Albertus Accolades

August 2015

Editor, Katy Stein Badeaux • Access previous editions of Albertus Accolades here.

Albertus Accolades is a monthly publication documenting the activities, accomplishments, and honors of
the University of Houston Law Center faculty and staff.

Leonard Baynes attended the Quarterly Deans’ Luncheon hosted by the Houston Bar Association on July 2. Dean Baynes spoke to alumni and friends at a reception hosted by Locke Lord LLP on July 22 and alumni and summer associates at Norton Rose Fulbright on July 23. Dean Baynes also attended the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges 78th Annual Conference in Austin, TX July 26-29. Judge Darlene Byrne was honored at a dinner as the incoming NCJFCJ’s President.

Chris Dykes and Dan Donahue were speakers at the hot topic program “Net Neutrality and Law Librarians: It’s a Good Thing” at the recent American Association of Law Libraries annual meeting. In Custodia Legis, a blog authored by the Law Librarians of Congress, reported favorably on the program.

Barbara Evans was a Visiting Fellow at the Center for Law, Ethics, and Applied Research (CLEAR) in Health Information at Indiana University during August. She recorded a podcast for This Week in Health Law with privacy scholar Nic Terry and bioethicist Eric M. Meslin. Her article on limits of FDA’s jurisdiction to regulate gene sequencing research just appeared in the Petrie Flom/FDLI Symposium of the Food and Drug Law Journal. She submitted a commissioned paper on ownership of data from wearables and mobile sensing devices as part of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation-funded Health Data Exploration Project. She participated in meetings for an Institute of Medicine report on access to hearing health care for adults. She visited the White House in July and continues to work on issues related to the administration’s Precision Medicine Initiative. She will present a paper on First Amendment issues in genomics at an FDLI symposium at Georgetown Law School in coming weeks and will present a paper on biospecimen research at Harvard Law School as part of an NIH-funded research project. She received invitations to speak at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna and the Global Genomic Medicine Collaborative in Singapore but attendance is uncertain due to teaching schedules. She is writing about genomic data networks for a book on medical knowledge commons edited by Katherine Strandburg, Brett Frischmann, and Michael Madison; about democratic self-governance of data access for a special issue of Applied and Translational Genomics edited by Misha Angrist; and about regulatory access-forcing mechanisms as part of an NIH project.

Dave Fagundes published two pieces this summer. The first is an essay based on his participation in the 2014 Texas A&M Law School Land Use Symposium: Property, Morality, and Moral Psychology: A Comment on Gerhart’s Property and Social Morality, 2 Texas A&M Journal of Real Property Law 301 (2015). The second is a contribution to a series of commentaries in memory of Dan Markel: Contextualizing Fan Action Committees: A Comment on Catalyzing Fans, 6 Harvard Journal of Sports & Entertainment Law 169 (2015). Professor Fagundes was also elected to the executive board of the Association of Law, Property & Society (ALPS) in recognition of his two years of service as the co-chair of the ALPS annual conference program committee.

Tracy Hester spoke at an invitational workshop in Paris on July 9 sponsored by Oxford University, where he reviewed the legal consequences of recent advances in climate attribution science.  He then attended the NAFTA Commission on Environmental Cooperation’s annual meeting in Boston on July 15 where he presented the annual report and recommendations of EPA’s National Advisory Committee on NAFTA issues. He joined Dean Marcilynn Burke and Professor Jacqueline Weaver in Anchorage, Alaska for the annual meeting of the Rocky Mountain Mineral Law Foundation on July 17-18.  Professor Hester spoke on the U.S. Supreme Court’s rejection of EPA’s mercury rules for power plants at the UH Law Center’s Supreme Court CLE event on July 28, and he then participated in the Texas Environmental Superconference in Austin on August  6-7. His article, Designed for Distrust:  Revitalizing NAFTA’s Environmental Submissions Process, was accepted for publication by the Georgetown Environmental Law Review.

Geoffrey Hoffman’s piece on Donald Trump and Immigration was published by Salon.com in July 2015, and is available here. Professor Hoffman was interviewed by radio host David Pitman for KUHF on the new Texas law requiring e-verify compliance for all state agencies. He also was interviewed for ACLU’s radio show “Be The Change” discussing immigration topics, including the recent DACA litigation, family detention, expedited removal, right to counsel, Fourth Amendment, among other immigration-related issues. The audio when available will be posted http://hmsnetradio.org/AudioLibrary/BetheChange.aspx. Professor Hoffman commented on a Nebraska Court of Appeals’ decision, Catlett v. Catlett, issued August 18 for the Bloomberg BNA Family Law Reporter. The case involved enforceability of federal immigration affidavits of support. Professor Hoffman was additionally interviewed by Houston Matters regarding problems immigrants may experience under Texas’ new ID policy. Audio is available here.

Sapna Kumar’s article Regulating Digital Trade was discussed by Chief Judge Prost and Judge O’Malley during the Federal Circuit’s oral argument for ClearCorrect Operating, LLC v. USITC. She also wrote two posts on Patently Obvious--the leading patent law blog--regarding the ClearCorrect litigation.

