Second Year Law Student Wins Arent Fox/Dale Bumpers Award

School of Law

Michael Adkins

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – Law student Michael Adkins, a staff editor with the Journal of Food Law and Policy has won the Arent Fox/Dale Bumpers Excellence in Writing Award. The Arent Fox law firm selects one article from the those prepared by the journal's staff editors. The winning article is published in the subsequent issue of the journal, and the author receives a monetary award. 

In this year's winning article, which was written and awarded while Adkins was in his second year of law school, he examines the Global Food Security Act of 2016, tracing its structure in context of the contemporary realities of global food insecurity. 

He argues that while the Act alone is insufficient to eradicate global food insecurity — due to conflict, drought, famine and other global problems — the whole-of-government strategy mandated by the Act is a modern, timely approach that breaks from past efforts and strategically focuses on sustainability in countries where progress can, and has been, identified. 

Adkins concludes that the United States must remain engaged and maintain its leadership role in combating the complex, intractable, yet arguably solvable issues contributing to global food insecurity. 

The Fayetteville native worked as a registered nurse before deciding to enter law school. He is a Northwest Arkansas Music Awards Hall of Fame inductee, volunteers for Big Brothers Big Sisters of Northwest Arkansas and received the 2017-18 Charles Pearson Fellowship from the Charles Thomas and Mary Alice Pearson Educational Foundation. He will continue to work with the Journal of Food Law and Policyas articles editor for the 2018-19 academic year.

He has a Bachelor of Arts in cultural anthropology from the University of Arkansas J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences and a Bachelor of Science in nursing from the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences. He expects to graduate with a Juris Doctor in May 2019.

The award was presented to Adkins at the Journal of Food Law and Policy end-of-year banquet, which was held in April. It is given in honor of former Arkansas Gov. and U.S. Sen. Dale Bumpers. 

Following his retirement from the Senate in 1999, Bumpers became counsel at the law firm, then known as Arent Fox Kintner Plotkin and Kahn, in its Washington, D.C., office. Bumpers represented a wide range of clients spanning the medical, food and airline industries while with the firm from 2000-10. This is the third time the award has been presented since Bumpers' death in 2016 at the age of 90.

The Arent Fox law firm was founded in 1942 and now has approximately 400 attorneys in offices in Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco and Washington, D.C.  It is a diversified firm with 31 practice groups and an emphasis on litigation, intellectual property, life sciences and real estate/finance.