As a student athlete who consistently made the Dean’s list at Xavier University while playing Division I baseball, Michael Moore found himself well-prepared for the rigors of the law school workload. “Baseball is a year-round sport. At Xavier, if I wasn’t in class, I was working out, practicing or playing games,” he said. “In law school, I’ve had to make sure I was using all the extra time I have efficiently.”
Moore’s interest in law school began in a business law class he took at Xavier. “The professor was an attorney, and he was frank about what it was like to practice law,” he recalled. “I liked the idea of a career where you’re always challenged, and I started researching law school.”
As a 1L, Moore enjoyed his Contracts class with Professor Rebecca Allensworth because she made a practice of calling on as many students as possible each time class met. “You had to be well-prepared for every class, because there was a good chance she would call on you,” he said. As a 2L, he is part of a team of students doing anti-trust research under Professor Allensworth’s supervision.
Moore, who majored in finance at Xavier, plans to earn the Law and Business Certificate at Vanderbilt. His upper-level classes in Corporate Law and Securities Law with Professor Yesha Yadav “solidified my interest in corporate and business law,” he said. “The passion and the energy she brought to the classroom motivated me to dig deeper into the material.”
But Moore’s first-year classes also piqued his interest in other areas of law. In addition to joining the Law and Business Society, he joined the Criminal Law Association and worked with Professor Christopher Slobogin, who directs Vanderbilt’s Criminal Justice Program, and a team of students analyzing the second-degree murder conviction of a Tennessee prisoner to determine if there were grounds to appeal his conviction.
His work with Slobogin highlighted a Vanderbilt advantage Moore appreciates. “Vanderbilt professors are very accessible and relatable to students,” he said. “They talk to us in and outside of class, send us articles, and are really invested in us as people, not just as law students. I wanted to be at a law school where professors and more experienced attorneys care about my growth–and that describes Vanderbilt.”
Moore has served on on the law school’s Honor Council as both the 2L and 3L representative and is the academic excellence chair of the Black Law Students Association. He was a summer associate at two Nashville law firms, Bradley Arant Boult Cummings and Bass Berry & Sims, in both 2015 and 2016.