Professor and Associate Dean, Milena Sterio, has been selected as a panelist, from a competitive call for paper proposals, for the 2016 AALS Annual Meeting.  Professor Sterio will present on a panel entitled “Increasing Author Diversity in Legal Scholarship: Individual and Institutional Strategies.” The panel will take place on Saturday, January 9, from 3:30 pm- 4:45 pm at the AALS Annual Meeting in New York City.  Professor Sterio’s remarks will focus on increasing gender diversity in legal scholarship.

Professor Heidi Gorovitz Robertson

Heidi Gorovitz Robertson, Steven W. Percy Distinguished Professor of Law, has published an article with Crain’s Cleveland Business, entitled “Ohio cities may have a new way to control oil and gas drilling within their borders.”  The article, available here, discusses a recent Franklin County Court of Common Pleas decision to uphold an earlier decision by the Ohio Oil and Gas Commission, which had voided an order allowing Cutter Oil to drill oil within North Royalton city limits.  In light of the Franklin County Court decision, the city of North Royalton, as well as other Ohio municipalities, may have a stronger voice regarding drilling permits and operations taking place within such municipalities’ geographic limits.  Professor Robertson had already published multiple articles and opinion pieces with Crain’s Cleveland Business on similar topics.

On September 3rd, Associate Dean Mark Sundahl delivered a paper at the University of Coimbra, the oldest university in Portugal. Dean Sundahl’s paper was delivered in response to a paper by Prof. Alberto Maffi of the University of Milan regarding the nature of maritime finance in ancient Athens. The presentation was part of “Symposion 2015” a biennial conference that gathers the leading scholars in the field of ancient Greek Law for four days of papers and debate on various legal issues. Dean Sundahl’s paper focused on the Athenian practice of requiring lenders to share in the risk of the debtor when financing trade missions throughout the Mediterranean. Drawing on the rationale underlying similar practices in Islamic law, Dean Sundahl suggested that the requirement to share risk compelled lenders to avoid high-risk ventures and ensure the efficient placement of capital.

On Thursday, September 10, Professor Alan Weinstein presented a CLE session for the Northeast Ohio Law Directors Association on the U.S. Supreme Court’s June decision in Reed v. Town of Gilbert, AZ, involving local sign regulations. Professor Weinstein discussed both the doctrinal and practical implications of the Reed case and advised that local governments would need to balance exposure to legal risk with retaining effective sign regulation as they seek to bring their sign regulations into compliance with the new requirements set out in the Reed decision.

Craig Boise, Dean and Joseph C. Hostetler – Baker Hostetler Chair in Law, was appointed to the newly created Cleveland Community Police Commission.  The Commission is court-mandated and is part of several reforms that were specified in the agreement signed between the United States Department of Justice and the city of Cleveland in May 2015.  The purpose and mandate of the Commission is to make policy recommendations to the Cleveland police chief on policies and practices that can help strengthen relations between officers and the communities they protect.

Over two hundred individuals had applied to become members of the Commission, and Dean Boise is one of ten individuals selected by a selection panel.  Dean Boise will serve a four-year term on the Commission. The appointees were announced in a swearing-in ceremony held in the Cleveland City Hall rotunda on September 8; two photographs from the swearing-in ceremony are available below.

Professor Brian Glassman attended “Art Crime and Cultural Heritage,” a symposium at NYU Law School, on June 5, 2015. Prof. Glassman participated in the Q & A session after the keynote presentation by Sgt. Harry Ettlinger (see photo), one of the last surviving “Monuments Men”—a group of art historians, curators, and conservators dedicated to protecting and preserving the art of Europe during World War II.

While at the symposium, Prof. Glassman spoke with art lawyer Howard Spiegler, a partner at Herrick Feinstein in New York City (see photo). In May, 2010, Mr. Spiegler participated in the panel presentation that Prof. Glassman organized and moderated, “Recovering Holocaust Art: Past, Present, and Future,” at the Maltz Museum of Jewish Heritage in Beachwood, Ohio.

Heidi Gorovitz Robertson, Steven W. Percy Distinguished Professor of Law, has published another article with Crain’s Cleveland Business.  This article is entitled “It’s round two in the fight beween Beck Energy and Munroe Falls,” and it discusses the continued zoning conflict between the city of Munroe Falls, Ohio, and Beck Energy, over the latter’s attempt to drill for oil and gas within Munroe Falls city limits.  The article is available here; it has already been cited by the press media (The Athens News) here.

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.