On November 19, 2020, Professor Matthew W. Green Jr. participated in a webinar focusing on the 2020 election.  The event, titled The 2020 Election: Lessons and Reflections, featured a panel of CSU faculty from colleges across campus discussing various issues pertaining to the election, including the effect that activism (including the Black Lives Matter movement), demands to defund the police, race and civil rights, and the future of the federal courts may have played in the election.  

The webinar was hosted by the Diversity Institute, a research center within CSU’s Division of Diversity, Inclusion and University Engagement.  

Professor Milena Sterio co-authored a blog post (with Eian Katz and Jonathan Worboys, Public International Law and Policy Group (PILPG)), “Attacks” Against Hospitals and Cultural Property: Broad in Time, Broad in Substance, which was published by Articles of War, an academic blog operated out of the Lieber Institute at West Point.  In this post, Professor Sterio and her co-authors discuss the definition of “attacks” under the International Criminal Court (ICC) statute.  This blog post is based on the Amicus Brief which Professor Sterio and her colleagues at the PILPG recently submitted to the ICC in the Ntaganda case.  The post was an invited contribution to the online symposium ran by Articles of War about the ICC’s Ntaganda case.  

The blog post is available here: https://lieber.westpoint.edu/attacks-against-hospitals-cultural-property-broad/

Professor Milena Sterio presented her paper, “The Syrian Conflict’s Impact on International Law,” at the American Society of International Law-Midwest Interest Group annual workshop held virtually on Nov. 13th.  Professor Sterio’s paper was selected from a competitive call-for-papers.

Professor Milena Sterio participated as a panelist in a panel on the Nagorno-Karabkah conflict (between Armenia and Azerbaijan) organized by the University of Southern California Institute of Armenian Studies Center on 11/6, entitled “Armenia and Azerbaijan at War: Roads to Peace.”  Professor Sterio discussed issues of self-determination and secession as they relate to this conflict.

A recording of the event is available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIUIoGkmFzM

This week Chris Sagers, the James A. Thomas Professor of Law, gave a presentation of his book, “United States v. Apple: Competition in America,” at a Yale Law School lecture series jointly sponsored by the Information Society Project and the Thurman Arnold Project.

He also participated in a panel discussion hosted by the Federalist Society that featured an extended, deep-dive discussion of the Justice Department’s historic antitrust suit against online search giant Google. Sagers debated the case with two leading antitrust experts, Doug Melamed of Stanford University and Geoff Manne, President of the International Center for Law & Economics. 

In early November, Prof. Ray moderated a panel on arbitrating cybersecurity and data privacy issues at the American Society of International Law’s Midyear Meeting Practitioner’s Forum.

In addition, the Seton Hall Law Review invited Prof. Ray to present his draft article Pandemic Privacy at its annual Symposium. The Review will publish the article next Spring.

Professor Ray is the Leon M. and Gloria Plevin Professor of Law and Director of CM Law’s Center for Cybersecurity and Privacy Protection.

The Future of Privacy Forum invited Professor Brian Ray to speak in October on a panel discussion on digital contact tracing at Privacy & Pandemics: Responsible Uses of Technology and Health Data During Times of Crisis — An International Tech and Data Conference.

Professor Ray was also asked to participate in drafting a workshop report, which will be prepared and used by the National Science Foundation to help set direction for Convergence Accelerator 2021 Workshops, speeding the transition of convergence research into practice to address grand challenges of national importance.

Professor Ray is the Leon M. and Gloria Plevin Professor of Law and Director of CM Law’s Center for Cybersecurity and Privacy Protection.

Professor Heidi Gorovitz Robertson was one of six speakers at the 20th Annual Great Lakes Water Conference “Water in the Courts” on Friday, November 6, 2020.  The conference is sponsored by the Legal Institute of the Great Lakes at the University of Toledo Law School. 

Robertson’s presentation — “Waters of the United States 2020 and its Legal Challenges” — addressed US EPA and the US Army Corps of Engineers’ latest version of the definition of “waters of the United States” under the federal Clean Water Act.  The definition has enormous consequences with respect to federal regulatory jurisdiction over discharges of pollution into U.S. surface waters and has been controversial for decades.  The “Navigable Waters Protection Rule” (NWPR) became effective in most of the country on June 22, 2020 and is the culminating step in the Trump Administration’s multi-year project to repeal and replace Obama Administration regulations defining “waters of the United States” and, by extension, limiting the scope of waters subject to federal jurisdiction. In particular, the NWPR implements a narrow definition of these jurisdictional areas, as indicated in President Trump’s February 28, 2017 Executive Order directing the EPA Administrator to consider interpreting “navigable waters “consistent with Scalia’s opinion in [the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2006 decision] Rapanos v. United States.”  

Legal challengers to the new rule insist that the agencies’ creating a rule consistent with Scalia’s opinion was inappropriate because Scalia’s opinion was a plurality, not a majority, and relied on a concurrence by Justice Kennedy to reach a majority.  Both the Executive Order and the resulting definition of “waters of the United States” ignore the Kennedy concurrence, which had been reflected in the 2015 (Obama Administration) iteration of the rule.

Robertson is the Steven W. Percy Distinguished Professor of Law at C|M|LAW and Professor of Environmental Studies at the Levin College of Urban Affairs.

Yesterday, Nov. 4, the Supreme Court heard Oral Argument in Fulton v. City of Philadelphia. Professor Doron Kalir was quoted extensively by Business Insider about the case. As Professor Kalir explained, the case pitted the interests of same-sex couples, who wish to be considered for foster parenting much like any other couple, with the interests of a catholic foster parenting service, which refused to acknowledge the right of same-sex parents to be foster parents. The city of Philadelphia refused to continue its contract with Catholic Social Services, and they sued. 

This clash — between the right to equality guaranteed by the 14th Amendment, on the right hand, and the right to free exercise of religion, guaranteed by the 1st Amendment — is “as big as they come in terms of legal battles,” explained Professor Kalir. Kalir was concerned that some of the gains earned by LGBTQ persons in Obergefell — which recognized the constitutional right to same-sex marriage — will be scaled back by the new case. 

To top that clash — which the Court has previously entertained, but refused to resolve, in Masterpiece Cakeshop (2018) — petitioners also asked the Court to overrule Employment Division v. Smith, a seminal 1990 case that defined the relation between general-applicable laws and their possible interference with free exercise of religion. Such overruling would place the newest Justice on the Court, Justice Amy Coney Barret, in the challenging position of possibly overruling one of the major opinions authored by her mentor, Justice Scalia, in her very first case on the Court. 

The interview can be found here:
https://www.insider.com/supreme-court-heard-lgbtq-rights-and-religious-liberty-case-2020-11

Professors Milena Sterio and John Plecnik participated as panelists in a webinar on November 4 on the topic of U.S. Presidential Elections.  The webinar was organized and hosted by Professor Matej Avbelj, New University, Faculty of Government and European Studies (Slovenia).  This webinar was part of the two-year bilateral research project between the Cleveland-Marshall College of Law and New University, Faculty of Government and European Studies.