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

January/February 2007

Christine Agnew was nominated to serve on the Council of the American Bar Association Section of Taxation. In addition, she was asked to serve on the academic advisory board of the Tannenwald Foundation for Excellence in Tax Scholarship. The overriding purpose of the Foundation is to encourage and foster in law students the intense passion that Judge Tannenwald had for rigorous and insightful legal analysis, for precise legal writing, and for quality legal education.

Aaron Bruhl has been selected to write two entries in the forthcoming International Encyclopedia of Political Science (Congressional Quarterly Press, 2008). The entries will cover “precedent” and “Contempt of Congress.”

Darren Bush completed a review of Network Access, Regulation, and Antitrust by Diana L. Moss, ed. that will appear in 30 World Comparative L. & Economic Review___ (2007). In February, he will comment on a paper by Larry Sullivan and Warren Grimes at a symposium in honor of Larry Sullivan who is retiring this year. In March, he will present his paper Electricity Merger Analysis: Market Screens, Market Definition, and Other Lemmings at the American Antitrust Institute’s 7th Annual Energy Roundtable Workshop titled Lessons Learned from Electricity Restructuring. In April, he will be discussing Robert Steiner’s paper on vertical restraints at the 2007 Loyola Antitrust Colloquium. He will also be participating in a PLI program on the Tunney Act, to be scheduled after Judge Jackson makes his ruling in the SBC/AT&T merger. He has also wrapped up his work for the Antitrust Modernization Commission which recently posted its list of tentative recommendations, available at http://www.amc.gov/pdf/meetings/list_of_recommendations_jan_11v3.pdf. In cooperation with the Houston Law Review, he will be working to gather papers and authors for a symposium on Airline Deregulation and Antitrust to be published next year. On December 13th 2006, he appeared on the local NBC and ABC affiliates discussing the potential combination of United Airlines and Continental Airlines. Finally, his article Mission Creep: Antitrust Exemptions and Immunities as Applies to (De) Regulated Industries is now available at 2006 UTAH L. Rev. 613 and at http://ssrn.com/abstract=945642.

Meredith J. Duncan presented her article “Rape Sans Rapist: The Need for Clearer Lines Between Forcible Rape and Nonconsensual Sex” at the Mid-Atlantic People of Color Legal Scholarship Conference at the University of Richmond School of Law on January 26 & 27, 2007.

Lonny Hoffman published a paper in January titled The Commencement Problem: Lessons from a Statute’s First Year. The citation is 40 U.C. DAVIS L. Rev. 469 (2006). Many thanks to Emily Gelman and Gregory Rhoden for last minute help in finalizing the piece before it went to publication. Professor Hoffman also presented his article, “Access to Justice, Access to Information: The Role of Presuit Investigatory Discovery,” at the University of Houston Program for Empirical Legal Studies (organized by Professor Paul Collins, UH Pol.Sci. Dept.). Full text of the article is available through the SSRN link at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=885820 (Univ. of Michigan Journal of Law Reform, forthcoming 2007). As editor of  THE ADVOCATE, the quarterly journal of the Litigation Section for the State Bar of Texas, Professor Hoffman published Volume 37 (Winter 2006), a symposium issue devoted to Insurance and Litigation. In January, in his capacity as a member of its editorial board, Professor Hoffman traveled to Charleston, South Carolina to attend a meeting of the First Press Group, a publishing committee of the Litigation Section of the American Bar Association. He also attended the monthly Houston Bar Association Administration of Justice Committee meeting. Over the holiday break, Professor Hoffman graded approximately one million law student essay answers; then, in January, he met with roughly half a million students to go over their exams.

Peter Hoffman was a presenter at the Texas Academy of Family Law Specialists 2007 Trial Institute held in Santa Fe, New Mexico on January 12-13, 2007. He was also a team leader for NITA’s Rocky Mountain Deposition Program held in Louisville, Colorado, on December 7-9, 2007 and was Program Director for NITA Trial Skills for Public Service Attorneys Program held on November 13-17, 2006, also in Louisville.

Craig Joyce published the Cumulative Supplement to Copyright Law (7th Ed. 2006).

Joan Krause is the author of an article, Accutane: Has drug Regulation in the United States Reached Its Limits? 6 J.L. & Health 1 (1991-92), that was used in the preparation of a November 2006 Swiss public television documentary about the drug titled “Morire per la Pelle (To Die for the Skin).”

