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BRIEFL Y NO TED BRIEFL Y NO TED

NIMMER NAMED ‘E-LAWYER OF THE YEAR’
Professor and former dean, Raymond T. Nimmer was selected as the 2016 Internet &
E-commerce Lawyer of the Year – USA by readers of Lawyer Monthly.
Nimmer, Leonard Childs Professor of Law, is the author of more than 25 books and numerous
articles.
He is listed in The Best Lawyers in America in six practice areas, including: copyright law,
information technology law, litigation — intellectual property. He is also one of 700 lawyers listed
in the International Who’s Who of Business Lawyers in the category of information technology law.
He was recognized in 2011 by his peers as the Best Lawyer in Houston in Information Technology
Law. In 2013 and 2016, his peers voted him the Best Lawyer in Houston in Copyright Law.
Winners of the Lawyer Monthly award were selected based on nomination forms emailed to nearly
180,000 contacts in the publication’s database.

FRANKEL LECTURE
The roles of the Democratic and Republican parties were greatly diminished in the 2016 presidential
campaign, a leading constitutional law scholar said as keynote speaker at the Houston Law Review’s 21st
Annual Frankel Lecture four days before the national election.
Samuel Issacharoff delivered his comments in a talk, titled “Outsourcing Politics: Political Parties and
the Theory of the Firm” at the JW Marriott in downtown Houston. “If you go back in American history,
there are certain characteristics and functions that the party and the party alone could do,” Issacharoff
said. “The erosion of that is in part because of changes of mores, society and law. It has made our parties
quite vulnerable.”
Issacharoff is the Bonnie and Richard Reiss Professor of Constitutional Law at New York University
School of Law. His research deals with issues in civil procedure, law and economics, American and
comparative constitutional law and employment law. He is considered a pioneer in the law of political
process and worked in both presidential campaigns for Barack Obama, with a focus on election and
voting issues.
Issacharoff began the lecture by pointing out the resilience of the American two-party system and how it
has survived civil war, two world wars, the rise of the administrative state and a number of realignments
in national politics. He said despite the persistence of both parties in American politics, their roles had
been marginalized by nontraditional candidates like businessman Donald Trump and Vermont Sen.
Bernie Sanders.
“Somehow the parties have been survivors, yet something odd happened this election,” Issacharoff said.
“You have on the Republican side a candidate who until the eve of the primary process was not a Republican and was not a member of the party.
He did not register as a Republican and did not vote Republican the best anyone can tell.”
“On the Democratic side, the leading candidate at times and almost the nominee, was somebody who was not registered as a Democrat, was in the
Senate, but never declared himself a member of the Democratic Party.”
Issacharoff pointed to super PAC funding and the caucus and primary processes as examples that show how parties have less of a say over their
nominee. He said the combination of super PACs and individual donors has galvanized the extremes of both parties and has allowed candidates to
circumvent the traditional structure to raise substantial amounts of campaign dollars.
In response, Heather Gerken, the J. Skelly Wright Professor of Law at Yale Law School, said even if parties are given more authority through
successful reform, it is not a given that it will lead to moderate behavior.
Robert Bauer, a partner at Perkins Coie, provided a final response. Bauer served as White House Counsel to Obama and in 2013 was named co-
chair of the Presidential Commission on Election Administration.
“Super PACs are here to stay,” he said. “We have to take Super PACs as a fixed feature of our political system and try to determine how we can
regulate an environment in which Super PACs and parties operate, so if they’re going to co-exist, they’re going to function efficiently.”
UHLC Assistant Professor D. Theodore Rave moderated the discussion, which has been published in Volume 54 of the Houston Law Review.

42 Briefcase 2017