Albertus Accolades

August 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 introduced guest speaker and UH Board of Regents member Paula Mendoza to the UHLC Pre-Law Pipeline Program on July 5. The following day Dean Baynes introduced to the UHLC Pre-Law Pipeline Program students guest speaker and UH Provost Dr. Paula Myrick Short. On July 7, Dean Baynes gave a presentation on the implementation of the Law Center’s Strategic Vision at the Provost’s Dean’s Advance Conference. At the Zealous Advocacy Conference, hosted by the Law Center on July 14, Dean Baynes introduced and presented the Believer Award to Judge Darlene Byrne. On July 18 Dean Baynes recorded the pilot episode of Legal Briefcase on KUHF. Next, on July 21, Dean Baynes served as moderator for the Law Center’s U.S. Supreme Court Update CLE. Later that evening Dean Baynes welcomed prospective students and guests at the Admitted Students Reception. Lastly, on July 29, Dean Baynes spoke at the Pre-Law Pipeline Program’s closing ceremony.

Janet Beck, by invitation from the Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights, served on a multi-disciplinary panel to determine the best interests of an undocumented immigrant child currently in the U.S. who suffers from a serious medical condition. She also supervised two Immigration Clinic students (Kade Rhodes and Iandra Lopes Santana de Pollo) at the Joe Corley Detention Center (located in Conroe, Texas) to interview six women (they came to the U.S. without children) and prepare them for bond hearings and procedures relating to their detention by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The YMCA Refugee Services gave the names of the women to the students who communicated with the women through a glass window and a telephone.

Emily Berman participated in the Law Center's CLE program looking at the recently completed Supreme Court term. She discussed two reproductive rights cases - Whole Women's Health v. Hellerstedt, in which the Court struck down Texas' recent abortion regulation law as unconstitutional, and Zubik v. Burrell, where the Court remanded the case to the appeals courts to allow the parties to reach a compromise regarding how to implement the Affordable Care Act's contraceptive mandate in the case of employees who work for religious institutions that object to covering contraception on religious grounds.

Seth Chandler has been named a Visiting Scholar at the Mercatus Center of George Mason University for 2016-17. He has co-authored a report entitled Affordable Care Act Turmoil: Large Losses in the Individual Market Portend an Uncertain Future, available here. He is presently preparing a follow-up piece defending his methodology against earlier criticism by the Commonwealth Fund and has already secured a published retraction from Commonwealth of earlier mischaracterization of the analysis. His article Regulation By Calculator: Experience Under The Affordable Care Act has been published in 2016 Michigan State Law Review 465 (2016). In June, Professor Chandler presented a talk entitled "data.healthcare.gov: A New Frontier" to the annual meeting of the American Society of Law, Medicine & Ethics at Boston University. And his talk "Building a Better data.healthcare.gov: How Wolfram Technologies Helped" has been accepted for presentation in October at the Wolfram Technical Conference in Champaign, Illinois. Professor Chandler has also been named a Lecturer at Rice University and will teach a class in their Professional Science Masters program this fall titled "Shaping Health Policy." He continues to blog on healthcare issues at the Forbes Apothecary site.

