Dean Lee Fisher and his wife Peggy Zone Fisher have been awarded the 2021 Richard W. Pogue Award for Excellence in Community Leadership and Engagement by the Cleveland Metropolitan Bar Foundation. Peggy Zone Fisher is the President and CEO of the Diversity Center of Northeast Ohio.

The award announcement notes that Lee and Peggy, “the ultimate Cleveland power couple,” have “have an unparalleled history of leadership in business, politics, law and community service,” which has spanned more than four decades.

The award will be presented on Saturday, February 13, 2021, at the Music Box Supper Club.

Professor Matthew W. Green Jr. was invited to participate on a panel in which law professors from the Cleveland area discussed issues of social justice and ways in which lawyers can join the fight for social justice in their communities through practical action.  Professor Green’s remarks focused on actions employers and lawyers might take to reduce workplace discrimination against LGBTQ+ individuals as well as members of other marginalized groups. 

The event, which took place on Wednesday, November 18, was sponsored by the Cleveland Intellectual Property Law Association (CIPLA).   

On November 19, 2020, Professor Matthew W. Green Jr. participated in a webinar focusing on the 2020 election.  The event, titled The 2020 Election: Lessons and Reflections, featured a panel of CSU faculty from colleges across campus discussing various issues pertaining to the election, including the effect that activism (including the Black Lives Matter movement), demands to defund the police, race and civil rights, and the future of the federal courts may have played in the election.  

The webinar was hosted by the Diversity Institute, a research center within CSU’s Division of Diversity, Inclusion and University Engagement.  

Professor Milena Sterio co-authored a blog post (with Eian Katz and Jonathan Worboys, Public International Law and Policy Group (PILPG)), “Attacks” Against Hospitals and Cultural Property: Broad in Time, Broad in Substance, which was published by Articles of War, an academic blog operated out of the Lieber Institute at West Point.  In this post, Professor Sterio and her co-authors discuss the definition of “attacks” under the International Criminal Court (ICC) statute.  This blog post is based on the Amicus Brief which Professor Sterio and her colleagues at the PILPG recently submitted to the ICC in the Ntaganda case.  The post was an invited contribution to the online symposium ran by Articles of War about the ICC’s Ntaganda case.  

The blog post is available here: https://lieber.westpoint.edu/attacks-against-hospitals-cultural-property-broad/

Professor Milena Sterio presented her paper, “The Syrian Conflict’s Impact on International Law,” at the American Society of International Law-Midwest Interest Group annual workshop held virtually on Nov. 13th.  Professor Sterio’s paper was selected from a competitive call-for-papers.

Professor Milena Sterio participated as a panelist in a panel on the Nagorno-Karabkah conflict (between Armenia and Azerbaijan) organized by the University of Southern California Institute of Armenian Studies Center on 11/6, entitled “Armenia and Azerbaijan at War: Roads to Peace.”  Professor Sterio discussed issues of self-determination and secession as they relate to this conflict.

A recording of the event is available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIUIoGkmFzM

This week Chris Sagers, the James A. Thomas Professor of Law, gave a presentation of his book, “United States v. Apple: Competition in America,” at a Yale Law School lecture series jointly sponsored by the Information Society Project and the Thurman Arnold Project.

He also participated in a panel discussion hosted by the Federalist Society that featured an extended, deep-dive discussion of the Justice Department’s historic antitrust suit against online search giant Google. Sagers debated the case with two leading antitrust experts, Doug Melamed of Stanford University and Geoff Manne, President of the International Center for Law & Economics. 

In early November, Prof. Ray moderated a panel on arbitrating cybersecurity and data privacy issues at the American Society of International Law’s Midyear Meeting Practitioner’s Forum.

In addition, the Seton Hall Law Review invited Prof. Ray to present his draft article Pandemic Privacy at its annual Symposium. The Review will publish the article next Spring.

Professor Ray is the Leon M. and Gloria Plevin Professor of Law and Director of CM Law’s Center for Cybersecurity and Privacy Protection.

The Future of Privacy Forum invited Professor Brian Ray to speak in October on a panel discussion on digital contact tracing at Privacy & Pandemics: Responsible Uses of Technology and Health Data During Times of Crisis — An International Tech and Data Conference.

Professor Ray was also asked to participate in drafting a workshop report, which will be prepared and used by the National Science Foundation to help set direction for Convergence Accelerator 2021 Workshops, speeding the transition of convergence research into practice to address grand challenges of national importance.

Professor Ray is the Leon M. and Gloria Plevin Professor of Law and Director of CM Law’s Center for Cybersecurity and Privacy Protection.

Professor Heidi Gorovitz Robertson was one of six speakers at the 20th Annual Great Lakes Water Conference “Water in the Courts” on Friday, November 6, 2020.  The conference is sponsored by the Legal Institute of the Great Lakes at the University of Toledo Law School. 

Robertson’s presentation — “Waters of the United States 2020 and its Legal Challenges” — addressed US EPA and the US Army Corps of Engineers’ latest version of the definition of “waters of the United States” under the federal Clean Water Act.  The definition has enormous consequences with respect to federal regulatory jurisdiction over discharges of pollution into U.S. surface waters and has been controversial for decades.  The “Navigable Waters Protection Rule” (NWPR) became effective in most of the country on June 22, 2020 and is the culminating step in the Trump Administration’s multi-year project to repeal and replace Obama Administration regulations defining “waters of the United States” and, by extension, limiting the scope of waters subject to federal jurisdiction. In particular, the NWPR implements a narrow definition of these jurisdictional areas, as indicated in President Trump’s February 28, 2017 Executive Order directing the EPA Administrator to consider interpreting “navigable waters “consistent with Scalia’s opinion in [the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2006 decision] Rapanos v. United States.”  

Legal challengers to the new rule insist that the agencies’ creating a rule consistent with Scalia’s opinion was inappropriate because Scalia’s opinion was a plurality, not a majority, and relied on a concurrence by Justice Kennedy to reach a majority.  Both the Executive Order and the resulting definition of “waters of the United States” ignore the Kennedy concurrence, which had been reflected in the 2015 (Obama Administration) iteration of the rule.

Robertson is the Steven W. Percy Distinguished Professor of Law at C|M|LAW and Professor of Environmental Studies at the Levin College of Urban Affairs.