Category Archives: Faculty News

Lind and Keating Publish on Cleveland Responses to the Mortgage Crisis

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Professor Dennis Keating, jointly appointed by CSU’s Levin College of Urban Affairs and C|M|LAW, and C|M|LAW Clinical Professor Emeritus Kermit Lind, have co-authored “Responding to the Mortgage Crisis:  Three Cleveland Examples” in the Winter 2012 issue of The Urban Lawyer, Vol. 44, No. 1:1-135.

Keating and Lind write that years before the mortgage crisis fueled by subprime and predatory lending became a national crisis in 2008, this emerging disaster was ravaging neighborhoods in Cleveland, Ohio. Investigations that followed revealed that homeowners were being persuaded to refinance their mortgages and often to finance home repairs and amenities through predatory lending, including adjustable rate mortgages with initial low interest rates (“teaser loans”). The Cleveland neighborhood of Slavic Village was especially hard hit, with massive amounts of mortgage fraud followed by hundreds of foreclosures of borrowers resulting in housing abandonment and widespread blight. Despite these discouraging data, the three examples of responses described in this article give hope that the challenges caused by this crisis can be met and the city’s neighborhoods can be rebuilt even with a reduced population and reconfigured land uses.

The article is available at:http://www.americanbar.org/publications/urban_lawyer/2012/winter_2012.html

Lewis Publishes “Papa’s Baby” with NYU Press

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When a child is conceived from sexual intercourse between a married, heterosexual couple, the child has a legal father and mother. Whatever may happen thereafter, the child’s parents are legally bound to provide for their child, and if they don’t, they’re held accountable by law. But what about children created by artificial insemination? When it comes to paternity, the law is full of gray areas, resulting in many cases where children have no legal fathers.

In Papa’s Baby, C|M|LAW’s Professor Browne C. Lewis argues that the courts should take steps to insure that all children have at least two legal parents. Additionally, state legislatures should recognize that more than one class of fathers may exist and allocate paternal responsibility based, again, upon the best interest of the child. Lewis supplements her argument with concrete methods for dealing with different types of cases, including anonymous and non-anonymous sperm donors, married and unmarried women, and lesbian couples. In so doing, she first establishes different types of paternity, and then draws on these to create an expanded definition of paternity.

To order Papa’s Baby from NYU Press click here: http://nyupress.org/books/book-details.aspx?bookid=5825  or through Amazon, click here: http://www.amazon.com/Papas-Baby-Paternity-Artificial-Insemination/dp/0814738486/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1343232500&sr=1-1&keywords=papa%27s+baby

Inniss Comments on the 40th Anniversary of Title IX, Notes Potential Uses for Combating Sexual Harassment

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In marking the 40th anniversary of Title IX, Lolita Buckner Inniss, C|M|LAW’s Joseph C. Hostetler-Baker & Hostetler Chair in Law, recently posted the following at the American Constitution Society Blog:

http://www.acslaw.org/acsblog/title-ix-single-episode-sexual-harassment-and-telling-stories-out-of-school

The principal provision of Title IX reads:

No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.

Although Title IX is best known for having transformed the arena of women’s sports, Inniss notes that Title IX has a much broader reach.  She writes that it also applies to sexual violence and sexual harassment. Inniss writes that one of the more controversial aspects of Title IX jurisprudence is that sexual harassment is not only defined by persistent behavior but may also be found in a single episode.  She argues that Title IX should give women an opportunity for articulating the legal and ethical wrongness of such behavior by telling their own stories in their own voices.

Kowalski Speaks on Recent U.S. Supreme Court Labor and Employment Decisions, and Argues in the Ohio Supreme Court

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Clinical Professor Ken Kowalski

C|M|LAW Clinical Professor Ken Kowalski presented Recent Supreme Court Decisions, Appellate Decisions and Related Topics in Labor and Employment Law at the NLRB Region 8 Labor Law seminar held in Cleveland on May 17th.

In addition, Professor Kowalski argued before the Ohio Supreme Court on June 5th in the case of James A. Lang [et al.] v. Director, Ohio Department of Job and Family Services.  The case involves the denial of certain benefits to three Ohio workers who lost their jobs when their employer transferred its manufacturing operations to Mexico.  A wage subsidy program, Alternative Trade Adjustment Assistance, created by Congress for older workers whose jobs are terminated due to national trade policies, is administered by the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services through contract with the federal Department of Labor.  At issue is whether the DOL interpretation of the requirements for participation in the program contravened the statute itself.  When ODJFS sought review in the Ohio Supreme Court, the National Employment Law Project, a national advocacy organization for employment rights of lower-wage workers which had successfully represented the claimants in the lower courts, contacted the Employment Law Clinic for assistance.  C|M|LAW Clinic students researched and helped brief a number of issues of statutory interpretation presented in this litigation, and helped prepare Professor Kowalski for the oral argument.

To view the oral argument before the Ohio Supreme Court, please click here: http://www.ohiochannel.org/medialibrary/Media.aspx?fileId=135921

Sagers Discusses a Gridlocked Congress as it Attempts to Move the Federal Trade Commission Out of its Long Time Home

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C|M|LAW’s James A. Thomas Distinguished Professor of Law Chris Sagers has published a Guest Opinion piece in FTC Watch.  In his article, The Ongoing FTC Building Fiasco, Sagers cites a Congressional Committee’s efforts to remove the FTC headquarters from its long-time home as evidence of a broken Congress.  The House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee has made moves to relocate the FTC from its 75 year old art deco building built for the agency by Roosevelt and turn that building over to the National Gallery of Art.  As further evidence, Sagers cites a study indicating that the American public finds “Congress to be less popular among Americans than  pornography, polygamy, British Petroleum during the Gulf oil spill, Richard Nixon at the peak of Watergate, and Communism.”

