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.

Professor Eric Tucker, Distinguished Scholar in Residence at the Cleveland-Marshall College of Law and Professor at Osgoode Hall Law School, York University, co-edited a book which will be published by the Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History in the fall of 2015.

The book is entitled Security, Dissent, and the Limits of Toleration in War and Peace: Canadian State Trials Volume IV, 1914-1939; the book launch is currently scheduled for November 5, 2015, in Toronto, Canada.  This book “looks at the legal issues raised by the repression of dissent from the outset of World War One through the 1930s and the Great Depression” (quoted from the book website, available here).

Cleveland-Marshall College of Law in partnership with the Cleveland eDiscovery Roundtable is excited to announce “Electronic Discovery and the Pending Changes to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure,” Friday, September 4th at 9:00 a.m.  Please join us for an informative discussion on these important changes to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and their connection to eDiscovery.  This event will be sponsored by Eaton Corporation.  Professor Brian Ray will moderate the first panel, featuring Judge Jeffrey S. Sutton of the U.S. Court of Appeals, Sixth Circuit, as well as Judge Benita Pearson, U.S. District Court, Northern District of Ohio and Magistrate Judge James R. Knepp, II, U.S. District Court, Northern District of Ohio.

More details about the event are available here.

On Thursday, July 30, Professor Alan Weinstein was one  of two presenters for a national webinar, “Reed v. Town of Gilbert: The Supreme Court’s New Rules for Temporary — and other — Signs,” presented by the Chapters & Divisions Consortium of the American Planning Association.  He discussed the effect on local sign regulations of the Reed decision, how cities can respond to ensure their sign codes could withstand a legal challenge, and noted the significant unresolved questions raised by apparent conflicts between Justice Thomas’s majority opinion and Justice Alito’s concurrence. More than 750 local government planners, city attorneys, and elected officials logged into the webinar.

Professor Weinstein has also been selected by the American Planning Association to serve on a panel of legal experts who will review and select the planning law sessions for the annual Alfred Bettman Legal Symposium at the 2016 APA National Conference in Phoenix. 

Professor and Associate Dean Milena Sterio’s book, “The Right to Self-determination Under International Law: ‘Selfistans,’ Secession, and the Rule of the Great Powers,” which had originally been published as a hard back edition in 2013, will be re-published in paper back in late 2015, following excellent sales of the original edition.

Professor Sterio’s book proposes a novel theory of self-determination- the Rule of the Great Powers. This book argues that traditional legal norms on self-determination have failed to explain and account for recent results of secessionist self-determination struggles, and it thus proposes and develops a new theory of self-determination, based on the Rule of the Great Powers, the most geo-politically and economically powerful states in the international arena.