The dean of UNC School of Law, Martin H. Brinkley ’92, has been appointed as Arch T. Allen Distinguished Professor of Law by the University’s Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost Robert “Bob” Blouin. Brinkley is now one of two Arch T. Allen Distinguished Professors at the law school, sharing the honor with Richard S. Saver.
In addition to carrying out his duties as dean, Brinkley currently teaches Life Cycle of an M&A Deal, a transition-to-practice course on corporate mergers and acquisitions that he designed. He is slated to teach first-year Property beginning in 2019.
The Arch T. Allen Distinguished Professorship was established in 1991 by Arch T. Allen III ’65 and his sister Reveley Allen Moore to honor their father, Arch T. Allen Jr., and grandfather, Arch T. Allen. The youngest Allen says his father initially established the fund as a charitable trust in honor of his own father. Allen and his sister, who passed away in 2002, continued to add to the trust. All three generations of the Allen family received undergraduate degrees from UNC-CH. Both of the younger Allen men received their law degrees from Carolina as well.
“There were no lawyers in my family. Arch III, known to many of his friends as ‘Arch T.,’ was my first real mentor in the law,” Brinkley says. “I have always looked up to him as an exemplar of everything good in our profession. It’s deeply meaningful to me to be one of the holders of the chair he created in honor of his father and grandfather. Add the fact that my brilliant colleague Rich Saver and I were college classmates at Harvard, and the honor becomes all the more meaningful to me.”
Allen met Brinkley – who had just graduated from Harvard at the time – when a mutual friend said Brinkley was trying to decide where to go to law school.
“My grandfather and father, one an educator and the other a lawyer, whom the professorship honors, would be pleased and proud for Dean Martin Brinkley to hold an Arch T. Allen Distinguished Professorship in the UNC School of Law,” says Allen. “Other family members and I are proud to have their name associated with Martin, a wonderful person of outstanding ability, intelligence and character.”
Brinkley is Carolina Law’s 14th dean, a position he has held since 2015. He is one of only two individuals in the school’s 173-year history to become dean directly from practice. During his 22 years of practice, he primarily focused on corporate law, mergers, and acquisitions, antitrust and regulated industries, public finance and charitable organizations law. In 2011-12, he served as president of the North Carolina Bar Association.
-November 6, 2017