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

June, 2008

Previous Editions of Faculty Focus can be accessed through the Faculty Focus Website

 

 

Richard Alderman chaired an international conference on teaching consumer law. The conference, presented by the Center for Consumer Law, was attended by more than 70 professors from eight countries. He published “A few Suggested Steps Toward Increased Credit Card Use in Nigeria,” 3 Consumer Journal 8 (2008). He also served on the University Sweatshop Task Force, spoke to hurricane survivors at Catholic Charities and to the Houston Retired Physician’s Association and the Sandpiper  Republican Women Association.

 

 

Seth Chandler's article "A 'Genetically Modified' Liability Insurance Contract has appeared in the Connecticut Insurance Law Journal, 13 Conn. Ins. L.J. 203. His article "The CISG Text" has been submitted to the Ninth International Mathematica Symposium. Prof. Chandler will present that paper this month in Maastricht, Holland. Prof. Chandler has been named an expert commentator on insurance law by LexisNexis. His first submission is Chandler on Florida Insurance Code Chapter 627.0628 (hurricane insurance) and will be available at http://law.lexisnexis.com/practiceareas/insurance. His second submission is "Congressional Bill Would Outlaw Use of Credit Scores in Personal Lines Insurance -- Maybe" and should be appearing shortly.
Professor Chandler has published six law-related Demonstrations over the past several months that are available at http://demonstrations.wolfram.com. They are:
General Divisor Methods (http://demonstrations.wolfram.com/GeneralDivisorMethods/) dealing with Congressional Apportionment
Tries (http://demonstrations.wolfram.com/Tries/) showing a data structure useful in the application of computational linguistics to law
Predictive Scores and Ultimate Test Passage (http://demonstrations.wolfram.com/PredictiveScoresAndUltimateTestPassage/), which is relevant to law school admissions and bar passage
Collocation by Symmetric Conditional Probability (http://demonstrations.wolfram.com/CollocationBySymmetricConditionalProbability/) demonstrating idea behind article on CISG
Reinsurance Cut-Through (http://demonstrations.wolfram.com/ReinsuranceCutThrough/) showing how settlement mechanism can subvert insurance insolvency laws
Insolvency Setoff (http://demonstrations.wolfram.com/InsolvencySetoff/) showing how setoff works.
He has also published three Demonstrations of general interest:
Cycles from Permutations (http://demonstrations.wolfram.com/CyclesFromPermutations/)
Shakesperean Networks (http://demonstrations.wolfram.com/ShakespeareanNetworks/)
Enumerating the Directed Graphs (http://demonstrations.wolfram.com/EnumeratingTheDirectedGraphs/)
Prof. Chandler has completed his site visit of the University of Dayton Law School and has submitted his reports to the American Bar Association and the American Association of Law Schools. He has been named chair of the site team for the University of Oklahoma Law School.

 

 

Anne Chandler delivered a talk on March 7 on Federalism, a Perspective from a Practitioner at the Tulsa Journal of Comparative and International Law’s 15th Anniversary Symposium, “What About Federalism?: State’s Rights and the New State Immigration Laws.” On April 5, 2008 she delivered a talk, Gangs, Domestic Violence and Asylum, to attorneys and academics at the John Marshall School in Chicago, Illinois at the Third Annual Conference on Unaccompanied Immigrant Children sponsored by the National Immigrant Justice Center. On May 2, 2008, she attended the Immigration Law Teachers Workshop at the University of Miami, and delivered comments to Andrew Moore’s article on Criminal Deportation, Post-Conviction Relief and the Lost Cause of Uniformity.

 

 

Victor B. Flatt delivered the Boehl Distinguished Lecture in Land Use Policy at the University of Louisville Louis D. Brandeis School of Law.  The title was: “Act Locally, Affect Globally: Local Government's Role in Addressing Climate Change and Other Large-Scale Environmental Harms.” Prof. Flatt has also been invited to speak at the University College London’s Public Lecture Series in October.  He will be speaking on U.S. Climate Change Legislation. Professor Flatt is co-teaching the class Alaska Native and Environmental Law this summer in Anchorage. He is also featured in the new film documentary Lawrence v. Texas, released in June.

