Doing scholarly research in a field where little has been done was very satisfying for Randall Lawrence-Hurt, a political science major from Tuftonboro, New Hampshire. For his Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship, he spent many hours reading and comparing federal and New Hampshire search-and-seizure law cases. This resulted in a thirty-page report, which he then narrowed and focused for his Inquiry article. Randy met his (future) mentor, Dr. John Cerullo, in 2007 during the University of New Hampshire’s Justice Studies Budapest program. “I thoroughly enjoyed Professor Cerullo’s teaching style,” Randy said, “and his willingness to converse about a range of historical, political and legal topics with students.” Although the research topic Randy finally chose was not a specialty of Dr. Cerullo’s, Randy knew that he would “ask the questions I needed to answer and challenge me to pursue different ways of thinking,” which was “exactly the kind of mentoring I needed.”
Randy graduated in December 2009 with a Bachelor’s of Arts in political science. He is taking time off from school to get a certificate for teaching English as a second language and also to continue his work with the UNH Mock Trial program. Spending some time abroad is in his future plans before going to law school.
Dr. John Cerullo, a professor of modern European history at the Manchester campus of the University of New Hampshire, arrived there in1981, when UNH-M was Merrimack Valley College. His research and teaching interests have ranged from intellectual history to legal theory and legal history. Over the last ten years, his research has been mainly on subjects pertaining to modern French history, and his most recent publications have addressed various aspects of the Dreyfus Affair and the theory and practice of French military justice prior to World War I. As faculty supervisor of the Justice Studies Budapest Program in the fall of 2007, he taught a course titled "Law and the Legacy of the 20th Century: Issues in Contemporary European Jurisprudence," which Randy attended.
It was enormously gratifying to work with Randy on this project,” Dr. Cerullo said. “He is one of the finest students I have known in my nearly thirty years as an academic. I learned a great deal from him about the theory and practice of criminal justice in New Hampshire, and especially about Fourth Amendment issues.” The fact that New Hampshire legal history is nearly untouched by scholars, Dr. Cerullo noted, is almost certainly attributable to there being only one law school in the state, Franklin Pierce, which is a rather young institution. “There is plenty of work to be done in this field,” he said. “I hope Randy will return to it someday, and I hope other students will be inspired by his achievement to address other aspects of it.”
Read Randall Lawrence-Hurt’s research article The Evolution of Search-and-Seizure Law: How New Hampshire and Federal Law Differ >>
