Faculty Focus is a monthly publication documenting the activities,
accomplishments, and honors of the University of Houston Law Center
Faculty.
November
2014
Editor, Katy Stein Badeaux, kastein@central.uh.edu
Previous editions of Faculty Focus can be
accessed here.
Leonard M. Baynes attended
eight alumni receptions during his first months in office, including a
welcoming event in Houston before traveling to Austin, San Antonio, Dallas, and
New York. He also met with smaller groups of alumni and supporters. Dean Baynes
also helped plan and participated in the National Bar Association’s 25th Annual
Wiley A. Branton Issue Symposium with the theme of
“Education: The New Civil Right.” The symposium took place on October 10, co-sponsored
by UHLC and the Ronald H. Brown Center at St. John’s University School of Law
in New York, and Dean Baynes moderated a panel on the “Law School Bubble.” On
November 4, Dean Baynes joined Donald J. Guter,
president and dean of South Texas College of Law, Judge Edith Jones and Judge
Jeff Bohm in a panel discussion on “The Changing Landscape of Legal Education”
hosted by the Garland Walker American Inns of Court. On November 7, Dean
Baynes served as the keynote speaker at the UHLC Black Law Students Association
Annual Dinner.
Janet
Beck gave a presentation on “Marital Problems” at the annual
University of Texas Immigration Law Conference. She was also on a panel
regarding human trafficking at the UH Graduate School of Social Work.
Aaron
Bruhl was elected to the American Law Institute in October. On October
31, he served as moderator of the Houston Law Review's annual Frankel
Lecture, which featured comments from Professors William Eskridge
(Yale), Nan Hunter (Georgetown), and Jane Schacter
(Stanford). Finally, a review of Professor Bruhl’s
latest article was recently featured on JOTWELL and is available at http://courtslaw.jotwell.com/.
David R.
Dow was the keynote speaker at the 10th annual symposium
on restorative justice and the death penalty held at Utah Valley University in
Orem, Utah, on October 23rd. His topic was “Who Benefits When the State
Executes?”. His most recent book, Things I’ve Learned from Dying,
has just been published in translation in China and Korea.
Barbara
Evans submitted her revised article for the Petrie-Flom/FDLI
October symposium, to appear in a special issue of Food and Drug Law
Journal. She provided a chapter for Nudging Health: Health Law and
Behavioral Economics (I. Glenn Cohen & Holly Fernandez Lynch, eds.,
Johns Hopkins Press, forthcoming 2015-16). Her chapter in FDA in the 21st Century: The Challenges of
Regulating Drugs and New Technologies cleared peer review this month and is in
production at Columbia University Press. She has been invited to write an
article on data ownership for Harvard Health Policy Review. She
is assisting a national cancer advocacy group that is helping its members learn
how to request their genomic data under the new HIPAA data access right that
went into effect October 6. She
was asked to join an American Society of Human Genetics work team developing
comments on FDA’s recently proposed framework for regulating lab-developed
tests. She is preparing public comments on the long-awaited NIH/HHS proposed
rule on Clinical Trial Data Sharing, which implements Title VIII of the 2007
FDAAA statute. On November 13, she gave a talk at Baylor College of Medicine
and she will address the Public Responsibility in Medicine and Research
(PRIM&R) annual meeting in Baltimore next week. She attended the
yearly meeting of the multi-institutional team with which she has been working
on the NIH-funded PoliSeq
study.
Tracy Hester published his article Environmental Action in the 114th Congress: Movement
at the Margins in Trends,
the monthly law newsletter for the ABA’s Section on Environment, Energy &
Resources. He had his first meeting as a new member of EPA’s National
Advisory Committee on NAFTA on October 23, and he coordinated and assisted with
a panel on environmental legal job opportunities for all Houston law students
hosted by the State Bar of Texas’ Section on Environmental and Natural
Resources Law on November 5. Professor Hester met with a delegation from Tanzania’s
National Environmental Management Council to review environmental issues and
policies for development of oil and gas resources on November 5, and he led a
group of environmental law students on a kayak tour of Armand Bayou on October 24
to explore wetlands and water quality concerns first-hand with the Galveston
Bay Foundation’s advocacy director.
Geoffrey
Hoffman spoke at a lunch held jointly by ACLU and PILO student groups on
unaccompanied minors and about his trips to Karnes Detention Center. Professor
Hoffman also served as a volunteer attorney and supervised immigration clinic
students during a DACA clinic with Own the Dream and local volunteer attorneys
at the Baker Ripley Center in South Houston. Professor Hoffman spoke about
domestic violence asylum and other topics on a panel during an Aid to Victims
of Domestic Abuse (AVDA) CLE held at UHLC in mid-November.
Craig Joyce attended the American Society for Legal
History’s Annual Meeting in Denver, where he reported to the Society’s Board as
chair of the Committees on the Annual Meeting and the History of the
Society. The “HOTS” Committee is charged with capturing and preserving the
history of the history society. The Annual Meetings Committee is charged
with continuing the viability of ASLH’s annual meetings tradition of excellence
in the face of current higher education financial constraints. The “Craig
Joyce Award for Distinguished Service” was presented to Thomas A. Green of the
University of Michigan, long-time editor of the Society’s Studies in Legal
History series.
