Author Archive for solangel-maldonado

Introducing Guest Blogger andré douglas pond cummings

posted by Solangel Maldonado

It is my pleasure to introduce Professor andré douglas pond cummings of West Virginia University College of Law as a guest blogger.  Professor cummings teaches and writes about investor protection and corporate law; race, affirmative action and social Justice; and entertainment and sports law.  In addition to teaching at West Virginia where he has been named Professor of the Year numerous times, he has taught at the University of Iowa College of Law, the University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law, Temple University Beasley School of Law, Tokyo Japan Campus, and Syracuse University College of Law.

Professor cummings received his J.D. from Howard University and his B.S. from Brigham Young University.  He clerked for Chief Judge Joseph W. Hatchett, United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit and Associate Chief Justice Christine M. Durham, Utah Supreme Court.  He was also an associate at Kirkland & Ellis LLP in Chicago where he focused on complex business transactions and public securities offerings.

His recent publications include:

Reversing Field: Examining Commercialization, Labor, Gender and Race in 21st Century Sports Law, Editor (West Virginia University Press) (with Anne Marie Lofaso)

Hip Hop and the Law: The Writings That Formed the Movement, Editor (forthcoming 2012) (with Donald Tibbs)

Coyotes on Wall Street: The Surprising Motivations of Mortgage Meltdown CEOs (forthcoming 2012)

Families of Color in Crisis: Bearing the Crushing Weight of the Financial Market Meltdown, 55 Howard L.J. (forthcoming 2012)

“All Eyez on Me”: America’s War on Drugs and the Prison Industrial Complex, 15 Iowa J. of Gender, Race and Justice (forthcoming 2012)

“It Takes a Nation of Millions”: The Transformative Potential of Hip-Hop, 1 Southern U. Journal of Race, Gender, and Poverty (forthcoming 2012)

Racial Coding and the Financial Market Crisis, 2011 Utah L. Rev. 141 (2011)

Post-Racialism?, 14 Iowa J. of Gender, Race and Justice 601 (2011)

The Associated Dangers of “Brilliant Disguises,” Colorblind Constitutionalism and Post-Racial Rhetoric, 85 Indiana L.J. 1277 (2010)

A Furious Kinship: Critical Race Theory and the Hip Hop Nation, 48 Louisville L. Rev. 499 (2010).

Thug Life: Hip Hop’s Curious Relationship With Criminal Justice, 50 SANTA CLARA L. REV. 515 (2010).

You can find his author page here.

 

  February 1, 2012 at 2:10 am   Posted in: Administrative Announcements   Print This Post   One Comment

Introducing Guest Blogger Nicole Huberfeld

posted by Solangel Maldonado

I am delighted to welcome Professor Nicole Huberfeld who will be blogging with us this month. Nicole is the Gallion & Baker Associate Professor of Law at the University of Kentucky College of Law and Bioethics Associate at the University of Kentucky College of Medicine.  Before joining the UK faculty in 2005, she was the Health Law Faculty Fellow at Seton Hall Law School.  Nicole teaches structural constitutional law and a variety of healthcare law classes.  Her scholarship focuses on the cross-section of constitutional law and federal healthcare programs with a particular interest in federalism and Spending Clause jurisprudence.  Her article, Federalizing Medicaid, will be published this month in the University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law.  She has been the recipient of the Duncan Teaching Award, a nominee for the University of Kentucky Great Teacher Award, and a nominee for the ALI Young Scholars Medal.  Prior to academic life, she practiced regulatory and transactional healthcare law in New York and New Jersey.

Nicole’s recent works include:

Post-Reform Medicaid before the Court: Tension between Reinvention and Path Dependence (forthcoming symposium issue, Annals Health L.)

Challenging the Stakeholders: A Review of Laura Katz Olson, The Politics Of Medicaid (forthcoming, J. Legal Med.)

Federalizing Medicaid, 14 U. Pa. J. Const. L. ___ (forthcoming 2011)

Conditional Spending and Compulsory Maternity, 2010 U. Ill. L. Rev. 751

Bizarre Love Triangle: The Spending Clause, Section 1983, and Medicaid Entitlements, 42 U.C. Davis L. Rev. 413 (2008)

Clear Notice for Conditions on Spending, Unclear Implications for States in Federal Healthcare Programs, 86 N.C. L. Rev. 441 (2008)

You can find Nicole’s SSRN author page here.

  November 30, 2011 at 11:18 pm   Posted in: Administrative Announcements   Print This Post   No Comments

Introducing Guest Blogger Gilbert A. Holmes

posted by Solangel Maldonado

I am delighted to welcome Gilbert A. Holmes, Professor of Law and former Dean of the University of Baltimore School of Law, as a guest blogger.  Professor Holmes joined the University of Baltimore School of Law in the summer of 2001, serving as Dean until 2007.  He previously served on the faculty of Texas Wesleyan University School of Law, where he was associate dean for academic affairs and budget (1999-2001). Professor Holmes also served on the faculties of Southern Methodist Law School (1995-1996), and Seton Hall University School of Law (1990-1994).  Professor Holmes’ principal teaching has been in family law, contracts, and property.  He was twice named Day Division Teacher of the Year at Texas Wesleyan, and was nominated for Teacher of the Year by the Seton Hall Law Student Bar Association on three occasions.

