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 [...]]]> 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.

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 [...]]]> 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

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 [...]]]> 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.”

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. [...]]]> 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!

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 [...]]]> 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)

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 [...]]]> 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.

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 [...]]]> 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.

Parents are aware of society’s disapproval of nonmarital families. For example, some married women take their husband’s surname to protect their children from assumptions that they are “illegitimate.”  Couples who have cohabited for years often get married once they decide to have children, in part, because they do not want their children to be stigmatized as illegitimate. Courts are aware of societal biases against nonmarital children and have upheld doctrines, such as the presumption of legitimacy—the presumption that a child born to a married woman is her husband’s child—partly to protect children from the “stigma of illegitimacy.” Courts have also rejected petitions to open adoption records, partly because doing so would expose children to the “stigma of illegitimacy.”   They have also rejected mothers’ petitions to change their child’s surname from that of the absent fathers’ to the mothers’ surname out of concern that people will assume that the child is illegitimate. The Massachusetts Supreme Court recently recognized the “enhanced approval that still attends the status of being a marital child” as a reason, among others, to extend the right to marry to same-sex couples.

The law should eliminate the remaining legal distinctions between marital and nonmarital children.  However, societal disapproval of nonmarital families will likely remain so long as lawmakers continue to signal that nonmarital families are undesirable.  Lawmakers have devoted significant resources to promote marriage and reduce the rate of nonmarital births or what they refer to as the “illegitimacy ratio.”  For example, the Bush administration earmarked $750 million over five years to fund programs that promote marriage and the Obama administration recently funded a national media campaign to publicize the benefits of marriage.  The 1996 welfare reform law (the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act) expressly provides that it aims to promote marriage and reduce nonmarital births and authorized a $100 million annual bonus to be awarded to five states that reduced the number of nonmarital births the most in a given year.  West Virginia provided “marriage bonuses” to public assistance recipients who married and other states experimented with a variety of marriage incentives and initiatives.

In addition to these marriage promotion and nonmarital birth reduction efforts, a number of courts have denied same-sex couples the right to marry on the ground that recognizing marriages between couples who cannot procreate naturally might signal that marriage is not “necessary for optimal procreation and child rearing to occur.” These efforts and statements by lawmakers signal that nonmarital families are inherently inferior and may serve to strengthen societal disapproval of these families.

While lawmakers might be persuaded to eliminate the remaining distinctions between marital and nonmarital children—after all, everyone agrees that children should not punished for the actions of their parents—they are unlikely to alter their messages signaling disapproval of nonmarital families.  One reason is that lawmakers believe that promoting marriage and decreasing nonmarital births will benefit children and society as a whole.  Recent studies, however, show that marriage’s positive effect on children may be almost entirely the result of factors other than marriage itself such as growing up in a family with fewer resources, individuals’ positive attitudes towards marital families, and the fact that couples who choose to marry may be more committed and future-oriented.

Even if we assume that marriage itself benefits children, denigrating nonmarital families is unlikely to lead to a greater number of healthy marriages.  When asked why they haven’t married, many unmarried mothers reply that they are waiting until they are financially stable and in a stable relationship.  They recognize that a marriage plagued by high conflict and chronic lack of resources does not benefit them or their children and is likely to end in divorce.  So rather than encourage expecting couples or parents to marry, regardless of their readiness to marry or the quality of their relationship, shouldn’t the law provide resources and support to all children without expressing disapproval of single parent and cohabitating families?

For most of U.S. history, [...]]]> 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.

Discrimination against nonmarital children has decreased significantly in the last 40 years as a result of numerous U.S. Supreme Court decisions striking down laws that discriminate on the basis of birth status.  The Uniform Parentage Act and most state statutes now provide that nonmarital children have the same legal rights as marital children.  Societal disapproval of nonmarital childbearing has also decreased as nonmarital births have become much more common.  The nonmarital birth rate increased from 5% in 1960 to 41% in 2008.

