On July 27, Professor Laura Hoffman, Co-Director of the CSU Law Center for Health Law and Policy, published a blog post on “Bill of Health,” a publication of Harvard Law School’s Petrie-Flom Center. Professor Hoffman’s post, “Intellectual Disability, Geography, and a Life-or-Death Decision” discusses the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent ruling Hamm v. Smith, involving the issue of determining intellectual disability in death penalty cases.

Professor Hoffman notes that the Hamm case had been “watched by both criminal justice and disability rights advocates for its potential impact on convictions for individuals sentenced to death involving a determination of intellectual disability.” However, the Court ultimately dismissed the case as improvidently granted, thus providing no further clarification on the legal standard.

Professor Hoffman argues that “people with disabilities and their advocates have been fighting for — and very much deserve — a unified standard that still allows an individualized assessment of the individual, not just cherry-picking certain criteria like an IQ score to define intellectual disability.”

Professor Lorenzo Luisetto has published two new articles examining mobility-restricting covenants, including noncompete agreements, across different contractual contexts. Noncompete agreements and other mobility-restricting covenants have mainly been studied at the level of the employment relationship, but other contractual contexts can be just as important in disciplining their use.

In “Mobility-Restricting Covenants in Business Contracts: The Case of Franchising,” published in the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, Professor Luisetto, together with Francine Lafontaine and J.J. Prescott, examines the use of several types of covenants, including noncompetes, but also confidentiality and non-recruitment clauses, in franchise contracts.

In “Collective Bargaining and Monopsony: The Regulation of Noncompetes in France,” published in Industrial Relations, Professor Luisetto, together with Tito Boeri, Tommaso Crescioli, and Andrea Garnero, studies what happens when unions regulate the use of noncompetes through collective bargaining.

Both articles are now available online in open access:

(JELS): https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jels.70033

(IREL): https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/irel.70036

Professor Heidi Gorovitz Robertson presented “What’s Real and Remaining: Can Clarity in Agency Decisionmaking Overcome Ohio’s Legislative Bias Against Renewable Energy Projects?” at the 10th Annual SRP Sustainability Conference for American Legal Educators (SCALE) at Arizona State University, May 14-15, 2026.

This project examines whether disciplined administrative reasoning—focusing on what is factually real and legally remaining after stipulations and project approval conditions—can mitigate structural legislative bias against renewable energy development in Ohio. The paper presents Robertson’s analysis of public comments at the Ohio Power Siting Board hearings regarding permit approval for Frasier Solar. Professor Robertson posits that similar results—where agencies rely on ‘what’s real and remaining’ of public opposition to renewable energy development projects—could reduce the outsized advantage the state has handed to oil and gas development projects over their renewable energy‑based counterparts.

Robertson is the Steven W. Percy Professor of Law at CSU College of Law and Professor of Environmental Studies at the Levin College of Public Affairs and Education, Cleveland State University.

On May 15, Professor Luisetto presented his paper, “Collective Bargaining and Monopsony: The Regulation of Noncompete Agreements in France,” at the American Law & Economics Annual Meeting (ALEA) hosted by the University of Chicago Law School. 

In his paper, Professor Luisetto examines how the regulation of noncompete agreements for employees through collective bargaining agreements affects firm-level markdowns in the French manufacturing sector. A key takeaway is that, by enhancing compliance or imposing additional requirements for noncompete enforceability, collective bargaining serves as an effective tool to regulate the use of noncompete agreements in France.