Albertus Accolades

August 2017

Editor, 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.

Leonard Baynes gave a presentation about the media, Anglo-American culture, and the 2016 U.S. Presidential election to members of the Foreign Ministry in Mexico City on July 12. Dean Baynes welcomed and addressed full-time students at the New Student Orientation on August 8, and gave welcoming remarks at the Part-Time Orientation on August 12. He also joined other Law Center faculty and students at the Naturalization Workshop where students helped lawful permanent residents prepare their naturalization applications. On August 14-15, Dean Baynes gave opening remarks to Law Center students and prospective employers at the lunchtime OCI Session I. On August 16, he welcomed transfer students during a lunchtime orientation. He also welcomed first year students and attended the Law Center’s Professionalism Dinner, an annual dinner to welcome each first year entering class. The purpose of the dinner is to underscore, very early in a student’s legal career, the importance of establishing their professional identity. Students have an opportunity to visit with other new classmates, meet faculty and staff, and hear from members of the Houston legal community. This year’s dinner was held at the Hilton University of Houston in the Waldorf-Astoria Ballroom. On August 17, Dean Baynes attended a reception to welcome new faculty to the University hosted by Provost Paula Short. On August 18-19, he visited Community Service Projects at the Houston Bar Association Veteran’s Clinic, the Houston Volunteer Lawyers Legal Clinic at the Third Ward Multi-Services Center, Beauty’s Community Garden in Independence Heights, Hermann Park Conservancy Japanese Garden, and the Houston Food Bank as part of the Annual Community Service Projects undertaken by Law Center faculty and students. On August 21, Dean Baynes hosted a Welcome Back Luncheon for Law Center faculty and professional staff. On August 22, he met with Congressman Ted Poe (’73), Gina Foote, Chief of Staff, Tim Tarpley, Deputy Chief of Staff and Legislative Director, Regent Durga Agrawal, and Jason Smith, Vice Chancellor/Vice President for Governmental Relations at UH to discuss Congressman Poe’s engagement in Law Center activities.

Janet Beck, along with her colleagues Josephine Sorgwe and Rosemary Vega, supervised Immigration Clinic students (Alina Fisher, Ademola Fakunle, Paola Barbieri and Robert Garcia) and one UHLC Pipeline student who served as an interpreter (Stephanie Janser) at the Hutto Detention Center in Taylor, Texas. The students spent from Friday to Sunday interviewing 46 women from Central America, Cuba and Colombia, who were hoping to apply for asylum. Many told horrific tales of domestic abuse in their home countries, others were persecuted on account of their involvement in anti-Government activities and still others suffered gang threats of death if they refused to join the gang. At the request of the Honduran consulate, Professor Beck spent four hours seeing Hondurans for legal consultations. Stephanie Janser, UHLC Pipeline student, observed. A photograph will appear on the Honduran consulate’s Facebook page. Professor Beck was also contacted by Univision to provide background on gang-related asylum cases.

Emily Berman attended the 2017 SEALS Conference, where she participated in two panel discussions. The first was about the legal issues surrounding the Trump travel ban; the second was entitled “Foreign Policy in an Age of Trump.” The moderator/organizer of the second panel dubbed its participants SEALS Team Six, which is the closest Berman will ever get to a Special Ops experience.

David R. Dow delivered the 2016-17 annual supplement to his treatise on Texas Contract Law to Thomson-West. He has been invited to give the keynote address at the annual Human Writes Conference in London, England in October. His topic will be “Representing Volunteers for Death: Legal and Ethical Challenges.”

Katya Dow has obtained for the Juvenile and Capital Advocacy Project (JCAP) a $100,000 grant from the Simmons Foundation to support JCAP's newest initiative: ad litem representation of so-called Dual Status youth. Dual status youth are young women and men who are involved in both the juvenile courts and the family courts. In conjunction with Judge Mike Schneider, the Harris County Youth Collective, and the Harris County Juvenile Probation Department, JCAP has developed a program to train law students to represent the best interests of these uniquely-situated juveniles and bridge the gap between these two parallel legal systems. 

Victor B. Flatt spoke at the Texas Environmental Superconference in Austin on August 4, on the ethical responsibilities of attorneys with respect to climate change. Professor Flatt has also been appointed to the Steering Committee of the Science Integrity Working Group for the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Tracy Hester mixed writing and traveling over the summer. First, he completed co-editing and writing The Law of Climate Engineering (for Oxford University Press) with Professor Michael Gerrard, and his article on The Law of Direct Air Capture was accepted for publication by the Environmental Law Journal. He also placed short articles on Green Interpretation by Environmental Courts and Tribunals in the Environmental Law and Management Journal and The Paradox of Regulating Negative Emissions Technologies Under U.S. Environmental Law for the Global Sustainability Journal. Both of these journals are peer-reviewed European law journals. Along with working with Professor Bret Wells on an interdisciplinary research project involving new legal issues related to hydraulic fracturing, he will also complete a research project grant on the application of environmental criminal laws after industrial disasters for a presentation to the Texas OneGulf Program at the end of August. In addition to writing, he also spoke at conferences and workshops at Northwestern, Oxford, Utrecht, Washington D.C., and he moderated panel discussions at the Natural Resource Law Teacher’s Institute in Banff as well as a natural resource scholars workshop at the Rocky Mountain Mineral Foundation’s annual meeting in Santa Fe (where he represented UH as a trustee). He wrapped up the summer by participating in environmental discussion groups at the SEALS conference in Boca Raton.

