Archive for the ‘Professor News’ Category

Faculty dissent is bubbling up across Suffolk University, weeks after the furor over its president’s $1.5 million compensation – more than four times the national average for top college administrators – thrust the school into the national spotlight.

More than 70 percent of the law school faculty approved a motion during Thursday’s faculty meeting raising questions about the way the university is governed. The motion, relayed to the college’s board of trustees, expressed concern that President David Sargent’s “excessive’’ compensation has demoralized students, faculty, staff, and alumni.

The negative publicity over the pay package, they said, had harmed the Beacon Hill school’s reputation and its ability to raise money and attract strong applicants, criticism that the board chairman says is unfair and has dealt “a hell of a blow to Sargent.’’

Professors in Suffolk’s business school, the college of arts and sciences, and school of art and design have also begun to complain, according to several faculty members. Law professors say they would like better communication from trustees about key decisions and believe there should be term limits for board members.

[Boston Globe]

They already detect and defuse bombs, control traffic patterns and do some basic household chores. And scientists predict that pretty soon, robots will be using artificial intelligence to play a larger role on the battlefield, operate our vehicles and take care of us in old age.

But who will be to blame if a robot-controlled weapon kills a civilian? Who can be sued if one of those new cars takes an unexpected turn into a crowd of pedestrians? And who is liable if the robot you programmed to bathe your elderly mother drowns her in the tub?

As mechanical engineers and computer scientists at Stanford develop technology that will transform the stuff of science fiction into everyday machinery, scholars at the Law School are thinking about the legal challenges that will arise.

“I worry that in the absence of some good, up-front thought about the question of liability, we’ll have some high-profile cases that will turn the public against robots or chill innovation and make it less likely for engineers to go into the field and less likely for capital to flow in the area,” said M. Ryan Calo, a residential fellow at the Law School’s Center for Internet and Society.

And the consequence of a flood of lawsuits, he said, is that the United States will fall behind other countries – like Japan and South Korea – that are also at the forefront of personal robot technology, a field that some analysts expect to exceed $5 billion in annual sales by 2015.

“We’re going to need to think about how to immunize manufacturers from lawsuits in appropriate circumstances,” Calo said, adding that defense contractors are usually shielded from liability when the robots and machines they make for the military accidentally injure a soldier.

[Stanford]

One of the most memorable moments of Cecelia Klingele’s yearlong U.S. Supreme Court clerkship wasn’t crafting an opinion on a particular case or listening to an oral argument.

It was playing Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in the clerks’ annual skit for the justices — who expect a witty performance during the clerks’ busiest time of the term — singing a duet with a colleague clad as new Justice Sonia Sotomayor.

“Afterwards, I thought, ‘I can’t believe I just did that in front of the entire Supreme Court, what was I thinking?’” she recalls. “Justice Ginsburg was a good sport, they were all good sports, they’re used to it.”

Klingele earned a rave review — both for her work for the court and for her turn as Ginsburg — from her former boss, Justice John Paul Stevens.

“She was the star of the show,” Stevens says. “She really was a fine performer, as well as being an excellent lawyer.”

After an intense year that saw her writing memos, reviewing facts for oral arguments and summarizing cases for Stevens — a workload that meant she spent a number of nights on the couch in her office — Klingele, a 2005 graduate of the University of Wisconsin Law School, returned to Madison this fall to start a two-year teaching appointment as a visiting assistant professor. This semester she is teaching criminal law to a small section of first-year law students.

[Wisconsin]

Council member David A. Catania is taking aim at a Washington & Lee School of Law professor who has taken a leading role in trying to carve out more exemptions in the bill to legalize same-sex marriage.

Professor Robin F. Wilson was one of five professors who sent a letter to the council last month asking that religious organizations be given more latitude to deny services for same-sex weddings. Wilson also took concerns public, writing an Op-Ed on the matter in the Washington Post and testifying before a council committee considering the bill.

During that testimony, Catania says Wilson misled the council. On two occasions, he argues, Wilson mischaracterized case law related to religious freedom. Catania, the sponsor of the same-sex marriage bill, fired off a letter to Wilson this morning demanding she recant her previous testimony.

