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Faculty Briefs

BeVierLillian BeVier delivered the Henry J. Miller Lecture at Georgia State University Law School on March 17. The title of the lecture was “State Action Reconsidered.”

BeVier, Vice-Chairman of the Board of the Legal Services Corporation, visited some of the Board’s legal aid grantees at their offices in Helena, MT; San Juan, PR (recipient of the Board’s largest grant); and Monterey, CA. The LSC is a private, non-profit corporation established by Congress in 1974 to assure equal access to justice under the law for all Americans. It is headed by a bipartisan Board of Directors appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate.

BonnieThe Institute of Medicine, an arm of the National Academy of Sciences, released this fall a major report on tobacco policy chaired by Richard Bonnie ’69. Bonnie was vice-chair of an IOM study on preventing youth smoking in 1994 and chaired a major study on underage drinking for the National Academy of Sciences which was released in September 2003.

In other work for the National Academies, Bonnie is serving on various committees studying ways to increase rates of organ donation, and implications of recent advances in knowledge about adolescent development.

On May 25, Bonnie made two presentations at the Annual Scientific Meeting of the American Psychiatric Association in Atlanta, one on “Diminished Responsibility and Capital Sentencing,” and another on “Unraveling Soviet Psychiatry,” a 15-year retrospective on a report mission to the USSR in 1989 on which Bonnie served. The session on Soviet Psychiatry was held at the Carter Center.

Bonnie made presentations on June 17 at the University of Auckland Law School in New Zealand on “Mental Illness and Capital Punishment” and on July 14 at the University of Sydney Law School on “Tobacco Policy in the United States: Present Status and Future Prospects.”

On September 19, Bonnie presented “State Laws on the Right to Refuse Medical Care at the End of Life: Implications of Diagnoses of Persistent Vegetative State and Minimally Conscious State” at a planning meeting in Washington, DC to advise the Institute of Medicine regarding the need for a study of the scientific, clinical, and ethical issues raised in the Terri Schiavo case.

Bonnie completed a project for the American Bar Association as reporter for a Task Force on Mental Illness and the Death Penalty. An article describing issues addressed by the Task Force appeared in the Catholic University Law Review. Bonnie also spearheaded endorsements of the Task Force’s proposals by the American Psychiatric Association.

Bonnie received a Presidential Award from Mothers Against Drunk Driving in Washington, DC on October 1 for his contributions to public policy in reducing underage drinking. He made a presentation on voting by people with dementia at the meeting of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law in Montreal on October 28. Bonnie also made a presentation on “Opportunities for Comparative Interdisciplinary Research on Aging and the Law” at the meeting of the Max Plank International Network on Aging in Marbella, Spain on November 5.

At the state level, Bonnie is working with Virginia Chief Justice Leroy Hassell on reforming the Commonwealth’s laws governing involuntary mental health treatment. He will deliver the keynote address to a major conference on this topic in Richmond on December 9.

BrooksRosa Brooks’s article, “Failed States, or the State as Failure?” will be published in the University of Chicago Law Review. Brooks is now a regular opinion columnist for the Los Angeles Times.

CannonThis spring, Jonathan Cannon presented a paper on environmentalism and the Supreme Court at environmental law workshops at Stanford University and University of Michigan. The paper analyzes the Supreme Court’s response to environmentalist claims in cases decided over the last 35 years. It concludes that the most important of these cases capture the struggle between environmentalist beliefs and values and those of mainstream culture, including the legal culture embodied by the Court, and illustrate the difficulty environmentalists have had in transforming that culture.

In August, Cannon was a featured panelist at the Environmental Law Institute’s Seminar “What Do Environmentalists Want from the Supreme Court,” examining recent developments and trends in the Supreme Court’s environmental cases that might be relevant to the nomination of Judge John Roberts to the Court. The seminar provided overviews of the intersection of constitutional and environmental law before the Court and how the Court has shaped environmental law. A panel of representatives from the Sierra Club, Republicans for Environmental Protection, Community Rights Counsel, and the National Wildlife Federation then discussed how nominees may shape the future of environmental law and whether environmental law may shape the future of Supreme Court nominations.