David
Kwok’s paper, “Fair Competition and False Claims in Off-Label Marketing,”
was selected by the AALS Section on Law, Medicine & Healthcare for
presentation at the 2015 AALS Annual Meeting in D.C. as part of its “Works in Progress
for New Law Teachers.”
Douglas
Moll was invited to participate (and did participate) on two panels at
the ABA’s LLC Institute in Washington, D.C. in October. The first panel
involved the Delaware USACafes decision, and
the second panel addressed family business disputes. Professor Moll also
submitted his solicited manuscript, Shareholder
Oppression and the New Louisiana Business Corporation Act, to the Loyola
Law Review.
Gerry Moohr’s essay, White Collar Crime Goes to the Movies, was published by the Ohio
State Journal of Criminal Law. She had presented the essay at the 2013
SEALS conference.
Michael
A. Olivas presented several talks on immigration law and higher education
law: at UCLA, he presented a workshop and conference Keynote Lecture, “The
Undocumented and the DACA-mented: State and Federal
Immigration-related Litigation and Legislation Concerning Higher Education.” He
spoke on the same subject at Michigan State University and at the MSU School of
Education. For AALS, he chairs the Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure,
and met with the Executive Committee in DC to discuss restructuring CAFT. He
also spoke at the American Immigration Council on DACA and State Law.
D.
Theodore Rave on November 7 presented a draft of his paper, When Peace Is Not the Goal of a Class Action Settlement, at NYU
School of Law as part of the NYU Center on Civil Justice’s conference on The
Future of Class Action Litigation: A View From the
Consumer Class.
Greg Vetter was an invited presenter on This Week in
Law (http://twit.tv/show/this-week-in-law/280),
a law and technology video‑cast news program discussing intellectual
property law topics, on the TWiT.tv Netcast Network.
Professor Vetter also moderated/hosted the 21st Annual Ronald
A. Katz Family Foundation Fall Lecture, put on by the Law Center’s Institute
for Intellectual Property and Information Law (IPIL) on November 5, 2014.
Professor Vetter also authored a guest blog post concerning patent
law: Oral Argument in Teva v. Sandoz: Patent
Law Exceptionalism and Judicial Process (http://hamilton-griffin.com/guest-blog-greg-vetter-oral-argument-in-teva-v-sandoz-patent-law-exceptionalism-and-judicial-process)
posted on the blog Hamilton and Griffin on Rights.
Jacqueline
Weaver participated in a two-day conference in Quito, Ecuador on October
16 and 17 that presented lectures to and engaged in dialogue with members of
the Ministry of Hydrocarbons of Ecuador. She spoke on “Best Practices in
Health, Safety and the Environment (HSE) in Exploration and Production.” The
conference was organized by Ricardo Colmenter of Entra Consulting and Weatherford International and
addressed “The Law and Practices of Upstream Oil and Gas Development: Challenges
for Ecuador.” Other speakers included Julian
Cardenas, a former Andrews Kurth Energy Law
Scholar at the UHLC from 2012-2014, and now an adjunct professor at the Law
Center. She also lectured on “The Oil & Gas Lease: Function and
Classification” and on “The Oil & Gas Lease: Defining the Duration” at the
Oil and Gas Law Short Course; Rocky Mountain Mineral Law Foundation CLE program
in Houston on October 20, 2014.
Bret
Wells engaged in a debate with Raffic Barage, an international tax partner with the Washington
office of Baker & Mackenzie over Professor Wells’ forthcoming article
entitled Revisiting §367(d): How Treasury
Took the Bite Out of Section 367(d) and What Should Be Done About It,
___ Florida Tax Rev. ___ (2015).
The debate was held on November 6 at Georgetown Law School as part of
their Graduate Tax Program’s Speaker Series. On November 12, Professor
Wells spoke on "Tax Policy Concerns and Regulatory Responses related to
Corporate Inversion Transactions” at the Houston Tax Roundtable. Professor
Wells' recently published article entitled Corporate Inversions and
Whack-a-Mole Tax Policy, 143 Tax Notes 1429 (June 23, 2014) was
distributed as part of that presentation.
Tasha
Willis spoke at the 10th annual Texas Mediator Credentialing Association
conference on October 25 on the "the best way to utilize all styles and
techniques within one mediation.” While at the conference she was also elected
to her second term as the educational representative on the TMCA board.
Allison
Winnike spoke on quarantine and isolation law in Texas at the “Ebola
Workshop: Preparing for Public Health Emergencies” event sponsored by the Health
Law & Policy Institute. The presentation highlighted the work she recently
completed in the updated Control Measures and Public Health Emergencies: A
Texas Bench Book, which was provided to the approximately 70 workshop
attendees. She also gave a presentation on the history of immunization law in
the United States for the Network for Public Health Law’s webinar on
“Immunization Laws: Impact of Non-Medical Exemptions.” On October 31st
she traveled to Austin to participate in the Texas Medical Board Telemedicine
Stakeholders meeting to discuss possible modification of current
telemedicine regulations. She has recently accepted an invitation to speak
on public health law at the Texas Public Health Association’s 91st
Annual Education Conference (co-hosted by the Texas Department of State Health
Services) in February.
Kellen
Zale spoke on urban development legislation as an invited panelist at
the Maine Law Review Symposium, "Connecting Law & Legislature: The
Legacy of Ed Muskie," at the University of Southern Maine on November 15,
2014. The symposium brought together academics and policy-makers, including
former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, for a discussion of the Senator's
legacy.