St. John's University Law Faculty Blog

Professor Robin Boyle was promoted to Editor in Chief of the editorial board of Perspectives: Teaching Legal Research and Writing. Perspectives is unique in that its nine-person board has a balance of law librarians and legal writing professors.  

For 2020-22, Professor Boyle served as the journal’s Assistant Editor in Chief, and from 2017-20, as an editorial team member. She has published several articles in Perspectives, including one forthcoming this summer entitled “Swimming with Broad Strokes: Publishing and Presenting Beyond the LW Discipline” (with Stephen Paskey). In addition to Professor Boyle, Professors Rosa Castello and Patricia Grande Montana have published articles in the journal in recent years.

Perspectives typically publishes articles that offer practical suggestions for teaching either the first-year or advanced courses in LRW, teaching international students, teaching transactional research or writing, and teaching the skills covered in academic support. 

Perspectives is an electronic journal sponsored and distributed free of charge by Thomson Reuters as a service to the LRW community. It has a subscriber base of 4,000 readers, and that base is growing.

Professors Gina Calabrese and Jeff Sovern spoke on May 20^th and 21^st at a conference entitled “Teaching Consumer Law In the New Normal,” hosted by the University of Houston Law Center’s Center for Consumer Law and the UC Berkeley School of Law’s Center for Consumer Law & Economic Justice. Professor Calabrese’s talk was titled “Online Dispute for Consumer Credit Cases” while Professor Sovern spoke about “Using Learning Science to Teach Consumer Law.”

Professor Eva Subotnik’s book chapter, “Dead-Hand Guidance: A Preferable Testamentary Approach for Artists,” has been published in Posthumous Art, Law and the Art Market: The Afterlife of Art, co-edited by Sharon Hecker and Peter J. Karol (Routledge, 2022). As described on the publisher’s website, “[t]his book takes an interdisciplinary, transnational and cross-cultural approach to reflect on, critically examine and challenge the surprisingly robust practice of making art after death in an artist’s name, through the lenses of scholars from the fields of art history, economics and law, as well as practicing artists.” Here is an abstract of Subotnik’s chapter:

Postmortem copyrights in the United States allow for the control of art long after the artist has died. Successors to these interests, and even the public generally, may have bona fide reasons to encourage visual artists to be specific and comprehensive about the ways in which artwork is to be reproduced and used after the artists’ deaths. Nevertheless, this chapter cautions that efforts to encourage visual artists to provide guidance should simultaneously discourage any attempts to make these instructions binding. First, it is not clear that purportedly binding testamentary instructions about these matters will be effective. Second, the proliferation of such instructions may run counter to the goals of copyright law, raising the question of whether they should be effective. In short, in these matters, dead-hand guidance is preferable to dead-hand control.

In addition, Subotnik and her co-author Professor Andrew Gilden presented their forthcoming article, “Copyright’s Capacity Gap,” an interdisciplinary paper on legal issues growing out of the Britney Spears conservatorship, at two workshops this spring: the Critical Trusts & Estates Conference 2022, and the Mid-Career Intellectual Property Scholars Workshop.

Professor Anna Roberts’s article Criminal Terms will be published in the Minnesota Law Review. Its abstract is as follows:

Core terms used by criminal legal academics bolster the criminal system and ward off radical critique. They do this by conveying implicit messages of three types: that the criminal system is generally accurate, that it is necessary, and that it is well-intentioned and moving in the right direction. While recent legal scholarship has identified other subtle ways in which we send pro-carceral messages, it has not focused on vocabulary. We thus fall behind other entities, which have recently announced vocabulary change, in recognition of the harm that such messages can do. We too have influence, not just through scholarly and public conversations, but through our framing of the system for our students, who will help determine its future. We must thus explore the possibility of, and obstacles to, change in our criminal terms.

During this academic year, Professor John Q. Barrett participated virtually in these symposia and events—

·         On July 6, 2021, he introduced and interviewed Professor Melissa Murray of NYU Law School, Chautauqua Institution’s 17^th annual Robert H. Jackson Lecturer on the Supreme Court of the United States;

·         On September 17, he spoke at a Constitution Day program, “FDR and the Supreme Court,” hosted by the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library & Museum (link to program is available here);

·         On October 6, he lectured on “U.S. Supreme Court, October Term 2020” to the Federal Bar Association, Eastern District of New York chapter;

·         On October 13, he lectured on “The U.S. Supreme Court in Foreign Affairs: Robert H. Jackson’s Enduring Perspective as Justice and As Lead Prosecutor of the Nazis at Nuremberg,” to the American Foreign Law Association;

·         On October 26, he gave a lecture on the “75^th Anniversary of the Nuremberg Trials,” hosted by the Queens Public Library;

·         On February 10, 2022, he gave a lecture, “Robert H. Jackson and the Birth of the National Gallery of Art,” to the Federal Bar Association’s Art Litigation & Fashion Law Conference;

·         On March 15, he gave a Supreme Court Review lecture to the Nassau County (NY) Inn of Court;

·         On April 19, he gave a lecture, “The Most Recent ‘Justice Jackson’: Robert H. Jackson’s Path in Life and the Law,” to the AdventHealth Attorney Retreat;

·         On April 28, he gave a lecture, “Some Alexander Hamilton, But Not So Much Hamilton, in the New Supreme Court,” in the Suffolk County (NY) Bar Association’s Law Day program (link to program is available here, and Professor Barrett’s remarks begin around 59:30); and

·         Also on April 28, he gave a lecture, “Justice Robert H. Jackson, the International Nuremberg Trial, and the Path to the Doctors’ Trial,” in the New York Medical College/Touro University Yom Hashoah symposium on the 75^th Anniversary of the Nuremberg Doctors’ Trial: