Associate Dean for Strategic Initiatives & Alston Associate Chair in Corporate Law Mehrsa Baradaran was featured on Project Syndicate regarding her book How the Other Half Banks. The article titled "Five Lessons from the US Government Shutdown" was written by Simon Johnson and published 1/31/19.
Callaway Chair Elizabeth Chamblee Burch will receive the 2019 Mangano Dispute Resolution Advancement Award for her groundbreaking scholarship in the area of multidistrict litigation settlement. Presented by the St. John's University Hugh L. Carey Center for Dispute Resolution, the award recognizes scholars whose published empirical research has furthered the advancement and understanding of the values and skills of dispute resolution. The honor will be formally presented in March.
Brumby Distinguished Professor in First Amendment Law Sonja R. West was featured in The Washington Post regarding public figures and inaccurate media coverage. The article titled "When they go low, Melania Trump calls her lawyers" was written by Emily Heil and published 1/30/19.
Associate Dean for Strategic Initiatives & Alston Associate Chair in Corporate Law Mehrsa Baradaran was featured on NPR's "The Takeaway" regarding her thoughts on payday lenders benefiting from the government shutdown. The program titled "Payday Lenders and Pawnbrokers Were Winners in the Government Shutdown" aired 1/29/19.
Associate Dean for Strategic Initiatives & Alston Associate Chair in Corporate Law Mehrsa Baradaran's book The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap was reviewed on the London School of Economics Review of Books.
The University of Georgia School of Law will hold a conference titled "MDL Turns 50: A Look Back and the Way Forward" on Feb. 7 in the Larry Walker Room of Dean Rusk Hall, located on UGA's North Campus. The event is open to the public. Topics covered during three panel discussions will include the rights of individual plaintiffs versus the interests of the group, individual plaintiff's interests against those of their attorney, and the role of the judge in overseeing these lawsuits. Legal scholars as well as practitioners will serve as panelists, including U.S. District Court Chief Judge for the Middle District of Georgia Clay D. Land and U.S. District Court Judge for the Northern District of Alabama R. David Proctor. Notably, Proctor also serves on the U.S. Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation. Additionally, former Georgia Gov. Roy E. Barnes will serve as a panel moderator.
Associate Dean for Strategic Initiatives & Alston Associate Chair in Corporate Law Mehrsa Baradaran and her book The Color of Money were featured in Financial Times. The article titled "Mehrsa Baradaran on 'opportunity zones'" was written by Brendan Greeley and published on 1/25/19.
Kilpatrick Chair of Corporate Finance and Securities Law Usha Rodrigues's article "Law and the Blockchain" (104 Iowa Law Review 679 (2019)) was reviewed by Anna Gelpern in JOTWELL (Jan. 29, 2019). In the review, Gelpern states, "The specter of runaway firms impervious to legal intervention could be a very big governance deal. Kudos to Usha Rodrigues for spotting it and launching the conversation."
Hosch Associate Professor Kent Barnett's forthcoming article "Some Kind of Hearing Officer" was reviewed by Kathryn Watts in JOTWELL (Jan. 28, 2019). In the review, Watts notes that Barnett's work "begins to pull the cover back from the administrative state's previously hidden judiciary."
CURRENTLY ALL UNIVERSITY OPERATIONS ARE NORMAL
At this time, we are planning for normal operations at the Athens Campus of UGA on Tuesday, Jan. 29. Clarke County is not listed among the 35 affected counties, and we are not expecting any weather-related problems during the day on Tuesday. However, we are continuing to monitor weather forecasts. Check emergency.uga.edu for updates.
Smith Professor Hillel Y. Levin published "A proposal to reduce vaccine exemptions while respecting rights of conscience" (with S. Kershner, T. Lytton and D. Salmon) on The Conversation. The article was published 1/2/19.
Congratulations to the team of third-year student Samuel Baker and second-year student William C. Phillips for finishing as first runner-up in Tulane Law School's Professional Football Negotiation Competition. The pair competed in six rounds of negotiations in the School of Law's first appearance in the competition.
Congratulations to third-year students Simone Ford, Thomas Grantham and Timia Skelton for winning the Hunton Andrews Kurth Moot Court National Championship. The team defeated William & Mary Law School in the final round. This invitation-only tournament is for the top 16 moot court programs from law schools across the country based on performances from the previous academic year.
The University of Georgia School of Law has announced the establishment of The Be Kind Fund, in memory of the late Georgia Supreme Court Chief Justice P. Harris Hines. The fund will: sponsor a Georgia Jurist-in-Residence, where a Georgia judge or justice will spend a period in residence at the School of Law teaching and interacting with students each year; support semester/summer fellowships for students, with preference given to those who will work or serve as judicial clerks at the Supreme Court of Georgia; and fund scholarship aid for law students.
University Professor & Caldwell Chair Dan T. Coenen published "Free Speech and the Law of Evidence" in 68 Duke Law Journal 639 (2019).
Carter Chair in Tort and Insurance Law Michael L. Wells published "Qualified Immunity After Ziglar v. Abbasi: The Case for a Categorical Approach" in 68 American University Law Review 379 (2018).
Wilner/UGA Foundation Professor in International Law Harlan G. Cohen presented "The Sociology of International Precedent" at the "Opening the Black Box of Precedent and Case-based Reasoning" workshop held at the University of Vienna in Austria during January.
Congratulations to second-year student Sydney A. Hamer for being awarded a Nelson Mullins Riley & Scarborough Diversity Scholarship. This honor is open to second-year law students and is designed to increase the number of diverse law students interested in summer and long-term employment with the firm.
The School of Law was recently awarded a Self Represented Litigant Grant from the Judicial Council of Georgia to support the efforts of the Athens Access to Justice Initiative, which seeks to provide community members, who are unable to afford legal representation, with access to attorneys. The initiative operates through a partnership between the School of Law, the Western Circuit Bar Association and the Athens-Clarke County Superior Court, and includes monthly legal pop-up clinics and a Self-Represented Litigant Center and Library.
Associate Dean for Strategic Initiatives & Alston Associate Chair in Corporate Law Mehrsa Baradaran was featured in Bloomberg Law regarding her thoughts on U.S. Rep. Katherine Porter's appointment to the House Financial Services Committee. The article titled "Warren Protege is Rookie to Watch on House Financial Services" was written by Lydia Beyoud and published 1/18/19.