Albertus Accolades

November 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 provided welcoming remarks at both the IPIL Fall Advisory Council Dinner on October 5 and the Upperclass Student Mentoring Program Kickoff event on October 6. The next day, Dean Baynes held “Discussions with the Dean” for the full-time and part-time students, giving them an overview of what is going on at the Law School. On October 8, Dean Baynes attended the UH vs. SMU football game where several Law Center alumni and Professor Bret Wells were guests of Chancellor Khator. On October 9, Dean Baynes toured the ExxonMobil Company in The Woodlands and attended Professor Bret Wells’ presentation on International Tax Law. Dean Baynes held a lunchtime talk with the Summer Public Interest and Global Fellows on October 13. On October 15, Dean Baynes spoke at a reception hosted by Norton Rose Fulbright LLP in Washington, D.C. and discussed the Law Schools’ successes. Dean Baynes gave the welcoming remarks and participated in the “Fostering Equality: Examining the Legal Issues Facing the LGBT Community” event at the Law Center on October 16. On October 23, Dean Baynes attended the BLSA Annual Scholarship Banquet. Dean Baynes hosted the Houston Bar Association Deans Luncheon with Laura Gibson, President of HBA, for Deans Donald Guter (South Texas College of Law) and Dannye Holley (TSU Law School) on October 27 at Indika restaurant. Dean Baynes additionally attended the Hispanic Law Students Wine & Cheese event on October 28. Finally, Dean Baynes gave the welcoming remarks at the second Houston Annual Conference – Oil and Gas Investment Arbitration 2015 – 40 years of the Lex Petrolea on Friday, October 30 at the Four Seasons Hotel in Houston.

Janet Beck was a judge in the 2015 Abrams National Mediator Competition/Newhouse Mediation Competition hosted by UHLC Blakely Trial Advocacy Institute. She also supervised Immigration Clinic students in a workshop sponsored by Neighborhood Centers, Inc.; the students helped people from the community regarding their naturalization/citizenship applications.

Emily Berman, with Professors Teddy Rave and Tom Oldham, gave a lunchtime table talk for PILO about the implications that the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, which held that there is a constitutional right to same-sex marriage, has in areas such as equal protection law, family law, and first amendment law.

Jamie West Dillon has been appointed to be a member of the Law School Admission Council’s New Admission Personnel and Faculty Members Workshop 2016 Planning Workgroup (better known as the Newcomers Conference). The annual conference, which is held each September, provides training to new admissions professionals and faculty admissions committee members on topics like financial aid, application pool management, candidate file evaluation, utilizing LSAC resources, marketing and recruiting strategies, diversity issues, and other information pertinent to the admissions process.

Barbara Evans presented papers at the Harvard Petrie-Flom Center’s conference on Specimen Science on November 16 and at Georgetown’s First Amendment symposium on October 30. She spoke in the UH Health Law & Policy Institute’s Speaker Series on November 4 and addressed a regional National Academy of Sciences meeting on reform of federal research regulations. She will speak at the joint U.S./U.K./China International Summit on Gene Editing next week in Washington. She is serving on a National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine working group to prepare comments on the rulemaking to amend 46 C.F.R. 46 (the Common Rule); on a working group on patient engagement in FDA’s Sentinel drug safety surveillance system; on the Patient Centered Outcomes Research (PCOR) Privacy and Security Research Scenario Initiative and Legal Analysis and Ethics Framework Development projects that the Office for National Coordinator of Health IT, NORC at University of Chicago, and the George Washington University are kicking off next week; and on a UH Task Force on classified and restricted research. She has been nominated for the planning board for a proposed national medical device safety surveillance data infrastructure. She is participating in multi-institutional work groups developing grant proposals related to precision medicine; regulation and reimbursement of diagnostic tests; legal issues in genomics; mobile and wearable medical sensors; and genomics policy issues.

Jim Hawkins presented an invited paper on November 20 at the Young Bankruptcy Scholars’ Workshop. The Workshop is the continuation of the Harvard-Texas Conference on Commercial Law Realities and is co-sponsored by the American Bankruptcy Institute and the Center for the Study of Business Law and Regulation at Brooklyn Law School.

Tracy Hester took his environmental law and climate change law classes to tour NRG’s W.A. Parish power plant in Sugarland on November 17 – the largest coal-fired power plant in the United States, and one of the few with a carbon dioxide capture and sequestration project still underway. He also hosted and moderated two EENR Center speaker events on October 23 (on environmental liability for industrial disasters) and November 13 (on water, endangered species and energy in Texas). Professor Hester met with EPA’s general counsel in Washington, D.C. on October 21 as part of a legal discussion hosted by the American College of Environmental Lawyers on the potential legal issues surrounding implementation of EPA’s Clean Power Plan. He also chaired the Texas Environmental Research Consortium’s board meeting on November 5, and met with the ABA’s Section on Environment, Energy and Resource’s governing Council on October 31 in Chicago to discuss Congressional outreach strategy and briefing options. And finally, Professor Hester lectured on the environmental legal implications of ocean acidification on November 6 as part of UH’s inaugural online graduate course on Sea Level Rise and Saline Intrusion (a course offered jointly with 20 other universities and multiple instructing professors of science, engineering and policy).

