UNM’s Annual Teaching Awards Announced
May 2, 2013
This year’s UNM Annual Teaching Awards Ceremony held on Thursday, May 2nd in the SUB Ballroom on main campus included the Outstanding Teachers of the Year award, one of which was presented to the law school’s Keleher & McLeod Professor of Law, Professor Sergio Pareja. The ceremony also included the naming of the law school’s Associate Dean for Faculty Development, Professor Max Minzner, as a Presidential Teaching Fellow. Recipients of this year’s teaching awards were announced by the Faculty Senate Teaching Enhancement Committee and were recognized by Provost Chaouki Abdallah and other campus leaders at the ceremony. A reception, hosted by the Office of Support for Effective Teaching, followed the ceremony.
Professor Sergio Pareja joined the UNM law faculty in 2005 after nearly nine years in private practice in Colorado and Indiana. Pareja primarily teaches business and tax law courses. He also has taught in the law school’s Business & Tax Clinic. Pareja's research interests currently include estate and gift taxation, with a focus on tax simplification and equity, as well as federal income tax law. He is extremely dedicated to giving students the opportunity to study law in other countries. He has taught in and directed the Guanajuato Summer Law Institute. In addition, he recently spent a year teaching as a visiting professor at the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid, Spain. He is the founding director of the Madrid Summer Law Institute, which will offer its first summer law program starting in June 2013. In 2011, he was identified by The National Jurist as one of the top law teachers in the country: The Bucket List: 23 Law Profs to Take Before You Die.
Professor Max Minzner teaches and writes in the areas of criminal law, criminal procedure and civil procedure. After graduating from Yale Law School, Minzner clerked for Judge Pamela Ann Rymer of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in Pasadena, California. From 2002 until 2006, Minzner was an Assistant United States Attorney in the Eastern District of New York with assignments in the General Crimes, Narcotics and Public Integrity Sections. Before joining the UNM School of Law faculty in 2011, he was a member of the faculty at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York. During the 2009-10 academic year, Minzner was on leave, serving as Special Counsel to the Director of the Office of Enforcement at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in Washington, D.C. Minzner was born and raised in Albuquerque and is a member of the New Mexico Bar.
More information on all of the UNM teaching award recipients can be found here.
