November 2006
Dean Heidi M. Hurd
David C. Baum Professor of Law and Professor of Philosophy
Co-Director of the Program in Law and Philosophy
Telephone (217) 333-9857
hhurd@law.uiuc.edu
Dear Students, Faculty, Staff, Alumni, Campus Leaders, and Friends,
October drew to a close with a packed Pedersen Pavilion of costumed students, staff, and faculty who gathered for a special Halloween Peer's Pub and a costume contest that displayed hilarious creativity. Jose Ortiz (1L) had the courage to dress as a (rather hairy and scary) diapered baby! Aaron Moshiashwili (1L) wrapped himself in animal skins, painted himself black, donned a long-haired black wig, and secured a huge rack of antlers to his head to affect an uncanny impersonation of the legendary Celtic figure Herne the Hunter who led England's famous Black Hunt. Cori Davis (2L) spent almost two hours exercising her professional stage make-up artistry to metamorphosize into a truly ghastly walking zombie. Zach Parry (1L) actually shaved his head and grew a beard so as to achieve an exact imitation of Mr. T. Jennifer Carroll (1L) affected an astonishingly perfect Rosie the Riveter. The College's always-cheerful receptionist, Joetta Morgan, was an adorable jar of spicy salsa. Professor Robbennolt's seven-year-old twin boys, Jake and Dale, were absolutely perfect copies of Dr. Seuss's Thing One and Thing Two. And Professor Ekow Yankah and Assistant Dean Dave Johnson teamed up as Miami Vice Detectives Sonny Crockett and Ricardo Tubbs in pink sports jackets and white shoes that were almost as frightening as the diaper.
But those who fear that we were having too much fun should know that the event was in fact infused with a seriousness of academic purpose. Professor Bruce Smith, for example, took it as an occasion to reinforce lessons of Property Law — by making a nuisance out of himself! On the day before Halloween he had taken his class through Boomer v. Atlantic Cement Co. (1970), a leading case on the law of nuisance involving "dirt, smoke, and vibration" caused by a cement plant near Albany, New York. Professor Smith concluded that as well as providing an opportunity to discuss the distinctions between property rules and liability rules, the case furnished a reason to dress as a cement bag for his class on Halloween! His approach was cheap and simple: He spray-painted a 30-gallon leaf bag with tan paint, cut a hole for his head (but not for his arms!), and stenciled the following logo on the bag: ATLANTIC CEMENT CO. GRADE A PORTLAND 80 kg. Before class, he died his hair white and had his assistant toss flour on his face, hair, and costume to mimic cement. As he told me, "Teaching without arms was a bit difficult, but I had prepared the classroom by writing terms and diagrams on the blackboard before class and arraying three copies of the casebook (opened at different spots) on the lectern. During class, I benefitted from a student who graciously arrayed a fresh set of my lecture notes midway through our proceedings." The lengths to which our faculty go to teach with style!
Having spent the day vicariously giving vent to my darker side as Cruella deVille, I have been returned to normal (please don't say it) on this first day in November to report on a month of very exciting new developments.
This month we are very proud of the following:
- Nationally-Renowned International Law Expert, Charlotte Ku, Assumes Leadership of the College's Graduate and International Studies Program
- Illinois Legal History Program Hosts a Successful Symposium on Comparative Early Modern Legal History
- College Faculty Make National News on High-Impact Issues:
- Law Students Take A Leadership Role in Organizing IMPACT for Campus-wide Philanthropy
- College Faculty Receive Large Grants to Study Pressing Issues of Global Significance:
Professor Margareth Etienne on CNBC and Reuters Wire Service on the Sentencing of Enron CEO, Jeffrey Skilling
Professor David Hyman on CSpan2 for Cato Institute Book Forum
Professor Richard Kaplan in CQ Researcher on Caring for the Elderly
Professor Jacqueline Ross Receives a Major Grant to do a Comparative Study of Policing Strategies
Professor C.K. Gunsalus receives $300,000 grant from the National Science Foundation
Professor Jay Kesan Receives a $25,000 Research Award from IBM
Nationally-Renowned International Law Expert, Charlotte Ku, Assumes Leadership of the College's Graduate and International Studies Program
I am thrilled to announce that Charlotte Ku, the 12-year Executive Director of The American Society of International Law (ASIL) in Washington, D.C., and a former professor at John Hopkins University and the University of Virginia, has accepted the Directorship of the College's Graduate and International Studies Program. Dr. Ku joined ASIL in 1990 and has served as Executive Vice President and Executive Director since 1994, coordinating a $2.2 million annual budget, managing project proposals that led to more than $2 million in foundation support, leading a capital campaign and building renovation project, and developing strategies and long-range planning in outreach and legal education with the Society's volunteer leadership. She also created the highly-visible ASIL website (www.asil.org) and the award-winning Electronic Information System for International Law and has taught and lectured at American University and in training programs at Air Command and Staff College at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama. She has partnered with the Academic Council of the United Nations to conduct annual workshops on global governance since 1991 for academics, advocates, and government officials.
