Albertus Accolades

March 2016

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 gave the welcome at the Houston Alumni & Student Networking Reception on February 3 at the Alliant Group Headquarters. On February 9, Dean Baynes gave welcome remarks and hosted the Texas Legends Dinner honoring Judge Ruby Kless Sondock at the Petroleum Club in Houston. Dean Baynes attended a reception hosted by The Provost’s Office and the University Libraries recognizing the promotion or promotion and tenure of the faculty and librarians at the M.D. Anderson Library on February 11. On February 15, Dean Baynes hosted and attended a dinner for Judge Lee Rosenthal, and introduced her at the Law Center Sondock Jurist-in-Residence program. Dean Baynes held Discussions with the Dean for the students, faculty and staff on February 16. Dean Baynes hosted Professor Andrea Young at the Law Center on February 17, for a presentation of her documentary “Making of Modern Atlanta” and moderated a panel exploring Houston’s comparison with Atlanta. Dean Baynes participated in panel at the symposium on “Super Tuesday: Analyzing the Big Issues of the Presidential Debate” at the Student Center on February 23, and discussed Media Coverage of the 2016 campaign. On February 25, Dean Baynes attended the University of Houston Law Alumni Association’s Fifth Annual Wine Tasting Reception at the Hofheinz House and gave welcoming remarks.

Janet Beck provided immigration consultations to parents at Mahanay Elementary School through the HBA Speakers Program.

Emily Berman appeared on the Ben Hall Legal Hour on KCOH to talk about the FBI’s efforts to force Apple to assist in unlocking the iPhone used by one of the perpetrators of the San Bernardino shooting.

Erma Bonadero recently attended "Externships 8," a national conference which brings together externship clinicians from across the United States. This year's conference was held at Cleveland-Marshall School of Law. As Co-Chair of the Mentorship & Scholarship Subcommittee of the AALS Clinical Section's Externship Committee, Erma headed up her group's Affinity Table during a conference luncheon. As part of her commitment to the Houston Bar Association's new "Teach Texas Program," Professor Bonadero, along with Harris County Probate Court No. 4 Judge Christine Butts, spent two recent afternoons teaching the history of Texas law and judicial ethics to seventh grade students at Willman J. Plummer Middle School. The Teach Texas project was organized by the Texas Supreme Court Historical Society and the State Bar of Texas's Law-Related Education Department. The program's teachings are based on a new book, Taming Texas: How Law and Order Came to the Lone Star State, by James L. Haley.

David R. Dow delivered the inaugural lecture at the University of Virginia Law School's mass incarceration project on February 29 in Charlottesville. His topic was "Inherent Vagueness in the Criteria for Determining Eighth Amendment Eligibility for Execution." His essay "The Myth that Scalia Matters" appeared on the Beacon Broadside on February 18. On March 1, he lectured via Skype at Miami University in Ohio on his most recent book, Things I've Learned from Dying.

Barbara Evans is being appointed to a National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine committee that will perform a year-long study commissioned by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy’s July 2, 2015, memorandum, Modernizing the Regulatory System for Biotechnology Products. She attended a March 2-3 meeting of the Advisory Board for the Building the Medical Information Commons project at Baylor Medical School. She visited Tempe, Arizona on March 10-11 to attend a planning meeting for the NSF-funded Building Reliable Advances In Neurotechnology (BRAIN) Collaborative Research Center of the UH Cullen School of Engineering and the Fulton Engineering School at ASU. On March 14, she spoke about Consumer-driven Genomic Information Commons at the New York State Psychiatric Institute at Columbia Medical School. She participated in conferences of FDA’s Sentinel System Stakeholder Engagement Group on March 15 and of FDA’s National Medical Device Evaluation System Planning Board and of the Data De-Identification Task Force of NCVHS on March 18. Her chapter on Consumer Protection in Genome Sequencing, in Nudging Health: Health Law and Behavioral Economics (I. Glenn Cohen & Holly Fernandez Lynch, eds., Johns Hopkins Press) has gone to press. Her chapter (with Eric Meslin) on Biospecimens, Commercial  Research, and  the Elusive Public Benefit Standard, in Specimen Science (I. Glenn Cohen, Holly Fernandez Lynch, Barbara Bierer & Suzanne Rivera, eds., MIT Press), moved into production. She completed a commissioned white paper entitled Consumer-driven Health Data Commons and the Transformation of Citizen Science for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation-funded Health Data Exploration Project (Kevin Patrick, M.D., P.I.). The Institute of Medicine’s Committee on Accessible and Affordable Hearing Healthcare for Adults, on which she is serving, has moved its report into peer review and will present its findings at the World Congress of Audiology in Vancouver next September.

