Faculty Forum (Blaze and Baxter)

Faculty Notes: September 2016

Faculty Notes, compiled and written by Teri Baxter, is a monthly feature highlighting the achievements of faculty at UT Law including publications in academia and the media, speaking engagements, interviews, awards, and other accomplishments.


Renee Allen

Our new Director of Academic Support Programs, Renee Allen, will be co-presenting at the SALT Teaching Conference with a colleague from Texas A&M. The presentation is titled Recognizing Implicit Bias: A Crash Course for the “Colorblind” Generation.

In her recent blog post on Law School Café titled The Real Cost of the Georgia Bar Exam Error, Allen commented on the Georgia bar office’s error in not including 90 students who had passed the July 2015 and February 2016 bar exams on the public list of those who passed. Allen noted that the devastating emotional effect on those students who thought they had failed the bar was not fully appreciated by those who responded to news of the error with concerns about the integrity of the bar exam process.

Wendy Bach

Professor Wendy Bach’s article Poor Support/Rich Support: (Re)viewing the American Social Welfare State will be published in the Spring 2017 issue of the Florida Tax Review.

Beginning Friday September 16, 2016 Bach will be facilitating national online clinical rounds sessions at the request of the Teaching Methodologies Committee of the AALS Clinical Section.  Online rounds provide an opportunity for clinicians to participate in structured sessions on clinical teaching with senior colleagues. Bach will facilitate three sessions for a group of eleven junior clinicians around the country and may extend the sessions into the spring semester.

Ben Barton

Professor Ben Barton was quoted in a Bloomberg Law article discussing Juris Masters programs at law schools. Barton expressed skepticism about such non-JD programs. “‘Is the program as expensive as a regular year in law school?’ Barton wrote. ‘If so, I doubt that right now they would be very cost effective, since there are many unemployed law grads and lawyers who are hungry for exactly the jobs these masters recipients would be competing for (compliance, health care law, etc.).’”

Zack Buck

Professor Zack Buck’s article The Cost of High Prices:  Embedding an Ethic of Expense into the Standard of Care, will be published in Spring 2017 issue of the Boston College Law Review.

Buck will give a CLE presentation titled ‘Reverse’ False Claims:  Compliance, Enforcement, and Ethics at University of Tennessee College of Law on October 15, 2016 (before the Alabama game).

Joan Heminway

Professor Joan M. Heminway was appointed the Deputy Secretary and Compliance Officer of SEALS.

Lucy Jewel

Professor Lucy Jewel’s article, Neuro-Rhetoric, The Law, and Race: Toxic Neural Pathways and Healing Alternatives, has been selected for publication by the Maryland Law Journal, where it will be published in a special issue devoted to Advocacy and Race. Professor Jewel has also been invited to speak at the symposium to be held on the topic, in late fall 2016, or early spring 2017.

On September 6, Jewel will be presenting her paper, Healing Alternatives: Neuro-Rhetoric Explains the Need for a Comparative Approach to Rhetoric in Law, at the Society of Law Scholars conference in Oxford, UK, as part of the program on Comparative Law.  The Society of Law Scholars is the annual national gathering of legal academics in the UK.

Jewel will present her paper, Embodied Inequality: Epigenetics, Neuroplasticity, Social Status, and the Law, at the Ninth annual ClassCrits conference at Loyola Chicago Law School on October 22.  ClassCrits is a consortium of legal academics interested in progressive solutions to all forms of inequality.

On August 26-27, Jewel travelled to Kansas City, Missouri to attend the board meeting of the Association of Legal Writing Directors, of which she is a nationally elected board member.

Professor Jewel has organized and will be participating in a panel presentation on the topic of lateral moves for legal writing professors at the American Association of Law Schools conference in San Francisco, in January 2017.

Alex Long

Associate Dean Alex Long spoke at the 5th Annual UT-Battelle Labor & Employment Conference at ORNL on August 25.  His talk was titled Discrimination in the Practice of Law:  A Question of Ethics?

Sybil Marshall, Scott Childs, and Carol Parker

The second edition of the book Tennessee Legal Research by Professor Sybil Marshall, Dean Scott Childs, and former Associate Dean Carol Parker was just published by Carolina Academic Press.

Karla McKanders and Val Vojdik

Professors Karla McKanders and Val Vojdik received funding through Law and Society and NSF for their colleagues from the MENA region participate in our International Research Collaborative in Mexico City, Mexico in 2017.Their IRC brings together Law and Society scholars from the Americas, Middle East, and North Africa to explore struggles at the intersection of gender and human rights for Arabs at home and in diaspora.