CoughlinOn May 18, Anne Coughlin gave a lecture at the Judicial Conference for the Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces at Catholic University in Washington, DC. Her topic was police interrogation tactics in rape and sexual assault cases, and recommendations for rape law reform.

On September 22, Coughlin traveled to UCLA Law School to present “Sex Under the Influence” as part of a Legal Theory Workshop. The paper explores the proper scope of liability for having sex with a partner who is intoxicated. Coughlin says, “this question is a vexing one, both in practice because many date rape allegations arise out of intoxicated sex, and in theory (what effect should intoxication have on an actor’s capacity to consent to have sex?).”

Coughlin is a member of a committee that formed last winter of the National Association of Women Lawyers. This is the Committee for the Evaluation of Supreme Court Nominees, and its “mission … is to review and evaluate the qualifications of each Presidential nominee to the United States Supreme Court with an emphasis on laws and decisions regarding women’s rights or that have a special impact on women.” The committee read and evaluated all available writings by Supreme Court nominee Judge John Roberts. According to Coughlin, “NAWL was organized well over a century ago—at a time when women were not allowed to vote, let alone participate in most professions—and its membership is large, broad, and deep, in the sense that the membership includes women from both sides of the political divide. NAWL is committed to fostering women’s equality under law, but the group is otherwise non-partisan. Other members of the Supreme Court Committee include partners at private law firms, corporate counsel, and law professors from Yale.”

Forde-MazruiKim Forde-Mazrui delivered a lecture at Arizona State University College of Law on March 21 entitled “Contemporary Lessons from Black History: Interracial and Same-Sex Marriage Compared.” The talk was the final event of the Black History Month lecture series. On the same day, Forde-Mazrui presented a paper to ASU’s law faculty entitled “Delegating Discretion Through Specific Rules: The Case of the Peremptory Traffic Stop.”

On April 21, Forde-Mazrui delivered a lecture entitled “Gender, Race, and the Constitution” at the Quadrangle, a retirement community in Haverford, PA. Forde-Mazrui was invited to give a presentation by Elizabeth Hill, widow of D. Peck Hill ’48. Hill invited Forde-Mazrui after reading about his work and the Center for the Study of Race and Law and the Justice Thurgood Marshall Research Professorship.

Forde-Mazrui published an essay entitled “Learning Law Through the Lens of Race” this past winter in the Journal of Law & Politics. The essay explores various benefits and potential risks involved in studying race and law, including its value for traditional law courses and in more specialized programs such as the Center for the Study of Race and Law.

GoluboffRisa Goluboff was a member of the Program Committee for the Law and Society Association Annual Meeting, which took place in Las Vegas in June. She presented a paper on human rights in the mid-twentieth century and commented on a roundtable discussion about labor activist and historian Herbert Hill. Goluboff published this spring “‘Let Economic Equality Take Care of Itself:’ The NAACP, Labor Litigation, and the Making of Civil Rights in the 1940s,” in the UCLA Law Review. She is also publishing a shorter piece that is part of a forum about Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes in the Law and History Review.

HarrisonJohn Harrison received an All-University Outstanding Teaching Award at a formal presentation at a dinner in the Rotunda on April 28. Barry Cushman ’86 prepared the nominating materials for the award, writing that Harrison’s “brilliance and his devotion to the education of his students are beyond question. He possesses the talents of a great teacher: the capacity for lucid exposition, rigorous analysis, penetrating observation, encyclopedic breadth of knowledge, sophisticated depth of understanding, spontaneous wit, generosity of spirit and compassion for those experiencing their initial encounters with the ‘mysterious science of the law.’ You will find him in his office every day and nearly every evening and weekend—at all hours—reading, learning, preparing lectures, talking with students, refining his craft. For John, the life of the mind and the transmission of learning are truly a consuming vocation.” A student of Harrison’s is also quoted, “Professor Harrison never told me the answer to his question; he showed me how to reach that answer on my own.”

HowardA.E. Dick Howard ’61 has been involved in numerous efforts directed at constitutional developments in other countries. He has worked with the U.S. Department of State’s Rule of Law program, including writing articles for its e-journal, Issues of Democracy. Through the American Bar Association, through the Iraq Foundation, and through the Council on Foreign Relations, he has also offered advice and comments to Iraqis involved in the drafting of a new constitution for that country.

Closer to home, in July Howard organized and moderated (as he has done for a number of years) the panel of law professors that, at the Fourth Circuit Judicial Conference, reviews the decisions of the most recent term of the Supreme Court. His panelists were Walter Dellinger (Duke Law School and a former Solicitor General), Marci Hamilton (Cardozo), John McGinnis (Northwestern), and Steve Saltzburg (George Washington and former UVA Law professor).

Howard addressed the Norfolk-Portsmouth Bar Association at their annual bench-bar luncheon in Norfolk. His subject was “The Rehnquist Court.” Howard also gave talks under the auspices of the Brookings Institution, the Federal Executive Institute, and the Sorensen Institute.

The Governing Body at Christ Church, Oxford, reelected Howard as a member of the College’s High Table.

HurwitzDeena Hurwitz traveled in May to Beirut, Lebanon with Matt Eisenbrandt ’01, acting director of the San Francisco-based Center for Justice and Accountability, on an investigative mission for a project in which the UVA International Human Rights Law Clinic is involved.

In June, Hurwitz spent two weeks in Melbourne, Australia, where she co-taught (with Doug Ford who is starting a new Immigration Clinic at the Law School) a graduate seminar in Human Rights Advocacy at the University of Melbourne Law School. She was a participant in the University of Melbourne Fulbright Symposium on Peace and Human Rights Education, and presented a paper on “Engaging Students Through Human Rights Clinical Programs: The U.S. Experience.” She and Ford also presented “Human Rights Lawyering, Litigation and Advocacy: A Perspective From the U.S.” at the Public Interest Law Clearing House and Liberty, Victorian Council for Civil Liberties, Inc. in Melbourne.

Hurwitz submitted a book chapter “Ethical Globalization and the Education of Relevant Lawyers” to be published this fall or winter in Progressive Lawyering, Globalization and Markets: Rethinking Ideology and Strategy for the Northeastern University School of Law Program on Human Rights and the Global Economy; and, with Meg Satterthwaite, she co-edited the Symposium issue of the Arizona Journal of International and Comparative Law on “The Right of Indigenous Peoples to Meaningful Consent in Extractive Industry Projects.”

Hurwitz also is organizing for the Human Rights Program this fall a panel on Srebrenica and genocide, marking the ten year anniversary of that tragedy.

KaneMitchell Kane ’96 presented a draft of his paper “Risk and Redistribution in Closed and Open Economies” at the Michigan Tax Policy Seminar last April and presented it again at the Harvard Law School Workshop on Current Research in Taxation in September. Kane will present a draft of his paper “Cost of Capital and Ownership Effects in International Tax Policy” at the National Tax Association annual conference in Miami in November.

From Jim Crow to Civil Rights

Klarman Receives Nation’s Top History Award

Michael Klarman received the 2005 Bancroft Prize for his book, From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court and the Struggle for Racial Equality. The Bancroft Prize is the nation’s most prestigious award for a work of American history. It is not limited to legal history, but encompasses the entire field and is equivalent in prestige to a Nobel Prize in American history. “Only the greatest historians, writing greatly about great subjects, win the Bancroft Prize,” said Charles McCurdy, chair of the University’s history department and professor of both history and law. “Klarman is only the third law professor ever to win the Bancroft.”In making the award, the Bancroft committee said that “Klarman’s examination of this classic problem in American constitutional history is not only our best account of Brown, its antecedents and consequences, but also goes well beyond that important story to make a larger set of arguments about the role of the Supreme Court in helping to bring about social change.”

KlarmanIn March, Michael Klarman responded to panel discussion of From Jim Crow to Civil Rights at George Washington University School of Law. He also taught a one-week faculty enrichment seminar on Antebellum Constitutional History for faculty at the Law School, and presented the lectures “Engaging the Mind” and “Brown and the Civil Rights Movement” to the Jefferson Madison Regional Library (coordinated by the University’s Provost). Also that month, Klarman presented “Brown and Lawrence (and Goodridge)” to a faculty workshop at the Villanova School of Law; and “Civil Liberties in Wartime” to the California Appellate Judges Conference commemorating the 100th anniversary of California Courts of Appeal in Los Angeles.