Prior to joining ALIS, she was a visiting professor at the John Hopkins University SAIS Nanjing Center and an assistant professor in government and foreign affairs at the University of Virginia. She also worked at the San Francisco Foundation, Children's Rights Group, as a legislative aide to U.S. Senator Alan Cranston, and in the Office of Legal Affairs at the United Nations. She is proficient in Chinese (Mandarin, Cantonese, Shanghai dialect), Spanish, and French; she has published nearly 40 scholarly papers; and she serves or has served on the Academic Council on the United Nations System, AALS Membership Review Committee, American Council of Learned Societies, Stichting Foundation for Hague Joint Conferences, International Judicial Academy, and International Studies Association. She is on the Editorial Boards of the American Journal of International Law, Baltimore Studies in Nationalism and Internationalism, Global Governance, International Legal Materials, and International Studies Perspectives.
Dr. Ku earned her B.A. magna cum laude from the American University School of International Service and her M.A., M.A.I.D., and Ph.D. from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. She will be joining the College in Spring, 2007 after serving as Acting Director at the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law at the University of Cambridge. In her capacity as the College's Director of Graduate and International Programs, she will coordinate the College's international LL.M. degree program and facilitate a wide array of faculty and student international exchange programs and international events.
Illinois Legal History Program Hosts a Successful Symposium on Comparative Early Modern Legal History
The Symposium on Comparative Early Modern Legal History, organized by Professor Richard Ross and held at Chicago's Newberry Library on October 6, was, by all accounts and by any measure, a smashing success! The Symposium, entitled "Law, Religion, and Social Discipline in the Early Modern Atlantic World," attracted leading law professors, historians, and sociologists from Yale, Harvard, the University of Chicago, New York University, Northwestern, the University of Texas, Johns Hopkins, the University of Wisconsin, the University of Pennsylvania, and from as far away as the Humboldt University in Berlin.
The conference explored the intertwined use of law and religion to "discipline" populations in early modern Europe and in the British and Spanish empires in the Americas. Discipline in this context does not mean "social control" so much as an ambition to cultivate virtue, godliness, industry, and civility. England and Spain each worried about encouraging discipline among settlers whom they viewed as unruly, quick to violence, overly greedy, liable to cultural degeneration, and too ready to elevate short-term personal advantage over long-term communal and imperial goals. With varying degrees of commitment, each sought to Christianize, order, pacify, and "civilize" indigenous peoples and slaves. The papers presented at the symposium, and the associated commentary and discussion, investigated a range of questions. To what extent did the English and Spanish empires see themselves as facing similar or different disciplinary challenges and to what extent did they employ similar or different techniques? How did disciplinary techniques familiar from Europe require adaptation given colonial conditions-in particular, given the exigencies of territorial expansion and the existence of unprecedented racial and ethnic diversity?
By encouraging a comparative perspective, the conference hoped to test claims about the nature, causes, and implications of legal-religious discipline made from within one national historiography. In particular, adoption of a comparative perspective offered a richer understanding of patterns of cooperation and rivalry among legal and religious authorities in the British and Spanish empires.
College Faculty Make National News on High-Impact Issues
Faculty members at the College of Law give more than 60 interviews a month to regional and national news media. Their commentary on the great debates of the day — ranging from the treatment accorded detainees at Guantanamo Bay to the success of measures to prevent elder abuse — has proved influential in affecting the distribution of rights, duties, and liberties by lawmakers and judges across the land. This month, I want to tell you about just three of the College's numerous news-makers.
Professor Margareth Etienne on CNBC and Reuters Wire Service on the Sentencing of Enron CEO, Jeffrey Skilling: Last week, Professor Margareth Etienne was featured prominently on CNBC discussing former Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling's sentencing in Houston. Professor Etienne wrote an amicus brief that the Skilling team used in court, arguing the fairness of Skilling's sentence compared with those given to similarly situated executives. In a court filing in support of Skilling, Professor Etienne said, "Imposing a sentence on Mr. Skilling that is several times that of the sentences faced by his co-defendants when the only material distinction between their cases appears to be Mr. Skilling's decision to go to trial strongly suggests that Mr. Skilling is being penalized for exercising his constitutional rights." Professor Etienne was also quoted internationally on the Reuters Wire Service, stating "Our system encourages guilty pleas, but a trial penalty — a punishment for exercising Fifth and Sixth Amendment rights — would clearly be unconstitutional."
