Professor John Plecnik’s article, Abolish the Inflation Tax on the Poor and Middle Class, was recently included on SSRN’s Top Ten download list for Auditing, Litigation & Tax eJournal, Macroeconomics: Prices, Business Fluctuations, & Cycles eJournal and Political Economy: Taxation, Subsidies, & Revenue eJournal. The article is forthcoming at 29 Quinnipiac L. Rev. 925 (2011).
You may view the abstract and download statistics at http://ssrn.com/abstract=1956692.
On Thursday, November 10, C|M|LAW hosted an innovative half-day conference on E-Discovery, Current E-Discovery Issues from a Practitioner and Judicial Perspective. C|M|LAW presented and organized the conference in conjunction with the Cleveland-based e-discovery firm JurInnov and the Jones Day law firm. The conference brought together judges, litigators, corporate counsel and industry experts to discuss the many pressing issues that have emerged in e-discovery practice. Professor Brian Ray was the driving force behind the conference at C|M, working closely with Mr. Timothy Opsitnick of JurInnov, and Mr. Ted Hiser of Jones Day.
The conference began by convening a practitioner’s roundtable to discuss current and emerging e-discovery issues, then brought in several judges to present the judicial perspective. Judicial participants included, The Honorable Dan Polster, Judge, U.S. District Court, Northern District of Ohio, The Honorable James R. Knepp, II, Magistrate Judge, U.S. District Court, Northern District of Ohio, and The Honorable Nancy Vecchiarelli, Magistrate Judge, U.S. District Court, Northern District of Ohio. In addition to co-sponsor JurInnov, industry participants included, representatives from the Cleveland Clinic, Lubrizol, Cooper Tire & Rubber, Squire Sanders & Dempsey, Jones Day, Thorman & Hardin-Levine. Conference attendees received a tour of C|M|LAW’s new state-of-the-art electronic trial courtroom, complete with demonstrations of the court room’s advanced technology. Participants were invited to join a new Northern Ohio E-Discovery Roundtable that will convene periodically to continue discussing current trends and best practices in e-discovery.
Professors Milena Sterio and James Wilson spoke at last week’s Central States Law Schools Association Conference at the University of Toledo College of Law. Sterio spoke on her work on piracy in Somalia. Wilson presented his work on three chapters of his upcoming book, The Structure of Class War.
The chapters Wilson discussed are titled, respectively, “The One,” “The Few,” and “The Many.” The book’s primary technique consists of using the wisdom of the ancient Greeks and The Buddha to demonstrate that most modern conservatives are not very conservative, most liberals not very compassionate, most Republicans not very republican, and most Democrats not very democratic.
Wilson’s three chapters apply the ancient Greeks’ distinction between governments ruled by the one, the few, and the many, to the United States and the global economy. The chapter on the “One” first compares the symbiotic relationship between the President and the CEOs of major corporations, who are, to use Max Weber’s term, “monocrats.” The rest of the chapter uses Plato’s political morality to help criticize Professor Posner and Vermeule’s proposal that the President should not be constrained by either “the rule of law” or “separation of powers.” For example, Plato believed that the best practicable form of government consisted of a wise king who was limited by “the rule of law” created by a public assembly.
The chapter on the “Few” contrasts Plato’s defense of an aristocratic conception of “justice” in The Republic with competing conceptions of “injustice.” The Republic contains much of continuing value and much to fear. The next part of the chapter considers Aristotle’s responses, which simultaneously clarifies lingering analytical problems surrounding the “one, the few, and the many” and provides justifications for a republican form of government instead of an aristocratic one. The final part employs and extends the economic distinction between “predatory” and “productive” modes of wealth accumulation to argue that the political economy of the United States has become increasingly predatory, a precursor to imperial decline.
Professor Sterio spoke on her work on piracy in Somalia. According to her abstract, the rise of piracy off the coast of Somalia over the last five years has been spectacular, amounting to a true crisis in international law. During the first six months of 2011, Somali pirates attacked 163 ships and took 361 sailors hostage. As of June 30, 2011, Somali pirates were holding 20 ships and 420 crew members, demanding millions of dollars in ransom for their release. Moreover, pirates have been attacking larger ships, such as oil tankers, and using more potent weapons, such as rocket-propelled grenades and automatic weapons. Pirates have also been attacking during monsoon season, an otherwise risky endeavor. According to the International Maritime Bureau Director, Pottengal Mukundan, “[i]n the last six months, Somali pirates attacked more vessels than ever before and they’re taking higher risks.”
