C|M|LAW Professor and Associate Dean Heidi Gorovitz Robertson appears as a Guest Blogger in this week’s Crain’s Cleveland Business.  Her post, Lessons from the Gulf: The Value of Emergency Planning suggests that emergency planning and preparedness for disaster was woefully inadequate in the Gulf of Mexico.  The shortcomings there have been well documented.  Robertson suggests that as Ohio rushes to develop its potentially lucrative shale oil and gas resources, it learn from the Gulf and make appropriate site specific plans for emergency response.

The post appears as part of Crain’s Ohio Energy Report.  See the post here:

http://www.crainscleveland.com/article/20130208/BLOGS05/130209796/1241/newsletter04

C|M|LAW Professor Patricia J. Falk’s article, Rape by Fraud and Rape by Coercion, 64 Brook.L.Rev. 39, (1998), was cited by the California Court of Appeals in  The People v. Morales.  The court is discussing whether fraudulent impersonation in the inducement of intercourse constitutes fraud in fact, and vitiates consent.

The court first references Falk’s article at page 9.  See the opinion here: http://www.courts.ca.gov/opinions/documents/B233796.PDF

On January 30, 2013 a team of C|M|LAW students supervised by C|M|LAW Professors Jonathan Witmer-Rich and Doron Kalir filed a Petition for a Writ of Certiorari with the United States Supreme Court. The petition seeks review of State v. Emerson, a recent Ohio Supreme Court decision holding that no person has standing under the Fourth Amendment to challenge the government ‘s use of his or her DNA profile, provided the DNA material was obtained lawfully.  The C|M|Law team filed the petition in collaboration with Mr. Emerson’s lawyer, Brian Moriarty (C|M|Law class of 1994), who represented Mr. Emerson before the Ohio Supreme Court and Court of Appeals. While the Supreme Court accepts less than 2% of the petitions it receives, the educational experience was extremely rewarding to all involved. The students on the team were Jamie Ganner, Brendan Heil, Jackie Staple, and Sarah Kendig.

C|M|LAW Professor Milena Sterio is heading to Azerbaijan on a Fulbright grant.  Read an interview with her about her upcoming adventure here: http://clevelandstate.tumblr.com/post/40179194338/q-a-csu-law-professor-milena-sterio-heads-to

C|M|LAW Professor Milena Sterio presented her article, The United States’ Use of Drones in the War on Terror: The (Il)legality of Targeted Killings Under International Law, at the International Criminal Law Interest Group Annual Workshop, at the John Marshall Law School in Chicago on December 14, 2012.  This article will be published in the Case Western Journal of International Law; it examines the legality of the United States’s use of drones in places abroad.  The article raises questions about the CIA’s covert drone operations, and in particular how the US defines the battlefield (where suich drones can be used), the legality of drone targets, and the issue of the identity of drone operators and their location (in offices in the US).

In addition, Sterio submitted an article entitled The Future of Ad Hoc Tribunals: An Assessment of Their Utility Post-ICC to the ILSA Journal of International and Comparative Law.   This paper, which will be published by the ILSA journal in 2013, examines the future of ad hoc tribunals in light of the presence of the International Criminal Court and raises the question of whether ad hoc tribunals will ever be useful or necessary in the future, when cases can be sent to the ICC.  Professor Sterio presented a paper on this topic at the International Law Weekend conference in New York City in October 2012 (at Fordham Law School).

At the 2013 Annual Meeting of the Association of American Law Schools (AALS), in New Orleans, Louisiana, C|M|LAW Dean Craig M. Boise was recently elected to the Executive Committee of the AALS Section for the Law School Dean.

C|M|LAW Professor Candice Hoke was included in a list of 10 Popular Authors in the Election Law Commons section of Bepress, on electronic, open-access forum for scholarship.  See her work via Bepress at: http://network.bepress.com/law/election-law/

C|M|Law Legal Writing Professor Brian Glassman presented From Art School to Law School: Visual Lessons for Legal Writing Students, at the University of Akron School of Law on December 7, 2012, as a part of the Legal Writing Institute’s One-Day Workshop series. Glassman walked the audience through innovative techniques he has developed for reinforcing writing topics using lessons learned in art school. For example, he used a well-known Degas ballet painting to discuss perspective and Ellsworth Kelly’s Red/Blue to teach contrast and distinguishing negative authority. At the beginning of the session, Glassman piqued audience interest by placing a collection of objects covered by a draped cloth in the front of the room.  Later in the presentation, he asked audience members to either sketch or identify the items under the cloth, thereby demonstrating how he employs another lesson learned in art school to teaching legal writing: to draw the body, the artist must understand the skeleton (the underlying structure); to write legal analysis, the writer must understand the structure of the argument. While Glassman designed these techniques to appeal especially to visual learners, he noted that his techniques may appeal to students with other predominant learning styles as well. The presentation was well received and generated lively discussion among the attendees.

Earlier this fall, Professor Glassman was an invited guest of the Cleveland State University Art Department, to which he presented International Law and Museum Practices Governing the Movement of Art in Peacetime: A Case Study.  To teach the subject matter, which included the International Council of Museums’ Code of Ethics, Professor Glassman developed a simulation in which students acted as members of a museum acquisitions committee. Glassman then guided the students through deciding whether to authorize bidding at auction on a rare Cambodian statue of uncertain provenance. Glassman based the simulation on an ongoing matter involving such a statue that Sotheby’s is being prevented from auctioning due to a claim made on the work by the Cambodian government, coupled with the intervention of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York. The Cleveland State University Art Department regularly invites Professor Glassman to present on art law topics.