Professor Holmes has published articles on a range of family law and constitutional issues in such journals as The Maryland Law Review, The University of Miami Law Review, Temple Law Review and the Texas Wesleyan Law Review, and has presented on a host of topics at conferences and symposia across the country. He is a member of the American Bar Association, the National Bar Association, and the Association of American Law Schools. He is admitted to practice in New York and before the United States District Court, Eastern and Southern Districts of New York, the United States Court of Appeals Second Circuit, and the United States Supreme Court.

Selected Publications

Conversations About the Intersecting Institutions of Marriage, 4 Texas Wesleyan L. Rev. 143 (1998)

The Extended Family System in the Black Community: A Child-Centered Model for Adoption Policy, 68 Temple L. Rev. 1649 (1995)

Student Initiated Prayer: Is It Speech or Religion, and Does it Matter Which, 49 U. Miami L. Rev 301 (1995)

The Tie That Binds: The Constitutional Right of Children to Maintain Relationships with Parent-Like Individuals, 53 Md. L. Rev. 358 (1994)

 

  November 13, 2011 at 9:07 am   Posted in: Administrative Announcements   Print This Post   No Comments

Introducing Guest Blogger Jennifer Hendricks

posted by Solangel Maldonado

It is my pleasure to introduce Professor Jennifer Hendricks of the University of Tennessee College of Law as a guest blogger.  Professor Hendrick teaches and writes about constitutional family law, gender, and federalism. The main focus of her current work is sex equality in parenting and reproduction. Her article Essentially a Mother, proposing a relationship model for pregnancy, won Honorable Mention in the AALS Scholarly Papers Competition in 2007. Her most recent work in this area, developing the relationship model as a woman-centered basis for a theory of reproductive and parenting rights, appears in the Harvard Civil Rights—Civil Liberties Law Review and in an international collection of feminist constitutional theory forthcoming from Cambridge University Press.  Professor Hendricks has also written about topics ranging from preemption of tort claims to reform of the electoral college.

Professor Hendricks received her J.D. magna cum laude from Harvard; clerked on the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals; and practiced law in Helena, Montana, where she specialized in constitutional, employment, and discrimination cases. In her practice, she successfully challenged illegal voter-redistricting and vote-counting, helped high school girls win equal sports opportunities, won access to government documents for reporters and private citizens, and defended several newspapers and ESPN against defamation claims. She also represented victims of harassment and discrimination on the basis of sex and sexual orientation. She received her B.A. with honors in mathematics and women’s studies from Swarthmore College.

Her recent publications include:

In Defense of the Substance–Procedure Dichotomy, 89 WASH. U. L. REV. _ (forthcoming 2011) (Selected for the University of Illinois Junior Faculty Federal Courts Workshop).

Teaching Values, Teaching Stereotypes: Sex Ed and Indoctrination in Public Schools (with Dawn Howerton), 13 U. PENN. J. CONST. L. 589 (2011).

Pregnancy, Equality, and the U.S. Constitution, in FEMINIST CONSTITUTIONALISM (Beverly Baines, Daphne Barak-Erez & Tsvi Kahana eds., Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2011).

Teaching Controversial Topics (with Beth Burkstrand- Reid and June Carbone), 49 FAM. CT. REV. _ (forthcoming 2011).

Converging Trajectories: Interest Convergence, Justice Kennedy, and Jeannie Suk’s “Trajectory of Trauma,” 110 COLUM. L. REV. SIDEBAR 63 (2010), reprinted in WOMEN AND THE LAW (Tracy Thomas, ed., West 2011).

Body and Soul: Pregnancy, Equality, and the Unitary Right to Abortion, 45 HARV. C.R.–C.L. L. REV. 329 (2010).

Contingent Equal Protection: Reaching for Equality After Ricci and PICS, 16 MICH. J. GENDER & L. 397 (2010).

You can find her author page here.

  September 30, 2011 at 2:02 pm   Posted in: Administrative Announcements   Print This Post   No Comments

Introducing Guest Blogger Margaret Lewis

posted by Solangel Maldonado

I am delighted to welcome my colleague, Professor Margaret Lewis, who will be blogging with us this month.  Professor Lewis’s research focuses on the intersection of Chinese legal studies with criminal procedure, criminal law, and international law. She joined Seton Hall Law School as an Associate Professor in 2009.

Professor Lewis is a Public Intellectuals Program Fellow with the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations and travels frequently to Asia. Her recent publications have appeared in the NYU Journal of International Law and Politics, Columbia Journal of Asian Law, and Virginia Journal of International Law.

