Professor and Associate Dean Milena Sterio participated in an episode of “Talking Foreign Policy” – a quarterly radio show on 90.3/WCPN devoted to a discussion of current foreign policy issues.  This episode will be broadcast at 7:00 PM (Eastern Time) on Friday, September 4, 2015; it takes on the controversy over the Iran Nuclear Accord, which will be voted on by Congress in a few weeks. The expert guests on the program included Professor Sterio, Dr. Paul Williams, President of the Public International Law and Policy Group in Washington, D.C., Col. Mike Newton, a Professor at Vanderbilt Law School, and Avidan Cover, Director of Case Western Reserve University’s Institute for Global Security Law and Policy.

Talking Foreign Policy is produced and hosted by Michael Scharf, Dean of Case Western Reserve University School of Law.  The live stream of the broadcast is available for world-wide listening here. The video of the program will be available for subsequent viewing at this link.

Professor Gordon Beggs (Emeritus) was interviewed by the ACLU of Ohio for its Oral History Project.  Professor Beggs served as ACLU Cleveland chapter executive director from 1973 to 1976 and then as ACLU of Ohio staff counsel for the Project on the Rights of the Institutionalized from 1976 to 1979. From 1979 to 1989, Professor Beggs acted as ACLU Cleveland chapter legal director and subsequently became ACLU of Ohio legal director, a position in which he served until 1991. The interview is available on YouTube.

Professor Eric Tucker, Distinguished Scholar in Residence at the Cleveland-Marshall College of Law and Professor at Osgoode Hall Law School, York University, co-edited a book which will be published by the Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History in the fall of 2015.

The book is entitled Security, Dissent, and the Limits of Toleration in War and Peace: Canadian State Trials Volume IV, 1914-1939; the book launch is currently scheduled for November 5, 2015, in Toronto, Canada.  This book “looks at the legal issues raised by the repression of dissent from the outset of World War One through the 1930s and the Great Depression” (quoted from the book website, available here).

Cleveland-Marshall College of Law in partnership with the Cleveland eDiscovery Roundtable is excited to announce “Electronic Discovery and the Pending Changes to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure,” Friday, September 4th at 9:00 a.m.  Please join us for an informative discussion on these important changes to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and their connection to eDiscovery.  This event will be sponsored by Eaton Corporation.  Professor Brian Ray will moderate the first panel, featuring Judge Jeffrey S. Sutton of the U.S. Court of Appeals, Sixth Circuit, as well as Judge Benita Pearson, U.S. District Court, Northern District of Ohio and Magistrate Judge James R. Knepp, II, U.S. District Court, Northern District of Ohio.

More details about the event are available here.

On Thursday, July 30, Professor Alan Weinstein was one  of two presenters for a national webinar, “Reed v. Town of Gilbert: The Supreme Court’s New Rules for Temporary — and other — Signs,” presented by the Chapters & Divisions Consortium of the American Planning Association.  He discussed the effect on local sign regulations of the Reed decision, how cities can respond to ensure their sign codes could withstand a legal challenge, and noted the significant unresolved questions raised by apparent conflicts between Justice Thomas’s majority opinion and Justice Alito’s concurrence. More than 750 local government planners, city attorneys, and elected officials logged into the webinar.

Professor Weinstein has also been selected by the American Planning Association to serve on a panel of legal experts who will review and select the planning law sessions for the annual Alfred Bettman Legal Symposium at the 2016 APA National Conference in Phoenix. 

Professor and Associate Dean Milena Sterio’s book, “The Right to Self-determination Under International Law: ‘Selfistans,’ Secession, and the Rule of the Great Powers,” which had originally been published as a hard back edition in 2013, will be re-published in paper back in late 2015, following excellent sales of the original edition.

Professor Sterio’s book proposes a novel theory of self-determination- the Rule of the Great Powers. This book argues that traditional legal norms on self-determination have failed to explain and account for recent results of secessionist self-determination struggles, and it thus proposes and develops a new theory of self-determination, based on the Rule of the Great Powers, the most geo-politically and economically powerful states in the international arena.

Professor Matthew Green presented at the Midwestern People of Color Legal Scholarship Conference in Havana, Cuba, on July 24th. His presentation topic was “LGBT Workplace Discrimination: Extant Protections & Issues on the Horizon.”

Browne Lewis, the Leon M. and Gloria Plevin Professor of Law presented on the impact that technology has on autonomy from the cradle to the grave and beyond.

On July 24, 2015, Professor Lewis presented at the Midwest People of Color Scholarship Conference in Havana, Cuba. Professor Lewis’ presentation was about the technology that permits patients to live longer. Unfortunately, that same technology causes terminally ill persons to spend more time experiencing severe pain and other side effects. Professor Lewis discussed the ethical and legal issues that may arise if physician-assisted suicide is made available to terminally-ill children in order to relieve pain and suffering. She discussed two main questions-Should the law permit physician-assisted suicide to be used to end the lives of minor children suffering from terminal illnesses? Should the minor child be included in the decision-making process? Currently, only five American states have legalized physician-assisted suicide. However, the procedure cannot be used to end the lives of terminally ill persons who are under the age of eighteen. Recently, Belgium removed the age restriction on physician-assisted suicide in order to permit parents to request lethal medication for their dying children.

On July 29, 2015, Professor Lewis presented at the Southeastern American Law Schools (SEALS) Annual Meeting in Boca Raton, Florida. In her presentation, Professor Lewis discussed the technology that make posthumous reproduction possible. The presentation consisted of an overview of Professor Lewis’ book on posthumous reproduction that is forthcoming from Routledge Press. According to Professor Lewis, the number of persons seeking to use the gametes of dead people to conceive children is increasing. Professor Lewis talked about the need to balance the reproductive rights of the dead with the best interests of the child conceived as a consequence of posthumous reproduction. Professor Lewis also spoke about human oocyte cryopreservation/egg freezing. Young women are choosing to freeze their eggs for future use to defer motherhood while they pursue their careers or wait to meet “Mr. Right”. Opponents of the procedure argue that the government should ban the use of human oocyte cryopreservation or restrict its availability to women of child-bearing years.