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.
Professor Wendy Bach was appointed to serve on the Executive Committee of the AALS Section on Clinical Legal Education.
Professor Robert Blitt’s article, “Experiencing Experiential Education: A Faculty-Student Perspective on the University of Tennessee College of Law’s Adventure in Access to Justice Author,” coauthored with 3L student Reece Brassler, will be published in Volume 50, Issue 1 of the John Marshall Law Review. John Marshall Law School hosted the Annual SALT conference in October 2016 where Professor Blitt and other UT faculty presented on the topic of Bringing Access to Justice to the Classroom through Focused Experiential Education.
Professor Blitt presented his research on the Organization for Islamic Cooperation and its position on international norms relating to nondiscrimination and equality during a one-day conference held at Nottingham Trent University Law School. The December conference, entitled Law, Human Rights and Religion: Flashpoints, was attended by scholars from North America and Europe.
Professor Joan Heminway was quoted recently in the recent Bloomberg article “Domino’s Rewards Customers With Free Stock in Season of Giving”. In the article, Professor Heminway notes that companies giving away stock as customer rewards must comply with state and federal securities laws, and she discusses some of the potentially applicable regulations.
Professor Michael Higdon has an article featured in “Revisiting Langdell: Legal Education Reform and the Lawyer’s Craft,” a book published by the Wake Forest Law Review that was released on Dec. 5 and can be purchased on Amazon here.
Professor Lucy Jewel authored an article on Bloomberg BNA entitled “Law Schools Can Prepare Future Lawyers for a Gender Inclusive Culture (Perspective).” In the article, Professor Jewel identifies societal and cultural norms, implicit bias, and harmful stereotypes as barriers to success for women in the legal profession. She encourages law schools to help reshape legal culture to eliminate inequities.
Professor Jewel’s article Old School Rhetoric New School Cognitive Science was named one of the best legal education papers of 2016 by TaxProf blog last month.
Professor Brian Krumm, Professor George Kuney, and Donna Looper have just published a new book, “A Transactional Matter.” The book, in the style of Kuney and Looper’s earlier book “A Civil Matter,” gives readers a summary of a basic transaction from initial choice of entity for a new venture through the harvest of that venture through a sale of substantially all its assets to an acquirer. This book allows students to get a feel for how transactional lawyering actually works―examining client objectives, legal options, client counseling, due diligence, documentation and implementation. The book is supported by an extensive web-based collection of the underlying transactional documents and instruments that are examined through notes and questions in the text itself and may be ordered here.
Professor Maurice Stucke was quoted in a Fortune article discussing Uber and Lyft prohibitions on third-party apps displaying their ride prices and wait times next to those of competing services. He was quoted as saying, regarding the risks this policy presents for Uber, “The greater the risk that the price transparency would let consumers find the better price, the greater the anti-trust risk.”
Professor Stucke’s book Big Data and Competition Policy received another positive review in the peer reviewed law journal, World Competition. His book Virtual Competition also received favorable attention in the article Think twice before trusting a digital assistant to do the shopping on Phys.org; in an interview by the University of British Columbia; and in an Italian newspaper article.
Professor Maurice Stucke and Ariel Ezrachi’s book, “Virtual Competition: The Promise and Perils of the Algorithm-Driven Economy,” was named book of the week by the Times Higher Education magazine. The Financial Times favorably cited Professor Stucke’s book and research on cartels, and the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton Business Radio interviewed him on Monday, January 9 about “Virtual Competition” and his earlier book, “Big Data and Competition Policy.”
Professor Stucke was also quoted in a New York Times article discussing Big Data and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development meeting in November that explored the subject: Big Data: Bringing Competition Policy to the Digital Era.
Professor Penny White served as faculty at Harvard Law School for its winter session Trial Advocacy Workshop from January 2-7. During the workshop, Professor White worked with other lawyers, judges, and clinical law professors to lead second- and third-year students through the elements of trial practice culminating in each student trying a jury and non-jury case. Professor White also participated in the evening presentations during which the teaching faculty demonstrate various trial practice techniques.
Professor White and Professor Erwin Chemerinsky served as the presenters at the Judge William A. Ingram Annual Symposium on Tuesday, January 10. sponsored by the Heafey Center for Trial and Appellate Advocacy and Santa Clara University School of Law. Each year, the Symposium, held at Santa Clara Law School, features national experts discussing the roles and responsibilities of judges with special expertise in the areas of judicial accountability and independence of the judiciary. The Symposium draws members of the California bench and bar in addition to the law school community.
