Professor Kevin F. O’Neill

C|M|LAW Professor Kevin O’Neill was quoted at length in an article,1st Amendment at issue in ban on gay-conversion therapy for minors, by David L. Hudson Jr., in
the January 2014 issue of the ABA Journal, on page 18.   The article deals with a recent Ninth Circuit decision upholding a California statute that bans a type of psychiatric therapy designed to dissuade gay and lesbian minors from homosexual conduct.  Professor O’Neill was asked to comment on the court’s First Amendment analysis.

According to O’Neill, “[p]laying the old ‘conduct-not-speech’ card is something that judges do when faced with particularly thorny speech issues . . .” He adds, “I don’t find it persuasive here, but it gave the 9th Circuit a convenient basis for applying rational-basis review.”

O’Neill says “[t]he statute singles out a particularly ludicrous treatment—a ‘medical’ treatment that is grounded upon ignorance and hostility toward gays and lesbians—and simply bans it. but the ugliness of the treatment doesn’t provide a constitutional basis for banning it.”

O’Neill notes that the Supreme Court invalidated “efforts to ban some of the ugliest speech ever” in the prohibition of images of animal cruelty in U.S. v. Stevens (2010) and violent video games in Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association (2011).

“If you’re going to uphold this statute, you have to focus on the government’s legitimate power to protect children from medical quackery,” O’Neill says. “But that doesn’t fit too easily into any of the unprotected categories of speech, such as obscenity, child porn, true threats or advocacy of imminent lawless action. The absence of clear guidance in First Amendment law may be a strong reason for granting cert in this case.”

Here is a link to the article:

http://www.abajournal.com/magazine/article/1st_amendment_at_issue_in_ban_on_gay-conversion_therapy_for_minors/

Professor O’Neill’s comments appear toward the end of the article, in a section entitled, “Beyond Ugliness.”

C|M|LAW Professor Phyllis L. Crocker was quoted in the article Interim law school deans at Akron, Case face leadership challenges in critical era, by Michelle Park Lazette, in Crain’s Cleveland Business on Monday, December 9, 2013.   Crocker served as C|M|LAW’s Interim Dean from March 2010 to June 2011. The Crain’s article quoted from Crocker’s article The Paradox of Being an Interim Dean:  The Permanent Nature of a Transitory Position, 44 U. Tol. L. Rev. 319 (Leadership in Legal Education Symposium XII 2013). Crocker noted that “Interim deans can be just as effective as a permanent dean if they work as though their leadership is not limited.”

You may read the Crain’s article by clicking here:

http://www.crainscleveland.com/article/20131209/FREE/131209827/0/SEARCH

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: