Professor Deborah Hoffman, Visiting Assistant Professor of Law at CSU Law, has published an article titled “Locked Out at Closing: When Crypto Fails at the Closing Table,” co-authored with Wesley Brandi, CTO of Praefortis. The article is published in ACC Docket, the publication of the Association of Corporate Counsel.

The article addresses the increasing use of cryptocurrency in commercial and real estate transactions and the legal issues that can arise when digital assets are part of a closing. It examines problems such as custody failures, frozen wallets, lost private keys, and disruptions involving third-party platforms, each of which can delay or prevent a transaction from closing.

The article focuses on how these issues fit within existing real estate and transactional law frameworks and discusses the role of counsel in addressing them through diligence, deal structure, and contract drafting. It is aimed at in-house counsel and transactional attorneys advising clients where digital assets are involved.

On February 4-5, Seton Hall Law School will host its first-ever “Faith, Values, and the Rule of Law: An Interdisciplinary Conference.” The conference will examine “how the world’s greatest religious, theological, and philosophical traditions have all contributed to the understanding of justice and human dignity that underscore modern rule of law principles,” bringing together “scholars in law, theology, religious studies, philosophy, political science, international affairs, history, literature, ethics, and related disciplines.” 

Professor Kalir’s paper, “Jewish Human Dignity:  Equality Before God & Men,” was selected for presentation at the Conference. The paper traces the notion of “K’vod Ha’Adam” – human dignity – in the Jewish bible as one of the main origins of the modern notion of equality. It further claims that understanding equality in such terms should trigger a rebuttable presumption of “leveling up” of equality-violation remedies, an issue that has long been portrayed as “one of the most vexing issues of constitutional equality.”

Christa Laser published the essay Ten Tips for Legal Empiricists in the Northwestern Journal of Technology and Intellectual Property. The essay, co-edited by Professor Laser and Professor Jordana Goodman, includes contributions from a range of leading empirical scholars on advice for empirical legal research.

In addition to Professor Laser and Professor Goodman, contributors to the essay include Mark Lemley, Lisa Larrimore Ouellette, Michael Frakes, Melissa Wasserman, Saurabh Vishnubhakat, Janet Frelich, Jennica Silbey, David Schwartz, and Neel Sukhatme.

The citation is Jordana Goodman and Christa Laser, Tep Tips for Legal Empericists, 23 N.W. J. Tech. & Intell. Prop. 227 (2025),

A forthcoming law review article by Professor Rama Kim was featured in a review in Jotwell. Jotwell is an online journal edited by a group of legal scholars that provides a forum to “identify, celebrate, and discuss the best new scholarship relevant to the law.”

The review, written by Georgetown Law Professor and family law expert Philomila Tsoukala, examines Professor Kim’s forthcoming article, Parents, Kin, and the State: Family and Households Between Functional Parenthood and Child Protection. The article engages with the ongoing debate in family law surrounding the legal recognition of “functional parenthood,” or informal caregiving relationships that resemble legal parenthood.

While the recognition of functional parenthood is often viewed as an unqualified normative good in family law literature, Professor Kim’s article challenges this assumption. Drawing on an in-depth case study of Kentucky law, it examines how such legal recognition can operate for families susceptible to intervention by child protection agencies. As Professor Tsoukala notes, the article “suggests that the costs of this model are real and uneven,” and that “functional parenthood can burden parent–child relationships in poor and racialized communities.”

Professor Tsoukala calls the work an “important contribution” that “resists easy resolutions.” She writes that Kim’s “core claim is not that functional recognition is always wrong, but rather that its use in child-protection contexts brings distributional consequences that much of the reform literature has not fully considered.”

The review concludes: “In this important contribution, Kim reminds us that the future of family justice depends not only on recognizing care, but on deciding whose care counts and on what terms.”

Professor Kim’s forthcoming article is: Rama Hyeweon Kim, Parents, Kin, and the State: Family and Households Between Functional Parenthood and Child Protection, 33 Geo. J. on Poverty L. & Pol’y ___ (forthcoming, 2025).