Professor David Hyman on CSpan2 for Cato Institute Book Forum: In early October, Professor David Hyman, the Galowich-Huizenga Faculty Scholar, was featured in a Cato Institute Book Forum in Washington, D.C., for his provocative new book, Medicare Meets Mephistopheles. The book forum has been broadcast on multiple occasions on CSpan2 during the month of October. In his book, Professor Hyman argues that Medicare is a massive government program that will lead the United States into financial ruin. As he puts it, in chapters titled as such, Medicare encourages the seven deadly sins: pride, envy, anger, sloth, greed, gluttony and lust. It undermines the virtues of thrift and honesty in health care and poses a significant challenge to lawmakers and scholars who are eager to ensure that high-quality, easily accessible health care is available to the rich and the poor alike.
Professor Richard Kaplan in CQ Researcher on Caring for the Elderly: Professor Richard Kaplan, the Peer and Sarah Pedersen Professor, was quoted extensively in the October 13 Congressional Quarterly Researcher cover story, "Caring for the Elderly." Professor Kaplan is considered one of the nation's leading authorities on Elder Law. He founded the Illinois Elder Law Journal and has authored dozens of articles and editorials in the area. The CQ Researcher article examines the question, "Who will pay for the care of aging baby boomers?," and it includes an extensive analysis of the explosion in the demand for long-term care that is anticipated in the coming decades.
CQ Researcher is often the first source that librarians recommend when researchers are seeking original, comprehensive reporting and analysis on issues in the news. Founded in 1923 as Editorial Research Reports, CQ Researcher is noted for its in-depth, unbiased coverage of health, social trends, criminal justice, international affairs, education, the environment, technology, and the economy. Reports are published weekly in print and online 44 times a year by CQ Press, a division of Congressional Quarterly Inc.
Law Students take A Leadership Role in Organizing IMPACT for Campus-Wide Philanthropy
I am always delighted and amazed at the staggering amount of community outreach conducted by College of Law student groups during the course of the year. As I walked into the College building this morning, I was delighted to see its entry-way lined with large plastic bins full of soap, cleaning supplies, and other necessary household items that had been collected through the Women's Law Society's Soap Drive for the local women's shelter, A Woman's Place.
Last month, the new University of Illinois College of Law student organization, IMPACT, held its first fund-raising event. IMPACT, which stands for Illini Making Progress and Contributing Together, was created by first-year law students Matt Johns, Josh Jones, and Anusha Pillay and is a charitable organization that has dedicated itself to uniting members of the graduate and professional communities to benefit the Champaign-Urbana community.
IMPACT's first fundraiser attracted over 350 graduate and professional students from Law, Veterinary Medicine, Engineering, Nursing, Industrial and Labor Relations, Mathematics, Accounting, and Medicine. The event grossed over $1,600, and proceeds will go to needy families within the Champaign and Urbana communities.
IMPACT plans to host a series of further fundraising events and it has plans to partner with the Student Bar Association and the American Bar Association to reinstitute the national work-a-day program that was first founded at the University of Illinois College of Law. Aren't our students something?!
College Faculty Receive Large Grants to Study and Teach Issues of Global Significance
While faculty in the sciences and in many of the humanities conduct considerable sponsored research, legal academics have traditionally very rarely sought out or received sizable grants to support their work. But the "new wave" within legal scholarship is an empirical one, and as legal scholars well-trained in the methodologies of the empirical sciences take up factual enquiries and adopt pedagogies that mimic those of the sciences, they are beginning to apply for and win large grants to support their work. And as in so many things, the College of Law faculty rides the crest of this new wave. This month, I have marvelous news to share about three very sizable grants that have been secured by faculty members who are leaving the Ivory Tower to tackle real-world issues in real-world settings.
Professor Jacqueline Ross Receives a Major Grant to do a Comparative Study of Policing Strategies: Professor Jacqueline Ross and her French research partner, Dr. Thierry Delpeuch (a legal sociologist at France's Centre Nationale de Recherche), have been granted 400,000 Euro — over $500,000 — from the French Agence Nationale de Recherche. Their research project is to compare policing strategies in the immigrant communities of France and the United States and, in particular, to study how the police acquire and analyze information about immigrant communities and how these modes of acquiring intelligence shape security policy and crime control practices. Over the course of the 2007-2008 academic year, Dr. Delpeuch and Professor Ross plan to conduct interviews with police, community organizations, and social service agencies in the immigrant communities of St. Denis (on the outskirts of Paris), Marseille, and Grenoble. In the following year, plans call for Dr. Delpeuch to come to the College of Law as a visiting scholar to conduct the American portion of the research in Chicago, Dearborn, and Tampa. Congratulations to Professor Ross on this very significant achievement!
