Faculty Focus is a monthly publication documenting the activities, accomplishments, and honors of the University of Houston Law Center Faculty.

March 2004

Darren Bush's article, The Law & Economics of Post-Employment Covenants: a Unified Framework was published in 11 Geo. Mason L. Rev. 357(2003) (coauthored with Mark Glick and Jonathan Hafen). An op-ed piece, All Evidence Isn't In On Racial Profiling (originally entitled The Complexity of the Racial Profiling Debate) by Professor Bush and Erik Luna appeared in the Houston Chronicle on February 18, 2004. Professor Bush has also been invited to submit a chapter for a book on statutory exemptions from antitrust law. He completed final revisions to his article Rethinking the Potential Competition Doctrine (coauthored with Salvatore Massa) and submitted the article for publication. Finally, Professor Bush moderated the Daily Cougar's Student Government Association Presidential Debate on March 8th.

 

Seth Chandler, Associate Dean for Academic Affairs has accepted a request from the American Bar Association to chair its accreditation site visit to the University of Mississippi next year. He participated last year in the accreditation site visit of the University of LaVerne in Ontario, California. Professor Chandler has submitted his paper, GCANs: Global Cellular Automation Networks for peer review to the 2004 International Mathematica Symposium to take place in August in Calgary, Canada. He is also serving as a reviewer/editor for several of the other papers. He has submitted a related piece on using graph theory to model social interaction to the "New Kind of Science" conference to be held in Boston this April. Professor Chandler was named secretary of the AALS Insurance Law section at its January annual meeting. He was interviewed by Channel 2 recently on the odds of winning the Mega-Millions lottery, although the edited product bore only tangentially on that subject.

 

Michelle Foss spoke at the Electric Utility Consultants, Inc. (EUCI) conference on natural gas issues in Denver on January 23rd, the Strategic Research Institute (SRI) Liquid Natural Gas Conference in Houston on January 26th and the Institute of Americas Liquid Natural Gas Workshop on January 29th in San Diego. On February 20th Dr. Foss was an expert at the meeting of the Keystone Energy Board on Natural Gas and Liquid Natural Gas Issues. She also addressed the American Public Gas Association on February 9th and the Institute of Americas for 2003. She was named one of the Key Women in Energy in Energy-Americas for 2003. Additionally fellow members of the Energy Institute Mr. Fisoye Delano spoke on at the Environment Canada workshop on LNG and Dr. Gurcan Gulen spoke at the Energy Modeling Forum at Stanford University on January 29th.

 

Lonny Hoffman was quoted in an article in the Texas Lawyer in February on the new state multidistrict litigation statute and rule promulgated, respectively, by the state legislature and the Texas Supreme Court. He also was quoted in the Corpus Christi Caller-Times on referral fees received by an attorney in a case that has generated considerable press in South Texas.

 

Craig Joyce, with Greg Vetter, spearheaded the Institute for Intellectual Property & Information Law's Inaugural Baker Botts Lecture, "The Right to Claim Authorship," by Columbia Law School Professor Jane C. Ginsburg. Professor Joyce also organized a memorial issue of the Journal of the Copyright Society of the U.S.A., the flagship journal of American copyright law, and published a tribute there, to long-time copyright colleague L. Ray Patterson of the University of Georgia.

 

 

Bryan A. Liang has three publications this month. The first is Professional Association Liability with Personal Malpractice: Just Who Can Be Liable? 16(1) Journal of Clinical Anesthesia 54 (2004). The second is Comment: Improving the Process of Informed Consent in the Critically Ill, 48 Survey of Anesthesiology 5 (2004). The third is Policy Forum: Law, Health Care, and Ethics: Detoxifying the Lethal Mix, AMA Virtual Mentor, March 2004. Professor Liang has been invited to be a group leader at the San Diego Center for Patient Safety Annual Meeting "Making Care Safer One Patient at a Time," University of California San Diego School of Medicine, San Diego, CA, on March 19th. He has been asked to testified to the Federal Trade Commission on pharmaceutical pricing and generic-brand competition policy in Washington, D.C. on March 16, 2004 and has been invited to be a member of a panel discussion, "Research and Patient Safety" at the National Patient Safety Foundation Annual Meeting in Boston, on May 4-6th. Professor Liang continues with two more invitations. The first is an invitation to speak at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and the Pittsburgh Regional Healthcare Initiative, National Quality and Patient Safety Meeting in Pittsburgh on October 8-9th and the second is an invitation to speak at the Widener University School of Law Special Symposium on "Regulating Medical Errors", in Wilmington on October 15th.