Sterio concludes that piracy has increased shipping expenses, costing an estimated $10 billion per year in global trade. She poses and responds to the following questions: What has sparked this international law crisis off the coast of Somalia? What can the international community do in order to alleviate the crisis and prevent piracy from spreading to other regions of the world? What should be the way forward?
Professor Sterio, currently Vice President of the CSLSA, was elected President for the upcoming year. The Central States Law Schools’ Association, is a regional consortium of law schools which has attracted member schools such as Toledo, Akron, Albany Law School, Michigan State, Louisiana State, University of Arkansas-Fayetteville, Texas Tech, Northern Kentucky, SMU, etc. With Sterio as President, it is likely that C|M|LAW will be the host of next year’s CSLSA annual conference.
For more information about the Central States Law Schools Association, click here: http://cslsa.us.
Professor John Plecnik and Associate Dean Mark Sundahl gave a joint presentation on October 28, 2012, at the Shaker|LaunchHouse, the new business accelerator in Shaker Heights. The presentation, “C Corps, S Corps and LLCs…Oh, My! Choosing the right business entity for your start-up“, was part of the Global Gateway Lecture Series jointly organized by CSU’s Monte Ahuja College of Business Administration and C|M|LAW. The Shaker|LaunchHouse is a new public-private partnership that fosters entrepreneurial success and job creation through seed capital, education and innovation.
For more information about the Shaker LaunchHouse, see: http://www.launchhouse.com
For more information about the Global Gateway Lecture Series click here: http://www.csuohio.edu/business/global/gateway
Professor Chris Sagers’ paper, Legal Boundaries as Political Economy: The Scope of Antitrust and a General Theory of the Competition-Regulation Dichotomy, was selected for the NYU Next Generation of Antitrust Scholarship Conference, to be held in January 20, 2012 at NYU. The event is co-sponsored by NYU, the AALS, and the ABA Antitrust Section. The paper was selected through a competitive process by a panel senior scholars in antitrust.
On Monday, October 31, Professor Phyllis Crocker was named by Ohio Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor to a joint task force of the Ohio Supreme Court and the Ohio State Bar Association on the death penalty. The 21-member task force includes seven judges, four legislators, two prosecutors, two law professors, a sheriff and several others. Its first meeting will be in Columbus this Thursday. “The task force will not decide whether Ohio should or should not have the death penalty,” Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor said in a statement. “It will not be on the table for discussion.” Instead, the task force is charged with determining whether Ohio’s death penalty is being administered fairly.
To see the announcement in the Columbus Dispatch, click here: http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/local/2011/11/01/19-named-to-review-death-penalty-in-ohio.html
Professor Kermit Lind
Clinical Professor Emeritus Kermit Lind was interviewed for the Washington Post article Good business for bad times: Mortgage field services, by Brady Dennis, Friday, October 28. The article addresses the surge in businesses that service the mortgage foreclosure industry. In particular, the article focuses on a Cleveland-area business, Safeguard Enterprises, that cares for foreclosed upon properties. Safeguard fixes broken windows, mows lawns, repairs pipes, etc. Business is booming and critics contend that Safeguard’s founder is “a shill for the banks whose mortgage abuses helped create and exacerbate the crisis.” Lind was asked about the paradoxical situation of Safeguard’s founder — as a businessman making a fortune out of the foreclosure crisis, or as a businessman serving the needs of his clients by caring for their properties. “He’s an apologist of the first order” for mortgage servicers, says Kermit Lind, a housing expert and former Cleveland State University professor. . . “[a]nd why not? They are the ones who are making him rich.” But, Lind adds, “To his credit, he’s tried to position himself as a mediator between the banks and the public. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.”
To read the full article, click here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/good-business-for-bad-times-mortgage-field-services/2011/10/24/gIQA2FTlPM_story.html
Professor Kevin O'Neill
Professor Kevin O’Neill was recently interviewed for Judicial System v. Social Media – Lawyers, courts argue pros and cons of online communication’s pervasive, yet useful nature, by Kathy Ames Carr, in Crain’s Cleveland Business, October 3-9, 2011. The article addressed issues concerning the role of social media in the court room. With access to and use of smart phones constantly increasing, jurors and others involved in trials have easy access to the internet. This means they can check their email, send and receive tweets and text messages, and browse websites. This easy, constant, and almost universal access presents challenges to the integrity of trials. Judges are now wrestling with the problem of managing electronic access to the outside world as cases are carefully presented within the walls of their courtrooms. According to O’Neill, there are presently no cases addressing the governance of social media the courtroom, and he doesn’t expect to see any cases soon. Instead, he suggests that judges need to be clear with juries, in their jury instructions, regarding court room expectations with respect to social media and electronic access. Judges have broad discretion to instruct juries, and O’Neill believes this is an area ripe for their control.
