Chris Sagers, the James A. Thomas Professor of Law, spoke to the Bar Association of San Francisco about current developments in antitrust on Capitol Hill and in the courtroom, especially as they relate to ongoing debate over high technology and online platforms. With him on the panel were Professor Josh Davis of the U.C. Hastings School of Law and Caitlin Coslett of Berger & Montague, PC.

The National Governor’s Association (NGA) recently invited Ray to provide an expert briefing on new developments in state privacy laws, and the Center for Internet Security interviewed Ray for its “Cybersecurity Where You Are” podcast about the intersection of cybersecurity and public policy and the growing number of states adopting incentive-based cybersecurity laws modeled on the Ohio Data Protection Act, which he helped draft as a member of the CyberOhio Board.

Ray co-chairs the Sedona Conference’s Biometric Privacy Primer drafting group of seven biometric law and technology experts. He will lead a discussion of the latest draft of the Primer at the Cybersecurity and Data Privacy Working Group’s annual meeting in late April. 

Professor Brian Ray co-authored the article South Africa’s technologies enhancing contact tracing for Covid-19: A human rights and techno-politics assessment published in the peer-reviewed South Africa Journal of Human Rights, the leading human rights journal in South Africa.

Professor Matthew Ahn’s article on attorney fee awards has been accepted for publication by the Dickinson Law Review. The article, titled Navigating Beyond the Lodestar: Borrowing the Federal Sentencing Guidelines to Provide Predictability, proposes overhauling the way in which courts (both federal and state) calculate attorneys’ fees.

The article is available for download here, and the abstract is as follows:

“The lodestar has been the dominant calculation method for fee-shifting awards for nearly forty years. But the lodestar has persistent issues: it leads to extra litigation and judicial effort, the fee awards are highly variable, and it creates an incentive for plaintiffs’ attorneys to bill extravagantly and reject settlement, among others. This Article argues that the issues with the lodestar result from a mismatch between the lodestar and the purpose of the underlying fee-shifting statutes, which encourage attorneys to bring suits that would not normally be economically viable. Encouraging attorneys to do so requires the fee awards to be predictable, and this Article concludes that predictability is impossible within the lodestar, which allows an attorney to set the base calculation and asks a judge to use percentage cuts to arrive at a just result. This Article therefore proposes adopting a framework for fee awards that resembles the Federal Sentencing Guidelines, using an automatic calculation to set a fee range that the judge can work within or, in an unusual case, deviate upward or downward from. This will address each of the lodestar’s persistent concerns while providing the predictability that will encourage the cases these fee-shifting statutes intend to encourage.”

Professor Milena Sterio presented the American Society of International Law Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C., on April 7th, on the topic of “Feminist Judgments at the ICC.”  Professor Sterio’s remarks focused on a book chapter that she is writing, as part of the “ICC Feminist Judgments” book project (book to be published by Cambridge University Press in late 2022).  Professor Sterio’s chapter will re-write the International Criminal Court’s Sentencing Judgment of Dominic Ongwen, former Lord’s Resistance Army leader, from a feminist perspective.  Dominic Ongwen had been sentenced by the ICC to 25 years of imprisonment in May 2021.  

Professor Milena Sterio presented at a conference at Washington University in Saint Louis on April 4, on the topic of “Living Together in Tomorrow’s World: French Secularism Beyond Borders.” Professor Sterio’s remarks focused on the European Court of Human Rights cases involving religious rights, and the ability of various European states to limit such rights for national security, public order, or other grounds.  The conference was co-sponsored by the Cultural Services of the Embassy of France in the US, and it assembled a group of French and U.S.-based academics; some conference panels were held in French and some in English.

Professor Mika was appointed to the Legal Writing Institute Outreach Committee, which was formulated to help mentor new and novice Legal Writing professors. 

Professor Karin Mika moderated the session “Beyond Black Letter Law,” at the Law for the People symposium hosted by the National Lawyers Guild on March 28-30 at Cleveland-Marshall.

Professor Mika also judged oral arguments at the Case Western Reserve Dunmore Moot Court Competition held in March.

Chris Sagers, the James A. Thomas Professor of Law, participated this week in a prominent speaker series of the US Justice Department’s Antitrust Division. Sagers, along with Mike Carrier of Rutgers Law School, discussed NCAA v. Alston, the Supreme Court’s landmark decision that the NCAA’s college athletics amateurism rules violated antitrust law. The speaker series is a private program in which leading antitrust experts brief the Department’s lawyers and economists on developments in the law.

Last year Sagers submitted a brief before the Court in the case and published about it in the George Mason Law Review, both with co-author Carrier. 

Professor Milena Sterio participated in a briefing on the topic of Ukraine (accountability and documentation) for members of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee on March 25th.  Professor Sterio delivered remarks about the basic principles of documentation of war crimes, best practices in documentation of war crimes, as well as on different avenues of accountability for Russian leaders.