Reviewing the redistricting endgame

By Colby Hamilton

February 2, 2012

The Empire

 

Excerpt:

 

Some observers worry that the recent Supreme Court case involving Texas’ redistricting will mean the courts will likely just accept whatever lines the legislature produced. But New York’s situation would have a crucial difference: in Texas, the lines were signed into law; here, Cuomo will have vetoed them. Without legal lines, the courts will be free to go their own way.

 

“The governor has so much power over this right now,” said Hofstra University law professor Eric Lane, who himself has participated in the redistricting process in the 1980s. “Once he throws the veto down, we’re at a standstill.”

 

To read the full article, visit empire.wnyc.org.

 

 

An adapted version of James Sample’s Chicago Legal Forum law review article has been published in the Winter 2012 issue of The Judges’ Journal, Vol. 51 No. 1. “Lawyer, Candidate, Beneficiary, AND Judge?” may be viewed on page 30 of the magazine.

 

 

Barbara S. Barron taught a trial advocacy teacher training course for the Department of State and Justice Department in Macedonia on January 23-26, 2012. The teacher training course is part of an integrated, comprehensive effort to introduce American style trial advocacy skills to the Macedonian criminal justice system. Macedonia is transitioning from an inquisitorial to adversarial system in Fall 2012. In anticipation of that transition and anticipated implementation of a new Criminal Procedure Code, Macedonian judges and prosecutors nationwide participated in the course in order to learn how to teach trial advocacy skills to their colleagues. The judges and prosecutors will then conduct American style trial advocacy courses throughout the country.

 

 

The Dr. Rubin "Hurricane" Carter International Justice Conference

March 8-11, 2012 at the Burswood Entertainment Complex in Perth, Western Australia

A brochure with complete program details is accessible online.

 

The National Association of Administrative Law Judiciary (NAALJ) Midyear Conference

April 1-3, 2012 at the The National Judicial College in Reno, Nevada

Registration is now open. Sign up by March 5 to qualify for the early registration rate.

 

The 11th Annual Conducting Empirical Legal Scholarship Workshop

May 23-25, 2012 at the University of Southern Carolina Gould School of Law

Law school faculty, political science faculty and graduate students interested in empirical research are welcome.

Registration deadline: May 11, 2012

For more information, email Mira Dalpe or Marie Cleaves at els2012@lawmail.usc.edu.

 

The 2012 American Inns of Court Warren E. Burger Prize

Acceptable topics: legal excellence, civility, ethics, and professionalism

Prize: $5,000 cash and publishing in the South Carolina Law Review

Deadline: June 1, 2012

 

The 2013-14 Fulbright Scholar Program

Teaching, research or combination teaching/research awards in over 125 countries

Application deadline for most awards: August 1, 2012

 

 

The New York State Bar Association has published an article by Professor Frank Gulino commenting on New York’s Marriage Equality Act. The article discusses the religious exemptions included in the Act to ensure its passage and the dissatisfaction with those exemptions on both sides of the gay marriage debate. A Match Made in Albany: The Uneasy Wedding of Marriage Equality and Religious Liberty was published in the January 2012 issue of the New York State Bar Association Journal, the flagship publication of the 77,000-member Association.

 

 

Professor Frank Gulino’s essay on William Howard Taft as Chief Justice has been published in The Bencher, the flagship publication of the American Inns of Court. The essay was selected for inclusion in a series of articles on “Lawyers Who Shaped America” and appears in the January/February 2012 issue of The Bencher. It focuses on Taft’s role in transforming the Supreme Court from a forum that primarily corrected errors in ordinary private litigation to a constitutional tribunal that resolved public policy issues of national importance.

 

Since 2007, Professor Gulino has been a Master of the Bench in the Theodore Roosevelt American Inn of Court in Mineola. During the same period, he also has been Hofstra Law’s faculty liaison to the Inn and a member of the Inn’s Executive Committee. Professor Gulino is also a member of the Inn’s Mentoring Program Implementation Committee. The committee oversees the Inn’s mentoring program, in which professional members of the Inn serve as mentors to student members from local schools, including Hofstra.

 

 

Film to show home movies of Nixon staffers

By Paul LaRocco

January 28, 2012

Newsday

 

Excerpt:

 

But "Our Nixon," culled from obscure home movies shot largely by Haldeman, Ehrlichman and special assistant Dwight Chapin, fills a historical gap, proving that even notorious political figures goof off, unwind and take in the sights.

 

"They don't look nearly as sinister when they're wearing Bermuda shorts and smiling," said Brian L. Frye, who along with wife Penny Lane, is turning more than 200 Super 8 reels from 1969 to 1972 into a feature-length film.

 

Frye, 37, a visiting assistant professor at Hofstra Law School, learned of the movies through a friend with ties to the National Archives. They had been stored at the Nixon Presidential Library & Museum in Yorba Linda, Calif., mostly inaccessible to the public. Transferring all 27 hours to video promised to cost $17,000.

 

To read the full article, visit newsday.com.

 

 

Upcoming conference:

The National Association of Administrative Law Judiciary (NAALJ)

Midyear Conference

April 1-3, 2012 at the The National Judicial College in Reno, Nevada

Registration is now open.

 

Fellowship opportunity:

IREX’s U.S. Embassy Policy Specialist Program (EPS)

Scholars and professionals that are U.S. citizens and hold advanced degrees are eligible to apply. The deadline is March 14 at 5 p.m.

Hofstra Law Uses Computers to Evaluate Court Rulings
By Laura Haring
New York Law Journal
January 27, 2012

Excerpt:

How can computers be taught to read and identify the logic behind legal decisions? That is what law students at the Law, Logic and Technology (LLT) Lab at the Maurice A. Deane School of Law at Hofstra University are studying, hoping to make analyzing court rulings easier for future attorneys.

The research is the subject of an article, "A Framework for the Extraction and Modeling of Fact-Finding Reasoning From Legal Decisions: Lessons From the Vaccine/Injury Project Corpus," published in the November 2011 issue of Artificial Intelligence and Law, a peer-reviewed journal. It was co-authored by Mr. Walker and 2011 law school graduates Nathaniel Carie, Courtney C. DeWitt and Eric Lesh.

To read the full article, visit newyorklawjournal.com.

Professor Bennett Capers has been named Chair of the Planning Committee for the AALS’s 2013 Mid-Year Criminal Justice Conference.  The Planning Committee will be responsible for organizing a three-day program for the 2013 mid-year meeting.  The other members of the Planning Committee are Professor Lisa Kern Griffin of Duke Law School, Professor Cynthia Lee of GW Law School, Professor Ryan Scott of Indiana-Bloomington Law School, and Christopher Slobogin of Vanderbilt Law School.