Geoffrey Hoffman represented UHLC at the meeting of the Executive Committee for the Houston Immigration Legal Services Collaborative, as well as at the DHS Roundtable with members of federal agencies and immigration attorneys. Both meetings were held at the Neighborhood Centers’ Lionel Castillo Community Center. Professor Hoffman supervised students and served as a volunteer attorney at a DACA clinic held near downtown Houston in conjunction with United We Dream. Professor Hoffman was also interviewed by media for news stories on Syrian refugees and humanitarian parole.

Craig Joyce attended the American Society for Legal History’s Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C., 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. No recipient of the “Craig Joyce Award for Distinguished Service” was named this year: the award is presented on an irregular, as-merited basis.

Sapna Kumar’s article Regulating Digital Trade was cited by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in ClearCorrect Operating, LLC v. International Trade Commission. Her article will be published in the Florida Law Review later this month.

Jacqui Lipton and Professor Emeritus Gerry Moohr co-authored (along with Professor Irina Manta of Hofstra Law School) the second edition of Gerry Moohr's The Criminal Law of Intellectual Property and Information casebook, published this October by West, along with the teacher's manual to the casebook. As chair of the AALS Defamation and Privacy Section, Professor Lipton is also co-chairing a panel at the AALS Annual Meeting on "Comparative Privacy Law" with the Comparative Law Section. Professor Lipton also gave a presentation at the Robert H. McKinney Law School (Indiana, Indianapolis) on her recent book, Rethinking Cyberlaw as part of their Center for Intellectual Property and Innovation Distinguished Lecture Series, October 14.

Rick McElvaney spoke on Landlord and Tenant Repair issues to the 16 Harris County Justices of the Peace at the Harris County JP CLE training in Galveston, Texas on November 10.

Douglas Moll presented at the ABA’s LLC Institute in Washington, D.C. He spoke on “Judicial Dissolution in LLCs,” and he shared the results of a 50-state survey that he conducted. Professor Moll’s article, Shareholder Oppression and the New Louisiana Business Corporation Act, was republished at XV Houston Business & Tax Law Journal 206 (2015).

Tom Oldham published an article in the Family Law Quarterly in October pertaining to jurisdiction in family law. The 56th update for his treatise on divorce property division, Divorce, Separation, and the Distribution of Property, was published in October.

Michael A. Olivas published The Law and Higher Education: Cases and Materials on Colleges in Court (Carolina Academic Press), in its Fourth Edition; he continues to serve on the Editorial Board of CAP. He participated in several music law events, including a panel on hip hop in Houston and a noon talk on music law issues, both for the UHLC Entertainment Law Student Organization. He also gave a talk at Texas State University in San Marcos on the 50th anniversary of the Higher Education Act, which was signed by LBJ on this campus, his alma mater. He also gave the keynote address at a conference at UC-Irvine on higher education finance issues, focusing on the Undue Hardship (UH) provisions of the bankruptcy act, concerning student loan discharges. He also entered cyberspace on Twitter at @rockandrollprof because Carrie Criado dogged him to do so, and he had 100 followers after his first week.

Jordan Paust has had two essays accepted for publication: Territorial Jurisdiction of the U.S. Does Not Exist on the Outer Continental Shelf or in Superjacent Waters, forthcoming 39 Houston Journal of International Law (2015) and NIAC Nonsense, The Afghan War, and Combatant Immunity, forthcoming 44 Georgia Journal of International and Comparative Law no. 2 (2016).

Jessica L. Roberts, along with Elizabeth Sepper (Wash U), Jessica Clarke (Minnesota), and students from the Yale Law School, submitted comments to the Secretary of Health and Human Services in response to the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking for the Affordable Care Act’s nondiscrimination rule. Those comments are available here. She also authored this blog post on the subject.

Daphne Robinson and Professor Ellen Marrus and have been selected to present at “A Workshop on Children, Vulnerability and Resilience,” at Emory University School of Law, Atlanta, GA, December 11-12. The subject of their presentation will be: “Recognizing ACEs in Justice-Involved Youth and Devising an Evidence-Based Antidote of Resiliency.” Professor Robinson also presented at the 5th Annual Houston Chapter of Nurse Practitioners Conference at the Hyatt Regency in Houston, TX on November 7. The subject of her presentation was Concierge Medicine.