Barbara Evans was a guest scholar at FDA’s medical device division in mid-August and gave a lecture series on data privacy and patient engagement and researched content for her new FDA Law course which launches this Fall. She logged a lot of air miles in connection with service on the U.S. National Committee on Vital and Health Statistics, the National Academies’ Committee on Future Biotechnology Products, and the Planning Board for FDA’s National Evaluation System for health Technology (NEST), all of which are developing reports and recommendations to publish later in the Fall. She wrote a piece on gene editing for a Special Issue of ABA’s Sci-Tech Lawyer. Cambridge University Press will publish an edited volume, Big Data, Health Law, and Bioethics, based on the May 2016 Petrie-Flom Annual Conference at Harvard Law School, and her conference paper will be a chapter in that book. She and co-author Harlan Krumholz at Yale Medical School submitted a medical journal article on patient-driven data collaboratives which is now being peer-reviewed. Professor Evans is heading the drafting team for an article on data commons as part of the NIH-funded Building the Medical Information Commons project led by Baylor College of Medicine and Duke. She’s participating in several academic and policy drafting projects responding to the latest round of calls for individual ownership of health data and biospecimens. She is part of an international research collaborative on data citizenship, a topic that flowed out of discussions at the June 2 White House Precision Medicine Initiative meeting. With huge help from April Moreno and the UH Office for Contract and Grants, she met the August 5 deadline to apply for a four-year renewal of her existing grant on genome sequencing in cancer. She is collaborating with geneticists at Columbia Medical School to develop an NIH proposal on regulatory and tort standards of care for periodic reinterpretation of genomic tests in light of emerging knowledge. She spent a pleasant two-day vacation at the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City late in July.

Dave Fagundes attended the Southeastern Association of Law Schools (SEALS) annual conference in Amelia Island, Florida. There, he presented his forthcoming article Buying Happiness: Property, Acquisition and Subjective Well-Being at the annual SEALS call for papers luncheon, and accepted an award commemorating his selection as a winner of the 2016 call for papers competition. He also participated in a roundtable on IP Exceptionalism, presenting an early draft of an essay titled Against ‘IP’.

Tracy Hester participated in the annual state bar’s Texas Environmental Superconference in Austin on August 4-5. On August 15, he was named in the Best Lawyers of America for environmental law for the eleventh time.

Geoffrey Hoffman was interviewed by Houston Public Media concerning the Fifth Circuit’s decision on the State of Texas’s Voter ID law. He also represented the Law Center at a meeting of the Executive Committee of the Houston Immigration Legal Services Collaborative. Politifact interviewed Professor Hoffman to evaluate the truth of a claim concerning interior deportations in the United States. Professor Hoffman also interviewed candidates for the Legal Services Director position of the Houston Immigration Legal Services Collaborative. At the request of the law firm Liu and Associates PLLC, Professor Hoffman gave a presentation to Chinese scholars and a tour of the clinics was provided by Professor Josephine Sorgwe and Professor Janet Heppard. Professor Hoffman supervised 1L students providing community service at a DACA clinic at United We Dream. CBS interviewed Professor Hoffman for a news piece on current deportation policy and Donald Trump.

Craig Joyce published the thoroughly revamped and updated Tenth Edition of his casebook, Copyright Law. The long-time leading resource began its run in 1985 in a solo edition by Joyce but has now added other front-rank scholars from across the U.S. Joyce also journeyed to Mexico City to plan, with Professor Emeritus Stephen T. Zamora (Center for U.S. and Mexican Law), for the Law Center to host the November 2018 American Society for Legal History Annual Meeting, to be titled “Houston: Gateway to las Americas.”

Renee Knake’s article Lawyer Speech in the Regulatory State was published by Fordham Law Review earlier this year. On August 9, Bloomberg Law published her essay, How Big Data Analytics is Changing Legal Ethics. She spoke at the American Bar Association Annual Meeting in San Francisco on August 6, unveiling the Final Report by the ABA Presidential Commission on the Future of Legal Services, which she drafted in her capacity as the Commission’s reporter. Professor Knake also spoke at the Southeast Association of Law Schools Annual Meeting on August 5 about a current work-in-progress, Gagging Judges, which examines the free speech rights of judges to speak about pending cases. She also was recently interviewed on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered about the client solicitation tactics by lawyers during the Flint, Michigan water crisis.

Sapna Kumar presented her paper Patent Damages Without Borders at the International Association for the Advancement of Teaching and Research of Intellectual Property Congress in Kraków.

Jessica Mantel attended SEALS this month, where she participated in two health care discussion groups. She first spoke about her article Tackling the Social Determinants of Health: A Central Role for Providers (forthcoming Georgia State Law Review), and then workshopped her article You're Fired! Restricting Physicians' Ability to Reject Noncompliant Patients, which she is co-authoring with Jessica Roberts.