Jessica Mantel's article, A Defense of Physicians' Gatekeeping Role:  Balancing Patients' Needs with Society's Interests, was recently published by the Pepperdine Law Review. Professor Mantel also presented her article, Spending Medicare's Dollars Wisely: Taking Aim at Hospitals' Cultures of Overtreatment (forthcoming University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform), at SEALS on July 27.  In addition, she participated in a SEALS discussion group on hot issues in law and bioethics, where she discussed potential privacy barriers to providers and nonproviders working together to address the social determinants of health.

Rick McElvaney spoke at the Credit Coalition on August 6  on housing and consumer issues, along with his consumer law clinic LLM student Bruce Hiran. The Credit Coalition provides Financial and Homebuyer Counseling and Education, Foreclosure Intervention Counseling, Reverse Mortgage Counseling and outreach services to all segments of our community, especially the low and moderate income. He also appeared on Telemundo Channel 47 news segments regarding landlord/tenant and consumer issues. The O’Connor’s Property Code Plus 2015-2016 (Jones McClure), which Professor McElvaney co-authored, will be out this month. It is in its Eleventh year of publication.

Douglas Moll submitted the manuscript for the 2015 supplement for his treatise on closely held corporations (Lexis Publishing, with Robert Ragazzo). He also submitted the manuscript for the 2015 edition of Corporations and Other Business Associations:  Statutes, Rules, and Forms (West Academic). Professor Moll is also busy with scheduling and logistics for the first annual Texas Legal Scholars Workshop, co-sponsored with SMU Law School, to be held on August 28 and 29 at UHLC.

Thomas Oldham is finalizing the details of his Fulbright visit to Australia in November and December 2015.

Michael A. Olivas was re-appointed to the Editorial Board of the Journal of College and University Law, a hybrid refereed journal and law review, published at Notre Dame Law School; it is the only law review in the country devoted exclusively to college law issues. He has served on the Editorial Board for more than 25 years. He has served on more than two dozen editorial boards of journals in immigration law and education law, as well as higher education. He briefed a number of journalists on entertainment law issues, including copyright and music business developments.

D. Theodore Rave was invited to participate in the American Law Institute’s Young Scholars Medal Conference on “The Future of Aggregate Litigation” this spring at NYU School of Law. He was also invited to contribute a paper to a colloquium on “Civil Litigation Ethics at a Time of Vanishing Trials” put on by the Stein Center for Law and Ethics and the Fordham Law Review next fall. Finally, Professor Rave was invited to present his forthcoming article When Peace is Not the Goal of a Class Action Settlement at South Texas College of Law on October 9.

Jessica L. Roberts attended the Southeastern Association of Law Schools Annual Conference, where she participated in a roundtable discussion of appearance discrimination, a roundtable discussion of accommodation, an employment scholars workshop, and the SEALS steering committee meeting. Her solicited essay, An Alternate Theory of Hobby Lobby v. Burwell, will appear in a forthcoming symposium issue of the Connecticut Insurance Law Journal.

Ronald Turner submitted the 2015 supplement to his co-authored casebook Employment Discrimination Law: Cases and Materials (LexisNexis) and is preparing the eighth edition of the work for publication in 2016.  He has also submitted an entry entitled The Age Discrimination in Employment Act which will be published in The American Middle Class: An Economic Encyclopedia of Progress and Poverty(Robert S. Rycroft ed., forthcoming).  His article On Free, Harmful, and Hateful Speech, 82 Tennessee Law Review 283 (2015), has been selected for inclusion in the forthcoming First Amendment Law Handbook, an annual compendium of notable articles on free speech issues published by Thomson Reuters. Professor Turner’s article, The Problematics of the Brown-is-Originalist Project, will be published at 23 Journal of Law and Policy 591 (2015). In addition, Professor Turner taught constitutional law and employment law classes in this summer's UHLC Pre-Law Pipeline Program.

Allison Winnike was named the Director of Research for the Health Law & Policy Institute where she welcomes new Research Professors Steven Chen and Daphne Robinson. At the end of July she traveled to Omaha for the Conference of Chief Justices (CCJ) and Conference of State Court Administrators (COSCA) annual meeting as a member of the CCJ Pandemic and Emergency Response Task Force. The Task Force met to discuss their model bench book and toured the University of Nebraska Medical Center Biocontainment Unit where three Ebola patients were treated last fall. On August 10 she participated in the Texas Medical Board Enforcement and Infectious Disease Stakeholders Group meeting in Austin. At the end of August she will travel to Austin to attend the Texas Tobacco Epidemiology Workgroup to discuss updates to the Texas Smoke-Free Ordinance Database.

Kellen Zale attended the annual Southeastern Association of Law Schools Conference in Boca Raton, Florida in July 2015, where she spoke on a panel about alternatives to municipal bankruptcy for financially distressed local governments.