Faculty
Focus is a monthly publication documenting the activities, accomplishments, and
honors of the University of Houston Law Center Faculty.
Editor, Katy Stein Badeaux, kastein@central.uh.edu
Previous editions of Faculty Focus can be accessed here.
August 2013
Richard Alderman submitted the manuscripts for the
2013-14 edition of his casebook, Texas
Consumer Law: Cases and Materials, as well as the 2013 update for the
two volume Consumer
Protection and the Law. He also presented papers at the State Bar
Convention on "Warranty Law and Arbitration," at the State Bar
College Conference on the "Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act," and
at the State Bar Advanced Commercial and Consumer Law Conference on an
"Update to the DTPA."
Janet Beck was asked to review a book written by a
now-retired immigration judge. Her review appeared on July 29 in the
online publication Immigration Law Week
under the heading: Three Titans in the Field Review “Bench Pressed, A Judge
Recounts the Many Blessings and Heaving Lessons of Hearing Immigration Asylum
Cases” by Susan Yarbrough.
Aaron Bruhl organized and moderated a panel on
Legislation/Regulation courses at the annual meeting of the Southeastern
Association of Law Schools. He also wrote a short paper on judicial activism
that has been accepted for publication in
The Green Bag.
Meredith J. Duncan attended the SEALS conference on
August 4th in West Palm Beach, Florida and presented at the wildly popular
discussion group “Professional Responsibility Pecha
Kucha: The Sequel.” Professor Duncan is one
of 26 law professors featured in the new book What
the Best Law Teachers Do published by Harvard University Press. What the Best Law Teachers Do is a
study of the teaching and professional techniques of twenty-six of the best law
professors in the United States. Professor Duncan is one of the model
educators whose instructional methods this book holds up as an example of the
best practices in legal education.
Tracy Hester began the summer with a presentation at the
European Society of International Law on "A Matter of Scale:
International Law and Regional Climate Engineering" at its Fifth Research
Forum in Amsterdam on April 24. He then chaired a panel discussion in
Montreal on June 13 about future research projects that the North American
Conference of Legal Educators could undertake in coordination with the NAFTA
Council on Environmental Cooperation, and he joined a symposium the next day
hosted by Vermont Law School on cross-border sustainability legal issues.
In July 2013, Hester participated in the George Mason University Law Center's
Economics Institute for Law Professors at Beaver Creek, Colorado. On
August 6, he sat in a panel discussion at SEALS organized by our own Professor Aaron
Bruhl on teaching statutory interpretation and regulatory interpretation
classes. He then lectured at the Fourth Annual Geoengineering
Institute held jointly by Harvard University and MIT on August 8 in
Boston. Last, Hester sat in the annual meeting of the ABA's Section on
Environment, Energy and Resources in San Francisco on August 10 as a member of
its governing Council. His chapter on applying domestic U.S. law to
climate engineering projects was published by Cambridge University Press in
July 2013 as part of Climate Change Geoengineering: Philosophical Perspectives, Legal
Issues, and Governance Frameworks.
Geoffrey Hoffman travelled to Port Isabel Service
Detention Center, in Los Fresnos, Texas in July. He
represented a Rwandan young man in removal proceedings with student Veronica
Bernal at the merits hearing. The immigrant was granted political asylum in a
ruling by the Immigration Judge in August.
Sapna Kumar presented her paper Life, Liberty, and
the Pursuit of Genetic Information at the 2014 Intellectual Property
Scholars Conference at Cardozo Law School.
Jessica Mantel spoke at the SEALS annual
conference in Palm Beach, where she was a discussant in the workshop “Health
Care Reform Reprised: What Progress Has Been Made Since Last Year?”. She also served as the moderator for a panel entitled
“Our Patchwork Health Care System: Benefits and Challenges.”
Douglas Moll completed work on the 2013 edition of Corporations & Other Business
Associations: Statutes, Rules, and Forms.
He has also begun work on his Business Torts casebook for West Publishing.
Raymond Nimmer was voted as Best Lawyers' 2014
Houston Copyright Law "Lawyer of the Year", an award based on votes
by the Houston legal community. He is also listed for inclusion in the 20th
Edition of The Best Lawyers in America in the practice areas of:
Copyright Law, Information Technology Law, Litigation - Intellectual Property,
also the result of votes by lawyer, in this case nationally. Additionally, he
is one of 700 lawyers listed in the International Who’s Who of Business Lawyers
in the category of Information Technology Law.
Tom Oldham has been appointed to the ABA Family Law Quarterly’s Board of Editors
for 2013-2014. At a conference in London in July he discussed his paper
regarding how inequality of the U.S. is affecting American families.
Several legal issues in college law arose this summer, including
three SCOTUS cases involving higher education on the same day as the Fisher
v. University of Texas remand, and Michael A. Olivas was on duty as
a commentator, speaking to reporters in the trade press and the general media.
An article about his newest book (Suing
Alma Mater, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013) appeared in Inside Higher Ed and other venues, as
did reviews of In Defense of My People,
his edited Arte Publico Press book about early Tejano lawyer Alonso Perales,
whose papers were donated to UH. He will also appear in part of the PBS series,
The Making of America: Untold Stories from American Latino History, on
Post-WWII civil rights issues in Texas and the Southwest, under the auspices of
the PBS Project, Latino Americans, a three-part, six-hour documentary
series set to air nationally in the fall.
D. Theodore Rave presented his article, The BP
Oil Spill Settlement and the Paradox of Public Litigation, with Samuel Issacharoff at the NYU School of Law Summer Faculty
Workshop on July 25. The paper is available at: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2278378.
Susan Sakmar presented “From Shale Gas to LNG Exports: The
Prospects for North American LNG Exports and the Impact on Global Gas Markets”
to the U.S. and International Association of Energy Economics at their 32nd
USAEE/IAEE North American Conference, July 28-31, 2013 in Anchorage, Alaska,
available at http://www.usaee.org/usaee2013/program_concurrent.aspx.
Sandra Guerra Thompson signed a contract with Carolina
Academic Press to publish a book she is writing on police crime labs and
criminal trials. In addition, her article, Judicial Gatekeeping of
Police-Generated Witness Testimony, published in 2012 in the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology,
has been selected by the National Association of Criminal Defense Attorneys as
a “must read” that will be featured in a column in The Champion magazine and on a separate link of the NACDL
webpage.
Tasha Willis, director of the University of Houston Law Center’s Alternative Dispute Resolution
program and supervisor of the Mediation Clinic, wrote Arbitration Comes to
Texas, the lead article in the Spring edition of the Journal of the Texas Supreme Court Historical
Society. Professor Willis also recently completed a multi-year program
to earn an LL.M. degree with high honors in Transnational Commercial Practice
with an emphasis in alternative dispute resolution. The program, offered
through Lazarski University in Warsaw, Poland, was
taught in Salzburg, Budapest, and Warsaw by faculty from Lazarski
University, Boston University, Salzburg University, and the Center for
International Studies.