Rick McElvaney was a guest on NPR Radio – Houston Matters program speaking about Flood Insurance. The 2016-2017 edition of his O’Connor’s Property Code Plus has been published. This is the 12th year of publication.

Douglas Moll accepted an invitation to become a Contributing Editor at the Business Law Prof Blog. He will post periodically on business and teaching-related issues. Professor Moll was also interviewed for an upcoming Business Divorce Roundtable Podcast on the subject of minority oppression in the LLC. Professor Moll will be speaking at a symposium hosted by the University of Alabama Law School on Bank Director and Officer Responsibilities. For that symposium, he has written an article (with Professor Julie Hill) on fiduciary duties of bank directors and officers.

Gerry Moohr, Jacqui Lipton, and Irina Manta’s The Criminal Law of Intellectual Property and Information was recently reviewed by Asha Puttaiah in the Journal of the Patent and Trademark Office Society. The favorable review follows the puzzles presented in the book when intangible property is “stolen” and praises the book for bringing order to “this newly evolving virtual mudslide.”

Raymond Nimmer was named as Copyright Law "Lawyer of the Year" in Houston. This award is based on a vote of lawyers in the city of Houston and only a single lawyer in each practice area and community is honored with a “Lawyer of the Year" award. It is the second time that he has received this award. In addition, Professor Nimmer was selected by a national vote of his peers for inclusion in the 23rd Edition of The Best Lawyers in America for his work in: Copyright Law, Information Technology Law, Litigation - Intellectual Property, Litigation – Patent, Patent Law, and Trademark Law.

Tom Oldham was notified this month that his two most recent articles were in the top 10 downloads of the SSRN divorce and dissolution list

Michael A. Olivas wrote an op-ed regarding college admissions after the Supreme Court’s ruling in Fisher v. UT. The piece was featured in the Academe Blog as well as in Inside Higher Ed.

Sandra Guerra Thompson made five media appearances this month. She appeared as the sole guest on the television show Truth and Justice with Vivian King on August 10th, discussing the Houston Forensic Science Center and other issues relating to criminal justice in Houston. She was interviewed on August 2nd on the radio show Houston Matters regarding judicial latitude in sentencing and the sentences of a Stanford swimmer convicted of sexual assault as compared to a St. Louis Cardinals baseball scout convicted of hacking the Astros email system. Professor Thompson was also interviewed on July 14th on CW39 TV for a story on a shoplifting suspect who led a Bellaire police officer on a high-speed chase that resulted in the officer’s death. On July 20th, the Houston Chronicle quoted Professor Thompson explaining the concept of felony murder and discussing the current use of the charge. The Houston Press quoted Professor Thompson on the Houston Sheriff’s Office’s responses to the indictment of deputies charged with official oppression on July 6th. As Vice-Chair of the Board of Directors of the Houston Forensic Science Center, Professor Thompson helped to organize a symposium entitled Backlogs and Exonerations, which took place on Thursday, August 11th. Her other work for the Center included attending the August meeting of the Board of Directors, as well as the meeting of the laboratory’s Technical Advisory Group. In addition, Professor Thompson attended the Harris County Criminal Justice Coordinating Council meeting on July 20th.

Gina Warren authored an op-ed in The Conversation, Curbing the Marijuana Industry’s Voracious Energy Appetite, available here. The piece was reprinted in the Houston Chronicle, available here, and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, here. Professor Warren was an invited speaker at Energy Bar Association’s 2016 Annual Meeting, “Building the Bridge from Energy Law Education to Practice.” The meeting, which took place in Washington D.C. June 7-8, was a dynamic discussion of the current status of law schools, the student body, and energy law curriculum and faculty.

Allison Winnike spoke on her Texas second-hand smoking municipal ordinances research grant and database project on August 4 in Austin at the Texas Department of State Health Services Tobacco Prevention and Control Program's Evaluator and Epidemiology Workgroup meeting.