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Albertus AccoladesApril 2018Editor, Robert N. Clark, Reference/Research Librarian 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. |
Katy Badeaux, along with Deb Hamilton of the Pikes Peak Library District and Heather Holmes of the Harris County Law Library, presented a program entitled “Diversify your Toolkit: Legal Research for Everyone” at the 2018 joint conference of the Southwestern Association of Law Libraries (SWALL) and the Houston Area Law Librarians (HALL). The conference was held April 5-7 at the Magnolia Hotel in downtown Houston. Leonard Baynes joined Provost Short, other deans and leaders from UH departments, and Houston Public Media at the Spring Academic Leaders Workshop on April 3. The workshop is convened in partnership with University Advancement and Academic Affairs twice annually to provide hands-on trainings for academic leaders to equip them to be successful in fundraising goals and strengthen partnerships between deans, leaders, and development officers. Dean Baynes attended the 18th Annual Houston Business & Tax Law Journal Annual Banquet on April 5. In his remarks, Dean Baynes highlighted that HBTLJ is ranked #13 of all Tax Journals according to Washington & Lee rankings; the Journal’s Compliance Database that charts changes in the codes of conduct of Fortune 500 companies; and the successful 18th Annual Symposium on February 23 that focused on energy investment tax issues around the world featuring U.S. Rep. Kevin Brady of Texas's 8th congressional district and several international tax experts. On April 6, Dean Baynes attended and provided welcoming remarks at the BLSA Spring Alumni Banquet at the HESS Club. He delivered the welcome address and attended the Houston Law Review Annual Banquet on April 11, featuring keynote speaker, The Honorable Kem Thompson Frost, Chief Justice of the 14th Court of Appeals of Texas. Dean Baynes welcomed and provided opening remarks to over 70 admitted students, their families and guests at the April 12 Diversity Reception and Admitted Student Day event at Xochi. On April 13, he provided opening remarks at the Admitted Students Day gathering at the Law Center. Later that evening he attended the 4th Annual UHLC Advocacy Banquet at Maggiano’s Restaurant where he delivered opening and closing remarks. He provided a welcome to the Career Paths for Young Attorneys in the Energy Section Symposium on April 14, and delivered opening remarks about the Law Center and its commitment to environmental, energy, and natural resources. Welcoming remarks were also provided by Victor Flatt, EENR Faculty Director. The symposium travels between law schools and follows a career theme for new law graduates and young attorneys interested in working in the energy industries. This is the first time UHLC has hosted the event, which was co-chaired by Gina S. Warren, Associate Professor of Law at the UH Law Center. Dean Baynes delivered a welcome at The Annual Dean’s Award Ceremony and Reception on April 17, and co-hosted the event with Associate Dean Sondra Tennessee. Faculty, staff, and students were honored for their service, commitment to the law, and academic excellence. 2018 Distinguished Award Recipients included: Meredith J. Duncan, The George Butler Research Professor of Law (2018 Ethel M. Baker Faculty Award Recipient); Luana Gearing, Assistant to the Dean (2018 Staff Award Recipient); Doug K. Moll, Beirne, Maynard, & Parsons, L.L.P. Professor of Law (2018 Order of the Barons Professor of the Year Award Recipient); Gina S. Warren, Associate Professor of Law, UH Energy Fellow (2018 Student Bar Association Professor of the Year – Full-Time Award Recipient); and Lauren J. Simpson, Clinical Assistant Professor, Lawyering Skills and Strategies (2018 Student Bar Association Professor of the Year – Part-Time Award Recipient). In all, 65 scholarship recipients, 64 LEX Award winners, and twenty-one 2018 Summer Public Interest Fellows were recognized. On April 18, Dean Baynes attended the UH Spring Faculty Assembly and Senate Meeting where Provost Paula Short was keynote speaker. The Provost shared her Five-Year Impact Report. The Houston Journal of International Law held its Annual Banquet on April 19 and also celebrated its 40th Anniversary at Le Méridien Houston Downtown. Dean Baynes delivered the welcoming remarks. On April 23 and 27, he participated in a series of twelve internal focus group meetings with varying faculty and staff and external programming