C . Neal Tate North Texas State University

C. Neal Tate, former dean of the Toulouse School of Graduate Studies and Regents Professor of political science, who worked at UNT from 1970 to 2003, died Sept. 13. He was serving as a professor and chair of the Department of Political Science at Vanderbilt University and also held an appointment at Vanderbilt Law School. Tate received his bachelor’s degree from Wake Forest University and master’s and doctoral degrees from Tulane University. His research specialties included comparative and American judicial politics, Third World politics and the military in politics. He was twice named a Fulbright-Hays senior research fellow, traveling to Ateneo de Manila University in the Philippines in 1987 and 1994 to conduct research on the Philippine Supreme Court. From 1994 to 1996, he directed the law and social science program at the National Science Foundation while on leave from UNT. He was chair of the political science department from 1980 to 1986 and served as graduate dean from 1997 to 2003, before joining Vanderbilt. He published extensively, most recently co-writing a report for the U.S. Agency for International Development in 2008 and co-writing an article on the law and human rights abuse published in the April 2009 Journal of Politics. He also was working on a book project, Political Repression, Human Rights and the Rule of Law: The Global Picture, 1976-2005, and was serving as the 2009-10 president of the Southern Political Science Association.