 

Chuck Meyer recently served as a roundtable discussion participant on the UK National Health Services Research Agenda at the Health, The Body and the E-Society Symposium in York, England on January 18 and 19, 2007. The conference was sponsored by the UK government’s Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), the funding body that provided Prof. Meyer and a team of other researchers at Oxford University with a research grant to investigate intellectual property rights in digitized mammograms shared over a grid-computing network. Professor Meyer and other team members are in the process of applying to the ESRC for additional grants to investigate further aspects of shared medical data, especially with respect to confidentiality of patient data and the need for access to such data for medical and sociological research.

 

Douglas Moll (with Bob Ragazzo) completed the statutory supplement for their recent casebook, Closely Held Business Organizations: Cases, Materials, and Problems (Thomson West). The supplement was published in early January. They have now started working on their treatise, The Law of Close Corporations (Aspen Publishing), to be published in 2008.

 

Gerry Moohr presented “The Prospects of Deterring White Collar Crime” at a University of Alabama Law School faculty colloquium last October. The paper, written for a symposium at the University of Maryland School of Law, will be published by the Maryland School of Business and Technology Law. Prof. Moohr has agreed to serve as co-author with Linda Malone, Paul Marcus, and Joe Cook in the sixth edition of their Criminal Law Casebook, published by Lexis. Her article, “What the Martha Stewart Case Tells Us About White Collar Criminal Law,” was published by the Houston Law Review in November 2006. This article is a “Top Ten” in SSRN criminal procedure downloads.

 

Tom Oldham and co-author Kelly Weisberg produced a new edition of Texas Family Code and Related Provisions, which was published in January by Aspen.

 

Michael A. Olivas delivered a paper on Germaneness in Academic Freedom Norms at the January AALS Annual Meeting, and serves on the Executive Committee of the Association. He has continued to give invited talks on his book about the Hernandez v Texas case, which he did in January at Boston College Law School. While he was at BC, he also gave a lecture on developments in the law concerning terrorism and the impact upon colleges and universities, at the BC Lynch School of Education. In addition, he served as a reviewer for book proposals for Harvard University Press, Rowan and Littlefield, the ASHE Monograph series, and NYU Press.

 

Jordan Paust was a member of a panel on Transnational Cybercrime at the meeting of the American Branch, International Law Association-West on February 3, 2007, at Santa Clara University.

 

Nancy Rapoport has two articles in the SSRN “top 10 downloads”: “Lord of the Flies (1963): The Development of Rules Within an Adolescent Culture” at http://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=949168, and “Not Quite ‘Them’, Not Quite ‘Us”: Why It’s Difficult for Former Deans to go Home Again” at http://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=936251. Prof Rapoport has also authored a chapter, Reflections of a Former Dean, in Law School Leadership Strategies: Top Deans on Benchmarking Success, Incorporating Feedback From Faculty and Students, and Building the Endowment (Aspatore Books 2006). In other news, on February 2-3, she spoke at a CLE for professional development coordinators of law firms in Dallas and she will speak on Enron at another CLE for the Nevada bankruptcy bar in Las Vegas on February 15. She has contracts to write a chapter of Collier on Bankruptcy and for a second edition of her Enron book.  In addition, she is drafting ethics questions for each of the three American Board of Certification exams and is talking to a university press about a book of essays on what is wrong with legal education.

 

Irene Rosenberg has authored an article, “The Bible for Lawyers-Legal Principles in the Story of Creation,” which has been accepted for publication by the Criminal Law Bulletin.

 

Ira B. Shepard spoke on “Recent Developments in Federal Income Taxation” (with Martin J. McMahon, Jr., of the University of Texas Law School) at the Mid-Winter meeting of the American Bar Association Tax Section in January. He also spoke in January on “Current Developments in Federal Taxation” to the Wednesday Tax Forum. In February, he spoke on “Ethical Lessons from the Tax Shelter Wars” to the (Houston) International Tax Forum, a topic on which he spoke in December to the Houston Bar Association Tax Section.

 

Don Tomlinson spoke on January 17, 2007 to the Sterling Bank Women’s Business Initiative at the H.E.S.S. Club in Houston. His talk was titled simply “Alternative Dispute Resolution.”

 

Jacqueline Weaver was in Beijing China from January 5 to January 15, lecturing to managers from two Chinese national oil companies, CNPC and Sinopec. The lectures covered topics in international petroleum contracts. On January 26 (in Dallas) and February 2 (in Houston), she spoke at the University of Houston’s CLE in Advanced Oil and Gas, on the topic of the future of our hydrocarbon-based economy.

 


Harriet Richman, Editor