Faculty Focus

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

October, 2005

David R. Dow's book, Texas Contract Law, co-authored with Craig Smyser, was published by Thomson-West in September.  His essay, Grave Errors in the Anti-Death Movement appeared in the Christian Networks Journal 48 (Fall 2005).  A second essay, Is the Death Penalty Constitutional?  Does it Matter?, an Exchange with Mark Dow, was published in X New Politics 55 (Summer 2005) and his letter, The Transition in the Court, appeared in N. Y. Times, September 7, 2005 at  A24.

 

Victor Flatt filed a brief as counsel for amici Senators Clinton, Boxer, Kerry, Lautenberg, et al. in the case of New York v. EPA, a case concerning the Clean Air Act.  Professor Flatt also spoke in Seattle at the memorial service for Judge Faye C. Kennedy, former Chief Justice of the Washington State Court of Appeals, Division I, who passed away in September.

 

Sandy Gaines's textbook, Trade and the Environment: Law and Policy (co-authors Chris Wold and Greg Block) has been published by Carolina Academic Press and is already being used at one school this fall.  Professor Gaines has also submitted the final version of his peer-reviewed paper, Environmental Policy Implications of Investor-State Arbitration under NAFTA Chapter 11 to the Commission for Environmental Cooperation. He will present this paper at the CEC's Third Conference on the Environmental Effects of NAFTA in Montreal on November 30th.

 

Gidi presented a paper in Colombia and Brazil regarding his proposed Class Action Model Code.

 

Leslie Griffin was a panelist for Rice University's Constitution Day on Friday, September 16th.  She spoke about some of the important cases from last term.  On Friday, October 7th, she was a panelist at the Summit on, Patient Safety: Moving Forward, in San Mateo, California, sponsored by the Hospital Consortium of San Mateo County. She spoke on Patient Safety:  Communicating beyond the Walls.

 

Craig Joyce attended the investiture of Chief Justice John. G. Roberts, Jr., at the United States Supreme Court in Washington, D.C.  Also, Professors Joyce and Moll launched the ABA Self Study at the Law Center, a process that will continue into next year.

 

Ellen Marrus and Irene Rosenberg co-authored two articles: After Roper: Keeping Kids Out of Adult Criminal Court to be published in the San Diego Law Review and Roper v. Simmons and Strickland v. Washington: Dancing With Death which will appear in the Criminal Law Bulletin. Professor Marrus is conducting a CLE for the Houston Bar Association on Sealing of Juvenile Records, to help the Houston Volunteer Lawyers Program train attorneys to do juvenile cases on a pro bono basis.  Also, Professor Marrus has received $15,000 from the Houston-Galveston Area Council for the Annual Juvenile Defense Conference sponsored by the Southwest Juvenile Defender Center.  Under a grant from Texas Appleseed to the Southwest Juvenile Defender Center, she has just completed updating juvenile handbooks for attorneys and families and will conduct training for attorneys in Texas on juvenile practice.  Professor Marrus coordinated volunteers for Families and Friends of Incarcerated Children, a New Orleans organization, which finds families who evacuated New Orleans leaving behind detained children who could not be released from facilities without them and had no way to locate them or check on their safety.

 

Douglas Moll was asked to participate as a commentator in a "virtual" junior scholars workshop on Conglomerate -- a corporate law blog. He reviewed an article on the Time Warner-AOL merger and exchanged comments and feedback with other "bloggers."  Professor Moll's article, Minority Oppression in the Limited Liability Company:  Learning (Or Not) From Close Corporation History, is set for publication by the Wake Forest Law Review.  The article was written for a symposium on the future of business structures.

 

Tom Oldham attended the ABA Family Law section meeting in San Diego on Oct 3 -7.  He also submitted a review of The Genius Factory: The Curious History of the Nobel Prize Sperm Bank by David Plotz to the Family Law Quarterly.

 

Michael A. Olivas submitted the manuscript for the third edition of his casebook, The Law and Higher Education, Cases and Materials on Colleges in Court (Durham: Carolina Academic Press, 2006) to the publishers; he is working on the Teacher’s Manual. Jimmy Smits has agreed to play him in the film version. His Presidential Lecture to be given at Rice University on September 26th was postponed due to Hurricane Rita. He attended the 40th reunion of his school baseball team’s state championship, in Albuquerque, NM. Not that he remembers it all that well, but that year (playing catcher for the Our Lady of Fatima Falcons) he caught a no-hitter, threw out the only base runner to reach first (on a walk) as he attempted to steal second, and went 3 for 5, including a triple. Everything since that glorious day at Los Altos Field has been downhill.

 

Laura Oren’s article, Honor Thy Mother:  The Supreme Court’s Jurisprudence of Motherhood  will be published in the Hastings Women’s Law Journal in the Spring/Summer issue.  It is a longer version of a paper she will deliver at the University of Houston’s Women’s Studies Program on, Twenty-first Century Motherhood:  Change on October 20-22, 2005.

 

Jordan Paust was a member of a panel on The Relevance of the Customary Law of Armed Conflict in Contemporary Armed Conflicts during a conference at the Washington College of Law of American University on The Reaffirmation of Custom as an Important Source of International Humanitarian Law, on September 28, 2005 and televised by C-Span.  The casebook, Paust, Van Dyke, Malone, International Law and Litigation in the U.S. (Thomson-West American Casebook Series, 2 ed. 2005) and the 2005 Documents Supplement thereto were completed in final form this semester.

 

Robert Schuwerk was quoted in the Texas Lawyer, September 19, 2005 at 5 in a case where a private corrections company is suing a law firm for money missing from an escrow account. The firm must show that the account was set up in a way that would reasonably protect the client’s assets.

 

Ira B, Shepard attended the Southern Federal Tax Institute, held September 26-30 in Atlanta, where he spoke on Recent Developments in Federal Income Taxation (for the 16th consecutive year) and served as Special Advisor to the Board of Trustees (for the 32nd consecutive year). His article, Recent Developments in Federal Income Taxation: The Year 2004 (co-authored with Martin J. McMahon, Jr.) was published at 7 Florida Tax Review 47-140 (2005).

 

Sandra Guerra Thompson attended the drafting meeting of the Advisory Board of the American Law Institute’s project Model Penal Code: Sentencing in San Francisco on September 10th.  The group is drafting new model sentencing laws to help guide state legislatures in revising their sentencing provisions.

 

Ronald Turner is finishing his fall semester visit at the College of William & Mary School of Law, and he will be teaching an Antidiscrimination Law and Policy graduate seminar at Rice University in the spring.  His article, Ideological Voting on the National Labor Relations Board will be published in a forthcoming issue of the University of Pennsylvania Journal of Labor and Employment Law.