On September 27, Clinical Professor Ken Kowalski moderated the Federal Bar Association’s  New Lawyer Training seminar entitled “A Whole Trial in 3 Hours.”   This seminar featured information on voir dire, opening statements, examination of witnesses, and closings.  Speakers included John R. Mitchell of Thompson Hine LLP, Susan Gragel of Goldstein Gragel LLC, Federal Public Defender for the Northern District of Ohio Dennis G. Terez, and Criminal Chief for the United States Attorney’s Ohio, ND Ohio David Sierleja.

On Oct. 11th Visiting Clinical Professor Maya Simek was awarded the Shining Star Award for her contributions to furthering Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgendered equality in an educational setting. This award honors her as an individual from the LGBT community who has proven to be a distinguished inspiration to others for guidance, inspiration, or scholarship in the field of Education. The award is part of the Cleveland LGBT Heritage Day Celebration co-sponsored by Cleveland’s LGBT Center and the City of Cleveland.  Maya was recognized for the work she did to revitalize both the undergraduate and law student LGBT student organizations, her outstanding service as president of CM Allies, and her many other successful efforts to increase LGBT visibility and equality at CSU and throughout the greater Cleveland area.  Many of Maya’s accomplishments occurred during her two-year tenure as a graduate assistant for LGBT Student Services in CSU’s Office of Diversity and Multicultural Affairs, but the award also recognized Maya’s ongoing efforts to make Cleveland a better community for all its citizens, exemplified by her work to create a legal clinic at the Nueva Luz Urban Resource Center based on a community lawyering model. C|M|LAW Professor Susan Becker, the 2009 recipient of the award, presented the award to Maya.

Professor Gwen Majette

Professor Gwendolyn Roberts Majette has published PPACA and Public Health:  Creating a Framework to Focus on Prevention and Wellness and Improve the Public’s Health in the Fall 2011 issue of the Journal of Law, Medicine, and Ethics.  This article is part of a trilogy of articles she is writing on health care reform and was part of a symposium on public health reform.

On March 23, 2010, President Obama signed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), a major piece of health care reform legislation. This comprehensive legislation includes provisions that focus on prevention, wellness, and public health. Some, including authors in the symposium, question whether Congress considered public health, prevention, and wellness issues as mere afterthoughts in the creation of PPACA. This article argues that they did not. This article documents the extent of congressional consideration on public health issues based on Professor Majette’s personal experiences working on the framework for health care reform – in particular, her experience as a Fellow for a member of the Health Subcommittee of the Senate Finance Committee from 2008-2009.

Professor Majette also includes in this work a review of congressional activity in the United States House of Representatives. Her analysis of the congressional meetings and hearings reveals that Congress had a deep understanding about the critical need to reform the U.S. public health and prevention system. The article illustrates how PPACA will have a positive impact on public health by examining the infrastructure that Congress designed to focus on prevention and wellness, with a particular emphasis on the National Prevention, Health Promotion and Public Health Council; the National Prevention, Health Promotion, Public Health, and Integrative Health Care Strategy; and the Prevention and Public Health Fund. The Council, strategy, and fund are especially important because they reflect compliance with some of the Institute of Medicine’s recommendations to improve public health in the United States, as well as international health and human rights norms that protect the right to health.

Professor Majette begins by addressing the nature of public health in general and setting forth why the U.S. public health and prevention system needs to be reformed.   She describes public health as ‘what we as a society do collectively to assure the conditions for people to be healthy.’  Primarily, the system is underfunded and there is insufficient collaboration on public health issues at the state and federal levels.  In addition, among other problems, the public health system is cut-off from the health care delivery system, which reduces its effectiveness.

The article sets forth some of the debates and initiatives in the United States Congress regarding reform of the public health and prevention system.  Specifically, she addresses the Senate’s framework for health care reform, including the Congressional hearings on prevention leading up to the health care reform legislation, and preliminary legislative proposals with emphasis on prevention, wellness, and public health.  With respect to the hearings in both the Senate and the House, she analyzes the testimony of many witnesses who appeared before Congress.

Ultimately, Professor Majette concludes that the National Prevention, Health Promotion and Public Health Council, strategy, and fund fill an important gap in existing federal law by creating a framework that focuses the U.S. healthcare system on prevention and wellness.  The comprehensive framework also complies with international norms on human rights by addressing the health care needs of the entire U.S. population; by addressing the intersectoral nature of health issues through adoption of a Health-In-All Policies approach at the cabinet level of the executive branch of the federal government; and by providing desperately needed resources to make financial investments into public health, prevention, and wellness.

