Fall 2010

Chancellor Jack M. Weiss joined other first amendment scholars November 11-12, 2010 in New York for a panel discussion titled Developments in First Amendment Jurisprudence.  The conference, sponsored by the Practising Law Institute (PLI), featured six nationally prominent lawyers and scholars, including the Law Center’s own Chancellor Weiss.  The conference is recognized as one of the most comprehensive in the field, covering the latest issues and case law in media, intellectual property, digital communications and privacy law.

Joining Chancellor Weiss on the panel were:

RonNell Anderson Jones, Associate Professor of Law at Brigham Young University’s J. Reuben Clark Law School, a constitutional law, First Amendment, and media law authority. Jones clerked for former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor and directed the 2007 Media Subpoena Study, a nationwide study of the impact and frequency of subpoenas served upon the media.

Adam Liptak, the Supreme Court correspondent of the New York Times;

Floyd Abrams, of the New York law firm Cahill Gordon & Reindell, LLP; and

Paul M. Smith, of the law firm Jenner & Block of Washington, D.C.

The panel was moderated by Lee Levine, one of the nation’s leading media attorneys and coauthor of the annual PLI program. Levine taught Comparative Media Law at the LSU Law Center’s program in Lyon in the summers of 2009 and 2010. He practices with Levine Sullivan Koch & Schultz, LLP in Washington, D.C.

Panelists addressed such issues as:

• What are the implications of the Supreme Court’s rejection in United States v. Stevens of a federal law criminalizing distribution of films showing infliction of harm to animals?
• Will the Supreme Court, despite Stevens, reverse course and uphold a content-based ban on distribution of violent video games to minors?
• Where is the Court going on campaign finance restrictions a year after Citizens United?
• Will there be an impact on the media if the Court holds that it is constitutional to impose tort liability on extremists who picket military funerals to protest the recognition of gay rights?

PLI delivers cutting-edge continuing legal education seminars, books, treatises, webcasts and audio briefings on subjects critical to the legal profession.

Chancellor Jack Weiss also participated in a panel discussion during a day-long symposium sponsored by Columbia University on November 4, 2010.  The symposium, entitled A Free Press for a Global Society, explored the role of American journalism and American free expression law in the global digital world. The program was co-sponsored by the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, Columbia Law School, and Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs.

Chancellor Weiss’ area of legal specialty is national media law and First Amendment law.

Joining Chancellor Weiss on a panel on “What I Need to Know” were:

Emily Bell, Director of Tow Center for Digital Journalism, Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism;

Bill Grueskin, Dean of Academic Affairs, Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism;

Michael Schudson, Professor, Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism; and

Specific topics addressed by the panel were:  What should journalism in a global society be? What should journalists know, how should they be trained, and what should be their role in the larger society?

The panel was moderated by Nick Lemann, Dean and Henry R. Luce Professor, Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

Professor Paul Baier’s annual Constitution Day Program featured Northwestern University Professor Jerry Goldman, whose Oyez Project brought “Voices of the Constitution” to McKernan Auditorium, featuring voices of Chief Justices Warren Burger and William Rehnquist, Justices Thurgood Marshall, Potter Stewart, Anthony Kennedy, and Antonin Scalia.  The program was jointly sponsored by the LSU Law Center SBA (Sean Corcoran, President) and Southern University Law Center SBA (Chuck Toney, President).

The International Association of Gaming Advisors invited Professor Baier to address its annual meeting, October 11-12, in Washington, D.C.  The invitation came via Paul West of Baker Donelson, President of the Association.  Baier’s lecture was entitled “Inside the Supreme Court.” Baier led the group on an inside tour of the Court, starting at the great bronze statue of Chief Justice Marshall, traveling down the exhibit area to the National Archive film clips of Chief Justice Hughes, Justices Cardozo, Holmes, Brandeis and McReynolds, and the portraiture of the West Conference Room, including Louisiana’s Chief Justice Edward Douglass White. 

Professor William Corbett attended and participated in the Fifth Annual Seton Hall Employment and Labor Law Scholars’ Forum.  Five young labor and employment law scholars presented papers that were critiqued by two or more senior scholars and then discussed by the entire group.  Professor Corbett and Professor Steven Willborn of the University of Nebraska College of Law, critiqued a paper by Georgetown University Law Center fellow Matthew Dimick, entitled Paths to Power: Labor Law, Union Density, and the Ghent System.

Professor Corbett accepted an offer of publication from the Catholic University Law Review for his article Hotness Discrimination: Appearance Discrimination as a Mirror for Reflecting on the Body of Employment Discrimination Law.  The article will be published in Issue 3 or Volume 60 in spring 2011.

