subsequently became the first African American to be tenured in the law school and the first African American woman to be tenured in the University. Her teaching areas at the University of Richmond were Antitrust, Torts, Advanced Torts (specifically Dignitary Interests), White Collar Crime and Gender and the Law. She created extensive teaching materials for many of the courses that she taught. She distinguished herself as a teacher by twice receiving the Distinguished Educator Award at the University of Richmond (1990 and 1993). She was also the recipient of Distinguished Faculty Award by the Virginia Women Attorneys Association Foundation (1991). She was a visiting professor of law at Washington College of Law, American University and Willamette University College of Law. She also continued to teach on a part-time basis while she was at the United States Attorney’s Office. In the spring of 2000, she co-taught a course on Race and the Law at Northwestern School of Law at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon. In the spring of 2001, she taught a course on Women and the Law also at Northwestern School of Law.

Professor Dark has published articles primarily in the torts area on topics like the National Childhood Vaccine Act and Racial Insults. She has also published a series of articles on race, gender and the legal academy. For example, her article Just My ‘Magination published in the Harvard Blackletter Law Review and the article Incorporating Issues of Race, Gender, Class, Sexual Orientation and Disability Into Law School Teaching in the Willamette Law Review.

In the area of Fair Housing, she has offered her personal story as a victim of housing discrimination in videotape titled “Who Can Ever Get Used to This?” Hope Fair Housing in Wheaton, Illinois produced this videotape. This tape has been used nationally by fair housing organizations in a variety of trainings, law schools in property or fair housing courses and the United States Department of Justice. In 1997, she was one of the recipients of the National Fair Housing Alliance’s Awards for Excellence in recognition of her role in the promotion of equal housing opportunity for all. She also received a Hope for People Award in 1991 for her work on Fair Housing Matters from Hope Fair Housing.

She is a frequent lecturer before national, state, and local legal and civic groups. A few of the topics on which she has spoken are Hate Crimes, Bridging ‘isms in the Workplace, Perceiving Stereotypes and Bias, Underscoring the Importance of Fair Housing and the Violence Against Women’s Act. She has also written and spoken extensively on the topic of teaching diversity in the classroom especially as it relates to the law school.

Prior to joining the legal academy in 1984, Professor Dark was a trial attorney at the United States Department of Justice in Washington, D.C. She joined the Justice Department through the Honors Program in 1979. She was in the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice for approximately 4 years. During that time she was involved in grand jury investigations, merger investigations, and some civil litigation. She served as a member of the trial team in United States v. AT&T. Professor Dark also worked as a Special Assistant United States Attorney at the United States Attorney’s Office in the District of Columbia. Her assignment was in the Misdemeanor Branch of the office where she handled a variety of motions and trials (bench and jury). Before leaving the Justice Department, she transferred to the Toxic Torts Section of the Civil Division to work on the defensive asbestos litigation. She had responsibility for cases in New Jersey, Southern California and Missouri.

Professor Dark is a member of the bars in Pennsylvania and New Jersey and an associate member of the bar in Virginia. She received her B.A. magna cum laude from Upsala College, East Orange, New Jersey. She received her Juris Doctor from Rutgers University School of Law in Newark, New Jersey where she was the recipient of the Alumni Senior Prize (graduating senior exhibiting highest achievement in law school and potential for success in the legal profession).

Publications

Professional Contributions

updated:November 10, 2008