Geoffrey Hoffman presented at a webinar hosted by the ABA Children's Immigration Law Academy on August 11 on the need for criminal defense counsel and the fugitive disentitlement doctrine. Professor Hoffman accepted an invitation to co-author an amicus curiae brief in the Supreme Court travel ban case related to statutory arguments supporting the plaintiffs' argument that the president's use of 1182(f) was overbroad. He spoke on the latest immigration and citizenship cases at the roundup on the Supreme Court's 2016 term at the Law Center. He accepted an invitation to be interviewed for a documentary entitled "The Rational Middle of Immigration." He was quoted in the New York Times relating to Hurricane Harvey and interviewed for the BBC World Service concerning Judge Garcia's recent decision partially enjoining SB-4. He was quoted in a Law360 article on a federal judge’s ruling enjoining five provisions of Texas’ sanctuary cities ban. He was also interviewed by PBS and the Canadian Broadcasting Service at the George R. Brown convention center shelter.

Renee Knake signed a contract with NYU Press to publish her book, Shortlisted: Modern Lessons from Women Considered for the US Supreme Court Before O’Connor. In early August, she presented on a panel at the SEALS Annual Conference about her work as Reporter for the ABA Commission on the Future of Legal Services. She had two symposium proposals accepted. One is for a co-authored essay with Professor Jessica Mantel entitled Legal and Ethical Impediments to Data Sharing and Integration Among Medical Legal Partnership Participants, to be presented at Loyola University Chicago School of Law in November and published in the Annals of Health. The second is for an essay entitled Abolishing Death, to be presented at Duke Law School in February and published in the Duke Journal of Constitutional Law and Public Policy.

David Kwok presented a paper, Regulating the Marginal Liar, at the Southeastern Association of Law Schools (SEALS) Annual Meeting as part of the “Three Felonies a Day” Discussion Group at the beginning of August.

Douglas Moll’s casebook, The Law of Business Organizations: Cases, Materials, and Problems (13th ed. 2017) (with Jon Macey) has been published. Professor Moll also completed the 2017 Supplement for his treatise, Closely Held Corporations (Lexis Publishing) (with Bob Ragazzo).  He is presently working on the second edition of his concise hornbook, Principles of Business Organizations (West Publishing) (with Rich Freer). Professor Moll is also working on an article for an upcoming conference involving the contributors to the Business Law Professors Blog. His article will address judicial dissolution in the LLC.

Nathan Neely received an appointment to the Misconduct and Irregularities in the Admission Process Subcommittee of the Law School Admission Council.

William Streng taught a one-week course on the OECD Model Income Tax Convention in a program sponsored by the Ministry of Finance’s Training Institute in the Republic of China (Taiwan). Students included government revenue officials from Honduras, Mongolia, Bulgaria, Malaysia, Belize, Thailand, Indonesia, Albania and Jordan, in addition to tax officials from Taiwan. In June, he participated in the annual meeting of the European Association of Tax Law Professors held in Lodz, Poland, where he was recognized as one of the longest participating associate (i.e., non-European) members of EATLP. He has completed the final chapter of the revision for the Fifth Edition of the two volume publication, Bittker, Emory & Streng, Federal Income Taxation of Corporations and Shareholders – Forms, published by Thomson-Reuters. He has also recently completed Supplement 2017-3 for these volumes. He has completed his portion of Release 58 for the three volume treatise, Streng & Salacuse, International Business Planning: Law and Taxation, published by Lexis-Nexis. He has finalized his portion of the 2017 revision of Streng & Davis, Retirement Planning - Tax and Financial Strategies, as published electronically by Thomson-Reuters.

Sandra Guerra Thompson presented a paper at the triennial meeting of the International Association of Forensic Science in Toronto, Canada on August 24th.  She co-authored a paper, Building the Infrastructure for ‘Justice through Science’: The Texas Model, with Visiting Professor Nicole Bremner Casarez for a symposium issue of the West Virginia Law Review. An excerpt of her article Daubert Gatekeeping for Eyewitness Identifications appeared in the latest edition of Joshua Dressler’s book Understanding Criminal Procedure: Investigation, published in August. Professor Thompson also recorded a radio spot on bail reform for the Law Center’s program Briefcase on KUHF.

Gina S. Warren was nominated to be a UH Energy Fellow responsible for, among other things, being a liaison between UH Energy, the Energy Advisory Board, and UHLC. She was invited to be a peer reviewer for the Environmental Law Institute’s book entitled, Legal Pathways to Deep Decarbonization in the United States, edited by Michael Gerrard and John Dernbach. Warren was also selected as co-chair for “Career Paths for Young Attorneys in the Energy Sector,” April 13 & 14, 2018, Houston, Texas, co-sponsored by the Institute for Energy Law & UHLC.

Denney Wright will be speaking at the 16th Annual Advanced In-House Counsel Texas Bar CLE Course on Thursday, August 17, in San Antonio, on Structuring In-House Training Programs. He has co-authored an article on the subject with Ann Marie Painter of Perkins Coie, LLP that will be published in the course materials. He is on the Planning Committee for this event, which is sponsored by the Business Law and Corporate Counsel Sections of the State Bar of Texas.