In June, Klarman presented “Why Brown was a Hard Case” and “Brown and the Civil Rights Movement” to the annual education conference of the Pennsylvania State Judiciary; “Why Brown was a Hard Case” as the Mason lecture to the Federal Bar Association annual meeting in Minneapolis; and “Constitutional Developments in the Warren, Burger, and Rehnquist Courts” to a reunion of attendees of annual education conferences of Indiana Trial Judges. In July, Klarman spoke to the Rutherford Institute on “judicial activism.”

In November, Klarman is serving on a panel on his book, From Jim Crow to Civil Rights, at the annual meeting of the American Society of Legal History in Cincinnati. He is also publishing in the Michigan Law Review an article entitled, “Brown and Lawrence (and Goodridge)”, which especially focuses on the political backlashes caused by Court decisions like Brown and the Massachusetts same-sex marriage case.

Klarman is visiting at Harvard Law School this academic year.

MalaniAnup Malani is co-authoring (with Rajesh Aggarwal, University of Minnesota), “Do golden parachutes and other change-in-control payments benefit shareholders?” As part of this project, they are gathering the most in-depth database of change-in-control payments following mergers in existence, and the first to explore mergers since 2000.

Malani is working with Ramanan Laxminarayan (Resources for the Future Institute) and others, including

Kenneth Arrow (Stanford), Donald Kennedy (Science magazine), and Saul Levmore (University of Chicago, formerly of UVA), on a project intended to propose policy changes to respond to the growing threat of antibiotic resistance. The project is funded by a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation grant.

Malani is the principal investigator on a clinical trial that examines the effect of caffeine on blood pressure in order to understand the role of patient expectations about treatment on treatment effects. Malani is also beginning new projects on why physicians engage in defensive medicine rather than cost-effective medicine (with Darius Lakdawalla, RAND), an empirical comparison of four regimes —piecemeal tort litigation, class actions, private global settlements, and bankruptcy—for compensation of mass torts (with Francis McGovern, Duke), and an exploration of the empirical foundations for textualism (with Ward Farnsworth, Boston University).

This fall, Malani will complete papers on advertising by non-profit hospitals and nursing homes (with Guy David, Wharton), on the importance of understanding treatment heterogeneity in valuing new drugs (with Feifang Hu, UVA), and on the use of statistical decision theory to improve statutory interpretation. He has just submitted a paper on self-selection of patients into medical trials (to the Journal of Human Resources). Malani is revising papers on placebo effects (for the Journal of Political Economy and for the Journal of the American Statistical Association), on the costs of the reallocation rule in joint and several liability cases (for the Journal of Law and Economics), and on why parties do not settle habeas corpus cases (for the Virginia Law Review).

MerrillRichard Merrill and Margaret Riley published an article this summer in the Columbia Science and Technology Law Review entitled “Regulating Reproductive Genetics: A Review of American Bioethics Commissions and Comparison to the British Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority.” The paper was commissioned by the Genetics & Public Policy Center at Johns Hopkins University, which is supported by The Pew Charitable Trusts. According to the abstract, “many people are now advocating expanded government regulation of research and clinical use of reproductive technologies. Although many of these technologies have been in use or anticipated for more than 25 years, and a number of bioethics commissions have considered regulation of them, efforts to develop broad national regulation have largely failed. This article examines the role that government institutions can play and have played in designing regulation of assisted reproduction and reproductive technologies.… We conclude that bioethics commissions can play an important role in formulating policy but they cannot create necessary political consensus if that consensus is lacking. Moreover, while the United States can glean important lessons from the British experience, the two countries’ political, legal, and medical cultures differ in ways that suggest importation of the British model would be difficult and perhaps unwise.”

O'ConnellOn March 5, Jeffrey O’Connell lectured on medical malpractice law at the Duke University Medical School, Durham, NC, and on March 2, he lectured on “John Rawls and Tort Law” at the Department of Justice Law & Society at American University, Washington, DC. On March 21, O’Connell lectured to the Legal History Group at the Law School on Joseph Tumulty, a lawyer and Chief of Staff to President Woodrow Wilson.

