Hannah L. Buxbaum

John E. Schiller Chair in Legal Ethics

 

Prof. Hannah L. Buxbaum authored "The Viability of Enterprise Jurisdiction: A Case Study of the Big Four Accounting Firms," 48 U.C. DAVIS LAW REVIEW 1769 (2015) . Also, Prof. Buxbaum's most recent article, entitled "Judicial Imperialism," is forthcoming in the Washington & Lee Law Review.

Kenneth Dau-Schmidt 

Willard and Margaret Carr  

Professor of Labor and Employment Law

Prof. Kenneth Dau-Schmidt published "Labor Law 2.0: The Impact of New Information Technology on the Employment Relationship and the Relevance of the NLRA," 64 EMORY L. J. 1583 (2015). This study examines how t he NLRA system of collective bargaining was born during the Industrial Age of the early 20th century. As a result, key terms in the statute such as "employee," "employer," and "appropriate bargaining unit" were first interpreted in the context of long-term employment and large vertically integrated firms that dominated this era. Beginning in the late 1970s, the new information technology wrought a revolution in the organization of production, increasing short-term contingent employment and the organization of firms horizontally in trading and subcontracting relationships across the globe.

To maintain the relevance of collective bargaining to the modern workplace, the interpretation of the key terms of the NLRA must be updated to recognize the changed circumstances of production and interpret union access and employee mutual support in light of the new technology. However, new information technology promises further changes in the workplace with the accelerating mechanization of many jobs and perhaps a fundamental change in the relationship between labor and capital with the development of artificial intelligence. In this essay, Dau-Schmidt explores the implications of new information technology for the workplace, the interpretation of the NLRA, and the continuing evolution of American labor policy.

 

In addition, Associate Dean for Research and Prof. Brian J. Broughman and Dau-Schmidt authored "Law and Economics, Empirical Dimensions," in THE INTERNATIONAL ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES, 2ND ED. (JAMES D. WRIGHT, ET AL, EDS., 2015).  

Prof. Charles Geyh authored "Courting Peril: The Political Transformation of the American Judiciary," (forthcoming Oxford University Press).

 

The rule-of-law paradigm has long operated on the premise that independent judges disregard extralegal influences and impartially uphold the law. A political transformation several generations in the making, however, has imperiled this premise. Social science learning, the lessons of which have been widely internalized by court critics and the general public, has shown that judicial decision-making is subject to ideological and other extralegal influences. In recent decades, challenges to the assumptions underlying the rule-of-law paradigm have proliferated across a growing array of venues, as critics agitate for greater political control of judges and courts.

With the future of the rule-of-law paradigm in jeopardy, this book proposes a new way of looking at how judicial decision-making should be conceptualized and regulated. This new "legal culture paradigm" defends the need for an independent judiciary that is acculturated to take law seriously, but which is subject to political and other extralegal influences. The book argues that these extralegal influences cannot be eliminated but can be managed by balancing the needs for judicial independence and accountability across competing perspectives, to the end of enabling judges to follow the "law" (less rigidly conceived), respecting established legal process, and administering justice.

Prof. William Henderson was featured on the cover of the October 2015 issue of the ABA Journal. Inside the magazine, he authored a piece entitled: "What the New Jobs Are: New Tech and Client Needs Create a New Field of Legal Operations."

Prof. Ethan Michelson recently completed Wave 2 of the China Legal Services Work Environment Survey. By re-interviewing lawyers across China who participated in the original 2009 survey, he discovered unexpected and dramatic growth in the field of criminal defense, which until now has been understood as unattractive and even dangerous to most Chinese lawyers.

Prof. Christiana Ochoa is consulting with the government of Vanuatu and the Secretariat of the Pacific Community regarding the contractual aspects of seabed prospecting and mining in that country, with an eye to enhancing environmental and social protections and rebalancing the risks and benefits of any prospecting and mining activity to better serve the country of Vanuatu. She will be traveling to Vanuatu for intensive consultations later this year and will extend her visit to conduct research-related field work there.

 

In the article, the authors enter the debate about the value of legal education, taking aim at the issue of the ways in which law schools prepare students for practice. But rather than focusing on skills training, their concern is with the approach of law schools to preparing students to understanding the context of the legal issues they will encounter, and specifically on their preparation for working with numbers, whether with regard to business, finance, or information presented in statistical form generally. Rocconi and Silver's contribution to this debate is to emphasize the importance of data in analyzing the value of law school, and they do that here with data on what law students think they are learning in law school with regard to business and financial concepts and quantitative information. In addition to explaining the experiences and perceptions of a sample of more than 8,000 law students, the importance of these data relates to the larger framework for explaining the value of legal education to prospective students and to the hiring market of law graduates.

 

Silver also is continuing her research on the ways in which international students experience U.S. legal education and will be participating in the American Bar Foundation's conference on diversity with a paper from that project co-authored by Swethaa Ballakrishnen. 

Prof. Jeffrey Stake has authored "Property Law Reflections of a Sense of Right and Wrong," (forthcoming in a 2015 book published by Springer International Publishing, Switzerland). The study examines how an evolutionary perspective on human morality may help us understand and critique the law. This chapter examines three areas of American property law. In two of the three areas, title by first possession and title by adverse possession, the pieces of legal doctrine fit together when seen through an evolutionary lens. In the third area of law, compensation for eminent domain, the inconsistency between the legal doctrine and biologically predictable human attitudes suggests why governmental takings of property raise public ire and suggests what can be done to make the law less offensive to normal sensibilities.

Prof. Carwina Weng will be presenting as part of a plenary panel at the Southern Clinical Conference on "Teaching Cross-Cultural Competency: An Interdisciplinary Approach," on Friday, October 23, at the University of  Memphis Cecil C. Humphreys School of Law.