Albertus Accolades

December 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 Pass the Bar Celebration hosted at Public Services Wine & Whiskey Bar on November 9. On November 13, Dean Baynes gave welcome remarks and attended the 11th Annual National Black and Hispanic Pre-Law Admissions & Preparation Conference and Law School Recruitment Fair 2015. Dean Baynes, along with Professor Sandy Thompson, Professor David Kwok and his wife Dr. Jessica Quan, Associate Dean Sondra Tennessee, Ashley Scott, Sr. Career Development Specialist, Dr. Elwyn Lee, VP Comm. Relations & Inst. Access and his wife Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee, attended the 2015 Barristers’ Ball hosted by the Spouses of Houston Barristers on November 13 at the Omni Houston Hotel. Dean Baynes also attended the UNCF-GMS Advisory Council Reception and Dinner on November 16 at the University of Houston Hilton Hotel. On November 17, Dean Baynes gave a presentation at Thompson Knight LLP in Houston. Dean Baynes attended and spoke about energy and environmental programs at UHLC at the UH Energy Advisory Board Meeting at the University of Houston Student Center on November 18. That evening, at the invitation of Chancellor Khator, Dean Baynes attended a reception and lecture by Rob Kaplan, Dallas Federal Reserve President, at the University of Houston Student Center. On November 19, Dean Baynes attended the New Regent Reception hosted by Chancellor Khator at the University of Houston Hilton. Dean Baynes also attended the Harris County Hospital District Foundation Jubilee at the Royal Sonesta Hotel in Houston as a guest of alumna Regina Rogers November 19.

Emily Berman introduced the annual Frankel Lecture, featuring Yale Law School Professor and former Legal Advisor to the Department of State Harold Koh, as well as Professors Dawn Johnsen and Ashley Deeks, of the University of Indiana Law School and the University of Virginia Law School, respectively. Professor Jordan Paust moderated the discussion. 

Erma Bonadero has been selected to serve as a co-editor of the AALS Clinical Section’s e-newsletter. The newsletter serves to keep the Clinical Section connected and informed about its work and the collective accomplishments of its members. Watch for the soon-to-be-published December edition, which will cover clinical program news, awards, Section committee updates, etc., for the entire calendar year.

Barbara Evans spoke at the three-day International Summit on Human Gene Editing sponsored by the US National Academies of Science and Medicine, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the UK Royal Society earlier this month. Her presentation was one of a dozen chosen for publication in a text version of the summit that the Academies are preparing with funding from the NIH. She has been appointed to the Planning Board for FDA’s proposed National Medical Device Evaluation System and attended a meeting in Washington on December 8. During the week of December 11 – 18 she participated in working group meetings and calls for an NIH study of genomic data access and data quality; an IOM study of hearing health care access; an Office of National Coordinator for Health IT study of patient-centered health outcomes research; a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation study of ownership of data from mobile devices, and studies of health-oriented research opportunities at UH and of classified and restricted research in academic settings. NASA, in a report published late in October, adopted recommendations of an IOM study of health standards for manned space flights to Mars, which she co-authored in 2014.  

Tracy Hester spent November and early December wrapping up the initial draft of The Law of Climate Engineering, which he is writing and editing with Professor Michael Gerrard of Columbia Law School. Cambridge University Press will publish the text in late 2016. He participated in the UH Energy Advisory Board meeting on November 18 as well as the inaugural UH Energy Fellows session on November 23. Professor Hester also moderated and spoke at an open lunch panel discussion on November 19 about the potential liability of energy companies that make deceptive climate change statements. The Texas Academy of Medicine, Engineering and Science of Texas named Professor Hester to its task force on the environmental and community impacts of shale energy development in Texas on November 30. On the lighter side, he took his classes to tour Texas' largest coal-fired power plant and its new carbon capture unit on November 17, hosted a group of students for a night of star gazing at the George Observatory on November 21, and explored possible pro bono work by UH Environmental Practicum students to protect the endangered Giant Grouper during a visit to an aquatic research facility in Kailua-Kona, Hawai’i on December 2.

Geoffrey Hoffman's piece was posted on the LexisNexis Legal Newsroom Immigration Law website regarding the selection process for Immigration Judges, available here. Professor Hoffman was interviewed by La Voz de Houston regarding a Pew Research Center study finding net zero migration for Mexican immigrants since the recession. Professor Hoffman was also quoted on KUHF regarding a Texas lawsuit seeking a TRO or preliminary injunction to prevent Syrian refugees from entering Texas. The radio story is available here. He also hosted a meeting of the membership subcommittee of the Houston Immigration Legal Services Collaboration at the University of Houston Law Center. Professor Hoffman was interviewed by KUHF regarding a news story highlighting difficulty of Pakistani family entering the U.S. before the death of their daughter, audio is available here.

Craig Joyce announced the theme for IPIL’s 2016 National Conference in Santa Fe, New Mexico: “Authorship in America (and Beyond).” The presenters will include faculty members from Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of California-Berkeley, and Beihang University (Beijing, China).  Professor Joyce will co-moderate with Judge Jon O. Newman of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.  Professor Joyce also announced Toronto as the site of the American Society for Legal History’s 2016 Annual Meeting.  ASLH will be hosted by Osgoode Hall Law School, the University of Toronto, and the Law Society of Upper Canada. 