consultants to gather information and discuss functional needs for a future Law Center facility. Dean Baynes presented an overview of the Law Center during a visit to Porter Hedges LLP on April 24. His presentation included our nationally recognized rankings in U.S. News & World Report, faculty scholarship, Centers of Excellence, alumni networks, and community engagement. Later that day, Dean Baynes attended the UH Law Alumni Association Board Meeting and the UH Law Alumni Association Annual Meeting and Celebration at the Briar Club. At the celebration, he highlighted the success of the Law Center over the past year. In addition, David Dow, Cullen Professor of Law, was honored with the UHLAA Faculty Distinction Award for his tireless service with the Texas Innocence Network (TIN) and Juvenile & Capital Advocacy Project. The almost 20-year academic career of Tobi Tabor, former Assistant Clinical Professor, Lawyering Skills & Strategies, was also celebrated at the Annual Meeting. On April 26, Dean Baynes attended the UH Faculty Excellence Awards Dinner held at the Hilton University of Houston Hotel. Professor Meredith Duncan received the Distinguished Excellence in Teaching Award. Professor Teddy Rave was recipient of the Excellence in Teaching Award. Dean Baynes attended a lunchtime briefing on April 30 by the Tahirih Justice Center titled, “The Immigration Landscape - Breaking Down Barriers to Justice: A Policy Strategy to Combat the Climate of Fear in Texas,” held at The Junior League of Houston. Founded in 1997, The Tahirih Justice Center protects courageous immigrant women and girls who are fleeing gender-based human rights violence, abuse, and persecution. Emily Berman accepted an offer of publication from the Boston University Law Review for her paper “A Government of Laws and Not of Machines” and an offer of publication from the Emory Law Journal for her paper “Digital Searches, the Fourth Amendment, and the Magistrates’ Revolt.” She also attended the Inaugural Annual Conference of Constitutional Law Scholars at the University of Arizona and moderated a debate here in Houston on political gerrymandering, sponsored by the UHLC ACS and Federalist Societies, between UHLC’s own Professor Teddy Rave and Pepperdine Professor Derek Muller. Dan Donahue and Emily Lawson presented a program entitled “Free and Low Cost Tech Tools for Law Librarians” at the 2018 joint conference of the Southwestern Association of Law Libraries (SWALL) and the Houston Area Law Librarians (HALL). Earlier in the conference, Mr. Donahue moderated a discussion on “Current Issues in Immigration Law” with panelists Geoffrey Hoffman, Rosemary Vega, and Anuj Shah. The conference was held April 5-7 at the Magnolia Hotel in downtown Houston. Barbara Evans attended the Greenwall Faculty Scholars annual meeting in San Francisco on April 4, where she and cardiologist Daniel Kramer of Harvard’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center co-led a lively debate about integrating artificial intelligence software into medical decision-making. She participated in a teleconference of the NIH LawSeq Privacy Working Group on April 18. On April 21 she traveled to Seattle for the Sage Assembly which, this year, gathered a small group of digital innovators, artists, and others to explore the theme of “Algorithms and the Role of the Individual.” On April 24 Professor Evans spoke at an NIH-supported conference on mobile health apps in Chicago, and she thanks Ed Jones for “Zooming” her into the event without having to get on an airplane. Professor Evans’ work “Big Data and Individual Autonomy in a Crowd” appears as Chapter 1 in the just-released Big Data, Health Law, and Bioethics (Cohen, Lynch, Vayena, Gasser, eds., Cambridge University Press), which is an edited volume of works first presented at the 2016 Petrie-Flom annual conference at Harvard Law School. On May 2, Professor Evans is playing the role of the lone privacy-law-spouting spoilsport at a workshop for 25 key health informatics innovators at La Playa Carmel. In April she accepted invitations to address the National Academy of Medicine on practical and financial impacts of patient data ownership, to sit on a panel exploring “New Paradigms for Neuromodulation with Downloadable Data” at the next Congress of Neurological Surgeons, and to participate in a workshop on “National Health IT Priorities to Advance Research” hosted by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology. Victor Flatt again served as a final editorial