Dean Kevin J Worthen and the faculty of the J. Reuben Clark Law School announced at the beginning of October the appointment of Frederick Mark Gedicks to the Guy Anderson Chair and David A. Thomas to the Rex E. Lee Chair at Brigham Young University’s J. Reuben Clark Law School.
The chairs are named after two distinguished lawyers, Guy Anderson, a distinguished attorney from Arizona, and Rex E. Lee, former dean of the Law School and former president of Brigham Young University,
A chair is one of the highest honors a professor can receive. The recipients of the chairs were nominated by fellow faculty members and selected from a list of qualified candidates. The appointments were made in recognition of distinguished records of published scholarship and teaching over many years.
Gedicks, honored as the Guy Anderson chair, teaches constitutional law, telecommunications law, and broker-dealer regulation at the BYU Law School. He received a bachelor’s degree from BYU and a juris doctorate degree from the University of Southern California, where he served as articles editor of the Southern California Law Review.
Following graduation, he clerked for a judge on the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, and then practiced corporate and securities law in Arizona. Gedicks has published widely in the area of law and religion, and is the author of “The Rhetoric of Church and State: A Critical Analysis of Religion Clause Jurisprudence,” among other scholarly works.
Thomas, appointed to the Rex E. Lee chair, joined the law faculty in 1974 after service as a federal judicial clerk and private law practice in Salt Lake City. He received his juris doctorate degree from Duke University, where he served on the editorial board of the Duke Law Journal, and received a master’s degree in library science from BYU.
Thomas teaches property law, real estate finance, civil procedure, and legal history. He is the editor-in-chief and principal author of “Thompson on Real Property, Thomas Edition,” one of the primary treatises in the field of real property. He is recognized as a leading scholar in property law, and his books and articles are cited frequently in federal and state courts.
For more information about these two chair appointments in the Law School, please contact Scott Cameron at (801) 422-1407 or camerons@lawgate.byu.edu.
Writer: Angela Fischer