Glenn Reynolds

The Third Circuit Court of Appeals cited Professor Glenn H. Reynolds’ article A Critical Guide to the Second Amendment, 62 Tenn. L. Rev. 461, 480 (1995) in a recent opinion. Reynolds was cited as a Second Amendment scholar who agrees that “unvirtuous citizens” such as convicted felons can be stripped of their Second Amendment right to bear arms.

Reynolds’ article “Of Coups and the Constitution” will appear in Vol. 48 Issue 2 of the Columbia Human Rights Law Review.

Reynolds was one of several Constitutional Law experts mentioned in a watchdog.org article about their amicus brief filed in a Seventh Circuit case.  The article noted that Reynolds was among “the most renowned legal minds in the country – on the right and the left – [that] are coming to the defense of the scores of Wisconsin conservatives targeted in Wisconsin’s infamous John Doe investigations. . . .” They argue that “core activities protected by the First Amendment … would be gravely endangered if this Court were to abandon its existing precedent and affirm the district court’s dismissal of Archer’s challenge to what she has competently alleged was a retaliatory partisan witch-hunt.”

Dean Rivkin

Professor Dean Rivkin has been appointed to a legislative task force charged with making recommendations for the reform of Tennessee’s juvenile justice system. Rivkin was one of ten public members appointed to the task force by Lieutenant Governor Ron Ramsey. The task force will study the feasibility of creating a state department of juvenile justice, whose mission will be “the treatment and rehabilitation of the state’s juveniles.” Among the issues to be studied are alternatives to juvenile detention through community-based programs, the prevalence of mental health issues among youth in state custody, and concerns about “a school-to-prison pipeline.” Students in Rivkin’s Education Law Practicum will be involved in research on these and related juvenile justice and education issues.

Briana Rosenbaum

Professor Briana Rosenbaum was quoted in a Law360 article discussing the use of RICO claims against mass tort plaintiffs’ lawyers to curb alleged lawyer misconduct. The article quoted Rosenbaum, who noted the “danger of painting class action and mass action lawyers as mobsters.” “‘If such RICO litigation becomes the new normal,’ she added, ‘it absolutely threatens to further an exceedingly negative narrative of the plaintiffs bar.’” The Law360 article also noted that Rosenbaum’s article on the use of RICO claims against attorneys will be published in the Iowa Law Review in September.

Greg Stein

ABA Book Publishing has published the third edition of Professor Gregory M. Stein’s bookA Practical Guide to Commercial Real Estate Transactions: From Contract to Closing, Third Edition. The book is co-authored by Morton P. Fisher Jr. of Ballard Spahr Andrews & Ingersoll, LLP, and Michael D. Goodwin of Arnold & Porter, LLP. The book is a “useful combination of text overview and practice pointers” that “helps lawyers with less experience navigate through the maze of steps involved in a real estate transaction. At the same time, it serves as a valuable reference for more seasoned attorneys as well as those whose practice is concentrated in other areas of the law.”

Stein was also quoted in a Business Insider article discussing “nail neighborhoods” in China. The name refers to Chinese citizens who hold out for higher compensation from the government in the face of condemnation threats over their homes.  In the article, Professor Stein explains that the compensation that the homeowners are offered is not sufficient to allow them to move into the new buildings.

Stein will give a presentation at the Annual Meeting of the Association of American Law Schools.  His talk will be part of a panel, organized by the Real Estate Transactions Section, entitled “Keeping the ‘Real’ World in Real Estate Transactions: New Ideas, Best Practices, and Partnership Opportunities to Strengthen Teaching and Scholarship.”  The meeting will take place in January 2017 in San Francisco, CA.

Maurice Stucke

Professor Maurice E. Stucke’s book “Big Data and Competition Policy” (with Allen Grunes) published this month by Oxford University Press, was highlighted in a Law360 article. The book argues that the existing models used by antitrust authorities to analyze the competitive effects of mergers do not match up well with the business models of those companies, leaving agencies in the dark. To close the gap, they say, regulators will have to look beyond price comparisons and come up with new approaches and economic models to gain a more complete picture of how transactions fueled by big data will affect things like the quality of competition and innovation.

Stucke was quoted in the Reuters article Bayer’s Monsanto acquisition to face politically charged scrutiny. The article discusses Bayer AG’s $66 billion all-cash deal to acquire Monsanto Co. The article noted that other “mega-deals” have faced tough scrutiny from the antitrust enforcers. Stucke remarked that “[m]erger reviews of this complexity would take six to nine months,” making it unlikely that the Obama administration would make the final decision about whether to allow the merger. Instead, Stucke said “this would be the first major test of the new administration.”