reviewer for the Land Use and Environment Law Review’s selection of the best environmental and energy law articles of the year. Professor Flatt has been asked by the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund to be the University of Houston point person for attacks on faculty for climate work and research. He spoke at the ABA Section on Environment, Energy, and Resources midyear annual meeting on the impact of the Trump administration on international climate law. He will present his paper “The Costs of Commodification” (co-authored with Michael Pappas) at the annual meeting of the Society for Environmental Law and Economics, sponsored by Notre Dame Law School in June. Professor Flatt was interviewed twice in April on Houston Matters. On April 2, he was interviewed about the impact of refinery “upset emissions,” and on April 12, he was interviewed about Texas being the number one state in terms of water pollution violations. He is one of the invited participants to the Global Energy Management Institutes invitation only annual event discussing the future of electric vehicles. He will speak on the ethical responsibility of attorneys with respect to climate change at the Air Alliance Houston's Public Interest Environmental Law program on May 11. He has received a $1,500 grant from the University of Houston Global Faculty Development Fund to help defray the expenses for the 2nd North American Conference on Environment, Energy, and Natural Resources, which will take place May 3-4. Janet Heppard was the guest on the Law Center’s Briefcase radio program on March 29 where she spoke with Dean Baynes about “Avoiding Probate”and the steps available prior to death to make it easier to transfer property after death. Professor Heppard spoke to parents at the Lane School in Aldine ISD to explain the guardianship process and to answer questions from the parents regarding guardianship. Professor Heppard, along with Professor Rick McElvaney and Staff Attorney Ryan Marquez applied for and have been informed that the Law Center Clinical Program was awarded a grant from the Greater Houston Community Foundation – Hurricane Harvey Relief Fund. The grant will be used to expand the clinical program to include consumer law assistance to community members affected by Hurricane Harvey. Professor Heppard also worked with Boy Scouts on their Soil and Water Conservation Merit Badge and, on April 7, helped manage the archery range at the Texas Skies District Boy Scout Camporee held at Brosig Scout Ranch near Sealy, Texas. Tracy Hester’s article “Legal Pathways to Negative Emissions Technologies and Direct Air Capture of Greenhouse Gases” appeared in the May 2018 issue of the Environmental Law Reporter. Professor Hester also spoke at an invitational conference on “Artificial Intelligence and the Law” at Vanderbilt University Law School on April 20, where he outlined some of the regulatory and ethical issues posed by the growing use of machine learning for environmental compliance, enforcement, and disaster prevention. On April 2, Hester moderated a panel discussion with EPA Deputy General Counsel Marcella Burke for the Federalist Society along with Professor Bret Wells. Hester also joined meetings of the Greater Houston Partnership’s Environmental Advisory Committee (as its vice-chair) and its Energy Advisory Committee on April 10 and 24. He was nominated to the Houston Audubon Society’s Board of Directors for its upcoming election on May 10, 2018, and the American Bar Association’s Section on Environment, Energy and Resources asked him on April 24 to chair its Climate Change and Sustainable Development Committee for 2018-2019. And after wrapping up his last classes on April 27, Hester traveled to Washington, D.C. to join the spring 2018 meeting of the EPA’s National Advisory Committee on NAFTA issues. Geoffrey Hoffman spoke on current topics in immigration law at the 2018 joint conference of the Southwestern Association of Law Libraries (SWALL) and the Houston Area Law Librarians (HALL) at the Magnolia Hotel in downtown Houston. Clinical Supervising Attorney Rosemary Vega and attorney Anuj Shah also spoke on family immigration and business immigration. Professor Hoffman was among a group of legal scholars who filed an amici curiae brief with the Ninth Circuit of the U.S. Courts of Appeals in support of the petitioner in Vijayakumar Thuraissigiam v. U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Professor Hoffman’s paper "Contiguous Territories: The Expanded