Professor and Associate Dean Milena Sterio participated in the inaugural American Society of International Law-Midwest Interest Group Workshop at the University of Minnesota Law School on September 5-6.  Professor Sterio presented her paper, “Prosecuting Juvenile Piracy Suspects: The Legal Framework.”  She is the Interest Group’s Vice Chair this year, and, in this capacity, had helped to organize this event. 

Professor Claire Robinson May was elected to the Board of Talespinner Children’s Theatre (TCT).  TCT is Cleveland’s newest children’s professional theater company, which “develops imaginative and original professional works for children across all socio-economic, cultural and traditional boundaries.”  TCT’s website is available here.

Professor Majette published a chapter entitled “Global Health Law Norms: A Coherent Framework to Understand PPACA’s Approach to Eliminate Health Disparities and Address Implementation Challenges” in a book entitled “Law and Global Health.” published by Oxford University Press.  The book includes 34 articles from scholars around the world and six different disciplines. 

Professor Majette’s chapter examines how domestic and international legal mechanisms can be integrated to use as tools to reduce health care disparities that disproportionately affect people of color.  In particular, Professor Majette’s chapter examines the multitude of diverse provisions within the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPCA) that have the potential to reduce health disparities, the barriers to implementing the PPACA (constitutional and political challenges), and the moral imperative to reduce health care disparities consistent with global health law norms.

Professor and Associate Dean Milena Sterio participated at the “Legitimacy and Effectiveness of International Criminal Law” conference at the University of Oslo, Norway, on August 28-29.  The conference was orgranized by Pluricourts- Centre for the Study of the Legitimate Roles of the Judiciary in the Global Order, which is a centre for excellence at the University of Oslo Faculty of Law.

Professor Sterio chaired a session entitled “Truth and Narratives,” which focused on a discussion of truth-seeking functions by any international criminal tribunal, as well as on various ways in which international criminal tribunals may obscure the truth (through mechanisms such as witness/victim protection, as well as the use of redactions).  

Professor Sterio’s travel was partly funded by the CSU Graduate Faculty Travel Award.  

Professor Dennis Keating has been commissioned by the History Press to write a
book on Cleveland’s Tremont neighborhood. In his research, he will be
referring to the role in its revitalization played by the Tremont West
Development Corporation, whose current director Cory Riordan is an MUPDD, Levin College of Urban Affairs,
alumnus.

Professor Lolita Buckner Inniss served as the keynote speaker at the 8th Annual Lutie Lytle Black Women Law Faculty Writing Workshop at the University of Wisconsin Law School on June 28, 2014.

Lutie Lytle is a national organization for supporting the scholarly work of black women law professors. Members of the organization are some of the most renowned and prolific scholars in the legal academy. Since the workshop began, participants have published 29 books, 44 book chapters, and over 400 articles.

Professor Inniss was also awarded the 2014 Lutie Lytle Outstanding Scholar Award, an honor reserved for a member whose scholarly work and mentorship of developing scholars makes her a model for the organization and for the legal academy in general.

Dean and Professor of Law Craig Boise was quoted in “The Atlantic” on August 19, in an article entitled “The Tax Dodge That Has Plagued the U.S. for More Than a Decade.”

The article addressed the recent resurgence of offshore corporate inversion transactions and it is available here.  

Professor Kevin O’Neill was interviewed and quoted by the Wall Street Journal on Public Protest Law, on August 14, 2014, in an article entitled “Ferguson Arrest Focuses Attention on Rights of Protesters.”  The protests in question stem from recent demonstrations in Ferguson, Missouri, sparked by the police shooting of an 18-year-old unarmed man. 

The Wall Street Journal article is available here.

C|M|LAW and Levin College of Urban Affairs Professor Heidi Gorovitz Robertson posted “Mandatory pooling and unitization protect landowner rights too,” in Crain’s Cleveland Business’ Energy Report, on June 20, 2014.

In this post, Robertson writes that as a property professor, she was initially intrigued (read: alarmed!) by the very idea that a state agency, the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, could decide that a landowner had no choice but to have drilling occur horizontally under his or her land. The agency’s powers of mandatory pooling and unitization allow this.  That sounded like an obvious violation of one of property law’s most sacred, although limited, rights — the right to exclude non-owners from your land. Traditional property law principles also dictate that when you own land, one of the rights that comes with that ownership, with some limited exceptions, is the right to decide how the land is used.  But in Ohio — and in most other states, too — a state agency can override an individual landowner’s decision to exclude a driller. They can only do it certain circumstances, but it sounded like a complete contravention of the right to exclude others from one’s property. It also sounded like a violation of landowners’ right to use property as they choose — here, the right not to have it drilled.

The point of Robertson’s post is to show that the state’s use of its mandatory pooling and unitization authority, although it appears to violate the property rights of some landowners — those who wish to prevent drilling from occurring beneath their land, supports the “right to use” held by neighboring landowners who do wish to have the mineral rights beneath their land developed.  The reason for this lies in state and best practices-imposed spacing and acreage requirements for drilling sites.  Assuming most landowners who control mineral rights to an area do want their land drilled, without the state’s mandatory pooling and unitization authority, one dissenting landowner could prevent the others from using their land as they choose– because without their land, an area would be too small or misshapen to be productive. Both of these concepts, although they apply in different circumstances, protect the correlative rights of the landowners (or mineral rights holders) who want to develop the resource. They favor the right of some landowners to develop their land or mineral rights over the rights of others not to develop their own.

Professor Robertson’s post is available here.

Chris Sagers, James A. Thomas Distinguished Professor of Law, was quoted in the New York Times on August 9 concerning the collapse of two pending mergers among major media entities–the acquisition of the Time-Warner entertainment group by Rupert Murdoch’s Fox enterprise, and the acquisition of T-Mobile by Sprint. Professor Sagers shared his thoughts on whether the mergers were dropped on fears of antitrust intervention, and whether their failures were to be welcomed.

An online version of the article can be read here.