Professor Heidi Gorovitz Robertson

Heidi Gorovitz Robertson, the Steven W. Percy Distinguished Professor of Law, has published a new article on Crain’s Cleveland Business, entitled “Ohio law has some gaps to fill when it comes to how landowners are forced into shale drilling arrangements.”

In this article, available here, Professor Robertson discusses the recent Ohio Oil and Gas Commission decision known as the “Teeter decision.”  According to Professor Robertson, the Teeter decision ” highlights the lack of statutory clarity in Ohio’s oil and gas statute regarding when the unitization section would apply, as opposed to the mandatory pooling section.”  As Professor Robertson’s article informs us, Teeter has appealed this decision to the Franklin County Court of Common Pleas, which will likely start looking at this case in December and early January.

Professor Sterio (far left), with, from left to right, Professor Charity, Professor Williams, Mr. Garraway, and Professor Scharf, at International Law Weekend 2015.

Associate Dean and Professor Milena Sterio participated in a panel discussion entitled “International Law Responses to States of Emergency” at International Law Weekend, an annual conference jointly organized by the American Branch of the International Law Association and the International Law Students’ Association.  The conference took place at the Bar Association of the City of New York and at Fordham Law School, in New York City, from November 5-7.  Professor Sterio had proposed and organized the above-mentioned panel; other panelists included Dean and Professor Michael Scharf, Case Western Reserve University School of Law, Professor Paul Williams, American University Washington College of Law, Professor Matthew Charity, Western New England College of Law, and Charles Garraway, the International Humanitarian Law Fact-Finding Commission.

Professors Newton, Scharf, and Sterio (from left to right) at the book launch of “Prosecuting Maritime Piracy” in New York City.

In addition, Professor Sterio participated in a book launch for her newly published book, “Prosecuting Maritime Piracy” (Cambridge University Press 2015), which she co-edited with Professor Michael Scharf and Professor Michael Newton, Vanderbilt Law School.  The book launch took place during the International Law Weekend conference, and it was hosted by the New York office of Baker & Mackenzie LLP.

Finally, Professor Sterio was recently appointed senior peace fellow at the Public International Law and Policy Group, a Nobel Peace Prize-nominated non-governmental organization based in Washington, D.C.  Professor Sterio had worked with the PILPG on different projects, including as a member of its High Level Piracy Expert Group, and as a participant in human rights documentation project in South Sudan.

Professor Alan Weinstein was one of three planning law faculty who organized and presented a Roundtable Discussion on “Teaching Aesthetics in the Planning Law Course” on October 22 at the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning (ACSP) Conference in Houston, Texas. The other planning law faculty were Professors Dawn Jourdan, University of Oklahoma, and Eric Strauss, Michigan State University.

Professor Joseph Mead’s article, “The First Amendment Protection of Charitable Speech,” has been published by the Ohio State Law Journal Furthermore.  The article is available here.

In addition, Professor Mead has also published a blog post about this article at the ACLU of Ohio website, available here.  Both the article and the blog argue that many Ohio cities have passed laws restricting charitable solicitation and/or panhandling that violate the First Amendment right to express a need.

On Saturday October 24th, Professor Matthew Green participated in a moderated panel discussion comparing LGBT political, legal  and cultural issues in the United States and Turkey.  Professor Green addressed these issues from the U.S. perspective and Evren Savci, an assistant professor of Women and  Gender Studies at San Francisco State University addressed them as they relate to Turkey.  David Barnett, senior reporter with Ideastream Cleveland, served as moderator.  The event was cosponsored by the LGBT Community Center of Cleveland and the Northeast Ohio Consortium of Middle Eastern Studies and was held at the Near West Theater in Cleveland.

Professor David Forte has published a commentary on the case of Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, due to be heard a second time by the Supreme Court this term. According to Professor Forte:

“The issues in Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin have been and remain first, whether the university’s undergraduate admissions program favoring racial minority applicants meets the requirements established in Grutter v. Bollinger (2003), and second, even if the program is compatible with Grutter, whether Grutter itself should be overruled.”

Professor Forte’s post is available here.

Chris Sagers, the James A. Thomas Distinguished Professor of Law, has joined as junior co-author a leading treatise in antitrust, just released by West Publishing, called The Law of Antitrust: An Integrated Handbook
(3d ed. 2015) (available here http://www.westacademic.com/Professors/ProductDetails.aspx?NSIID=3339). First published by the late Lawrence Sullivan of the University of California at Berkeley during the 1970s, the treatise rose to leading prominence and has been cited extensively by the U.S. Supreme Court, other federal courts, and hundreds of books and articles. In this third edition, Sagers and co-author Warren Grimes of Southwestern Law School continue the tradition, in a thoroughly revised text, including several completely re-written chapters.

Professor Jonathan Witmer-Rich

Professor Jonathan Witmer-Rich recently published “‘Sneak and Peek’ Searches: Critique and Reform,” in Volume 42 of the Search and Seizure Law Report. Search and Seizure Law Report is a legal periodical targeted at judges and practitioners, and focuses on constitutional policing issues under the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments. In the article, Professor Witmer-Rich explains some of the serious flaws in the current statute, passed as part of the USA PATRIOT Act, that authorizes covert searches and seizures with delayed notice search warrants. He then proposes several amendments to the statutory scheme that would better regulate delayed notice searching.

On Friday, October 24, 2015, Professor Jonathan-Witmer-Rich presented at a conference at the Case Western Reserve Law School, titled “Whren at Twenty: Systemic Racial Bias in the Criminal Justice System.” Professor Witmer-Rich presented a paper titled “Arbitrary Law Enforcement is Unreasonable.” Other conference presenters included Devon Carbado (UCLA School of Law) and Davis Harris (University of Pittsburgh School of Law). Conference papers will be published in a symposium issue of the Case Western Reserve Law Review.