Use of Expedited Removal in the Trump Era” was recently listed on SSRN's top ten download list for the Legal Anthropology eJournal, and Profesor Hoffman is currently in the top ten percent of authors on SSRN by total new downloads within the last twelve months. Professor Hoffman spoke at the American Constitutional Society meeting at UHLC on current topics in immigration enforcement with Clinical Supervising Attorneys Rosemary Vega and Josephine Sorgwe. Professor Hoffman was cited as a source in a PolitiFact article on the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Sessions v. Dimaya. He was also among a group of immigration law scholars who submitted an amici curiae brief to the office of the U.S. Attorney General in the Matter of A-B-. Professor Hoffman argued a case in federal district court for a detained client. Clinical Supervising Attorney Rosemary Vega and alumnae Magali Candler and Christine Truong also collaborated on the case along with several clinic students. Professor Hoffman accepted an invitation to join the National Steering Committee for Litigation of the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA). Craig Joyce presided over the Institute for Intellectual Property & Information Law’s Fifteenth Annual Spring Lecture and associated events, sponsored by Hunton Andrews Kurth LLP. The Lecture featured Professor Paul Ohm of Georgetown University Law Center, speaking on “Forthright Code.” Sharon Israel, of Shook, Hardy & Bacon LLP, served as commentator. The lecture will be published in the Houston Law Review. Renee Knake testified at the Texas Supreme Court in a judicial discipline hearing on April 17. She conducted archival research at the Bush Presidential Library in College Station, April 12-13, supported by funding from her University of Houston Small Grants Program Award. She also has been named the Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, where she will research Australian innovations in access to justice and legal ethics from January to July 2019. Sapna Kumar was awarded a scholarship from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) to take a four-week intensive German class at the Goethe Institute in Freiburg, Germany in July. She also presented about the role of the International Trade Commission in the IP administrative state at Berkeley Law School’s Administrative Law of IP Symposium. Professor Kumar was selected to present her research on the impact of nationalism on IP law at the Advancement of Teaching and Research in Intellectual Property conference in Helsinki. Emily Lawson and Dan Donahue presented a program entitled “Free and Low Cost Tech Tools for Law Librarians” at the 2018 joint conference of the Southwestern Association of Law Libraries (SWALL) and the Houston Area Law Librarians (HALL). The conference was held April 5-7 at the Magnolia Hotel in downtown Houston. Douglas Moll received the Professor of the Year award from the Order of the Barons for the 2017-18 academic year. He attended the organization’s award banquet on April 25. Thomas Oldham published the spring 2018 supplement for his treatise Divorce, Separation and the Distribution of Property. Teddy Rave debated Professor Derek Muller of Pepperdine School of Law about the justiciability of partisan gerrymandering claims at an event cosponsored by the University of Houston chapters of the American Constitution Society and the Federalist Society on March 28. On April 20, Professor Rave presented his paper “Aggregation on Defendants’ Terms: Bristol-Myers Squibb and the Federalization of Mass Tort Litigation” 59 B.C. L. Rev. __ (forthcoming 2018) (with Andrew Bradt) at a faculty workshop at the University of Kentucky College of Law. On April 27, he spoke about his paper “The Information-Forcing Role of the Judge in Multidistrict Litigation” 105 Calif. L. Rev. 1259 (2017) (with Andrew Bradt) on a panel at the Duke Law School Bolch Judicial Institute conference on Documenting and Seeking Solutions to Mass-Tort MDL Problems in Atlanta, Georgia. And he was selected for the University of Houston Teaching Excellence Award for 2017-18. Jessica L. Roberts accepted an offer from the Yale Law Journal to publish “The Future of Genetic Privacy,” an essay co-authored with Brad Areheart (Tennessee) on the ten-year anniversary of the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act. Lauren Simpson presented a talk entitled “Catching the Court’s Eye: Persuading Effectively in Motions and Briefs” at the April 2018 Winning Writing