Professor Christine Corcos recently published the article Some Thoughts of Chuck Lorre, Bad Words, and the Raging Paranoia of Network Censors, 22 Regent U.L. Rev. 360 (2009/2010) (Symposium Issue).  Her essay Magic Images in Law will appear in Explorations on Courtroom Discourse (Anne Wagner ed., Ashgate, 2011)   Professor Corcos’ book review of Neil Feigenson and Christina Speigel, Law on Display appears in the May 2010 issue of the International Journal for the Semiotics of Law.   For the third year in a row, Professor Corcos was approached by an editor of the ABA Journal to participate as a juror to select the ABA’s pop culture “Top 25”.   This year the subject was “the 25 greatest fictional lawyers who are not Atticus Finch.”  See the results of the jury’s deliberations at: http://www.abajournal.com/magazine/article/the_25_greatest_fictional_lawyers_who_are_not_atticus_finch/

Professor Robert Lancaster published an article, co-authored with Cynthia Baker from Indiana University School of Law – Indianapolis, entitled Under Pressure:  Rethinking Field placements in a Bleak Economy.  The article is published in Volume 17 of the Clinical Law Review. 

Also, Professor Lancaster was recently re-elected to the Board of Governors of the Society of American Law Teachers.

Professor Michael Malinowski served as a member of the Working Group that in May founded LouisianaBio, http://www.louisianabio.org/, a nonprofit trade association dedicated to the promotion and growth of the bioscience industry throughout the state of Louisiana. He presented, All that is Gold Does Not Glitter in Human Clinical Research: A Law Policy Proposal to Raise the Global `Gold Standard’ for Drug Research and Development at the  9^th International Conference on Health Economics, Management and Policy Presentation, a peer-reviewed event held in Athens, Greece, June 28-July 1, 2010.  He also presented this paper at the 5^th International Conference on Social Science Research, another peer-reviewed event, which was held in New Orleans, LA, Sept. 23-25, 2010. 

In this paper and in two related, ongoing articles, Professor Malinowski challenges the Food and Drug Administration’s science-regulatory standards for drug development and approval and broad physician discretion to use pharmaceuticals “off-label,” meaning beyond the scope of the clinical research relied upon to put them on the market and the FDA’s actual approval.  In May 2010, Professor Malinowski’s Keynote Address to Academia Sinica in Taipei, Taiwan, entitled A Law-Policy Proposal to Promote the Public Nature of Research in Contemporary Life Science, was published in the Biennial Review of Law, Science and Technology 2-24 (Wen-Tsong Chiou ed., 2010).

Professor Olivier Moréteau, Russell Long Chair, published “Catastrophic Harm in United States Law: Liability and Insurance” in the American Journal of Comparative Law, a report prepared for the World Congress in Comparative Law (Washington DC, July 2010). He gave interviews to the Austrian national television (ORF) and Radio Canada on the compensation of victims of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

Professor Moreteau gave a keynote speech on the use of dictionaries in comparative law at the 4^th Summer Institute of Jurilinguistics at the University of Moncton (Canada).

With Dr. Agustín Parise, he discussed The Louisiana Civil Code, A Global Give and Take, at the Hemispheric Freedom Symposium, organized by the LSU Law Center, the Baton Rouge Area Foundation and the Pennington Foundation in Baton Rouge on September 21-22.

On October 15, he was the guest speaker at a Society of Bartolus meeting in New Orleans, presenting François-Xavier Martin, father of Louisiana Jurisprudence.

Professor Ken Murchison was recently quoted in the ABA Journal in its July 2010 article on The Supreme Court Report titled The ‘Super Median’: On an Ideological Court, It’s All About Keeping Justice Kennedy.

Professor Christina Sautter presented a work-in-progress, tentatively titled Standstills: Friends or Foes in a Sale of Corporate Control, on September 30, 2010 at Florida State University College of Law as part of Florida State’s Faculty Enrichment Series. 

She also presented this work-in-progress on August 2 during a panel she organized called The Changing Face of Mergers and Acquisitions, at the Southeastern Association of Law Schools Annual Meeting in Palm Beach, Florida.  Other panelists were:  Professor Afra Afsharipour of UC Davis School of Law, Professor Steven Davidoff of University of Connecticut School of Law, and Professor George Geis of University of Virginia School of Law.  Professor Trey Drury of Loyola University New Orleans College of Law moderated the panel.

In addition, Professor Sautter’s article titled, Rethinking Contractual Limits on Fiduciary Duties, will be published in a forthcoming issue of the Florida State University Law Review.  The article discusses a board of director’s ability to change its recommendation to shareholders in favor of a merger and situations in which a board may agree to contractually limit its ability to change this recommendation

Professor Christopher Tyson will be recognized by the Baton Rouge Business Report as a “Forty Under 40” award recipient at a ceremony to be held on December 2, 2010. The “Forty Under 40” program honors forty of Baton Rouge’s most dynamic young business leaders who share a commitment to professional excellence, the community and who are under the age of 40. 

Professor Tyson earned his B.A. in Architecture, with honors, from Howard University; a Masters of Public Policy from the Harvard Kennedy School and a J.D. from the Georgetown University Law Center.  Prior to earning his law degree, Professor Tyson worked in management consulting and in the Washington, DC office of United States Senator Mary L. Landrieu.  After earning his law degree, Professor Tyson worked as an associate in the Real Estate Practice at the law firm Jones Walker, LLP in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.  He teaches and writes about real estate development, local government law and problems in urban development.  The professor has also published scholarly works on politics and public policy, including At The Intersection of Race and History: The Unique Relationship Between the Davis Intent Requirement and the Crack Laws, 50 How. L.J. 345 (2007).