Despite these legal and demographic changes, the law and society continue to discriminate against nonmarital children.  For example, nonmarital children must establish paternity before they can inherit from the father’s intestate estate, while marital children are entitled to inherit by virtue of their status as marital children, even (in many states) when there is evidence that they are the progeny of the mother’s extramarital affair.  Immigration and citizenship laws also discriminate on the basis of birth status.   While a foreign-born marital child of a U.S. citizen father (who meets certain residency requirements) is automatically entitled to U.S. citizenship, a nonmarital child must show that the father agreed (in writing) to support him or her and acknowledged paternity under oath or obtained a filiation order before the child’s eighteenth birthday.

Furthermore, at least one state expressly discriminates against nonmarital children seeking support for college expenses. The Iowa Supreme Court has upheld a statute that authorizes courts to order divorced parents to contribute to their children’s college education but does not authorize courts to order the same from parents of nonmarital children.

In addition to these explicit distinctions between marital and nonmarital children, the law indirectly disadvantages the latter by signaling that nonmarital families are undesirable.   In a future post, I will discuss these messages and how they contribute to further stigmatization and disadvantaging of nonmarital children.

Professor Eichner [...]]]> 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).

From 2008 to 2010, Professor Jeffries took a leave from Seton Hall Law to serve [...]]]> 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.

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 [...]]]> 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

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 [...]]]>

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).

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 [...]]]> 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.

What is an appropriate sanction in this case? Is disbarment too harsh? Is it relevant that Mr. Witherspoon has a “troubling disciplinary history?”  That he claims that he made the offers “purely in jest”?  Does it matter that none of the women accepted his offers even though they all believed that he was serious—that their legal fees would be reduced if they provided sexual favors?  Attorneys who willfully misappropriate trust funds are generally disbarred. Is Mr. Witherspoon’s conduct as egregious as theft?

New Jersey Supreme Court Justice Jaynee LaVecchia thought so. As she put it, “[o]ne’s bodily integrity is at least as important as the security of the finances one entrusts to an attorney.” According to Justice LaVecchia, Mr. Witherspoon’s “astounding exhibition of bad taste, lack of professionalism, and overreaching of vulnerable clients” warranted disbarment: “The only appropriate measure of discipline that protects the public from respondent’s intolerable behavior, and sends a zero-tolerance message toward lawyers who would consider preying on their clients, is disbarment.”

If you are worried that Mr. Witherspoon will no longer be able to earn a living as a lawyer, you can relax. Justice LaVecchia wrote the dissenting opinion (which Justice Barry Albin joined). The majority of the Court, in an opinion written by Justice Helen Hoens, held that disbarment was not warranted and instead suspended Mr. Witherspoon from practicing law for one year and required him to complete a sensitivity training course. The Court reasoned that while Mr. Witherspoon’s “repeated, demeaning and offensive suggestions to his clients were not merely in jest, but an effort to barter his professional services for sexual favors,” his behavior was not criminal, nor did it involve unwanted physical contact or children. Thus, it lacked the severity that has led to disbarment in other cases. (In some cases, attorneys who have been convicted of sexual offenses, including sexual exploitation of a minor, have not been disbarred). The majority was concerned that the zero-tolerance rule advocated by the dissent would require automatic disbarment of attorneys involved in “non-criminal, non-threatening, non-traumatizing, purely verbal, sexual improprieties directed at other adults, simply because [the victims] are clients.”

I, for one, believe we should disbar attorneys who seek sexual favors from their clients even if their conduct is not criminal or threatening, or involve physical contact. If Mr. Witherspoon behaved in this manner towards his employees, he could be liable for sex discrimination and sexual harassment under Title VII of the federal Civil Rights Act, and if he were a college professor, his behavior, if directed at one of his students, could similarly be actionable under Title IX. In fact, the District Ethics Committee that first heard this case found that Mr. Witherspoon had violated Rule of Professional Conduct 8.4(g) (sexual discrimination and harassment). So why shouldn’t preying on clients, which the majority concedes “goes directly to the heart of the trust on which the attorney-client relationship is founded,” lead to automatic disbarment?

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 [...]]]>

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.

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 [...]]]>

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.

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.  [...]]]>

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.