Professor Liang was appointed to the Editorial Board, Journal of Biolaw & Business. He also was appointed to the Advisory Boards of HealthyHearing.com and Audiology.com as well as the Review Board of AudiologyOnline.com. He has been asked to serve on the Advisory Board of the Consortium for Research in Elder Self-Neglect, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston.

 

Douglas Moll was asked to speak at the HBA Securities Litigation & Arbitration Section on "Shareholder Oppression in Texas Close Corporations." He will be a panelist along with District Judge Tad Halbach for the Section's April meeting.

 

Brent Newton's book entitled Criminal Litigation and Legal Issues in Criminal Procedure: Readings and Hypothetical Exercises will be published with a teacher's manual this spring by NITA Press (University of Notre Dame).

 

Raymond Nimmer delivered a presentation at Stanford Law School on "Transactional Privacy and Modern Data Rights Law". He also has been offered a contract from Lexis/Nexis for a casebook on Licensing Law which will be published next spring.

 

Michael A. Olivas delivered a talk in February at the Cornell Law School entitled, "Brown and the Desegregative Ideal: College Racial Identity and High Education Policy;" the paper will be published in a Fifty Years After Brown symposium of the Cornell Law Review. He also conducted a UHLC workshop for alums on "Becoming a Law Professor" which was attended by more than 90 lawyers and spoke on "The Law of Teaching" for members of the A.A. White Society. In March, he chaired the ABA/AALS accreditation inspection of the University of California-Davis Law School.

 

Jordan Paust was a member of a panel session on the Alien Tort Claims Act during the State Bar of Texas International Law Section meeting on February 27th. Thereafter he was a moderator of UHLC Conference on Civil Litigation of International Law Violations in U.S. Courts. He also helped to draft two amici briefs on two cases before the U.S. Supreme Court concerning Hamdi v. Rumsfeld and Rumsfeld v. Padilla and he provided advice on an amici brief in the Supreme Court case of Sosa v. Alvarez-Machain.

 

Nancy Rapoport spoke at the Commercial Law League of America's Western Meeting in Palm Springs held the last week in February. The topic was (surprise, surprise) Enron.

 

Jon Schultz authored Multinational Statutes Compared, published by William S. Hein & Co. His presentation "Planning and Recovery Processes: Easing the Pain", at the annual meeting of the American Association of Law Libraries in Seattle received top reviews. He spoke to the Houston chapter of the American Association of Law Libraries on "The Instant Academic Law Library: Just Add Water". He produced a short piece in The Public Lawyer entitled The Road Back to Point A. He was a member of the ABA inspection team for Florida International University in Coral Gables.

 

Greg Vetter launched an IPIL sponsored web resource that he has been developing for the last year. The web resource is available at www.fcplc.org. It provides information for precedential patent law cases decided by the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. Cases and summaries are provided. In addition, for those who join the listserv described on the web site, there is automatic email delivery for some of the available resources.

 

Jacqueline Lang Weaver's article Can Energy Markets Be Trusted? continues to careen about electronically through both the SSRN Abstract service and the Houston Business & Tax L.J. bringing many electronic pen pals to her email box including a "deep throat" analyst who appears to be scanning the hundreds of gigabytes of Enron emails and evidence on FERC's website for particularly juicy insights. The American Public Power Association contacted her to be a judge in their annual competition on energy innovation called DEED-Demonstration of Energy-Efficient Developments. Also her paper was listed in the Top10 Hits in SSRN categories for Regulated Industries, Antitrust, Corporate Governance, Business Policy and Strategy, Regulation of Financial Institutions, and the University of Houston Law Center's own SSRN series on Public Law. Professor Weaver urges other faculty member to use the SSRN as a good way of publicizing your work and adding to your inbox messages.