Professor Brian E. Ray

Brian E. Ray, C|M|LAW’s Joseph C. Hostetler-Baker & Hostetler Professor of Law, published Courts, capacity and engagement: Lessons from Hlophe v City of Johannesburg in the Economic and Social Rights Review, a publication of the Social and Economic Rights Project at the University of the Western Cape’s Community Law Centre.  The comment analyzes a recent South African housing-rights decision in which a court ordered the City of Johannesburg to detail the planning and budgeting processes it has developed to comply with its constitutional obligation to provide emergency housing to people rendered homeless by eviction from private property.  Ray argues that this is one of the first cases where a South African court has used the right to housing to address broader, systemic problems in service delivery and connects this authority to the Constitutional Court’s meaningful engagement requirement.  Ray conducted research for this comment while he was a Fulbright Scholar at the Community Law Centre and the University of Stellenbosch from January through August 2013.

Please click here to download the ESR Review, no. 3, 2013, in which Professor Ray’s article appears:

Professor Heidi Gorovitz Robertson

C|M|LAW Professor and Associate Dean Heidi Gorovitz Robertson, who holds a joint appointment at the Levin College of Urban Affairs, posted Support for Fracking Seems to be Fueled by Gas, on November 15,2013, in Crain’s Cleveland Business’ Energy Report.  In this blog post, Robertson notes that ballot initiatives seeking to ban the use of the hydraulic fracturing technology were up for a vote in several jurisdictions, most visibly in Ohio and Colorado.  She commented that although the attempts to ban the technology met with varying degrees of success, the attempts seemed primarily to succeed in jurisdictions where the technology was not really at issue — that is, no drilling permits had been requested.  In contract, in areas that were already active in the exploration or drilling process, the bans mostly failed.

To read more, see:

http://www.crainscleveland.com/article/20131115/BLOGS05/131119907/-1/blogs05

C|M|Law’s James A. Thomas Distinguished Professor of Law Chris Sagers, who was quoted last week on the issue in the Wall Street Journal [http://online.wsj.com/news/article_email/SB10001424052702303559504579196173938040380-lMyQjAxMTAzMDEwMzExNDMyWj] and in the New York Times [http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/16/business/baffling-about-face-in-american-us-airways-merger.html?pagewanted=2&_r=0&ref=commonsense], appeared on National Public Radio today to talk about the pending merger of U.S. Airways and American Airlines.  Sagers appeared on the program “On Point with Tom Ashbrook,” a production of WBUR in Boston that is distributed on public radio in 260 American cities.  He discussed the settlement of federal challenge to the merger, whether the terms of settlement would likely achieve desirable goals, and what may have motivated the agency to settle.

An audio-file of the program can be heard here:

http://onpoint.wbur.org/2013/11/18/us-airways-american-airlines-merger-justice-department

Professor Chris Sagers

C|M|LAW’s James A. Thomas Distinguished Professor of Law Chris Sagers was quoted in Saturday’s New York Times, in James Stewart’s “Common Sense” column, entitled Baffling About-Face in American-US Airways Merger.  The article concerned the settlement of a federal challenge to the merger of U.S. Airways and American Airlines.

“The settlement is hard to square with the original complaint, ” said Christopher L. Sagers, an antitrust professor at Cleveland-Marshall College of Law.

He testified in Congress last March about the potential harm to consumers if the merger went ahead. “I have a lot of respect for the people in the antitrust division,” he said this week, “But I’m perplexed, and so are a lot of other people. I’m afraid the merger is likely to result in some real consumer harm.”

The article is here:

C|M|LAW Associate Dean Mark Sundahl was quoted in a September 27, 2013, article in SpaceNews, regarding new proposed safety practices for commercial orbital and suborbital human spaceflight companies.  The safety practices have been proposed in response to the recent growth of private companies, such as SpaceX and Virgin Galactic, that will soon be providing human spacelflight services to NASA and the public.  The article quotes Sundahl during a recent FAA teleconference where he commented that “if the intention of the document is to prevent Congress from stepping in to guide the process, I think we need to continue to consider whether the contents of the document are sufficient to do that.”  The entire article can be found here:

http://www.spacenews.com/article/civil-space/37428industry-faa-look-to-stay-one-step-ahead-of-congress-with-draft-safety