for Trial Lawyers seminar, sponsored by the Texas Criminal Defense Lawyer’s Association and the Harris County Public Defender’s Office. Professor Simpson also continues her community service in support of pollinator conservation. On April 14, Simpson taught a class on pollinators for the 2018 Texas Envirothon, part of the National Conservation Foundation―Envirothon high school environmental education competition. Additionally, on April 25, Simpson hosted an educational visit for the West University Garden Club at her home’s gardens, which are a Certified Wildlife Habitat, a Certified Butterfly Garden, and a Monarch Waystation. Additionally, at the June 2 Planting for Pollinators workshop, co-sponsored by the Katy Prairie Conservancy and the Houston Audubon Society, Glenn Olsen and Simpson will discuss why native plants matter for pollinators and how to create beneficial and beautiful home gardens using natives. Sandra Guerra Thompson spoke on a panel at a symposium hosted by the Georgia State Law Review in Atlanta on April 6. She and Adjunct Professor Nicole Casarez co-authored an article entitled “Three Transformative Ideals to Build a Better Crime Lab,” which will be published in the symposium issue. Professor Thompson also spoke at the University of Wisconsin–Madison on April 27 on “Remedying the Criminal Justice Crisis of Fines, Fees, and Other Charges.” She was a speaker at a Criminal Justice Conference sponsored by the Thompson Center on Public Leadership. On April 13, she attended the meeting of the Board of Directors of the Houston Forensic Science Center on which she serves as Vice Chair. Tiffany Tucker participated in a panel discussion on the importance of networking at the Mentorship Kick Off Event held by the Asian American Bar Association of Houston. The event was held on March 20 at the offices of Vinson & Elkins, LLP. Greg Vetter represented the Law Center at the Texas Bar Foundation event on March 27, honoring The Texas Bar Foundation Fellows and special guest Chief Judge Lee H. Rosenthal of the United States District Court for the Southern District of Texas. He attended the Law Center’s retirement celebration on March 28, honoring several recently retired colleagues. He represented the Law Center and IPIL at the April 12 dinner of The Honorable Nancy F. Atlas Intellectual Property American Inn of Court in Houston, Texas. In his capacity as Associate Dean, he represented the Law Center at the alumni affairs wine tasting event on April 18, providing welcoming remarks for the attendees. He represented the Law Center and IPIL at the World IP Day celebration held on April 19 by the Houston Intellectual Property Law Association (HIPLA) and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office at Thurgood Marshall School of Law at Texas Southern University. As a part of the Law Center’s new building effort, he attended daylong focus groups on April 23 and 27. Finally, he presided over the IPIL Advisory Council dinner event of April 23, where Professor Paul Janicke presented on various topics within patent law. Amanda Watson, along with Joe Lawson of the Harris County Law Library, presented a program entitled “Disaster Recovery: Law Library Responses in Times of Crisis” at the 2018 joint conference of the Southwestern Association of Law Libraries (SWALL) and the Houston Area Law Librarians (HALL). The conference was held April 5-7 at the Magnolia Hotel in downtown Houston. Jacqueline Weaver taught a course on International Petroleum Transactions at Catolica, our sister school in Lisbon in March. She also completed the first draft of a completely revised Chapter 1 (Overview of the International Petroleum Industry) for the 4th edition of the casebook on International Petroleum Transactions, published by the Rocky Mountain Mineral Law Foundation Press. Bret Wells made a presentation on Permanent Establishment Issues to the Tax Section of the Houston Bar Association on April 18. Professor Wells also provided a book review for Frank L. Brunetti, Federal Tax Accounting (Wolters Kluwer, 2017). Kellen Zale’s invited essay “Local Government Formation and Boundary Change in Texas: A Post-Harvey Assessment” has been published in the Houston Law Review’s online companion, HLRe. Professor Zale has been invited to present on the topic at two upcoming conferences in May: the Columbia-Fordham-NYU International Conference on Sustainable Cities and the Fourth Annual Sustainability Conference of American Legal Educators at Arizona State University. |