Professor and Associate Dean Milena Sterio presented at the Southeastern Association of Law Schools (SEALS) Annual Meeting in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, on August 11th.  Professor Sterio spoke on a panel entitled “Faculty Development Deans: Meeting Challenges and Supporting Faculty Members.”

Heidi Gorovitz Robertson, the Steven W. Percy Distinguished Professor of Law, and Professor of Environmental Studies, attended the Rocky Mountain Mineral Law Foundation Annual Institute in Victoria, British Columbia, July 18-21, 2018.  At the Annual Institute, Professor Robertson participated in the Natural Resources Law Teachers’ Workshop.  She commented on the papers of her colleagues, and presented her own work-in-progress, Cities Seethe: A Case Study in Local Efforts to Influence Pipeline Routing Decisions.

Public Discourse, the on-line journal of the Witherspoon Institute, has just published David Forte’s article on Down syndrome children: From Termination to Extermination.  It can be found here.

Chris Sagers, the James A. Thomas Professor of Law, spoke with various media as events continue to swirl around antitrust developments of the past few weeks.

He participated in a “Washington Bytes Chat,” an online exchange hosted by Forbes, concerning the Supreme Court’s decision in Ohio v. American Express. Other participants were Randy Picker of the University of Chicago, Michael Kades of the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, and Hal Singer of George Washington University. As Sagers told them, “Listening to Clarence Thomas talk about American Express is like listening to Donald Trump talk about Vladimir Putin.”

Sagers also spoke with several outlets about the latest surprising turn in the Justice Department’s challenge to the merger of AT&T and Time Warner. They included Bloomberg, a separate story for Bloomberg Law, and the subscription journals S&P Global Market Intelligence, CTFN and Communications Daily.

He spoke on certain other matters as well, including with BloombergBNA  about Microsoft’s proposed acquisition of the software collaboration platform GitHub, and the subscription service Law360 about the antitrust philosophy of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.

Professor and Associate Dean Milena Sterio has been selected as the recipient of the 2018 CSU Faculty Award in the Research category.  Professor Sterio specializes in international law, international criminal law, and human rights.

On July 17, Clinical Professor of Law Doron Kalir presented at Case Western Reserve’s Siegal Lifelong Learning Program. The presentation, entitled “What’s New(s) in Israel,” dealt with three major issues: the current national security concerns in Israel’s Northern and Southern borders; the new Basic Law: Jewish Nationality, and the four pending criminal investigations against Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu.

The presentation, part of the Eastside Conversation Series, mimics in its format the famed City Club Friday Forum. Thus, after a 30-minute presentation, the floor was opened for a lengthy Q&A session. That was Professor Kalir’s third appearance at the series.

Prof. Mark Sundahl and the new Global Space Law Center at C|M|LAW have had a busy year so far in 2018.  From Washington politics to asteroid mining, the GSLC and its student-staffed Research Council has been active in this rapidly moving industry.  Here are some highlights from the past months:

• ·      Prof. Sundahl chaired the recent ABA Space Law Symposium panel in Washington, D.C. on the newly reconstituted National Space Council which advises President Trump on his new space policies. Prof. Sundahl led a candid discussion among leading figures in the field of space law and policy regarding the NSpC’s recommendations to the administration.
• ·      Prof. Sundahl also contributed to a White Paper for the United Launch Alliance (a joint venture of Boeing and Lockheed Martin) regarding the legal issues surrounding the manufacturing of rocket fuel from lunar ice deposits.
• ·      The GSLC Research Council generated work product in support of two critical international projects in space law.  One initiative, the Hague Space Resource Governance Working Group, has been constructing the “Building Blocks” for an international framework governing space resource extraction (i.e. “asteroid mining”).  The other project, the UN Space Learning Group, is charged with determining the relative jurisdictions of two UN agencies, the International Civil Aviation Organization and the Committee of the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space, when regulating suborbital spaceplanes that straddle the divide between air space and outer space.
• ·      For the first time, the new online course on Space Law was taught at C|M|LAW this summer.  The course was taught online and asynchronously in order to allow students from anywhere in the world to participate.  The course featured interviews with thought leaders in the space industry and will continued to be rolled out around the world in the coming years in order to build capacity in Space Law to serve a growing industry.

The 2018/19 academic year promises to bring new adventures in Space Law for our students!