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

December 2010

Editor, Dan Baker djbaker2@central.uh.edu

Previous editions of Faculty Focus can be accessed here.

Thomson/West recently published Richard Alderman’s 2010-11 edition of the two-volume Consumer Credit and the Law and the 2010-11 edition of the two-volume Consumer Protection and the Law. Dean Alderman also published “What’s Really Wrong with Forced Consumer Arbitration” in the ABA Business Law Section’s online journal Business Law Today. He also published the 2010-11 edition of Texas Consumer Law: Cases and Materials. In March of this year, Dean Alderman was sent by the State Department to consult with the Vietnamese government regarding a proposed consumer protection law. The law was just enacted by the Vietnam National Assembly, and Dean Alderman has been invited back to work on implementing rules and regulations.

Erma Bonadero has been elected a Fellow of the Texas Bar Foundation – the largest charitably-funded bar foundation in the country. Prof. Bonadero was nominated for inclusion in this premier organization by a UHLC externship placement supervisor who serves as the Senior Attorney of the Administrative Office of the District Courts of Harris County. She has also been elected as a director-at-large for the Texas State University Alumni Association Board of Directors.

Aaron Bruhl presented a paper on statutory interpretation at a workshop hosted by Arizona State University and the legal blog PrawfsBlawg.

Tracy Hester spoke at a workshop on carbon capture and sequestration sponsored by the British and Norwegian consulates on Dec. 6 in Houston. He presented a summary and analysis of new EPA rules for storing carbon dioxide in underground wells.

Julie Hill’s empirical study of bank capital enforcement actions was selected for presentation at the Center of Law, Economics and Finance’s Junior Faculty Business and Financial Law Workshop. The article was selected through a blind peer review process that received more than eighty submissions. The Workshop will be held at George Washington University in April.

Geoffrey Hoffman participated in a panel discussion, entitled “Immigration, Citizenship and Law,” organized by the UH Department of Sociology. The panel was held at the Honors College, Nov. 17, 2010, and co-sponsored by the UHLC Immigration Law Clinic. Video of the lecture and discussion is available online at http://mediasite.uh.edu/mediasite5/Viewer/?peid=4e48c39457c2407588db269215b039e4.

Craig Joyce attended the American Society for Legal History’s Annual Meeting in Philadelphia, where he was reappointed as chair of the Committee on the Annual Meeting. In addition, the president and the board approved Prof. Joyce’s proposal for a Committee on the History of the Society, aimed at creating and preserving both documentary and oral histories of ASLH’s founding and early years. Prof. Joyce will chair the new committee.

Sapna Kumar’s paper “Expert Court, Expert Agency” made SSRN’s Top Ten download list for the Intellectual Property Law eJournal. The paper will be published in the UC-Davis Law Review in June. She presented the paper to an ongoing IP Colloquium series at University of Washington Law School in October.

Mon Yin Lung and Emily Woolard gave a presentation on researching immigration law last month as part of the Houston Area Law Librarians Fall Seminar on Immigration Law. Other presenters included Anne Chandler, Director of Tahirih Justice Center Office in Houston and former UHLC Clinical Professor,  Sandy Heathman, UCSIS District Director, and Pauline Appelbaum, UCSIS Chief Counsel. This seminar offered three Texas CLE credits.

Dean Nimmer spoke Nov. 5th on “Copyright Issues” at the Symposium on "First Sale and Patent Exhaustion – A context where contract dominates”, sponsored by High Tech Law Institute at Santa Clara University. Dean Nimmer attended the Swearing-In Ceremony in Austin on Nov. 22, and also attended the Texas Access to Justice Law School Advisory Committee Meeting in Austin on Nov. 22.

Tom Oldham has been invited to participate in the annual faculty-organized symposium at LSU in April 2011. This is like their Frankel lecture. The topic for the symposium this year is “The Future of Community Property.”

Michael A. Olivas turned in his final manuscript to NYU Press for his forthcoming book, No Undocumented Child Left Behind: Plyler v. Doe and the Education of Undocumented Schoolchildren, to be published in the NYUP Series on Citizenship and Migration in the Americas. He served as a consultant to the defendant University of California in Martinez v. UC Regents in the California Supreme Court, whose decision upheld the state residency statute. Prof. Olivas is also an expert witness for the state in Mannschreck v. Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska, et al., a Nebraska state court challenge to a similar resident tuition statute, one Prof. Olivas helped draft several years ago. On Jan. 8, 2011, he assumes the presidency of the Association of American Law Schools. In this connection, the Mayan Calendar predicts the world will end in 2012.

Jordan Paust has an on-line essay concerning U.S. refusals to prosecute alleged Nazi war criminals, “US Inaction: Aiding and Abetting Nazis After the Fact,” available at http://jurist.org/forum/2010/11/us-inaction-aiding-and-abetting-nazis-after-the-fact.php.

Sandra Guerra Thompson, on Monday, Dec. 6, testified as an expert witness on eyewitness identification and wrongful convictions reform legislation at a pretrial hearing of a capital case in a Harris County Criminal Court.

Ronald Turner and his co-authors (Arthur B. Smith, Jr. & Charles B. Craver) have completed and submitted the manuscript of the forthcoming seventh edition of Employment Discrimination Law: Cases and Materials (LexisNexis). He has also accepted the SMU Law Review’s invitation to contribute an article on employment law which will be published in the 2011 Annual Survey of Texas Law.

Bret Wells published this month “The Economic Substance Doctrine: How Codification Changes Decided Cases” in 10 Florida Tax Review 411 (2010).