You may read the full text of Professor Majette’s article at http://www2.law.csuohio.edu/newsevents/images/39JLME366.pdf

Emeritus Clinical Professor Gordon Beggs was interviewed for the American Civil Liberties Union’s Oral History Project regarding his service to the ACLU.   Beggs’ ACLU service included helping organize a student ACLU chapter at the University of Pennsylvania in 1968 to address police practices at anti-war demonstrations, serving as a Law Student Civil Rights Research Council Intern while a student at Penn Law, holding five positions with the ACLU of Ohio beginning as Cleveland Executive Director in 1973 and finishing as Ohio Legal Director 1989-1991.  He handled four major cases as volunteer attorney during his first years at Cleveland-Marshall.

Professor Chris Sagers was the lead drafter of an amicus brief in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit on behalf of the American Antitrust Institute.  In the words of the AAI:  AAI filed a brief in the Second Circuit urging the court to reject the application of the filed rate doctrine in electricity markets subject to ‘market based rates.’  AAI maintained that the filed rate doctrine, which provides immunity from antitrust damages where conduct involves regulated, filed rates, has little justification in general, and should have no place when ‘rates’ are set by competition rather than fixed by regulation.  The issue is a question of first impression in the Second Circuit.”

You may view the brief at:  http://www.antitrustinstitute.org/content/amicus-brief-aai-opposes-filed-rate-doctrine-electricity-simon-v-keyspan

Professor Sandra Kerber

Legal Writing Professor Sandra Kerber has been reappointed to the Judicial Candidates Rating Coalition (JCRC).  The JCRC interviews judges to evaluate them for integrity, judicial temperament, diligence, and professional competence. The JCRC serves the voting community at large by disseminating information on judicial qualifications through the website Judge4Yourself.com.  Judge4Yourself educates Cuyahoga County voters about judicial candidates’ qualifications in an effort to eliminate the judicial “guessing game.” Judge4Yourself.com offers ratings for all the candidates running in contested races in every judicial election in Cuyahoga County.  It also provides biographies of each candidate.

Professor Matthew Green has been invited to join the Cleveland Employment Inns of Court.  The Cleveland Employment Inns of Court was formed in 2005 and is a Charter Member of the American Inns of Court and was organized to enhance the professional and ethical quality of legal practice.  The Inn holds educational programs and is a forum for discussion of its discipline.

Professor Jonathan Witmer-Rich

Professor Jonathan Witmer-Rich recently published “Interrogation and the Roberts Court” in the top-50 ranked Florida Law Review.  In this work, he argues that 5 cases decided under the Roberts court are reshaping and limiting the rules for the interrogation of suspects by the police.  In particular, the Court is limiting the rules that would have been protective of suspects rights.  In Kansas v. Ventris, Montejo v. Louisiana, Florida v. Powell, Maryland v. Shatzer, and Berghuis v. Thompkins, the Roberts Court has created, but not yet articulated, a new principle of ‘fair play’ in interrogations.  Witmer-Rich explains that the Warren Court was moved by the idea that suspects under interrogation are, by their circumstances, under compelling pressures from which the Court must protect them.  To do this, the Warren Court created the rules in Miranda and Massiah and others.  In contrast, although it mentions concern in its opinions for the relative strength of position between the interrogator and suspect, the Roberts Court does not seem similarly influenced it.  Instead, it presupposes that each suspect understands and is protective of his or her own rights.

Witmer-Rich approaches his analysis of this assertion, that the Roberts Court has moved away from the suspect protective Warren Court position, by evaluating, independently, the Roberts Court’s cases on the 5th amendment and the 6th amendment.  In his section on the 5th amendment, Witmer-Rich studies three opinions–Powell, Thompkins, and Shatzer–and describes how each decision illustrates the Roberts Court’s movement towards a ‘fair play’ principle.  In his section on the 6th amendment, he does the same with respect to two additional cases, Montejo and Ventris.

Ultimately, Witmer-Rich decides that the Roberts Court’s ‘fair play’ rubric is not a fair and adequate principle for organizing constitutional interrogation doctrine.  He explains that the Roberts Court, in moving away from the Warren Court’s assumption that suspects need and are entitled to protection of their rights, towards the assumption that suspects are fully capable, autonomous, informed agents who can protect their own interests, takes an important step backward in terms of real fairness.  The Roberts Court’s ‘fair play’ concept is not fair at all and fails to protect the constitutional rights of suspects against self-incrimination and the guarantee of assistance of counsel in criminal cases.