Leah Deskins ‘21
Professor Liaison Editor
Last Friday, I logged onto a Zoom call with Christina Luk ’21, Maria Luevano ’21, Sam Pickett ’21, and Jacob Smith ’23 to interview Professor Thomas Frampton. A native of Washington, D.C.,[1] Professor Frampton attended Yale for his bachelor’s and master’s degrees, before attending UC Berkeley for law school. After law school, he clerked at the trial and appellate levels, practiced law as a public defender for the Orleans Public Defenders in (shocker) New Orleans for a few years, and then was a Climenko Fellow at Harvard before landing in Charlottesville last summer. Professor Frampton is a criminal law scholar, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, taught criminal law this past fall. This semester, he’s teaching criminal adjudication.[2]
Pictured: From a criminal law scholar to a banjo picker, Professor Frampton is multi-talented and a must-take-professor! Photo Courtesy of law.virginia.edu.
The first portion of our discussion focused on “academic” topics. Professor Frampton explained that he’s been very impressed with how well students have rolled with the punches and been so resilient this year, and that his favorite part of teaching is learning from his students.[3] We chatted about the oral argument for a real case he conducted in his criminal law class last semester and the wonderful opportunity it presented for 1Ls to see the law in action. Professor Frampton also spoke about a current article he’s working on that discusses prison abolition and focuses on how the criminal justice system should handle the “dangerous few.” Although Professor Frampton is still working on his argument, it seems like the article will be very interesting and timely, and one that students should be on the lookout for. Finally, we discussed an interesting quirk of Professor Frampton’s teaching style: He asks students to call him by his first name but calls students by their last names. I wish I could say there was a fascinating reason behind this unusual phenomenon, but really it seems that the last name thing is sort of a default setting for Professor Frampton. However, our conversation may have prompted him to reconsider his ways. TBD.
The second portion of our discussion dealt with life outside of the Law School. Professor Frampton mentioned that he’s looking forward to experiencing the Charlottesville music scene once things are back up and running again, and that during the pandemic, he learned how to play banjo.[4] Aside from working on his banjo technique, he has been a member of a local soccer team, Kerfuffle FC.[5] And his three favorite musical artists are The Mountain Goats, Against Me!, and Phil Ochs. We also learned that he hates eggnog and that he’s not a fan of King Cake. I mean, who wants to bite into a plastic baby, anyway?
Lastly, Professor Frampton offered some advice for law students. He advised that, as UVA Law students, we’ve already done a ton of gold star chasing, and that at some point we should make peace with ourselves and relax our desire to continue to collect gold stars. While Professor Frampton framed this advice as directed at “1L Thomas,” his insight could benefit law students of all levels.
I decided to get in touch with Professor Frampton about speaking with the Law Weekly because I’ve really been enjoying his criminal adjudication class. His interview did not disappoint. We had a lively discussion, and he even suggested a new, professor-related idea for the Law Weekly: instead of students interviewing a professor, the professor could interview the students. Overall, it was a great interview, and my only regret is that the pandemic prevented us from getting together in person.[6]
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lcd4ew@virginia.edu
[1] DC proper, not Northern Virginia or Maryland. Specifically, he’s from the area near the National Cathedral, which also happens to be where he got married last year.
[2] Of note, Professor Frampton incorporates real-world, current(ish) happenings into class meetings and conveys enthusiasm for discussing legal and policy issues adjacent to the doctrine in the casebook. Readers may recall that he conducted an oral argument for a real client during one of his criminal law class meetings last semester.
[3] Professor Frampton explained that he spends a lot of time preparing for class, at least in part because students’ questions are “intellectually exciting.”
[4] Am I seeing a bluegrass cover band in the Law School’s future? Alternatively, he could play the banjo part in “Come on Eileen,” a la Professor Kim Ferzan’s rendition of “Heartbreaker,” at Fauxfield 2019, should any Law School-affiliated group ever play that song. *wink*
[5] I’m supposed to mention that Kerfuffle FC defeated the Law School’s team, Barristers United.
[6] Professor Frampton wanted me to mention that he’s 7’4”. Because of the pandemic, there’s no way for me to see how tall he actually is, so I guess I’m just going to have to accept this stated fact as true. See Christina Luk, Something About Twiqbal But Make It Zoom, 72 Va. L. Weekly 19 (2020).