O’Connell lectured on medical malpractice law at the Law School of Tel Aviv University, Israel, on July 13 and spoke to a group of law faculty members at Hebrew University in Jerusalem on July 18 on the same topic.

On September 4, O’Connell spoke on tort law reform at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Association in Washington, DC, and on October 10, he spoke at the UVA Medical School on medical malpractice litigation arising from treatment of liver disease.

This fall, an article entitled “The Rise and Fall (and Rise Again?) of Accident Law: A Continuing Saga” by O’Connell and co-author John Linehan will be included in America’s Second Gilded Age? Perspectives on Law and Class Differences, (Ed. Paul D. Carrington and Trina Jones) to be published by the New York University Press.

OrtizDaniel Ortiz published in the Southern California Law Review “The Empirics of Campaign Finance.” This piece discusses both empirical social science studies on the effects of campaign contributions and how the courts use empirical studies in developing campaign finance law. It concludes that much empirical research is bedeviled by endogeneity problems and that the courts’ use of empirical research may appear insufficiently serious because it is directed at the wrong questions.

Ortiz also co-authored (with Anthony Corrado, Thomas Mann, and Trevor Potter) The New Campaign Finance Sourcebook (The Brookings Institution). This sourcebook brings together in one resource all the central materials bearing on campaign finance regulation. It includes a series of well-developed “roadmap” essays even-handedly laying out the issues and organizing the source materials.

Working with co-author Sam Hirsch, Ortiz published for The Reform Institute a discussion guide Beyond Party Lines: Principles for Redistricting Reform (forthcoming 2005 and available at http://reforminstitute.org/resources/Report7.pdf). The booklet lays out the pros and cons of various principles commonly proposed to regulate state and congressional redistricting.

RutherglenGeorge Rutherglen has completed the casebook Employment Discrimination: Law and Theory, published by Foundation Press; an article “Distributing Justice: The September 11th Victim Compensation Fund and the Legacy of the Dalkon Shield Claimants Trust,” to appear in the Virginia Journal of Law and Social Policy; and an article on “Controversy, Consensus, and the Concept of Discrimination,” to appear in the St. Louis University Law Journal.

RyanIn the spring, James Ryan ’92 gave talks at two conferences, one at Ohio State on affirmative action after Grutter (voluntary integration), and the second at the University of Minnesota on race and regionalism (race and school finance reform). This fall, Ryan is participating in a constitutional law conference at Harvard. He hopes to present an early chapter of his book about law and educational opportunity at both Emory and Stanford University Law Schools. Ryan is heading to China this semester, to participate in a program that brings together young professionals from the United States and China. Last, he will be giving a talk at a summit on education reform in Virginia.

ScottIn April, Robert Scott presented his forthcoming article “The Political Economy of International Sales Law” at the Distinguished Scholars Colloquium of the Ohio State University Law School. The article will be published this fall in the International Journal of Law and Economics. On October 26–30, Scott traveled to St. Gallen, Switzerland to participate in the First International Scientific Conference on Law and Economics at St. Gallen. He presented the paper (co-authored with Professor George Triantis LL.M. ’86) entitled “Harnessing Litigation by Contract Design,” scheduled for publication in the Yale Law Journal. This fall, Paul Stephan ’77 and Scott will finish and deliver their book, The New Leviathan: Contract Theory and the Hardening of International Law to be published by Cambridge University Press.

This fall, Scott is visiting at Columbia Law School, where he holds the appointment as the Justin W. D’Atri Visiting Professor of Law, Business and Society.

StephanIn March, Paul Stephan ’77 served as host and moderator for a conference on “The Politics of the Geneva Convention.” The resulting papers will be published in the Virginia Journal of International Law. Stephan spoke at a conference in April at the Kennan Institute in Washington, DC on Commercial Law Reform in Russia and Eurasia. This summer, Stephan taught U.S. corporations law at Münster University.

This fall, Stephan and Robert Scott will finish and deliver their book, The New Leviathan: Contract Theory and the Hardening of International Law to be published by Cambridge University Press.