To make his point, Catania sent a copy of his letter to Robert A. Smolla, the president of Washington & Lee, and Rodney A. Smolla, the dean of the law school. He also copied the letter to the Chief Disciplinary Council for the State Bar of Texas, where Wilson is licensed to practice law.

“I am disturbed that you may use your misunderstanding of these cases in future testimony before legislative bodies,” Catania wrote. “I am respectfully asking that you cease these misrepresentations in order to allow an honest discussion of the merits of present and future legislation.”

[Washington Post]

A TV news producer accused of blackmailing David Letterman in exchange for keeping quiet about his sexual affairs was only trying to sell the late-night comic a screenplay, the producer’s lawyer said Tuesday.

Robert J. “Joe” Halderman’s attorney asked a Manhattan judge at a hearing to dismiss the attempted first-degree grand larceny charge.

Gerald Shargel, a defense attorney and Brooklyn Law School professor, said that Halderman was merely trying to sell Letterman a screenplay when he approached him with the package left in Letterman’s car.

“There was no extortion. There was a screenplay for sale,” Shargel, who is the practitioner in residence at the Joralemon Street law school, said outside the courtroom. “There was a commercial transaction. Nothing more.”

An attorney for Letterman called the host the victim in the case and derided Shargel’s claim that Halderman was merely trying to sell a screenplay.

“It’s classic blackmail, no matter how Mr. Halderman’s lawyer wants to dress it up,” Daniel Horwitz said.

Prosecutors have said Halder-man left a bizarre and threatening package in Letterman’s car on Sept. 9, demanding $2 million to keep quiet about some of the “Late Show” host’s dalliances. The materials included a letter, a synopsis of a supposed screenplay that said Letterman’s world would “collapse around him” when information about his private life was disclosed, photos, personal correspondence and portions of a diary, authorities said.

[Brooklyn Eagle]

A law school professor has withdrawn a lawsuit accusing the legal blog Above the Law of publishing a “viciously racist series of rants” after reporting the professor’s arrest for suspicion of soliciting prostitution.

University of Miami School of Law professor Donald Marvin Jones dropped his lawsuit on Wednesday, nine days after he filed it pro se in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida. He did not respond to a request for comment.

Above the Law Managing Editor David Lat declined comment on Thursday, but in a blog post on Wednesday wrote that there had been no settlement and that the posts Jones complained about will remain on the site. He offered to let Jones make his case on Above the Law, but there was no word from Jones on that front as of Thursday.

“I’m relieved that Mr. Jones came to his senses,” the site quoted Above the Law attorney Marc Randazza as saying. “We were prepared to file a motion to dismiss and a motion for sanctions, and we were confident that both would have been successful. I am consistently unimpressed by academics and anti-speech parties who think that the courts are there for the redress of foolishness, not the legitimate redress of valid legal grievances.”

[Law.com]

I’m dedicating this column to my friend Michael Goldsmith, a BYU law professor who died Sunday at the age of 58 of Lou Gehrig’s disease.

While in the debilitating throes of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), Goldsmith almost single-handedly brought new national awareness to the disease when he wrote an essay in Newsweek that prompted Major League Baseball last summer to designate July 4 Lou Gehrig Day at ballparks around the country.

The passion Goldsmith had for the cause led 15 major league home teams to recognize the Yankees star on the 70th anniversary of his famous “I’m the luckiest man on the face of the earth” speech at Yankee Stadium, and raise money for ALS research in the process.

Goldsmith was invited to throw out the first ball at Yankee stadium that day.

His effort, even while the nerve cells in his brain continued to rapidly deteriorate, was typical of the former New Yorker and organized-crime fighter transplanted to the more pastoral climate of BYU in Provo.

Who he was and how he thrived at the J. Reuben Clark School of Law at BYU had a dramatic impact on me, the hopeless Ute fan with a life-long and freely admitted bias against the rival school south of the Point of the Mountain.

[Salt Lake Tribune]