On February 4-5, Seton Hall Law School will host its first-ever “Faith, Values, and the Rule of Law: An Interdisciplinary Conference.” The conference will examine “how the world’s greatest religious, theological, and philosophical traditions have all contributed to the understanding of justice and human dignity that underscore modern rule of law principles,” bringing together “scholars in law, theology, religious studies, philosophy, political science, international affairs, history, literature, ethics, and related disciplines.” 

Professor Kalir’s paper, “Jewish Human Dignity:  Equality Before God & Men,” was selected for presentation at the Conference. The paper traces the notion of “K’vod Ha’Adam” – human dignity – in the Jewish bible as one of the main origins of the modern notion of equality. It further claims that understanding equality in such terms should trigger a rebuttable presumption of “leveling up” of equality-violation remedies, an issue that has long been portrayed as “one of the most vexing issues of constitutional equality.”

Christa Laser published the essay Ten Tips for Legal Empiricists in the Northwestern Journal of Technology and Intellectual Property. The essay, co-edited by Professor Laser and Professor Jordana Goodman, includes contributions from a range of leading empirical scholars on advice for empirical legal research.

In addition to Professor Laser and Professor Goodman, contributors to the essay include Mark Lemley, Lisa Larrimore Ouellette, Michael Frakes, Melissa Wasserman, Saurabh Vishnubhakat, Janet Frelich, Jennica Silbey, David Schwartz, and Neel Sukhatme.

The citation is Jordana Goodman and Christa Laser, Tep Tips for Legal Empericists, 23 N.W. J. Tech. & Intell. Prop. 227 (2025),

A forthcoming law review article by Professor Rama Kim was featured in a review in Jotwell. Jotwell is an online journal edited by a group of legal scholars that provides a forum to “identify, celebrate, and discuss the best new scholarship relevant to the law.”

The review, written by Georgetown Law Professor and family law expert Philomila Tsoukala, examines Professor Kim’s forthcoming article, Parents, Kin, and the State: Family and Households Between Functional Parenthood and Child Protection. The article engages with the ongoing debate in family law surrounding the legal recognition of “functional parenthood,” or informal caregiving relationships that resemble legal parenthood.

While the recognition of functional parenthood is often viewed as an unqualified normative good in family law literature, Professor Kim’s article challenges this assumption. Drawing on an in-depth case study of Kentucky law, it examines how such legal recognition can operate for families susceptible to intervention by child protection agencies. As Professor Tsoukala notes, the article “suggests that the costs of this model are real and uneven,” and that “functional parenthood can burden parent–child relationships in poor and racialized communities.”

Professor Tsoukala calls the work an “important contribution” that “resists easy resolutions.” She writes that Kim’s “core claim is not that functional recognition is always wrong, but rather that its use in child-protection contexts brings distributional consequences that much of the reform literature has not fully considered.”

The review concludes: “In this important contribution, Kim reminds us that the future of family justice depends not only on recognizing care, but on deciding whose care counts and on what terms.”

Professor Kim’s forthcoming article is: Rama Hyeweon Kim, Parents, Kin, and the State: Family and Households Between Functional Parenthood and Child Protection, 33 Geo. J. on Poverty L. & Pol’y ___ (forthcoming, 2025).

Professor Laura Hoffman has published an article titled “Putting the ‘Social’ into Social Determinants of Health: Why Policymaking for Improving Health Must Tackle Social Isolation and Loneliness,” in the Oklahoma Law Review.

The article “explores what is known about loneliness and social isolation in the United States and examines how law and policy can play a role in being part of reducing their impact on health.” In the piece, Professor Hoffman conducts “an examination of a sample of current legislative efforts to put loneliness and social isolation at the forefront now given the significant influence on health.”

She articulates a set of policy recommendations, arguing that “it is no longer possible for policymakers to neglect the ‘social’ aspect” of social determinants of health.

The article citation is Laura C. Hoffman, Putting the “Social” into Social Determinants of Health: Why Policymaking for Improving Health Must Tackle Social Isolation and Loneliness, 78 Okla. L. Rev. 97 (2025), https://digitalcommons.law.ou.edu/olr/vol78/iss1/4.

On Friday, November 21, CSU Law School hosted a day-long seminar on Advanced Appellate Advocacy in partnership with the Eighth District Court of Appeals. The seminar featured Justices, Judges, court staff, and practitioners who shared their experiences and expertise on appellate practice.

Two CSU Law faculty members also presented at the event. Professor Methab Khan presented on a panel titled “Generative AI 101 for courts: Hallucinations, Deepfakes, and the Record.”  Professor Doron Kalir presented on “The Art of Persuasion – How to Write an Appellate Brief.” 

The seminar was extremely well-received, and the MCR was full to near capacity.