Most recently before joining Seton Hall, Professor Lewis served as a Senior Research Fellow at NYU School of Law’s U.S.-Asia Law Institute where she worked on criminal justice reforms in China. Following graduation from law school, she worked as an associate at the law firm of Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton in New York City. She then served as a law clerk for the Honorable M. Margaret McKeown of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Diego. After clerking, she returned to NYU School of Law and was awarded a Furman Fellowship.

Professor Lewis received her J.D., magna cum laude, from NYU School of Law, where she was inducted into the Order of the Coif and was a member of Law Review. She received her B.A., summa cum laude, from Columbia University and also studied at the Hopkins-Nanjing Center for Chinese and American Studies in Nanjing, China.

Her recent publications include:

Presuming Innocence, or Corruption, in China, 50 Colum. J. Transnat’l L. __ (forthcoming 2012)

Controlling Abuse to Maintain Control: The Exclusionary Rule in China, 43 N.Y.U. J. Int’l L. & Pol. 629 (2011) (awarded Jerome A. Cohen Prize for International Law and East Asia)

The Tension Between Leniency and Severity in China’s Death Penalty Debate, 24 Colum. J. Asian L. __ (forthcoming 2011) (invited submission)

The Enduring Importance of Police Repression: Laojiao, the Rule of Law and Taiwan’s Alternative Evolution, in The Impact of China’s 1989 Tiananmen Massacre (co-authored with Jerome A. Cohen) (Routledge, 2010)

Taiwan’s New Adversarial System and the Overlooked Challenge of Efficiency-Driven Reforms, 49 Va. J. Int’l L. 651 (2009)

China’s Implementation of the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime, Asian J. of Criminology, Vol. 2, No. 2 (2007)

You can find Professor Lewis’s SSRN Author page here

  September 30, 2011 at 1:39 pm   Posted in: Administrative Announcements   Print This Post   No Comments

Launch of the Feminist Legal Theory Collaborative Research Network

posted by Solangel Maldonado

Readers interested in interdisciplinary work in feminist legal theory will be pleased to learn of the launch of the Feminist Legal Theory Collaborative Research Network, a newly-constituted group that seeks to bring together scholars across a range of fields.  The inaugural meeting of the Feminist Legal Theory CRN took place at the Law and Society Association meeting in June 2011.  The next meeting will be held at George Washington University Law School on Wednesday, January 4, 2012, the day before the AALS annual meeting.  Paper proposals on any topic pertaining to legal feminism are being accepted until September 23, 2011. For instructions on registering, submitting a proposal, or participating in this and other activities of the Feminist Legal Theory CRN, please see the detailed information posted here.

 

 

  August 15, 2011 at 10:20 am   Posted in: Uncategorized   Print This Post   No Comments

Law Schools and the Curve

posted by Solangel Maldonado

The New York Times has published yet another article accusing law schools of misleading students, this time of failing to inform admitted students with merit scholarships contingent on maintaining a certain grade point average of the possibility of losing their scholarships. I agree with many of the article’s points and the comments in response.  For example, I completely agree that law schools should inform admitted students of the curve (it varies from a 2.67 at some schools to a 3.4 at others)  and provide them with their grading guidelines.  I found the following information on the websites of four law schools:

Law School 1

A+      1%

A         8%

A-       15%

B+      25%

B         20%

B-       12%

C+      7%

C         4%

C-       4%

F        4%

Law School 2

A or higher No more than 10 percent

A- or higher No more than 25 percent

C+ or lower At least 15 percent

C- or lower At least 6 percent

Law School 3

A+      0-2%

A         7-13%

A-       16-24%

B+      22-30%

B        Remainder

B-       4-11%

C         2-5%

D/F    0-5%

Law School 4

At least 20% of grades are A- or above and at least 20% of grades are C+ or below.

***

Given that grading guidelines vary from school to school, knowledge of a law school’s grading system may help merit scholarship recipients assess their likelihood of retaining their scholarships.  However, I disagree with the article’s suggestion that the curve is the main reason why many students lose their scholarships. The curve is generally not the reason why a student who never had a grade lower than a B+ in college may earn a B- or C in law school. In my experience, the curve does not lower a student’s grade but instead bumps the grade up or has no effect at all. In other words, in the absence of a curve, many more law students would earn B minuses and Cs in their first semester (or first year). The reason is that few first semester law students write good exams. This is understandable. Law school exams are generally very different from the exams students took in college or other graduate programs, and it takes a while to figure out how to take a law school exam. A student may have memorized the “black letter” law, but lack the skills to apply it to a complex fact pattern with numerous legal issues.  As the article acknowledges, law students, especially those with merit scholarships, assume that because they performed well as undergraduates, they will automatically perform well in law school—even in their first semester.  However, this is not the case.  Many students do not learn how to apply the law to a new fact pattern or how to advise a client of “all the potential claims and defenses” (a common law school exam question) until after their first round of exams when they meet with their professors individually to review the exam. Maybe law schools need to do a better job of providing students with feedback before they take exams and with formative assessments, as the Carnegie Report on Legal Education recommends, that focus “on supporting students in learning rather than ranking, sorting and filtering them.”

  May 4, 2011 at 9:59 pm   Posted in: Education, Law School   Print This Post   8 Comments

Introducing Guest Blogger Courtney Joslin

posted by Solangel Maldonado

I am delighted to introduce Courtney Joslin who will be blogging with us this month.  Courtney is an Acting Professor of Law at UC Davis School of Law, where she teaches Family Law; Employment Discrimination; and Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity, and the Law. Courtney’s areas of interest include family and relationship recognition, particularly focusing on same-sex and nonmarital couples.

Prior to joining the faculty at UC Davis, Courtney served as an attorney at the National Center for Lesbian Rights (NCLR), where she litigated cases on behalf of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people and their families. She received her undergraduate degree from Brown University and her law degree from Harvard Law School.

Her recent publications include:

Searching for Harm: Same-Sex Marriage and the Well-Being of Children, 46 Harv. C.R.-C.L. Law. Rev. 81 (2011)

Protecting Children(?): Marriage, Gender, and Assisted Reproductive Technology, 83 S. Cal. L. Rev. 1177 (2010)

Travel Insurance: Protecting Lesbian and Gay Parent Families Across State Lines, 4 Harv. L. & Pol’y Rev. 31 (2010)

Interstate Recognition of Parentage in a Time of Disharmony: Same-Sex Parent Families and Beyond, 70 Ohio St. L.J. 563 (2009)

You can find Courtney’s SSRN Page here.

Welcome, Courtney!

  May 2, 2011 at 7:34 am   Posted in: Administrative Announcements   Print This Post   No Comments

Introducing Guest Blogger Kevin Noble Maillard

posted by Solangel Maldonado

I am delighted to welcome Professor Kevin Noble Maillard as a guest blogger this month.  Professor Maillard is an Associate Professor of Law at Syracuse University where he teaches Family Law, Trusts & Estates, Children and the Law, and Adoption.  His research focuses on civil liberties within the family and society. His interests include nontraditional families, racial intermixture, and the role of marriage in America.   He is the author of the forthcoming book, Loving v. Virginia in a Post-Racial World (with Rose Villazor, Cambridge 2010).

Professor Maillard received his B.A. in Public Policy from Duke University, his law degree from Penn Law School, and his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Michigan.  Originally from Oklahoma, he is a member of the Seminole Nation, Mekesukey Band.

His recent publications include:

Rethinking Children as Property, 32 Cardozo L. Rev. 225 (2010) 

The Color of Testamentary Freedom, 62 SMU L. Rev. 101 (2009)

The Multiracial Epiphany, 76 Fordham L. Rev. 2709 (2008)

The Anatomy of Grey: A Theory of Interracial Convergence (with Janis McDonald), 26 Law & Inequality 305 (2008)

The Pocahontas Exception: American Indians and Exceptionalism in Antimiscegenation Law, 12 Mich. J. Race & L. 107 (2007)

  April 1, 2011 at 12:01 am   Posted in: Uncategorized   Print This Post   No Comments

Wal-Mart and the Future of Antidiscrimination Law

posted by Solangel Maldonado

Today the Supreme Court will hear argument in Wal-Mart Stores v. Dukes, potentially the largest employment class action case in U.S. history.  The plaintiffs allege that Wal-Mart paid male employees more and promoted them over women with more seniority and that it maintained a culture of gender stereotyping where women were called “Janie Q’s,” told to wear make-up and “doll-up,” and meetings were held at Hooters.   They also rely on statistical data to establish discrimination.  They claim that women comprise 80% of hourly supervisors, but only one-third of store managers.  The percentage of women in higher positions is even lower.

Unfortunately, we won’t learn for a while whether Wal-Mart actually discriminated against its female employees.   The issue before the Court is one that civil procedure, specifically class action, junkies should find titillating—whether the six plaintiffs should have been certified to bring a class-action that could potentially include 1.5 million employees in thousands of stores across the country.   Wal-Mart claims that there is no commonality among the plaintiffs’ claims and that the “named plaintiffs’ claims cannot conceivably be typical of the claims of the strangers they seek to represent.”  If the term “class-action certification” is making you yawn, you might be missing the potential impact of this issue for employment discrimination plaintiffs going forward.  If the Supreme Court adopts the view of the dissenters in the Ninth Circuit opinion and requires plaintiffs seeking class certification to show “significant proof that an employer operated under a general policy of discrimination,” plaintiffs (including the EEOC) are also likely to find it much more difficult to prove that the entity should be held liable when the case is heard on its merits.   I didn’t understand these implications until I read Professor Tristin Green’s article exposing the impact of Dukes for the future of systemic disparate treatment law.   She also argues that the current individualistic model of disparate treatment (one bad actor or as one Wal-Mart executive put it, “some bosses may have gone astray”) has made it difficult for scholars to think critically about entity responsibility for systemic disparate treatment in the workplace.  You can read the abstract and article here.

  March 29, 2011 at 12:42 pm   Posted in: Civil Rights, Employment Law, Feminism and Gender   Print This Post   One Comment

The Old Illegitimacy Part II: Facilitating Societal Discrimination

posted by Solangel Maldonado

In a prior post, I demonstrated that the law makes explicit distinctions between marital and nonmarital children and denies the latter benefits automatically granted to its marital counterparts.  The harms resulting from the law’s continued distinctions on the basis of birth status are significant.  For example, these distinctions impair nonmarital children’s ability to acquire property and wealth.  While individuals often use part of their inheritance for a down payment on a home, to start a business, or to fund their own children’s education, nonmarital children are denied the same access to intergenerational wealth.

These legal distinctions may also stigmatize nonmarital children. Denying nonmarital children access to post-secondary educational support that is granted to marital children suggests that the former are less deserving of support.  It also signals that fathers’ responsibilities to their children differ depending on whether they are marital or nonmarital.  Denying U.S. citizenship to the children of unmarried fathers unless their fathers expressly agreed to support them similarly signals that nonmarital children are not automatically entitled to support.

These legal distinctions also facilitate societal discrimination by encouraging individuals (either intentionally or otherwise)  to make negative assumptions about unmarried parents and their children.  Many Americans (not just former Gov. Mike Huckabee) believe that it is wrong for unmarried persons to have children.  Seventy-one percent of participants in a recent Pew Research Center study indicated that the increase in nonmarital births is a “big problem” for society and 44% believe that it is always or almost always morally wrong for an unmarried woman to have a child.  Some people assume that unmarried mothers are sexually irresponsible and that their children will be burdens on the public purse.  They also expect nonmarital children to underachieve academically, economically, and socially.

Read the rest of this post »

  March 15, 2011 at 10:27 pm   Posted in: Constitutional Law, Estates and Trusts, Family Law, Immigration   Print This Post   3 Comments

The Old Illegitimacy: Legal Discrimination Against Nonmarital Children

posted by Solangel Maldonado

Professor Nancy Polikoff is organizing a conference titled The New “Illegitimacy”: Revisiting Why Parentage Should Not Depend on Marriage, at American University, Washington College of Law, March 25-26.  Many of the speakers will be focusing on the law’s discrimination against children of same-sex couples whose parents are not married or in a civil union.   Some scholars believe that “illegitimacy-based discrimination has largely faded from the legal (and social) landscape” and that the children of same-sex couples are the only group that still experience discrimination on the basis of birth status.   In reality, however, children of married couples (both opposite and same-sex) continue to reap legal and societal privileges that are denied to their nonmarital counterparts (regardless of their parents’ sexual orientation).

For most of U.S. history, “illegitimate” children, as they were referred to historically (and even now by some courts), suffered significant legal and societal discrimination. They had no legal right to parental support, intestate succession, or government benefits available to marital children.  They were stigmatized as “bastards” and frequently denied access to social, professional, and civic organizations.  Lawmakers and society justified their abhorrent treatment of nonmarital children on the ground that it would deter men and women from having children out of wedlock.

Read the rest of this post »

  March 13, 2011 at 6:00 pm   Posted in: Constitutional Law, Family Law   Print This Post   8 Comments

Introducing Guest Blogger Maxine Eichner

posted by Solangel Maldonado

I am delighted to welcome Professor Maxine Eichner as a guest for the month of March. Maxine is a Professor of Law at the UNC-Chapel Hill School of Law. Her teaching interests include sex equality, family law, employment and employment discrimination law, legal theory and torts. She writes on issues at the intersection of law and political theory, focusing particularly on family relationships, social welfare law and policy; sex equality; and the relationship of the family, the workplace, and market forces. Her new book, The Supportive State: Families, Government, and America’s Political Ideals (2010), has just been released by Oxford University Press. The book considers the role that government should play in dealing with families and the dependency issues that families face.

Professor Eichner attended Yale College and Yale Law School, where she was an articles editor of the Yale Law Journal. She also holds a Ph.D. in political theory from UNC. After law school, she held a Women’s Law and Public Policy Fellowship through Georgetown Law School, clerked for Judge Louis Oberdorfer in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, and then clerked for Judge Betty Fletcher in the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. She also practiced civil rights, women’s rights, and employment law for several years at the law firm of Patterson, Harkavy, and Lawrence in Raleigh, N.C. before joining the faculty at UNC-Chapel Hill School of Law in 2003.

Professor Eichner is an editor of Family Law: Cases, Text, Problems (2010) (with Ellman, Kurtz, Weithorn, Bix, and Czapanskiy). She is also Reporter for the Uniform Law Commission’s Visitation and Custody Issues Affecting Military Personnel and Their Families Committee.

Her recent publications include:

Families, Human Dignity, and State Support for Caretaking: Why the United States’ Failure to Ameliorate the Work-Family Conflict is a Dereliction of the Government’s Basic Responsibilities, 88 N.C. L. REV. 1593 (2010).

Feminism, Queer Theory, & Sexual Citizenship, in GENDER EQUALITY: DIMENSIONS OF WOMEN’S EQUAL CITIZENSHIP (with J. Grossman and L. McClain) (Cambridge Press 2009).

Marriage and the Elephant: The Liberal Democratic State’s Regulation of Intimate Relationships Between Adults, 30 HARV. J.L. & GENDER 25 (2007).

  February 28, 2011 at 10:59 am   Posted in: Uncategorized   Print This Post   No Comments

Introducing Guest Blogger Shavar Jeffries

posted by Solangel Maldonado

I am delighted to welcome Shavar Jeffries who is an Associate Professor of Law at Seton Hall Law.  Professor Jeffries’s work focuses on impact civil-rights scholarship, advocacy, and litigation, focusing on education and housing inequities affecting urban communities.  He has represented thousands of urban children in education-reform litigation, including children denied free, after-school tutoring services under the No Child Left Behind Act, and thousands of Newark children attending public-charter schools who were denied equitable instructional and facilities funding. Professor Jeffries has also represented individuals and community associations in a variety of housing cases, including tenants facing unlawful rent-increases in subsidized housing units, and individual victims of mortgage fraud and predatory lending.

From 2008 to 2010, Professor Jeffries took a leave from Seton Hall Law to serve as Counsel to New Jersey Attorney General Anne Milgram. In that role, Professor Jeffries had oversight responsibility for several divisions of the office, including the Division on Civil Rights, the Juvenile Justice Commission, and the state’s multi-state litigation and advocacy portfolio. Professor Jeffries also managed a range of special initiatives, including the state’s mortgage-mediation program and several initiatives design to grant greater protection to domestic-violence victims.

Prior to joining Seton Hall in 2004, Professor Jeffries was a Gibbons Fellow in Public Interest and Constitutional Litigation at Gibbons P.C., where he worked on a variety of cases including matters involving special education, voting rights and affordable housing. Professor Jeffries also clerked for Nathaniel R. Jones, a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, and worked as an Associate at the law firm of Wilmer Cutler & Pickering, where he defended the University of Michigan in affirmative-action litigation challenging its admissions policies, and represented black farmers who for decades had been denied farming loans by the United States government because of their race.

Professor Jeffries, a Newark native, is extensively involved in the Newark community. He was the Founding Board President of TEAM Academy Charter School, the largest public charter school in New Jersey, and served as Board President from 2002 through 2007. From 2004 through 2007, Shavar was Board President of the Boys and Girls Clubs of Newark, which had a $700,000 deficit when he took over and which had three consecutive balanced budgets during his tenure. In April 2010, Shavar was elected to the Newark Public Schools Advisory Board, winning more votes than any school-board candidate in seven years. Shavar was then unanimously selected by his colleagues to serve as President of the board.

For his public-interest advocacy, Shavar has received numerous honors including the Garden State Bar’s Young Lawyer Award, the Greater Newark HUD Tenants Coalition’s Public Service Award, the Brendan Byrne Distinguished Public Servant Award, and recognition by the Newark Star-Ledger as a “Person Who Made a Difference” and by New Jersey Superlawyers Magazine as a “Rising Star.”

Professor Jeffries received his B.A. in History from Duke University and his J.D. from Columbia Law School, where he was a Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar, Paul Robeson Scholar, Jane Marks Murphy Prize recipient, Mitsubishi International Fellow, and Managing Editor of the COLUMBIA HUMAN RIGHTS LAW REVIEW.

  November 30, 2010 at 10:06 pm   Posted in: Administrative Announcements   Print This Post   No Comments

Introducing Guest Blogger Craig Livermore

posted by Solangel Maldonado

It is my pleasure to introduce Craig Livermore, the Executive Director of the New Jersey Law and Education Empowerment Project (“NJ LEEP”), as a guest blogger this month.  Craig holds a B.A. from Franklin and Marshall College in Religion and Mathematics, a Master of Theological Studies from Harvard, and a J.D. from Columbia Law School.  In 2006, he founded NJ LEEP, in partnership with Seton Hall Law School, as a comprehensive and continuous pipeline diversity program for urban youth in grades eight through twelve interested in pursuing a legal career.

Craig is the founding board chair of Newark Legacy Charter School and is an Adjunct Professor at Seton Hall Law School where he teaches a course on Race, Law and Education.  In addition to work on religion, ethics and public policy, Craig has published articles on urban educational management, and educational policy and its effects on racially equitable educational outcomes.

Recent Articles:

Racial Complexity and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, __ J. Civ. Rights & Econ. Dev. ___ (forthcoming 2011).

Obama, Racial and Political Complexity, and Hope for a Transformed Racial Order, Race-Talk J. Kir. Institute (Spring 2010), available at http://www.race-talk.org/?p=4497 (scholarly e-essay).

 Centralized Standards and Decentralized Competition: Suggested Revisions for No Child Left Behind to Create Greater Educational Responsiveness Toward Disempowered Minority Groups, 33 Seton Hall Legis. J. 433 (2009).

 Unrelenting Expectations: A More Nuanced Understanding of the Broken Windows Theory of Cultural Management in Urban Education, University of Pennsylvania Grad School of Education Perspectives On Urban Education (2008), available at http://www.urbanedjournal.org/Vol%206%20Order%20in%20Schools/Commentaries/Commentary_2_Broken%20Windows%20Theory.html (peer reviewed on-line journal).

You can find Craig’s SSRN Page at  http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=1517942

  October 31, 2010 at 9:08 pm   Posted in: Administrative Announcements, Uncategorized   Print This Post   No Comments

Introducing Guest Blogger Alicia Kelly

posted by Solangel Maldonado

I am delighted to welcome Alicia Kelly who will be blogging with us this month.  Alicia is a tenured Associate Professor at Widener University School of Law in Delaware where she teaches Family Law, Property Law, Wills and Trusts and a seminar on Money, Intimacy & Law.  Her scholarship focuses on the intersections of economic behavior, intimate relationships and gender.  Her writing explores theoretical and policy foundations for wealth allocation during marriage and at divorce, with particular attention to the impact of interdependent sharing behavior on wealth generated by human capital.  Alicia is currently working on how these issues play out for cohabiting couples, as well as how they relate to intimate partner contracts.  She is also co-authoring (with Nancy Knauer) a Property Law text for the Practice and Context Series slated for publication in 2013 (by Carolina Acdemic Press).

Alicia is currently serving as Chair of the Association of American Law Schools Section on Family & Juvenile Law, and was Program Chair for the section panel, Money, Intimacy, Law & Inequality at the 2010 Annual Meeting. She is also a member of the Executive Committee for the Section on Women and Legal Education. 

This past spring 2010, Alicia was a Visiting Professor of Law at Temple University.  Before joining Widener, she was on the faculty at Western State University College of Law in California.  She holds an LL.M. in Legal Education from Temple University School of Law, where she was an Abraham L. Freedman Fellow and Lecturer of Law, and also earned her B.A. (magna cum laude) and her J.D.(cum laude) from Temple University. Before her law teaching career, Alicia was in private practice concentrating on complex domestic relations and general civil litigation. She is also a trained mediator.

Alicia’s publications include:

Money Matters in Marriage: Unmasking Interdependence in Ongoing Spousal Economic Relations, 47 Louisville L. Rev. 113 (2008).         

Rehabilitating Partnership Marriage As A Theory of Wealth Distribution at Divorce: In Recognition of A Shared Life, 19 Wis. Women’s L.J. 141 (2004) 

The Marital Partnership Pretense and Career Assets: The Ascendancy of Self Over the Marital Community, 81 Boston Univ. L. Rev. 59 (2001).

  August 31, 2010 at 8:41 pm   Posted in: Administrative Announcements, Uncategorized   Print This Post   No Comments

Bartering Legal Services for Sex

posted by Solangel Maldonado

Sometimes I think that lawyers unfairly get a bad rap. Most lawyers work hard, comply with all of the ethical rules, and respect their clients. However, there are a few that repeatedly violate the Rules of Professional Conduct, hurting their clients and threatening the public’s trust in the legal profession. Unfortunately, they continue to practice law.

Imagine an attorney who has been admonished, reprimanded, and censured four times in a 6-year period for failing to communicate with clients and for recordkeeping violations, and who is later held ineligible to practice law for 15 months for failure to pay into the state’s Lawyers’ Fund for Client Protection among other things.  Imagine that this attorney (who continues to practice law during this period of ineligibility) offers discounted fees to three female bankruptcy clients and to the daughter of another client in exchange for sexual favors. (He told the daughter of a bankruptcy client who could not afford his fee that he would forgive her father’s debt if she would meet him “in a hotel room for three hours.”)  You can read the rest of the stipulated facts here.

Read the rest of this post »

  August 4, 2010 at 8:08 pm   Posted in: Feminism and Gender, Law Practice, Legal Ethics   Print This Post   8 Comments

Introducing Guest Blogger Meredith Johnson Harbach

posted by Solangel Maldonado

I am so pleased to introduce Meredith Johnson Harbach as a guest blogger for the month of August.  Meredith is an Assistant Professor at the University of Richmond School of Law, where she teaches Family Law, Children and the Law, and Civil Procedure. Her current scholarship explores the ways in which law influences families’ choices to “oursource” certain roles and work traditionally done by family members. She also brings to her scholarship and teaching a keen interest in pedagogy and Lawyering theory. Meredith joined Richmond in 2009 from New York University School of Law’s Lawyering Program, where she taught for four years and acted as the Program’s Associate Director for the last two. Prior to joining NYU in 2005, she was a litigator in Houston, Texas.

Meredith received her B.A. from the University of Texas at Austin with highest honors and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. Afterward, she spent a year studying in Spain at the University of Salamanca as a Rotary Ambassadorial Scholar.  She received her J.D. from Columbia Law School, where she was Executive Articles Editor of the Columbia Law Review and a Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar. After graduation, she clerked for United States District Judge Nancy F. Atlas in the Southern District of Texas.

Her most recent publication is:

Is the Family a Federal Question?, 66 Wash. & Lee L. Rev. 131 (2009)

Welcome Meredith.

  August 2, 2010 at 7:42 am   Posted in: Administrative Announcements   Print This Post   No Comments

Introducing Guest Blogger Glenn Cohen

posted by Solangel Maldonado

I am delighted to welcome Glenn Cohen who will be blogging with us this month.  Glenn is an assistant professor at Harvard Law School where he teaches bioethics, health law, and civil procedure. He is also co-director of the law school’s Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics.  His scholarship focuses on legal and ethical issues relating to reproductive technologies (and reproduction more generally), medical tourism (the travel of patients from one country to another country for the primary purpose of receiving health care), and other issues at the intersection of law, medicine and ethics. Prior to joining the faculty, Glenn served as a clerk to Chief Judge Michael Boudin, U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. He also served as an appellate attorney for the U.S. Department of Justice, Civil Division, Appellate staff, where he acted as lead counsel in over 12 Circuit Court cases, counsel in numerous others, and represented the United States in the U.S. Supreme Court in conjunction with the Solicitor General’s office. Immediately before joining the faculty he was a fellow at the Petrie-Flom Center.

His publications include:

The Constitution and the Rights Not to Procreate, 60 STANFORD L. REV. 1135 (2008)

The Right Not to Be a Genetic Parent?, 81 S. CAL. L. REV. 1115 (2008)

Intentional Diminishment, The Non-Identity Problem, and Legal Liability, 60 HASTINGS L. J. 347 (2008) (symposium)

Protecting Patients with Passports: Medical Tourism, Medical Tourism and the Patient-Protective Argument, 95 IOWA L. REV. __ (being published this month)

Trading-Off Reproductive Technology and Adoption: Does Subsidizing IVF Decrease Adoption Rates and Should It Matter? 95 MINN. L. REV. ___ (forthcoming, December 2010) (co-authored with Daniel Chen)

Medical Tourism: The View from 10,000 Feet, 40 HASTINGS CTR. REP, March- April, 11 (2010)

He is currently working on set of papers relating to the reliance on what he calls “Best Interests of the Resulting Child (BIRC)” reasoning to justify the regulation of reproduction (in areas as diverse as the criminalization of incest, prohibitions on sperm donor anonymity prohibitions, restrictions on access to reproduction to those over age 50, etc) and the problems attached to that justification as well as to its possible substitutes.

  August 2, 2010 at 7:24 am   Posted in: Administrative Announcements   Print This Post   No Comments

Introducing Guest Mark Alexander

posted by Solangel Maldonado

I am delighted to welcome Professor Mark C. Alexander as a guest blogger for the month of July.  Mark is a Professor of Law at Seton Hall Law where he teaches Constitutional Law, Law & Politics, Criminal Procedure, and The First Amendment.  His scholarship focuses on the intersection of law, politics and government, and on free speech issues.  Mark served as Senior Advisor to then Senator Barack Obama during the presidential campaign and on the Presidential Transition Team, reviewing the Federal Election Commission, as part of the Justice and Civil Rights Team.  He also served as General Counsel to Cory Booker and the Booker Team in the 2006 Newark Municipal elections and then for Newark in Transition, as Mayor Booker moved to assume the office.  Mark has significant international experience, including a year in Spain on a Fulbright Scholarship, where he taught American Law and Politics.  He has also taught in Italy and is a fellow of the U.S.-Japan Leadership Program.

Mark clerked for Chief Judge Thelton Henderson of the United States District Court for the Northern District of California and was a litigator with Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher before joining the Seton Hall Law faculty in 1996.  He received his B.A. and J.D. from Yale University.  His publications include:

Let Them Do Their Jobs: The Compelling Government Interest in Protecting the Time of Candidates and Elected Officials, 37 Loy. U.-Chic. L.J. (2006)

Money in Political Campaigns and Modern Vote Dilution, 23 U. Minn. J.L. & Inequality 239 (2005)

Campaign Finance Reform: Central Meaning and a New Approach, 60 Wash. & Lee L. Rev. (June 2003)

He is currently working on a book, The Great Political Pivot, which examines the consequences going forward of the new wave of empowerment—manifested in the tea party, individual activists, and individual candidates across the country, on the left and right—that Obama for America unleashed when it challenged the political establishment.

  July 3, 2010 at 11:04 am   Posted in: Administrative Announcements   Print This Post   No Comments

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