To read the article, click here:  https://www.law.csuohio.edu/sites/default/files/facultystaff/sagers_ftc_article.pdf

C|M|LAW Hosts Former Nixon White House Counsel John Dean

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White House Counsel John Dean (1973)

As part of C|M|LAW’s enhanced effort to bring issues of ethics and professionalism into the culture of discussion in the law school community, C|M|LAW hosted Former Nixon White House Counsel John Dean for a full day of events on Thursday, April 19.  Mr. Dean began the day by appearing on The Sound of Ideas radio show, with Host Mike McIntyre, at WCPN 90.3 FM.  He appeared on the radio show with C|M|LAW Dean Craig Boise to discuss, in part, the teaching of ethics and professionalism in the law schools.  Mr. Dean met with C|M|LAW students for 1 1/2 hours later that morning to educate them about his experiences, what he learned about ethics and the legacy that Watergate has left us in the form of enhanced rules of legal ethics.  After lunch with a small group of guests and university officials, Mr. Dean held a discussion with the C|M|LAW faculty.  He answered questions about his experiences and the impact they had on his own life and the lives of others.  In the evening, Mr. Dean presented a continuing legal education program with Mr. Jim Robinault (Thompson Hine) in the C|M|LAW Moot Court Room to a crowd of 250-300 people.  At that program, Mr. Dean focused on the events of the first week following the break-in, discussed his testimony before the Senate, and showed video clips of that testimony and other commentary.

John Dean (Today)

Listen to Watergate at 40 on WCPN at http://www.ideastream.org/soi/entry/46411

Sundahl Quoted in Space News Regarding Virgin Galactic Space Flights

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Associate Dean Mark Sundahl

C|M|LAW Associate Dean Mark Sundahl was quoted in a Space News article, Virgin Galactic Granted License Exemption for Spaceflight Experience, by Dan Leon.  The article concerned the decision by the U.S. State Department not to require Virgin Galactic, Richard Branson’s space flight corporation, to obtain an export license for flying non-U.S. citizens on suborbital jaunts departing from New Mexico’s Spaceport America.  According to the article, “Virgin Galactic, which now expects to fly its first paying customers in 2013, was told by the U.S. government that the company may fly non-U.S. citizens to the edge of space without first obtaining an export license from the State Department.”  Sundahl clarified that Virgin Galactic was asking “that their operations be removed from the scope of the International Traffic in Arms Regulations.”  The ruling means that [Virgin Galactic’s] operations will not be ITAR-controlled.  “Virgin’s flight hardware, Sundahl added, would remain under export control. However, he said the determination was, on the whole, “good news for Virgin Galactic and the entire space tourism industry.””  In addition, Sundahl said that “without this determination from State, allowing a non-U.S. citizen to ride in a Virgin spacecraft — or even training a non-U.S. citizen to do so — would legally have been an export activity that required federal approval.”

To read the Space News article, click here:

http://spacenews.com/venture_space/120411-virgin-granted-exemption.html

Weinstein and McCleary Publish on the Association of Adult Businesses with Secondary Effects, and Present at the Association of American Geographers Conference

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Professor Alan Weinstein

C|M|LAW Professor Alan Weinstein published (with Richard McCleary), The Association of Adult Businesses with Secondary Effects: The Legal Doctrine, Social Theory, and Empirical Evidence, in the Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal.

In addition, Weinstein presented their work from this article on February 25 at the Association of American Geographers (AAG) Conference in New York, New York as part of a track titled “Erotic Cities: Geographies of the Sexual Economy.” Over 7,000 geographers and environmental scientists from around the globe attended the Conference.

The Erotic Cities track featured papers that discussed various aspects of two phenomena: (1) the visible spatial sexualisation of the city as seen by the movement of commercial sex activities from the periphery to the mainstream, spatially and socially and (2) the complementary invisible spatial sexualisation of the city, with the internet providing a platform for those who want to convert their sexual desires into realities via various social networking sites.

Other presenters/papers in this track included:

Amber Martin, The University of Nottingham, “Sex Shops in England’s Cities: From the Backstreets to the High Street.”

Paul J Maginn, University of Western Australia and Christine A Steinmetz, University of New South Wales “Erotic Sydney: The Sexual Economy, Global City Status and Urban Cosmopolitanism.”

John Scott, University of New England (AUS), “Telecommunications Impacts On The Structure And Organization of Male Sex Work.”

Penny Crofts, University of Technology, Sydney and Barb Brents, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, “Mainstreaming and Legalization: Comparing Legal
Prostitution in New South Wales and Nevada.”

Moriah McSharry McGrath, Portland State University, “Confl ict and Coexistence: Strip Clubs and Neighbors in “Pornland,” Oregon.”

The article is available at at http://www.cardozoaelj.com/wp-content/uploads/Journal%20Issues/Volume%2029/Issue%203/Weinstein%20McCleary%20Final.pdf

Keating Interviewed by WCPN Regarding Demolition in Response to Foreclosure

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C|M|LAW and Levin College of Urban Affairs Professor Dennis Keating was interviewed for WCPN’s recent story on demolitions in response to the foreclosure and abandonment crisis. The program, including Keating’s interview, was included in the April 5, 2012, edition of NPR’s Business News segment.

Inniss Wins Research Grant from Princeton Archives

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Professor Lolita Buckner Inniss

C|M|LAW’s Joseph C. Hostetler-Baker & Hostetler Chair in Law Lolita Buckner Inniss was awarded a Friends of the Princeton University Library reseach grant in the amount of $3400 to help support additional work at the Princeton University Archives. This award is in reference to her book project on The Princeton Fugitive Slave Case.  This represents the third award that Inniss has received based on her book proposal.