 

 

Paul Janicke was the luncheon speaker for the spring meeting of the American Intellectual Property Law Association, held this year on May 15 in Houston. AIPLA is the world's largest organization devoted to intellectual property law.

 

 

 Tom Oldham will be presenting 2 papers at an international family law conference in Sussex in July.

 

 

Michael A. Olivas Michael A. Olivas published "Hernandez v. Texas," in SAGE Encyclopedia of Race, Ethnicity, and Society (2008), 611. In 2007, he published Immigration-Related State Statutes and Local Ordinances: Preemption, Prejudice, and The Proper Role for Enforcement, University of Chicago Legal Forum 27-56 (2007), in a special issue on immigration law and policy. Since then, this article was re-published ion the Bender's Immigration Law Bulletin, and will now be re-published in Immigration and Nationality Law Review, which selects "the year's outstanding scholarly contributions in the field" for inclusion.

 

 

Jordan Paust was the discussion leader during a session on Issues in International Humanitarian Law and the “War on Terror,” during the Teaching IHL Institute, American University Washington College of Law (WCL), June 4, 2008.  He also gave lectures on Terrorism and Human Rights at the WCL during the Academy on Human Rights and Humanitarian Law. A book chapter written by Prof. Paust has also recently been printed: Secret Detentions, Secret Renditions, and Forced Disappearances During the Bush Administration’s “War” on Terror, in The Theory and Practice of International Criminal Law: Essays in Honor of M. Cherif Bassiouni (Leila Nadya Sadat & Michael P. Scharf eds. 2008).

 

 

Diana Velardo was a guest speaker at Baylor College of Medicine. Her presentation was “Issues of Human Trafficking in the medical field. How to identify victims, and Legal Implications.” She also was a guest speaker at Rice University during Violence Against Women Week. Her presentation was titled “Domestic violence in the immigrant community and the local problems with human trafficking”. Diana was also a co-panelist at the Annual South Texas College International Human Trafficking and Sexual Exploitation Conference titled “A presentation and panel on state/local issues and challenges.”

 

 

Greg Vetter organized, moderated and presented on a panel discussing “Law, Regulation, and Software Licensing for the Electronic Medical Record” at the Computers, Freedom, & Privacy 2008 conference in New Haven, Connecticut on May 23rd.  His presentation examined the use of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) for the Electronic Medical Record.  Additionally, on June 6th and 7th, he presided at IPIL’s Santa Fe conference:  Patent Law in Perspective.  A year in the making, the conference was organized by Professor Vetter.  Professors who presented papers authored for the conference include: Rebecca Eisenberg of the University of Michigan School of Law; Paul J. Heald of the University of Georgia School of Law; Michael Meurer of the Boston University School of Law; Janice M. Mueller of the University of Pittsburgh School of Law; and Arti K. Rai of Duke Law School.

 

 

Stephen Zamora lectured for two days in May on International Litigation in U.S. Courts, at the Academy of American and International Law, in Dallas.  The Academy is hosted by the Center for American and International Law (formerly, the Southwestern Legal Foundation), and brings 80 to 90 foreign lawyers to Dallas for 6 weeks of lectures by lawyers and law professors from around the United States.  This was the nineteenth consecutive year Prof. Zamora has lectured on this subject at the Academy. On May 28, he gave a lecture on The Social Repercussions of Free Trade: A Proposal for a North American Regional Development Fund, to the Mexican Academy of Private International Law, in Mexico City. On May 26, he spoke on comparative legal education to the lawyers of the Mexico City law firm of Lopez Velarde, Heftye and Soria.  The founder of the firm, Rogelio Lopez Velarde, is a University of Houston Law Center graduate, and one of Mexico’s leading energy law experts. Prof. Zamora also had Op Ed pieces on NAFTA published in the Houston Chronicle, and the Mexico City Reforma, on the need for a North American Regional Development Fund to deal with U.S. – Mexico immigration issues.

 

 

 

Spencer L. Simons

Director of the Law Library and Assistant Professor of Law