Professor Scott Fruehwald has passed 1500 paper downloads on SSRN. He has four of the top ten all-time downloads for the SSRN Law & Evolution Journal and two of the top ten all-time downloads for the SSRN Law & Neuroscience Journal.

Professor Frank Scaturro and some of his students took a trip to Washington, D.C. and visited the U.S. Supreme Court Building. Below is a photo of Hofstra Law students with Justice Samuel Alito.

On Saturday, October 17, 2009, law students and social work students engaged in a cross-disciplinary trial skills program led by faculty from Hofstra Law School and Hunter College School of Social Work, at Hunter’s School of Social Work. Hofstra Law students played the role of attorneys in a child dependency case, and Hunter students acted as expert social worker witnesses, in a full-day trial preparation workshop. The project, part of the Family Law with Skills Course taught by Professors Andrew Schepard and J. Herbie DiFonzo, is designed to teach the skills of case theory development, witness preparation and witness examination that lawyers and social workers must use in real cases. Theo Liebmann, Professor of Clinical Law and Attorney-In-Charge at the Hofstra Child Advocacy Clinic, led the workshop, which he had designed with experts from New York and around the country. Professors Schepard and DiFonzo participated, along with volunteer experts in law and social work.

Professor of Law Vern R. Walker has posted to YouTube the first in a series of educational videos that he is producing, and which will appear on the Hofstra server in higher quality than YouTube provides. The videos use his default-logic framework to analyze, visualize and help automate legal reasoning. This introductory video explains why the rule of law requires legal rules, how such rules work, and what they look like from a logical perspective. It analyzes the structure of legal rules using the logical connectives AND, OR, and UNLESS. It shows us why the law, as a system of rules, nearly always expands and becomes more complicated.

Click here to view video.

Future videos will explore such topics as extracting legal rules from statutes, regulations, and case opinions; assessing the probative value of evidence; and modeling the dynamics among rules, evidence, policies, and legal principles.

Professor Barbara Barron delivered the keynote address "Convincing a Jury: Trial Advocacy in the Saiban-In Mixed Jury Trial" during the Japanese Federation of Bar Associations Program in Tokyo, Japan.

In January 2008, Barron participated in the first national trial advocacy training program for criminal defense attorneys in Tokyo. The Japan Federation of Bar Associations created the program to train attorneys in American/Anglo trial advocacy skills so that they will be prepared for the switch to the mixed judge/citizen jury system "saiban-in" that begins January 2009.

In October 2008, Barron returned to Tokyo to participate in the second such program. In both programs, more than 100 lawyers were trained. Barron has been invited to return to Japan in January 2009 to participate in another program in Osaka.

For her work in Japan, Barron will be profiled in an NHK (the “PBS of Japan”) documentary airing December 2008.