Sandra Guerra Thompson gave a talk on Asset Forfeiture in the United States at Tilberg University Law School in The Netherlands, on October 27 at an international conference on Criminal and Terrorist Financing. Professor Thompson was interviewed by Channel 13 to provide perspective on the Deputy Goforth murder case on October 22. On November 11, she attended the Harris County Criminal Justice Coordinating Council at which she was named as an advisor to the team drafting the county’s grant proposal for a MacArthur Foundation grant to reduce the jail population without affecting public safety. She gave a lecture on her recent book, Cops in Lab Coats, at Houston Community College on November 12. Professor Thompson’s comments to the Associated Press regarding the indictment of 106 bikers who were arrested after a shootout outside a restaurant in Waco appeared in an article on the Austin American-Statesman website. Professor Thompson was also quoted in an article in The Atlantic on the biker case in Waco. Also this month Professor Thompson became a contributing blogger on Grits for Breakfast (a Texas criminal justice blog) as well as Forensics Forum.

Ronald Turner's article Marriage Equality and Obergefell's Generational (Not Glucksberg's Traditional) Due Process Clause will be published by the Duke Journal of Gender Law & Policy, and he has accepted an invitation to present the article at the journal's spring 2016 symposium. His peer-reviewed article On the Obergefell Dissenters' Selective Judicial Self-Restraint will be published by the Vienna Journal of International Constitutional Law. In September and October 2015 he spoke at the Law Center's CLE programs Race and the Law: Hate Crimes, Confederate Symbols, and Healing the Racial Divide, and Fostering Equality: Examining the Legal Issues Facing the LGBT Community. He also discussed non-traditional legal careers at the October 2015 Rocky Mountain BLSA Academic and Career Development Retreat, and is the recipient of the UHLC BLSA Favorite Professor award. He also chaired the October and November sessions of the City of Houston's Step III Grievance Review Committee.

Greg Vetter was an invited presenter for the topic of Software Protection on October 29 as a part of the University of Texas at Austin’s hosting of the University of St. Gallen Postgraduate Program Executive M.B.L.-HSG. The Executive Masters in European and International Business Law (M.B.L.-HSG) is a postgraduate law course of study by the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland, one of the top European Universities for the study of European and International Business Law. Professor Vetter also moderated/hosted the 22nd 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 12, featuring Professor Ruth Okediji of the University of Minnesota Law School as the lecturer.

Jacqueline Weaver gave two lectures 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 sponsored by Rocky Mountain Mineral Law Foundation in Denver, Colorado, on October 19. She also gave a talk on “Offshore Safety after Macondo: Lowering Risks through Regulation in the Gulf and Globally” at the panel on “Tensions in the Sustainable Energy Sphere and Community Solutions” at the University of Denver Sturm College of Law’s Leonard v.B. Sutton Colloquium, for its 48th Annual Conference on International Law on Sustainable Energy and Sustainable Development on October 10.

Bret Wells spoke on October 30 on the "Status of Business Tax Reform" at the 33rd Annual Advanced Tax Law Course hosted by the State Bar of Texas in Houston. Professor Wells was an invited commentator at the University of Virginia Law School’s Invitational Tax Conference held on November 6-7. Professor Wells spoke at the 18th Annual International Tax Symposium hosted by the Tax Section of the State Bar of Texas in Dallas on November 12 and then spoke again at this conference in Houston on November 13. On November 19, Professor Wells participated in a panel discussion on Oil & Gas Taxation Topics at the 13th Biennial Parker C. Fielder Oil and Gas Tax Conference hosted by the University of Texas Law School and the IRS Office of Chief Counsel. In the month of November, Professor Wells' article entitled The Dominant Mineral Estate in the Horizontal Well Context: Time to Extend Moser Horizontally was published in the Houston Law Review.

Allison Winnike was selected to join the 2016 Class of Leadership Texas, having been nominated to join the elite network of outstanding women leaders. She appeared on the Texas Standard (October 20) and Houston Public Media News (October 19) to discuss Texas removing Planned Parenthood from the Medicaid program. In early November she attended the American Public Health Association annual meeting in Chicago as a member of the Law Section. On November 11 she spoke on “Disability Law for Parents” at the Children’s Case Management Coalition in Bellaire. She traveled to Austin on November 18 to participate in the Texas Medical Board Telemedicine Stakeholders Group meeting to discuss new telemedicine regulations. On November 19 she joined Dr. Umair Shah and Dr. Paul Grunenwald in a panel discussion on the Future of Public Health at the University of Texas School of Public Health. On November 30 she will speak on "Tension in Public Health Law: Individual Rights v. the Public Good" at the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) at Galveston Public Health Seminar. Next month she will travel to McAllen to speak on “Public Health Law and Ethics and Implications for Local Health Authorities” at the Texas Department of State Health Services Multi-Disciplinary Workshop on High Consequence Infectious Disease Response: Ebola and Other Pathogens.

Kellen Zale presented a draft of her article, Scale in the Sharing Economy, at the Local Government Works-in-Progress Conference at Rutgers University on November 6 and the Urban Core Workshop at Northeastern University on October 31. She has been invited to speak on a panel about the sharing economy at the Rocky Mountain Land Use Institute's annual conference in March 2016.