Jacqui Lipton will be co-chairing a panel on comparative privacy law at the AALS Annual Meeting. Professor Lipton is chairing the Section on Defamation and Privacy Law; the section is co-chaired with the Comparative Privacy Law section. Professor Lipton has been asked to contribute a paper for the Global Commission on Internet Governance on Internet domain names, trademarks and free speech. Also, Professor Lipton was invited to present a paper on Internet governance at the Lastowka Cyberlaw Symposium in February 2016, hosted by the University of Pittsburgh School of Law.  

Sapna Kumar participated in the panel “The ITC and Digital Trade: The ClearCorrect Decision” at the CATO Institute. A video of her talk is available here.

Jessica Mantel’s article, Spending Medicare’s Dollars Wisely: Taking Aim at Hospitals’ Cultures of Overtreatment, has been published in the Fall 2015 issue of the University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform. 

Michael A. Olivas was invited to testify before the UHS Board of Regents on the subject of the proposed UT move to Houston. The testimony was cited by a number of news stories and is archived here. He published Who Gets to Control Civil Rights Case Management? An Essay on Purposive Organizations and Litigation Agenda-Building, 2015 Michigan State Law Review __ (forthcoming). He conducted a workshop for the UH Center for Mexican American Studies on preparing for promotion and tenure, and spoke about immigration developments at a breakfast seminar sponsored monthly for lawyers by UHLC alum Judge Ravi Sandill of the Harris County 127th District Civil Court.

Jessica L. Roberts’ essay, An Empirical Perspective on Medicaid as Social Insurance (co-authored with Nicole Huberfeld), was published by the Toledo Law Review in its health law symposium issue. She also went with a delegation on behalf of the Medical School Steering Committee to the FSU Medical School.

Daphne Robinson has been chosen to serve as a member of the “Preparing Providers Workgroup,” a part of the integrated health care systems-change initiative, facilitated by MHA of Greater Houston and funded by the Hogg Foundation. Professor Ellen Marrus and Professor Robinson presented their paper, “Recognizing ACEs in Justice-Involved Youth and Devising an Evidence-Based Antidote of Resiliency,” at A Workshop on Childhood, Vulnerability and Resilience December 11-12 at Emory University School of Law in Atlanta, GA. Professor Daphne Robinson will also be presenting at the 30th Annual Conference on the Prevention of Child Abuse, January 25 – 26 at the Westin Dallas Park Central Hotel in Dallas, Texas. Her workshop is titled “How Can We Improve the Investigation and Prosecution of Child-Neglect Fatalities? A Public Health Approach.” 

Spencer Simons and Mon Yin Lung were interviewed on November 13 as part of an oral history project recording the memories and current thoughts of long-standing members of the law librarianship community. The video recordings will be available in An Oral History of Law Librarianship, which will appear in HeinOnline. The interviewer was Pat Kehoe, who served as the second in command at the UHLC law library from 1968 to 1971, after which he served at Yale and then as Director of the American University Washington College of Law Library from 1973 until his retirement in 2001. Pat Kehoe greatly enjoyed seeing the UHLC again and visiting with our librarians about its history.  

Jacqueline Weaver was the Liskow & Lewis Visiting Energy Law Professor at LSU on November 4 and 5 in Baton Rouge, LA. She gave a talk on "Offshore Safety after Macondo," open to the law school and the greater legal community. She also participated in two classes taught by LSU professors. LSU Professor Keith Hall, the Campanile Charities Associate Professor of Energy Law and Director of the Mineral Law Institute organized the two-day visit with students, professors, alumni and donors to LSU's energy law programs. As AIPN Professor-in-Residence, she attended a three day workshop on negotiation of international petroleum contracts on November 10-12, and then flew to Mexico City for the joint UHLC-ITAM program that trains Mexican regulators facing a host of new issues under the major energy law reforms that Mexico enacted in 2014. On the morning of November 13, she was asked to present a lecture on offshore safety and best practices to the newly created ASEA--the new agency responsible for health, safety and environmental issues in the petroleum sector from the wellhead to the burner tip. She met the heads of various ASEA departments and addressed about 60 employees from the agency. In the evening of November 13, she gave a 3 1/2-hour class session on the lessons learned from Macondo, the new regulatory regime in the Gulf of Mexico, and how Mexico's Hydrocarbons Law and new HSE Law creates a better legal framework for best practices in the Gulf than that on the U.S. side of the Gulf. She also compared the Mexican system with the European Union Offshore Safety Directive, which directs all EU companies to use the EU framework when operating abroad--a framework which is much like the new Mexican laws. On November 14, she spoke to the class about Best Practices in petroleum development, offering a range of topics, such as: best practices in onshore shale operations;  Free, Prior and Informed Consent and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and measuring the impacts on local communities of oil and gas development, using examples of various "scorecards" issued by think tanks, green investor groups and NGOs that assess and rank oil companies' performance. Steve Zamora met her at the airport on her arrival in Mexico City and then enjoyed a lunch with her in between the ASEA and the ITAM talks. She also met with Josefina Cortes, professor of administrative law and Director of ITAM's energy law center about future work and joint projects between ITAM and the Law Center. It is an exciting time to be involved in Mexico's energy reforms and it is great to have Steve Z. on the ground in Mexico City, promoting joint programs.