WhiteOn March 24, G. Edward White delivered the Knowlton Distinguished Lecture at the University of South Carolina Law School. The subject of the lecture was “Historicizing Judicial Scrutiny,” an analysis of the Supreme Court’s posture toward scrutinizing legislation challenged on constitutional grounds in the nineteenth century.

On October 20, he delivered the Monsanto Lecture at Valparaiso Law School. That lecture is given annually on a topic related to tort law. The subject of his lecture was “A Customary International Law of Torts.”

For a portion of the fall semester White will be an academic visitor at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

New Faculty Join Law School

THE LAW SCHOOL welcomes several new professors this year, with expertise in fields ranging from intellectual property to tax law.

AbramsKerry Abrams joins the faculty after three years as an acting assistant professor in the Lawyering Program at New York University School of Law. Her primary research and teaching interests are in family law, immigration law, and feminist jurisprudence. Before joining the faculty at NYU, Abrams was an associate at the New York City law firm of Patterson, Belknap, Webb & Tyler, where she litigated disability rights, employment discrimination, intellectual property, and international libel cases. In 1998-1999, Abrams clerked in New Orleans for Judge Stanwood R. Duval, Jr. of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana. She graduated with Highest Honors in the Humanities from Swarthmore College, where she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. As a law student at Stanford, Abrams served as the co-president of the Marion Rice Kirkwood Moot Court Board and graduated with distinction.

BarzuzaBefore joining the Law School, Michal Barzuza was a John M. Olin Research Fellow in Law and Economics at Harvard Law School, where she earned her LL.M. and S.J.D. Her dissertation at Harvard won the John M. Olin Prize for Outstanding Paper in Law and Economics. She was a Byse Teaching Fellow and taught a workshop on regulatory competition in corporate and securities law. Barzuza received her LL.B. and B.A. from Tel Aviv University, where she was a member of the editorial board of the Tel Aviv University Law Review and a Cegla research fellow. She practiced corporate law at Haim Zadok & Co., in Israel, and has also worked at Sidley Austin Brown & Wood in New York. Her research interests include corporate law, corporate finance, securities law, and law and economics.

ChoiAlbert Choi was an Associate Professor of Law in the University of Virginia’s Department of Economics and taught at the School of Law last year. In joining the Law School faculty full-time, he will also serve as Associate Director of the John M. Olin Program in Law and Economics. His research and teaching interests include law and economics, contract theory, corporate law, corporate finance, and organization. Choi earned his J.D. from Yale Law School and his Ph.D. in Economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2001. While at Yale, he was an Olin Fellow in Law and Economics and earned John M. Olin Research Fellowships in the summers of 2000 and 2001. At MIT, he was a National Science Foundations Graduate Research Fellow.

DoranMichael Doran worked for several years in government service and private practice before joining the faculty. Doran’s current research focuses on Social Security reform, the tax policy implications of executive compensation, tax penalties and other compliance incentives in the federal tax system, and tax transition policy. He teaches federal income tax, corporate income tax, and Social Security reform. After earning his J.D. at Yale Law School, Doran clerked for the Honorable I. Leo Glasser of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York. He then practiced tax law at Caplin & Drysdale, where he worked both as an associate and as a partner. Doran twice served in the Office of Tax Policy at the U.S. Treasury Department, from 1998–1999 and from 2002–2004. At Treasury, he had responsibility for legislative and regulatory matters involving Social Security reform, individual savings incentives, executive compensation arrangements, pension plans, health and welfare benefits, and other tax policy matters. Doran is also an Affiliated Scholar with the Urban Institute in Washington, DC, where he works with the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center.

GarrettBrandon L. Garrett’s areas of research and publication include remedies, civil rights, criminal procedure, constitutional law, and new forms of public governance. While a law student, he was an articles editor of the Columbia Law Review and a Kent Scholar. After graduating he clerked for the Honorable Pierre N. Leval of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. He then worked as an associate in New York City at Cochran, Neufeld & Scheck LLP, litigating wrongful conviction, DNA exoneration, and police brutality cases, and at Beldock Levine & Hoffman LLP, litigating civil rights, employment discrimination, criminal defense, and mass tort cases.

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