Tracy Hester spoke in New Delhi on March 4 at an international conference on sustainability and economic development, which was sponsored by UNESCO, India’s National Green Tribunal, and its national environmental agency. On March 11-12, he moderated and spoke on a panel on the Trans-Pacific Partnership’s effects on North American environmental activities under NAFTA. The discussion took place in Monterrey, Mexico at the North American Conference of Legal Educators, where Professor Hester joined Professors Stephen Zamora and Dave Fagundes. On February 10, Professor Hester hosted a presentation at UHLC by Professor David Schoenbrod (NY Law School) on the need to reform the Clean Air Act, and he then participated in a jobs panel presentation and workshop for environmental law students on February 18 organized by the State Bar of Texas’ Environmental and Natural Resources Law section. He represented UHLC at the annual Law Schools Breakfast for the Institute for Energy Law conference in Houston on February 19, and he co-hosted a Chatham House-rules invitational workshop at Bauer Business College on March 9 which focused on the likely effects of the Clean Power Plan on Texas energy production and dispatch. He also posted his first entry to the UH Energy Fellows website on the same topic on February 18. Last, and most satisfying, Professor Hester is nearing completion of the first draft of his textbook Climate Engineering and the Law, which he is writing and co-editing (with Professor Michael Gerrard of Columbia Law School) for Cambridge University Press. He also accepted an invitation from Carolina Academic Press to write Mastering Environmental Law with co-author Professor Joel Mintz.

Geoffrey Hoffman represented UHLC at a meeting at the Simmons Foundation as part of the executive committee of the Houston Legal Services Collaborative, discussing funding opportunities for nonprofits in Houston. Professor Hoffman also wrote a blog about the necessity for appointed counsel and the cognitive dissonance faced by immigration judges who deport children, available here. Professor Hoffman went to Karnes Family Detention facility with six students and provided this blog along with student Kate Chapman (3L) to the AILA Leadership Blog. Additionally, Professor Hoffman represented UHLC at the 2015 Year in Review for Tahirih Justice Center held at the law firm of Baker & McKenzie LLP downtown; Tahirih assists victims of violence, by providing holistic legal services and advocacy in courts, communities, and Congress.

Craig Joyce was reappointed to his 17th term on the Editorial Board of H-LAW. H-LAW is a vehicle of the American Society for Legal History, advancing the discussion network of Humanities Social Sciences On-Line. 

Sapna Kumar and Dean Leonard Baynes served as co-moderators for a Fireside Chat with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office director, Michelle Lee. Professor Kumar then headed to Austin, where she presented at SXSW Interactive on a panel discussing the International Trade Commission’s attempt to regulate digital trade. Professor Kumar also served as a commentator at the Duke Law Journal's Administrative Law Symposium, which was on the topic of "Intellectual Property Exceptionalism in Administrative Law." Her current article, Standing Against Bad Patents, has been accepted for publication by the Berkeley Technology Law Journal.

David Kwok’s article, Controlling Excessive Off-Label Medicare Drug Costs Through the False Claims Act, was accepted for publication with Health Matrix: The Journal of Law-Medicine at Case Western.

Jacqui Lipton presented "Legal Issues for Authors" at the Writers' Series, South-Euclid/Lyndhurst Branch, Cuyahoga County Public Library, Cleveland, OH, March 23. On March 2, Professor Lipton presented "Looking Back on the First Round of new gTLD Applications: Implications for Trademark Law and Free Speech" for the Global Commission on Internet Governance Workshop, American University School of Communications, Washington D.C. She will also be publishing this paper in their paper series.

