Professor Mickey Davis, with co-author Peter Arno, published an op-ed entitled “The New Face of U.S. Health Care: $1,000 Per Pill.”  Davis and Arno argue in this op-ed that the federal government should also regulate pharmaceutical prices, for products developed through federal funding, because unregulated prices have been sky-rocketing and have precluded thousands of patients from benefitting from life-prolonging medications.  The op-ed is available here:

http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/28171-the-new-face-of-us-health-care-1-000-per-pill

Professor Karin Mika presented at the Legal Writing One Day Workshop held at Miami School of Law on December 6th. The title of her presentation was “The Dreaded Assumption: How Failure to Accept Generational Differences Makes for Bad Teaching and Poor Learning.”

The focus of Professor Mika’s presentation was on the fact that law professors must be hyper aware of how different students are from students of yesterday and ourselves. Students come from many diverse cultural backgrounds than ever before, and the information age has made it so that students no longer relate to any of the same common references that could be made in a classroom setting even a decade ago. It is not so much that professors need to be attuned to pop culture, or even present their material in a visually entertaining manner, but do need to understand that changes in the world have made it so a lot of elements of law instruction considered to be common knowledge are simply not common knowledge. Professors need to take the time to explain the context for case references in a way that students can relate and must be more attuned than ever before to references that can be construed to be offensive or degrading. Professors also need to be attuned to the fact that the informational age has lessened everyone’s attention span and that, after a certain point, information conveyed by pure lecture can no longer be absorbed.

Professor Karin Mika will move up to President Elect for the AALS Teaching Methods Section starting in 2015.  In her capacity as Secretary of the Teaching Methods Section, Professor Mika prepared two newsletters, the latter of which is attached below and highlights the Cleveland-Marshall Solo Incubator (p. 13).  The newsletter also highlights multiple upcoming programs at the 2015 AALS Annual Meeting, including a program on “Adding Foreign and Comparative Law to Your Course,” at which Professor Milena Sterio will present (on January 3, 2015).

TMSection Fall 201415 Edition

Kevin O’Neill

On October 21, 2014, Professor Kevin O’Neill gave a presentation at the Cleveland Metropolitan Bar Association on two important First Amendment decisions handed down by the Supreme Court last term: Town of Greece v. Galloway, 134 S. Ct. 1811 (2014) (upholding the power of local town councils to commence their public meetings with overtly sectarian prayers); and McCullen v. Coakley, 134 S. Ct. 2518 (2014) (striking down buffer zones around abortion clinics in Massachusetts).

Professor Heidi Gorovitz Robertson

C|M|LAW’s Steven W. Percy Distinguished Professor of Law, Heidi Gorovitz Robertson has written in Crain’s Cleveland Business’ Energy Report regarding the eminent domain process pertaining to a proposed interstate natural gas pipeline that would cross Ohio.  At present, NEXUS Gas Transmission is working towards burying a 3 to 5 foot pipeline across Medina county and elsewhere in Ohio.  Professor Robertson’s blog post in Crain’s is available here.

Professor and Associate Dean Milena Sterio’s Letter to the Editor (“C.I.A.’s brutal interrogation techniques nothing short of illegal torture”) was published by the Plain Dealer; the full text of the letter is available here.

On December 12, Professor John Plecnik joined ​Associate Dean & Professor Jonathan Entin of Case Law School in speaking to a U.S. State Department-sponsored delegation from Indonesia on American politics and constitutional law. This roundtable discussion was hosted by the Cleveland Council on World Affairs at Case Western Reserve University School of Law as part of the International Visitor Leadership Program, which is the U.S. State Department’s premier professional exchange program.

Professor and Associate Dean Milena Sterio published a blog post on Intlawgrrls entitled “Torture is Always Illegal, No Matter What Results It May Produce.”  In this post, Professor Sterio responds to the recently released Senate Intelligence Committee report (“Torture Report”) on enhanced interrogation techniques used by the C.I.A. post 9/11.  Professor Sterio argues that these techniques amounted to torture under both international law (the Convention Against Torture, and various courts’ interpretations of this Convention) as well as domestic law.  In addition, Professor Sterio argues in this post that the question of whether enhanced interrogation techniques produced valuable intelligence results is irrelevant, because even if such techniques did produce excellent intelligence information (which the Senate committee report proves they did not), such techniques are still illegal because they amount to torture, and should never be utilized.

C|M|LAW Assistant Professor Joseph Mead undertook pro bono representation of a former public school teacher who was removed from his position because a dairy farmer from the community complained about the school teacher’s vegan advocacy on Facebook.  In a letter to the school district, Professor Mead explained that the district’s action violates the guarantee to freedom of speech contained in the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.  The letter demanded that the teacher be immediately reinstated, arguing that “Urging people to drink soy milk on Facebook is not a fireable offense” and “forcing those who teach future citizens to relinquish their citizenship rights has no support in law or policy.”   Professor Mead, who holds a joint appointment with the Maxine Goodman Levin College of Urban Affairs, previously litigated constitutional cases for the United States Department of Justice, and is handling this case in cooperation with the ACLU of Ohio.

A copy of the letter can be accessed here.  Professor Mead was recently interviewed about this case; the interview and a  news story about the case are available here.  Several other local and  Chicago-based news and media outlets have picked up this story (available here, here and here).