Faculty Forum – November 2018

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

Professors Wendy Bach, Joy Radice, and Eric Franklin Amarante traveled to Columbia, South Carolina to participate in the Southern Clinical Conference on “Overcoming Division: The Role of Clinical Legal Education.” The presentation, entitled Walls Will Fall: Harnessing the Collective Capacity of Clinics, Pro Bono, Alumni, Courts & Our Rural Communities, focused on the UT clinic’s recent efforts to bring legal services to rural areas in Tennessee that have virtually no affordable legal services. The UT Rural Mobile Legal Clinic has harnessed the resources of four individual clinics, pro bono students, clinic alums, and local judges to bring a Cost Waiver and Expungement Court to residents of rural areas in East Tennessee. This endeavor involves holding Saturday morning court at civic organizations or local churches to help people remove the burdens of old court costs which have resulted in obstacles to securing work and housing and the loss of a driver’s licenses. The clinicians are exploring how to use the practice areas of other clinics like the Wills Clinic and Community Economic Development Clinic to provide a range of legal services on these Saturday mornings.

In October, Dean Emeritus and Professor Doug Blaze did a CLE for the Sevier County Bar Association and Sevier County Juvenile Court entitled: “Thriving as a Lawyer: Maintaining Motivation, Balance, and Effectiveness.”

Professor Zack Buck presented “What Is the Affordable Care Act?” at Mic/Nite, a “Pecha-Kucha Powered” social gathering in order to enhance the intellectual, interdisciplinary, and cultural life of the faculty and staff at UT Knoxville. “[I]n an effort to imagine the next field of debate in health care reform, this brief presentation takes stock of the ACA’s successes, failures, and unintended consequences. Its experience is replete with lessons for future efforts.”

On Nov. 2, Professor Lucy Jewel presented a paper, Death in the Shadows(co-written with Dr. Mary Campbell, UTK College of Art & Design), at the eleventh annual ClassCrits conference at the West Virginia College of Law.  The paper identifies connections between visual imagery, the law, and racial inequality. The paper will be published in the spring 2019 issue of the Hastings Journal of Race & Poverty. Professor Jewel is a founding board member of ClassCrits, Inc., a nonprofit organization dedicated to highlighting the role that law can play in perpetuating economic, social, and racial inequalities.

Professor Paula Schaefer presented Behavioral Legal Ethics Lessons for Corporate Counselat Case Western Reserve University School of Law.Her presentation was part of the Leet Symposium: Fiduciary Duty, Corporate Goals, and Shareholder Activism. Symposium papers will be published in the Case Western Reserve Law Review.  

Professor Maurice Stucke presented on Nov. 1 the issue paper “The Effective Competition Standard: A New Standard for Antitrust” which he wrote with Marshall Steinbaum of the Roosevelt Institute at the Federal Trade Commission’s hearings, “Competition and Consumer Protection in the 21st Century.”  Videos of the 3rd and 4th panels where Maurice presented their proposed standard and discussed the shortcomings of the current “consumer welfare” standard are available here. Their proposal was also featured in The Economist and The Hill.

The University of Chicago Law Review extended an invitation to Professor Stucke and his co-author to present their paper at its May 2019 symposium, Re-Thinking the Chicago School of Antitrust Law. The law review will also publish Professor Stucke and Dr. Steinbaum’s paper, along with the other symposium papers.

Professor Stucke testified on the topic of algorithmic collusion in the Federal Trade Commission’s Hearings on Competition and Consumer Protection in the 21st Century.  He presented his latest research, a paper he co-authored with Ariel Ezrachi of Oxford University. Their paper is featured this week on SSRN’s Weekly Top 5 Papers.

Former Senator Ted Kaufman cites Professor Stucke’s work in a recent Delaware Online (part of the USA Today Network) article. In the article “As economic power continues to concentrate, so does political power,”  Kaufman extensively quotes Professor Stucke’s Harvard Business Review policy paper with Professor Ariel Ezrachi to explain his concerns about how a concentration of power in industry can lead to a concentration of political power, to the potential detriment of democracy. The same paper was cited and quoted in Tom Saler’s Journal Sentinel article “Massive wealth flowing to relatively small number of individuals, businesses.

Following several years of participating in one week of the advocacy program at Harvard Law School, Professor Penny White has been selected to serve as a Visiting Professor during Harvard’s winter term. As Visiting Professor, White will be responsible for leading a group of lawyers and judges as they instruct students on evidence and trial practice and for evaluating the students’ skills in both jury and non-jury trials.

Since the summer break, Professor White has provided a number of continuing legal and judicial education programs including: two evidence programs and one ethics program for Louisiana judges and lawyers at the annual Louisiana State Bench and Bar program;  courses on impeachment, hearsay, and confrontation in the Evidence in a Courtroom Setting course for state court judges held in Wyoming in July; programs on “Authenticating and Admitting Electronic Evidence” and “Resolving Expert Testimony Issues” for the annual South Carolina Judicial Conference in August; a two-day on-line course (“Vetting, Considering, and Weighing Opinion Testimony”) for more than a hundred USDA appellate division ALJs in September; and multiple sessions on Advanced Evidence for state court judges at the University of Nevada in October. 

Additionally, Professor White presented her annual “Evidence Refresher” for the Tennessee Judicial Conference in October and included a short discussion of evidence issues that may arise with the use of blockchain technology. Professor White also recently presented a review of recent Tennessee procedure, evidence, property, and family law decisions for the Upper Cumberland Bar Association and a program on “Preserving Error, Escaping Waiver” for the Tennessee Public Defenders’ Conference Annual Meeting.

On Nov. 6, Dean Melanie Wilson presented a talk to students at William & Mary on the Ideals and Injustices of the American Criminal Justice System.

Professor David Wolitz presented Principle and Prudence in Constitutional Adjudication: The Case of Alexander Bickelat the Constitutional Law Colloquium at Chicago-Loyola School of Law.