Douglas Moll’s casebook, The Law of Business Torts and Unfair Competition: Cases, Materials, and Problems (with Colin Marks), was just published by West Academic. He was also offered a contract to write the second edition of his student hornbook, Principles of Business Organizations (with Rich Freer). Professor Moll spoke at the 2016 Conference on Securities and Business Law on “Fiduciary Duties in Corporations: The Basics.” Professor Moll also served as a judge for the final round of the John Black Moot Court competition. The problem involved business torts and business organization issues.

James Nelson’s article, Corporations, Unions, and the Illusion of Symmetry, was accepted for publication in the Virginia Law Review.

Tom Oldham has submitted a solicited chapter to John Eekelaar, who is editing volume to be published later this year regarding recent developments in family law in the U. S. and England.  

Michael A. Olivas, published The Accidental Historian, or, How I Found My Groove in Legal History, in Carlos Kevin Blanton, A Promising Problem: The New Chicana/o History [Chapter 2, 33-57] (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2016). On February 3, he assumed the presidency of the UH Downtown (enrollment:14,000 students) on an interim basis. While he is continuing to teach his course, he will be on leave from UHLC until the position is filled on a permanent basis.

Jordan Paust was a member of a panel on The Morality of Robotic Warfare at the Conference on Ethical Dilemmas in the Digital Age, Virginia Military Institute Center for Leadership and Ethics, March 7, and a speaker on Human Rights as Law of the United States at the School of Law, University of California at Irvine, March 17.

D. Theodore Rave accepted an offer to publish his article, Fiduciary Voters?, in the Duke Law Journal. On February 23, he participated in the University’s pre-debate conference on “Super Tuesday: Analyzing the 2016 Presidential Election” as a panelist (along with Professor Seth Chandler) speaking about “Supreme Court and Economic Implications of Presidential Elections.” Associate Dean Marcilynn Burke moderated, and Dean Leonard Baynes spoke on a different panel. Professor Rave was invited to present a draft of his paper,The Information-Forcing Role of the Judge in Multidistrict Litigation (coauthored with Andrew Bradt, UC Berkeley), on July 14-15 at the University of Washington as part of the second annual Civil Procedure Workshop.

Spencer Simons submitted the manuscript for the second edition of Texas Legal Research to Carolina Academic Press. Publication is scheduled for this summer, with the text available for adoption for the fall semester of 2016.  

Greg Vetter was an invited symposium author and presenter for an event at Harvard Law School on March 11-12, held by the Project on the Foundations of Private Law, covering theoretical perspectives relating to Private Law and Intellectual Property. He presented his paper entitled Opportunistic Free and Open Source Software Development Pathways. He also presented an earlier draft of the same paper at the Works-in-Progress Intellectual Property (WIPIP) Colloquium held on February 19-20, at the University of Washington School of Law by its Center for Advanced Study and Research on Intellectual Property (CASRIP). As of the February 2016 WIPIP event, Professor Vetter completed five years of service as a member (including as a former chair) of the WIPIP Organizing Board; see www.wipip.info.

Bret Wells, on February 25, participated in a panel with senior IRS and Treasury personnel at the 2016 IFA USA Annual Conference in Miami, Florida. The panel discussed current Foreign Tax Credit policy issues. On February 26, Professor Wells spoke on Oil and Gas law at the Houston Business and Tax Law Journal’s Annual Symposium held at the ExxonMobil campus. On March 4, Professor Wells participated in an EENR Speaker Series event at the law center where he and another co-panelist presented "Offset Well Clauses and Allocation Wells in the Horizontal Shale Development Context.” The March 4 panel discussion was based in part on Professor Wells’ article entitled Allocation Wells, Unauthorized Pooling, and the Lessor’s Remedies that will be published this spring in the Baylor Law Review. On March 11, Professor Wells presented his paper entitled The Foreign Tax Credit War at the 2016 BYU Law Review Symposium, and this article also will be published later this year in the BYU Law Review.