Official Blog of St. John's University School of Law Faculty
On Wednesday, Professor Edward Cavanagh participated in a CLE on attorneys’ fees in federal litigation sponsored by the Federal Bar Council. The event was held at the federal district court in Central Islip and featured United States District Judge Joanna Seybert ’71 and United States Magistrate Judge Kathleen Tomlinson ’87, in addition to Professor Cavanagh. Anton Borovina ’75 was the program coordinator.
On May 17, 2013, Professor John Q. Barrett introduced the Chief Justice of the United States, John G. Roberts, Jr., when he spoke to a crowd of over 2,000 people at the Robert H. Jackson Center in Jamestown, New York.
For video of the Chief Justice’s speech, click here.
For audio of the entire event, including Professor Barrett’s introduction (starting at counter reading 9:05), click here.
For the text of Professor Barrett’s remarks, click here.
Professor Barrett is Justice Jackson’s biographer, author of the very widely read Jackson List (click here for the archive, and for instructions on how to subscribe) and a member of the Jackson Center’s Board.
John Q. Barrett
Jeremy N. Sheff’s paper, Disclosure as Distribution, forthcoming in the Washington Law Review, is now available online. Here is the abstract:
This brief Response to the work of Professors Omri Ben-Shahr and Carl Schneider on mandated disclosure regimes investigates the normative criteria underlying their claim that those regimes are failures. Specifically, it unpacks the pieces of those authors’ implicit cost-benefit analysis, revealing inherently normative judgments about desert and responsibility at the core of their (or any) critique of disclosure regimes. Disclosure regimes may aim to improve human decisionmaking behaviors, but those behaviors are influenced in non-deterministic ways by cognitive capacities that are heterogeneously distributed among subjects of the regimes. Accordingly, any claim regarding the normative desirability of disclosure regimes (or any other regulatory regime that seeks to channel and improve decisionmaking) implicitly rests on judgments regarding individuals’ responsibility for their own capacities. I argue that in evaluating such regulatory regimes, focusing on efficiency through cost-benefit analysis distracts from inescapable and logically prior distributive questions regarding desert and responsibility.
On Law Day (May 1), Professor Jennifer Baum, together with faculty from La Universidad de Puerto Rico and the University of Colorado, led a multi-national group of clinical law professors in an immersion experience at the local courts in San Juan, Puerto Rico during the annual AALS Conference on Clinical Legal Education.
Professor Baum and her colleagues escorted two dozen clinical law professors from the continental United States and abroad through San Juan criminal, civil, and family court, and observed Spanish-language court cases using simultaneous translation through headsets. The visit culminated in a discussion on the role of court observation in graduating practice-ready law students.
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In an article headlined Tea party investigation: Is the problem the IRS or the tax code?, the Christian Science Monitor quoted Professor Nina Crimm. Here’s an excerpt:
But some experts are skeptical that Congress will do much to fix the system that underlies the current IRS scandal, even if they do manage the long-shot feat of a sweeping tax overhaul sought by Baucus and Representative Camp.
“How much of the code, if any, is really going to be tackled?” Crimm asks. “And is this something that this Congress wants to tackle in terms of the tax exempt area?”
“My suspicion is that a lot of them might not see fit to tackle this area,” she says, because picking a campaign-finance fight amidst an already difficult slog to paring back the nation’s tax code is probably a bridge too far.
Professor Jeremy Sheff’s article, Self-Replicating Technologies, gets a mention in an IPKat post on the Supreme Court’s recent decision on patent rights in Bowman v. Monsanto. Here’s an excerpt from the post:
In an interesting paper entitled ‘Self Replicating Technologies’, Professor J. Sheff highlighted that ‘not all self-replicating technologies are identical, and a categorical rule exempting them from exhaustion doctrine is unwarranted’. Although the Supreme Court did not go as far as identifying a criterium [sic] for modulating the patent exhaustion doctrine, as suggested in the paper (according to which, ‘the application of the exhaustion doctrine should depend on the patentee’s ability to charge supracompetitive prices in its primary market where consumers are able to substitute secondary-market embodiments’), its final clarification appears to be a step in the right direction.
Professor Janai Nelson was named to the Lawyers of Color’s 50 Under 50 list of minority professors making an impact in legal education. The list is published in LOC’s “The Law School Diversity Issue” which was released today.
The world’s largest international insolvency organization, INSOL International, the International Association of Restructuring Insolvency & Bankruptcy Professionals, has named Professor G. Ray Warner course leader of its Global Insolvency Practice. To be eligible to take the course, practitioners must have at least five years of practice and experience in transnational cases. The course includes training in the insolvency regimes of major nations and the international insolvency law that applies to cross-border cases. Students who complete the course become Fellows of INSOL International.
Professor Marc DeGirolami’s book, The Tragedy of Religious Freedom (Harvar
d University Press), was released on Amazon.com earlier this week (official publication date June 1). The Tragedy of Religious Freedom analyzes the First Amendment religion and explores more general questions about the relationship of legal theory and legal practice.
Here’s an excerpt from the Harvard University Press webpage about the text:
When it comes to questions of religion, legal scholars face a predicament. They often expect to resolve dilemmas according to general principles of equality, neutrality, or the separation of church and state. But such abstractions fail to do justice to the untidy welter of values at stake. Offering new views of how to understand and protect religious freedom in a democracy, The Tragedy of Religious Freedom challenges the idea that matters of law and religion should be referred to far-flung theories about the First Amendment. Examining a broad array of contemporary and more established Supreme Court rulings, Marc DeGirolami explains why conflicts implicating religious liberty are so emotionally fraught and deeply contested.
Twenty-first-century realities of pluralism have outrun how scholars think about religious freedom, DeGirolami asserts. Scholars have not been candid enough about the tragic nature of the conflicts over religious liberty—the clash of opposing interests and aspirations they entail, and the limits of human reason to resolve intractable differences.
Here’s what two noted law and religion scholars have said about the text:
“The Tragedy of Religious Freedom is a first-rate contribution to the law-and-religion conversation. This conversation—how to think about, and how to effectively protect in law, religious freedom in a constitutional democracy—is a lively and timely one, and DeGirolami is an impressive participant.”—Richard W. Garnett, Notre Dame Law School
“A sophisticated and thoughtful book, which offers fresh insights on a central question of religious liberty.”—Philip Hamburger, author of Separation of Church and State
Congratulations, Marc. Look out for upcoming events for The Tragedy of Religious Freedom on this blog.
Allison Frankel, calling Professor Adam Zimmerman “a specialist on relations between [Attorneys General] and class action lawyers,” quoted Professor Zimmerman in her On the Case column for Thomson/Reuters. For more on Professor Zimmerman’s writings on class actions and administrative agencies, see here.
Adam Zimmerman
