Dean J. Herbie DiFonzo appeared live on News 12 Long Island's Long Island Talks on Thursday, June 17th to discuss the history of no-fault divorce in New York State and field viewer questions on the subject.

To watch the video of Professor DiFonzo's appearance, click here.

BofA Could Face Liability For Dollar Rolling
By Brendan Pierson
Law360.com
July 13, 2010

EXCERPT:

Though Bank of America insists that the dollar rolls had no material effect on any of its statements to investors or the public, the size of the transactions suggests that claim might not hold up, according to Ron Colombo, a professor at Hofstra Law School.

“If these numbers are truly material to the bottom line of Bank of America, then there's some real potential liability,” he said.

“The practice of dollar rolling is not illegal,” Colombo said. “That's not the problem. The problem is if this dollar rolling causes Bank of America's books or records or communications with shareholders or the public to be inaccurate. If any of those reports, communications, etc., were materially misleading because of the dollar rolling, then you'd have a potential Rule 10(b)5 violation,” he said.

Read the full article at law360.com.

Professor Elizabeth Glazer has been selected as one of the Best LGBT Attorneys Under 40 by the National LGBT Bar Association. She will be included in the inaugural listing of the best and brightest in the LGBT legal community. Prof. Glazer will be recognized for her selection at the 2010 Lavender Law Career Fair & Conference.

Lea Bishop Shaver, up-and-coming legal scholar in the areas of intellectual property and human rights, will join Hofstra Law’s full-time faculty as an associate professor of law effective September 1, 2010. In her first year, Shaver will teach Intellectual Property Survey, Patent Law and Transnational Law.

Shaver received her Bachelor of Arts in sociology and Master of Arts in social sciences from the University of Chicago. She graduated in 2006 from Yale Law School, where she was a Coker Fellow in Constitutional Law and served as the submissions and articles editor for the Yale Human Rights & Development Law Journal.

After law school, Shaver received a Fulbright scholarship to work at the Centre for Applied Legal Studies, an academic research and litigation center at the University of the Witwatersrand Law School in South Africa. While there, she contributed to human rights litigation defending access to education, housing and water.
Since her return to the United States, Shaver has worked as a resident fellow at Yale Law School’s Information Society Project, an academic center for law and technology. During her tenure at Yale, Shaver taught the advanced seminar Access to Knowledge Practicum and oversaw research projects on intellectual property and innovation in seven countries.

For more information about Lea Shaver, read the press release or visit her website.

Dean J. Herbie DiFonzo’s article, “Stopping for Death: Re-Framing Our Perspective on the End of Life,” was featured in the University of Florida Journal of Law and Public Policy. Published this week, the article was co-written by Ruth C. Stern.

ABSTRACT:

How we die is increasingly becoming a matter of law and public policy. We grapple with issues of patient autonomy, the proper parameters of doctor-patient discussions on the end of life, the right to hasten death, and the right to control our own medical treatment. But it is physicians and patients, not judges and legislators, who are the principal actors in events at the end of life. Palliative medicine is just beginning to probe the multi-dimensional totality of suffering in dying and seriously ill patients. What we learn will influence our options at the end of life and tell us why different approaches benefit different individuals. Before we invite the lawyers and the policy makers to our bedsides, it is important that we understand the dying process, and how doctors and patients can more effectively collaborate in the pursuit of a better death. As litigation in appellate courts and battles over state voter initiatives reveal, our legal system has not yet decided who should control the final decision over our lives. Stopping for Death: Re-Framing our Perspective on the End of Life, continues the examination of the judicial, ethical and policy responses to the demand for legalized assisted suicide and euthanasia which we began in Terminal Ambiguity: Law, Ethics and Policy in the Assisted Dying Debate, 17 B.U. Pub. Int. L.J. 99 (2007). This new article reflects upon our society’s growing sensitivity to suffering, and examines how recent developments have altered expectations of the doctor-patient relationship. Learning more about the nature and impact of serious illness highlights the limitations of our current end-of-life laws and policies. The legal parameters for voluntarily ending our lives are currently confused and in conflict. Moreover, they have been debated and enacted amidst a cacophony of rights’ talk and discourse about the permissible extent of governmental authority and the range of constitutionally-commanded privacy. Indeed, the current clamor threatens to drown out more subtle yet insistent voices asking that, before we bestow a right, we thoroughly investigate the nature of the wrong. But an insufficient amount of scholarly literature has addressed the conditions at ground zero in the assisted suicide debate: the quality of life of those near death, as well as their expectations for care and how a reasonable society might fulfill them. This article questions the utility of the concept of “terminal illness” in devising methods to care for the dying, and it argues that hospice and palliative care, long believed to be nearly infallible in end of life care, do not benefit all patients. We conclude by suggesting that assisted dying is but one of several ways to manage our own dying. What is more important is that, in an era of shrinking health care resources, we revise the ways in which we think about death, both medically and legally.

The formal citation is 20 U. Fla. J. L & Pub. Pol’y 388 (2009).