To read this full story, see: https://www.law.csuohio.edu/sites/default/files/newsevents/crainsjvsm.pdf
C|M|LAW Professor Emerita Jane M. Picker returned to CSU on Tuesday, October 18, to speak on Litigation and Social Change: Developing Women’s Rights in the Twentieth Century. Professor Picker spoke, in particular, about a case she argued in the U.S. Supreme Court in 1973, LaFleur v. Cleveland Board of Education. Her client, Jo Carol LaFleur (now Jo Carol Nesset-Sale) was present to introduce her. LaFleur, then a Cleveland school teacher, had been suspended from her job because she was four months pregnant. Under the applicable maternity leave rules, teachers were barred from Cleveland classrooms starting in their forth month of pregnancy. LaFleur wanted to remain in the classroom and her baby was not due until July, well after the end of the school year. Picker took her case, pro bono, all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, and won. Of course, by then LaFleur’s child was long-since born, and LaFleur herself had gone on to attend law school. But as a result of this effort the women’s protective laws, like that which had barred LaFleur from the classroom, were overturned not only in the Cleveland schools, but all over the country.
For more information, see Chapter 13 in Peter Irons’ The Courage of Their Convictions- Sixteen Americans Who Fought Their Way to the Supreme Court, at: https://www.law.csuohio.edu/sites/default/files/newsevents/ironscouragechap13.pdf
Last week’s C|M|LAW conference on The Politicization of Judicial Elections drew more than 200 participants, and led Professor Susan Becker to be sought out by a Nevada reporter for assistance in understanding a controversial redistricting decision a state judge recently entered there.
The conference was inspired by the November, 2010 elections in which three sitting Iowa Supreme Court justices were ousted from the bench as a result of the court’s unanimous ruling in Varnum v. Brien, 763 N.W.2d 862 (2009). The Varnum decision struck down, on equal protection grounds, a state statute limiting marriage rights to a union between a man and a woman. The conference examined the effect, if any, the ouster of these judges may have on an judicial independence as well as its effect on future efforts to present state court challenges to laws prohibiting marriage for same-sex couples and to otherwise advance the civil rights for LGBT persons through state court litigation.
More specifically, the conference addressed such issues as the importance of an independent judiciary and whether that independence might be undermined by judicial elections that are highly politicized due to socially contentious issues the court has recently resolved or will resolve in the near future. In Iowa, for example, that politicization took the form of partisan interest groups funneling resources into the election process to oust justices who voted the “wrong way” by favoring LGBT rights in Varnum. A similar pattern has emerged in the recent Wisconsin elections where the incumbent justice was almost voted out of office due to opponents’ assumption that this conservative justice would vote to uphold state legislation rendering public employee unions powerless.
Speakers at the conference included Former Iowa Chief Justice Marsha K. Ternus, who spoke on judicial independence and the polarization of the judiciary, and Camilla Taylor, the Lambda attorney who successfully litigated Varnum through the Iowa courts. Ms. Taylor spoke on the background of the case and her reaction to the election backlash. In addition, Ohio State Professor Daniel Tokaji, an expert on election law and issues, discussed judicial elections more generally. C|M|LAW Professors Susan Becker and Matthew Green organized the conference, offered introductory remarks, and moderated the panel discussion.
The Nevada news story, A political judiciary – A Carson City judge’s sortie into politics raises concerns, by Dennis Myers, explains the role of Nevada District Judge Todd Russell in that state’s legislative redistricting. The Nevada Legislature had enacted redistricting plans for both the Legislature and the state’s U.S. House seats. Those plans were vetoed by Gov. Brian Sandoval, and rather than send the matter back to the legislature for resolution, Judge Russell appointed three ‘special masters’
The article’s author sought out Professor Becker for comment: “Judge Russell’s creation of an entirely new system of appointing special masters to devise the redistricting plan is creative, and arguably born of necessity,” said Cleveland State University law professor Susan Becker, who has done work on the politicization of the courts. “But a strong argument can be made that the remedy is unconstitutional because it contravenes the unambiguous language of the Nevada constitution’s redistricting provisions.”
You may read the full story at: http://www.newsreview.com/reno/political-judiciary/content?oid=4186254
The conference video and other supporting materials are available to the public as part of the C|M|LAW Library’s open access research guides at: https://www.law.csuohio.edu/lawlibrary/guides/sexualorientation#judicialindependence
The Cleveland State Law Review will be publishing the comments and essays submitted by the speakers in its Spring 2012 issue.
CSU Law Faculty 