2017 AALS Participation
Professor Brad Areheart presented and moderated during several sessions at AALS. He first moderated a panel he constructed in his capacity as Chair of the Employment Discrimination section, entitled, New and Emerging Voices in Workplace Law. The session is designed to give junior scholars the chance to receive feedback from a more senior commentator on a current work-in-progress.
Professor Areheart hosted a joint breakfast for the Employment Discrimination and Labor Relations and Employment Law sections on Thursday, January 5th. Later that day, he moderated another panel that he put together as Chair of the Employment Discrimination section, entitled Responding to Fisher v. Texas. That session reassessed, in the recent wake of Fisher v. University of Texas, whether and/or how employers can be attentive to race in hiring and promotion.
Professor Areheart also presented “The Symmetry Principle” on Friday, January 6 as a part of a Federalist Society Works in Progress Panel. Finally, he coordinated a dinner at AALS for the Law Professors Christian Fellowship.
Professor Wendy Bach was a speaker on the panel entitled, Charting the Past, Projecting the Future: New Directions in Poverty Law Works in Progress. With the renewed publication of case books and supplements respecting poverty law, the time is ripe for sociolegal scholars to coalesce around poverty, precarity, and inequality. This meeting featured brief presentations by scholars on their works in progress, thoughtful responses by commentators, and a robust discussion by all participants regarding past and present poverty law, policy, and practice.
Professor Michelle Cosby was a Discussion Group Moderator on the topic Student Assessment: Tips and Tricks from the Trenches. American Bar Association Standards 314 and 315 have required some of us to rethink how we assess our students during their study of law. This discussion group covered how assessment is handled at several institutions and by several types of professors. The group also discussed technicalities of assessment, such as who needs to perform them, the necessary types and tools, the value of student-to-student assessment, graded and ungraded assessment, opportunities and challenges of meaningful assessment, what to do with the assessment, and how the library can help faculty with assessment.
Professor Joan Heminway is a co-convenor and co-moderator for the AALS Discussion Group entitled Salman v. United States and the Future of Insider Trading Law. In Salman v. United States, the United States Supreme Court is poised to take up the problem of insider trading for the first time in 20 years. In 2015, a circuit split arose over the question of whether a gratuitous tip to a friend or family member would satisfy the personal benefit test for insider trading liability. The potential consequences of the Court’s handling of this case are enormous for both those enforcing the legal prohibitions on insider trading and those accused of violating those prohibitions. This discussion group focused on Salman and its implications for the future of insider trading law.
Professor Heminway also completed her service as a member of the Executive Committee of the Section on Securities Regulation at the Annual Meeting.
Professor Lucy Jewel spoke on The Legal Writing Lateral during an AALS Arc of Career Program. Navigating the lateral hiring process as a legal writing professor can be daunting, but the results can be tremendously rewarding. While information on lateraling as a doctrinal professor is abundant, little guidance exists for the legal writing lateral. To a certain extent, even in this constricted legal education jobs market, positions for accomplished legal writing teachers are more plentiful than those available for traditional law professors. Legal writing professors who have lateraled in the past five years shared their thoughts on the process.
Professor Brian Krumm was a Discussion Participant on the topic of Why (Transactional) Law Matters. The panel discussed how various schools are integrating transactional skills training into their curriculum.
Professor Krumm presented on how the University of Tennessee is integrating a 1hour “Transactional Lab” component into its first year curriculum, and introduced his recently coauthored book A Transactional Matter: A Guide to Business Lawyering (with George Kuney and Donna Looper), as part of the materials to be used in the course.
Professor Karla McKanders was a speaker on the “Human Rights Outside the West” panel sponsored by Section on International Human Rights. The panel considered questions such as: How well has the Western human rights paradigm traveled outside of its home territories? Europe has, to be sure, the most effective regional human rights mechanism in the European Court for Human Rights, but what about developments in Africa or the Americas? How does Asia, which has no such regional mechanism, fit into the mix? Panelists investigated either regional institutions, or developments within a particular state (India, China, South Africa, etc.).
Professor Greg Stein participated in a panel presented by the Real Estate Transactions Section. The panel was entitled, Keeping the ‘Real’ World in Real Estate Transactions: New Ideas, Best Practices, and Partnership Opportunities to Strengthen Teaching and Scholarship. The panel’s discussions will be published in the Wake Forest Law Review.
Professor Stein also served on the Section’s Executive Committee.