Professor C.K. Gunsalus receives $300,000 grant from the National Science Foundation: Professor C.K. Gunsalus has partnered with Professor Michael Loui of the College of Electrical and Computer Engineering/Coordinated Science Lab to secure a $300,000 award from the National Science Foundation for their program on Ethics Education in Science and Engineering. Their goal is to advance an understanding amongst researchers that academic research itself raises ethical issues and must honor ethical protocols if it is to protect the rights and interests of the subjects it studies. Professors Gunsalus and Loui are planning to adapt the role-play/simulation techniques that Professor Gunsalus and Law Professor J. Steven Beckett have been utilizing in their unique Counseling and Fact Investigation course, so as to teach researchers in medicine, education, law, and the sciences to better identify and address the ethical issues raised by their research. Specifically, the grant will allow them to develop an extensive set of role-play exercises that will explore the wide array of ethical issues potentially raised within research settings and to assess their efficacy in teaching responsible research behaviors.
Professor Jay Kesan Receives a $25,000 Research Award from IBM: Professor Jay Kesan received a $25,000 Faculty Award from IBM for his work on intellectual property and university-industry interaction. This award is a tremendous compliment, because it is an award and not a grant — which means that Professor Kesan did not apply for it; rather, it was given in recognition of his prominent stature within, and valued contributions to, the field of intellectual property. Professor Kesan, the Director of the College's Program in Intellectual Property & Technology Law, holds positions in the College of Law, the Coordinated Science Laboratory, the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, and the Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics. He has written extensively in the areas of patent law and patent institutions, law and the regulation of cyberspace, intellectual property, and law and economics. His most recent writings have focuses specifically on patent law and regulatory issues in computer software and agricultural biotechnology.
November 2006
November 8, 4:00-5:00 p.m., Max L Rowe Auditorium: David C. Baum Memorial Lecture. The David C. Baum Memorial Lecture Series on Civil Liberties and Civil Rights is an endowed biannual lecture series named in memory of University of Illinois College of Law Professor David C. Baum. Professor Robert C. Post of Yale Law School, will present the topic, "Informed Consent to Abortion: A First Amendment Analysis of Compelled Physician Speech." Reception to immediately follow in the Pedersen Pavilion.
November 9, 12:00-1:00 p.m., Room C: Lunch with Alumni from New York. Students are invited to have lunch with visiting alumni for an informal discussion about New York's legal market. Lunch and drinks will be provided to the first 60 students. For more information contact Amanda Lindemann at 217-265-5345 or lindemnn@law.uiuc.edu.
November 9, 4:00-6:00 p.m., Pedersen Pavilion: Peer's Pub: Great American Cities Program featuring New York. Students have the opportunity to introduce themselves to visiting alumni and enjoy delicious food and beverages from the New York area. For more information contact Amanda Lindemann at 217-265-5345 or lindemnn@law.uiuc.edu.
November 9, 6:30-9:30 p.m., Room D: Social Justice Film Festival: "Dolores Claiborne". All are invited to join the College of Law community to view a film and discuss various social justice issues. Dean Heidi Hurd and Professor Michael Moore to facilitate the discussion.
November 16, 11:30 a.m.-1:30 p.m.: Chicago Alumni Luncheon at The University Club of Chicago, 76 E. Monroe Street in downtown Chicago. Special guests at the luncheon will be Distinguished Alumnus Award recipients Ronald H. Galowich '59, Daniel I. Schlessinger '78, and Judge Marilyn F. Johnson '79 as well as Professor Richard Ross, the new Thomas M. Mengler Faculty Scholar. And, making a special appearance, former Dean Thomas Mengler. Sign up to attend by clicking here https://www.law.uiuc.edu/alumni/events/cal/pmt/registration.asp.
November 16, 5:30-7:30 p.m.: University of Illinois Law Alumni (UILA) Reception: The University Club of Chicago, 76 E. Monroe Street in downtown Chicago. Reception for alumni and graduates who have been recently sworn in by the Illinois Bar Association. RSVP to Meredith Olson at alumni@law.uiuc.edu by November 9th.
November 27, 3:00-4:00 p.m., Room 200: Deans' Open Forum. Students are invited to join Dean Hurd and Assistant Dean Virginia Vermillion for an open discussion of College matters.
